Around Eighty Days Around the Earth - Audiobook (MP3)

Travel is still an adventure today, but what the traveler experienced 150 years ago is history for us. The Suez Canal has already been built, greatly shortening the journey between Europe and India. A railway crosses America between the east and west coasts, but Indian attacks are not uncommon, and passengers defend themselves in firefights. In principle, it is possible to travel by train through India, but there are sections that have not yet been completed, which the passenger must organize on his own, even on elephant back. In China, opium is king, and in India it still happens that even the living wife is burned on the husband's funeral pyre. The British Empire, on the other hand, is huge, and what Verne describes about it from a French perspective seems like early globalization. But all this is just the framework, the background for a humorous, entertaining story about an English gentleman and (not coincidentally) his French valet on a trip around the world, which they have to complete in an almost unrealistic amount of time, as a bet. A race against time, the excitement of which is heightened by the fact that our hero is followed and hindered by an obsessed detective who believes him guilty of a high-value theft. It goes without saying that the novel also has a love story, which begins with a very romantic life-saving act. To make the experience complete, József Székhelyi narrates the episodes as colorfully and naturally as if he were telling anecdotes from his own experiences to a dinner party.