I’ve recommended Mary Morris’s Nothing To Declare: Memoirs of A Woman Traveling Alone over the years, was very happy to read that her latest book, All The Way To The Tigers, was another travelogue/family history/personal growth saga. Thanks to Doubleday Books/Nan Talese and NetGalley, I received an advance copy in return for this honest review.

In 2008, on the eve of her long-awaited sabbatical, an ice skating accident shattered her leg so seriously her doctor admitted later to her he wondered if she would ever walk again. The next three years were filled with surgeries and extensive rehabilitation, as she worked toward a dream trip to India in search of a F2F encounter with a tiger. Morris has had a lifetime attraction to tigers, perhaps because she has been such a successful woman alone: “Unlike lions, there is no word for tigers together. That’s because they never are.”

Throughout the book, she offers wonderful tidbits about tigers as they are in nature, and also as they have become familiar in popular culture. As someone who always felt that Roy (of Siegfried and Roy fame) earned what happened to him, I appreciated reading that Mantacore attacked Roy because “…months before the attack Roy had stopped feeding the tigers and stopped whispering to them…broke the bond and the tiger felt no loyalty to comply.”

Bouncing between 2008 when she was injured to 2011, when she took her long-awaited trip to India, she shares thoughts about her terrible, sad childhood. At least, she generally presents it as sad, with her mother appearing be an extremely unhappily married woman and her father being loud and overbearing. But she admits that “Harvard University study shows that creative people tend to remember their childhoods as unhappy even if they were not.” There are some nice memories in there, for example “It is my father who tucks me in. He sits at the side of my bed, making up stories about a homesick snowflake…a brook…sings me the Whiffenpoof song about the poor little lambs…until I drift to sleep. Not my mother.”

Her unhappiness growing up and an eye-opening trip to Europe with her mother led her to begin her life of extensive travel, and although she is desperate to have an encounter with a ferocious animal in the wild, she admits “I’ve never courted danger…for me, it was always about escape.”

Once she makes it to India, she explores the plight of tigers in the wild, sharing that it is the”…expansion of roads that impinges the most on the tiger’s habitat.”  As always, her  descriptive abilities are incredible: “A long chaotic industrial strip, filled with tire outlets, packs of wild dogs, sacred cows, feral pigs devouring trash. Women in bright-colored saris balance water jugs on their heads. Girls on mopeds, their heads and faces completely covered, dark glasses on, zip by. Women crouch, weaving garlands of flowers.“

There are some thought-provoking lines that really stood out to me, for example:

• “…about travel. The point isn’t to stay in one place. It is to move on…seizing the moment, the hour, the day, with the understanding that it isn’t forever.”
• “…why Buddhism took root in India. Because Buddhism teaches you how to sit quietly and be present.”
• “…I realized that silent is an anagram for listen. It is the voice that comes from the silence that the writer or artist must listen to.”
• “we are only seven meals away from anarchy.”

Her exploration of both the physical environment during her tiger trip and her own lessons along the way bring her to the big epiphany that may affect her future travel and whether she is now less inclined to go solo: what she   “…learned along the way that I could do this on my own. I know that I can. I also know that it is all right to have someone.”

I found the self-exploration and the descriptive passages to be as wonderful as I expected, but I wasn’t as enthralled with the extensive bouncing back and forth between 2008, when the life-altering accident happened, and 2011, when she finally took her trip “all the way to the tigers.”  Four stars rather than five, mostly because Nothing To Declare is clearly a five,  and this one was a shade less awesome for me. Still, highly recommended.