Travel Writing, "In the Jungle"

In Annie Dillard's piece about the Ecuadorian jungle, the reader is taken on a journey with her, as she explains her experience there and entices us to join her. Her writing conforms well to the expected elements of the travel writing genre. She shares with us many personal experiences, some more pleasurable than others. "We were holding cool drinks and idly watching a hand-sized tarantula seize moths that came to the lone bulb on the generator shed beside us." She mentions how she interacted with the "village girls" and portrays their playfulness, noting that, "they were all braiding my hair, all five of them, all fifty fingers, all my hair, even my bangs. And then they took it apart and did it again, laughing, and teaching me Spanish nouns, and meeting my eyes and each other's with open delight."

 

As well as giving the reader her personal experiences, Dillard fills the piece with sensory details. Through her use of certain verbs and nouns, one can clearly picture the image that she is describing, "Green fireflies spattered lights across the air and illumined for seconds, now here, now there, the pale trunks of enormous, solitary trees. Beneath us the brown Napo River was rising, in all silence; it coiled up the sandy bank and tangled its foam in vines that trailed from the forest and roots that looped the shore." She is constantly reminding the reader of the atmosphere throughout the piece. The final element that Dillard combines into her travel writing is convincing the reader to make the journey. Her personal anecdotes provide a friendly, joyful, positive and intriguing atmosphere that could potentially cause the reader to take the trip. In conclusion, through the author's experiences, sensory details and positive descriptions of the destination, Dillard successfully captures all of the expected elements of her genre and, at least in my case, achieves the ultimate goal of convincing the reader to want to take the journey.