Am I reading too many books?

Time to leave...

It's a thin line between learning too much about a place you've never been before and learning too little about this place. The danger in reading too much is that each book presents the point of view of somebody else. The experience that I will have traveling abroad will be different than the experience of others. Just because two people go to the same place doesn't mean that they will share the same journey. I think it is easy to fool ourselves into believing that this is true. There is also a certain scare factor that is certainly present in much of the reading I've done. In "The Zanzibar Chest," Aidan Hartley is a foreign corespondent who visits and reports on conflicts in Eastern Africa. He is surrounded by starvation and death. In each conflict he sees the worst side of mankind. Reading this book made me terrified. Watching "Darwin's Nightmare" I had a similar response. I also read "Bad Trips," a collection of stories describing funny, interesting, horrifying, embarrassing, awful trips from countries around the world. The only time Tanzania was mentioned was when one author casually mentioned that his girlfriend was raped in Tanzania. Vietnam was discussed in regards to the Vietnam War and sex tourism. For a while, the combination of these stories made me apprehensive and nervous. I realized though that the things that I see, that I feel, that I relate to will be different. I will not have the access that Hartley or the director of "Darwin's Nightmare" had. I will not be in Vietnam during the war. Tanzania is a very peaceful country. There are so many sides to a country and to a story and while it's important to learn about a country, I need to remind myself not to go overboard.