Companions on the Road | Karavansara

28 July 2015
by Davide Mana 2 Comments

He’s a pirate – Henry de Monfreid

Two summers back, in 2013, I bought on a whim three books from a small italian publisher.
I was intrigued by the titles, and by the short bio of the author.
The author was Henry de Monfreid.
The three books I bought as a bundle for a few euro are the unlikely translations of de Monfreid’s first three books – Les secrets de la mer Rouge (1931), Aventures de mer (1932), La croisière du hachich (1933).
Henry de Monfreid was, by his own admission, a pirate, a drug smuggler, an adventurer and a gunrunner.
Or, as his French Wikipedia page simply states, un commerçant – a man of business.

But it gets better than that. Continue reading →

20 July 2015
by Davide Mana 5 Comments

Yachting through the Jungle

The first thing I found intriguing, about Commander Attilio Gatti, was the fact that his Wikipedia entry quoted a birth date (1896) but not a date of death.

Who knows, I thought – maybe during his African expeditions, he discovered some strange ritual, same weird fountain of youth, maybe the eternal flame of Ayesha, and he’s still alive somewhere, approaching his 120th birthday.

Attilio Gatti was very active between the 1930s and the 1940s, but seems to have faded from the public’s memory since the 1970s, when his many popular books went out of print and became highly priced collectors’ items¹. Continue reading →

7 July 2015
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Companions on the Road: Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki (2)

And after the documentary, the dramatized movie.

There is a moment, ninety minutes in Ronning & Sanberg’s 2012 movie Kon-Tiki, in which the camera backs away from the raft, lost in the middle of the pacific, and climbs up through the clouds and the atmosphere, catches a glimpse of the sun beyond the curve of the planet, pans across the Milky Way, catches the moon hanging in space and then plunges back towards the ocean and the Kon-Tiki.
It’s a perfect synthesis, to me, of what the Kon-Tiki expedition meant to those men that lived it – and a lot of us, in the years that followed. Continue reading →

2 July 2015
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

Companions on the road: Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki (1)

This is the first part of a two-part special.
catching up on my movies, I finally got around to watch the 2012 Kon-Tiki, about the 1947 Heyerdahl expedition across the Pacific Ocean, from Peru tu Polinesia.
The movie had been high on my to-view list, but had somehow slipped my memory.
What had not slipped my memory, though, was the 1950 documentary, written and produced by Heyerdahl himself, and that had caught my imagination when I was a kid .
And so I thought – why not watch the two back-to back?
And then blog about it.
It would be personal, but fun.

So, here’s the first post – tonight movie is Kon-Tiki, the 1950 documentary written, produced and filmend by Thor Heyerdahl.
The film won an Oscar for best documentary presentation in 1951. Continue reading →

22 June 2015
by Davide Mana 4 Comments

Alone with the Pharaohs

Even the best laid plans…
Summer is here, and I had been planning a one day vacation for a while.
The idea is simple – ride the 7 am train to Turin, get th the Museo Egizio di Torino, and spend a whole day exploring the new layout of the museum.
It would have been a good thing for the Mana Brothers, and having my brother along – who studied Egyptology when he was in university – would have been a boon.

But my father’s health further deteriorated, and right now me and my brother can’t take a day off simultaneously – someone has to be at hand 24/7.

Which means that, if I will do it, I’ll go alone.
Just like when I was a kid. Continue reading →

11 April 2015
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

The politics of the rat and the snake

As you read this, I am way in Modena, to attend a gaming convention, and my editor is reading the somewhat messy first draft plus of my second novel.

It’s been hard going.
The novel still does not have a title, but I know it’s built in four parts, each of them with its own title and two quotes to set the mood.
The fourth part is called The politics of the rat and the snake, and it’s been the hardest one to read because i had a somewhat clear idea of what was going to happen, but I did not know how it would actually happen, and most important I did not know how my characters would face the challenge. Continue reading →

22 October 2014
by Davide Mana Leave a comment

The explorer that loved music – Henning Haslund

Henning Haslund was a Danish explorer.
In the early 1920s he was part of an expedition to Central Asia led by his old military academy chum Carl Krebs.
The idea was to get there and set up a dairy farm.

What happened next is the subject of Mongolian Adventure, that Haslund published somewhere back in the first half of the 20th century; a thick, massive, highly satisfactory book that the fine guys of the Long Riders’ Guild* have reprinted a few years back.
I was given the book as a gift by a friend – and what a wonder it is! Continue reading →