Travelling with your favourite characters

Books have been part of all my journeys, worthy companions in my travels. They save me from the boredom of waiting when a flight is delayed or a train postponed, and sometimes rescues me from the monotony of conversation with boorish travellers; most of all they keep me sane in long journeys with only myself for company. And that set me thinking. When we read a book, we are travelling with the characters in the story in their own journeys and trials of life. With a book in hand, travel becomes an adventure. And with your favourite character for company, the pleasure is doubled. Some of these characters appeal to us for various reasons; others we hardly remember as soon we finish a book. What if you have to choose your favourite character to travel with you on a journey somewhere? Who would you chose? Or why?

Read on for the perfect travel companions…

1. Sherlock Holmes, most doughty of characters, so believable that I trundled to 22B Baker Street once. Indomitable foe, loyal friend, a man of action who, according to his good friend, Dr.Watson, hated moving from his lodgings. I would drag him along on any trip, anywhere.

2. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, heroic genius from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Macondo’s first born. He escaped fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, a firing squad, a lethal dose of strychnine and an attempted suicide. His story is an enduring spirit of adventure and he is one to take along if you are travelling to the insurgent infested regions of India’s North-east.

3. Lisbeth Salander, from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. She is fiercely unconventional, the ultimate misfit, androgynous, asocial and gifted with a superb photographic memory. In short, she is cool and sassy. Now if you are travelling to a urban jungle of the future teeming with perverts, she’s should be the one by your side…

4. Saleem Sinai from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the protagonist and narrator with an enormous nose, one of fiction’s biggest, but with stories and coincidences galore, he is almost the perfect travel companion on dull road trips, but beware of that constantly dripping nose and a ponderous nose means trouble is just round the corner…

5. Dean Moriarty from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This reckless, free-spirited Denver vagrant appeals for his sense of adventure, and who wouldn’t adore a person whose purpose in life is to simply live.

6. Hergé’s Tintin and Snowy, traveler’s traveler, master raconteur, supreme innovator, and an adventure always waiting to happen at the next corner…

7. Chris McCandless, aka Alex Supertamp from Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction book Into the Wild, a young man who decides to give up all his worldly possessions and head towards the Alaskan wilderness.

8. Pi from Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the young Pondicherry lad, who survived 227 days in the Pacific Ocean, with a Royal Bengal tiger, Richard Parker, his sole friend and enemy. His experience should come in handy if you are planning a long sea voyage in a flimsy boat…

9. Jean Passepartout, from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg’s valet, and doesn’t he ‘go everywhere’. With Passepartout by your side, you can sit back and relax.

10. Asterix, from René Goscinny’s and Albert Uderzo’s wonderful world of the indomitable Gauls, who are forever resisting Roman occupation. And yes, if trouble strikes, there is always a bit of magic potion to go around. He is the one if you are planning a Roman vacation or a space trip.