AWOL
Page 1
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
CONTENTS
Introduction
Laurie Gough Monks on Mopeds
Peter Unwin Incident at Rankin Inlet
Simona Chiose Chickens, Girls and Ruins
Charles Wilkins Two Days in Dallas
Camilla Gibb Her Eyes Follow
Michael Redhill On the Road to San Rocco a Pilli
Myrna Kostash Looking for Demetrius
Rick Maddocks Bus Ride to Big Jesus
Grant Buday Exit Permit
Mark Anthony Jarman Penetrating Europe-Land
Steven Heighton The Drunken Boat
Gillian Meiklem A Lesson in Dance
Brad Smith Local Rules
Andrew Pyper A Brazilian Notebook
David Manicom Up the Holy Mountain (and Down by Cable Car)
Warren Dunford Off-Season in Puerto Vallarta
Deirdre Kelly Close Encounters of the Euro-Trash Kind
Nick Massey-Garrison We Turned Some Sharp Corners: A Marriage Proposal in Durango
Karen Connelly Broken Heaven, Broken Earth
Tony Burgess With My Little Eye
James Grainger The Last Hippie
Arjun Basu How I Learned to Love Scotch
Rabindranath Maharaj The Tea House on the Mountain
Scott Gardiner My First Brothel
Nikki Barrett The Growing Season
Patrick Woodcock The Ballet of Patrick Blue-Ass
Jill Lawless Aftershock
Michael Winter Two Drawings
Jonathan Bennett Headlands
Alison Wearing The Motherhood Roadshow
Sandra Shields Station Road
Katherine Govier Where the Birds Are
Rui Umezawa Photographs
Jamie Zeppa Coming Home
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
What you hold in your hands is a treasure trove of travel tales from people gone AWOL—absent without leave from their usual circumstances; true stories to inspire those who replenish their spirits by getting out there.
For most of us, home is safe and comfortable—it’s hard to lose our bearings on the daily trek to work by car or subway. Travel is a state of being that brings us moments of beauty and unusual challenge. It can change our perspective, make us less materialistic, more willing to mix with different kinds of people. It can scare us and confuse us at the same time as it makes us feel most alive. Travelling without an agenda, with time for meandering, is often the hardest and most rewarding form of adventure: it can lead us away from the beaten path toward something unexpected.
Travel and writing have always gone hand in hand. The urge to inscribe moments of a journey onto paper can be irresistible, while many of us wander because of a story we’ve read. For us, the editors, the travel stories that fire our imagination resonate with the peculiar magic of being in a particular place at a particular time. Like fiction, these tales capture something emblematic or beautiful in their characters or description or direction. Like travel, they assume various shapes. They are illustrations of another reality; of how each place yields different things to every traveller, depending on why you go, whom you meet, who you are.
In compiling this book, we looked for stories that showed the author altered by getting away from the familiar, whether across the globe or a few hours from home; we looked for humour, emotional honesty, beautiful style, a zest for life, an absorption in the surroundings conveying a strong sense of place, stories that surprised. Each piece was chosen for something special it portrayed to our travel-inspired sensibilities. All had to be original, never published before, and all had to be true—the truth, of course, often being stranger than fiction.
Deliberately approaching an unusual mix of writers—some new, others established, among them poets and novelists and journalists—we were overjoyed at the positive response. Not only did these writers have AWOL stories to share, they were excited about this collection coming together. People who treasure “getting away” have plenty of stories to tell about what they have seen and learned out there; and more often than not, they want to hear about other people’s travel exploits.
In compiling this collage of stories and visuals, we included the offbeat, the irreverent and the provocative, to keep the concept as unconfined as the travel we enjoy. Out on the road, alliances both strong and bizarre form. The travellers in this book fall in love, make marriage proposals, are subjected to strange courtships. They are thrown together with people they’d never meet back home, make new friends and discard identities they have acquired among people they know. They learn to travel with babies and teenagers. They also long for privacy and isolation, a chance to get away from the pack and breathe deeply.
Storytelling is at its best when it includes the traveller as a character, perhaps astonished, perhaps dismayed, but always learning along the way. We enjoy the picture of the young traveller setting out to experience the big wide world, looking for love and adventure, the world and its stories there “for the taking,” as Scott Gardiner puts it. There is an infectious enthusiasm in Mark Jarman’s romp through Europe, Hemingway filling his head, or in Deirdre Kelly’s opportunistic hunt for excitement in Paris.
In some of the longer pieces, writers who have lived in other countries reveal deeper observations: Karen Connelly trying to switch off what she knows, to merely listen and learn in Burma; Camilla Gibb feeling guilt over the hardship she leaves behind in Ethiopia; David Manicom wondering how he can appreciate societies as old as coal when he comes from a country still hesitant about its own identity. Jamie Zeppa paints a powerful picture of the culture shock of returning to Canada after years in Bhutan.
All the writers are from Canada. Canadians are always looking beyond their borders, and many of these authors have already published extraordinary travel books. Combining freshness with intelligence, Canadian travel writing remains under-promoted, in spite of the national appetite for memoir and for travel itself. Short pieces that are unconventional, personal and opinionated rarely reach Canadian readers by way of the mainstream press unless written by celebrities. Many of these tales were pulled from travel journals, personal stories that, until now, never had an appropriate forum.
A recurring theme that jumps out as being Canadian is multicultural heritage. Simona Chiose feels wealthy when spending pesos in Cuba, yet the poorest villages remind her of Romania, where she grew up. Nikki Barrett has to go through a claustrophobic tour of Robben Island to realize that her African childhood has been overwritten by her more recent North American experience. If Canadians find pieces of their identity by travelling the world—the quest for identity is the only journey, said Northrop Frye—their sense of self is no less complex or mysterious when they come back.
For us travel addicts, there is a simple pleasure in stepping on unknown ground: the smells and tastes of a new place; the struggles with unfamiliar languages and customs; the knowledge that when you wake up, there will be new people to meet, that life might take you in an unexpected direction. This book shows how the delicious moments of travel—in Brazil, India, China, Greece, Iceland, Thailand, Australia, the United States or Canada—can inspire in many different ways. Because these stories are personal, they don’t aim to tell the full story about a place, just one juicy slice of experience.
This is a book for those of us who are happy to live with no fixed address, and those of us who are inspired by sitting back and reading about it. However you do it—go AWOL!
Jennifer Barclay and Amy Logan
001Destination: Thailand
MONKS ON MOPEDS
Laurie Gough
The midnight boat to the island of Koh Phangan was full of hippies. Not friendly hippies, but people who liked to dress the part. They didn’t smile. For such a ragged, dreadlocked, motley crew, they took themselves extremely seriously. I lay awake on the deck for most of the night and let my thoughts sink into the deep purple sky over Thailand. I was thrilled to be in a country I had read so much about, a country so ancient and storied, the Venice of the East, filled with temples of dawn and northern hill tribes. I recalled what I had seen earlier that day on the train through the southern tip of Thailand: jagged mountains, jungles, rubber plantations and giant Buddhas that sat contemplatively in rice paddies.
When the boat reached the island in the morning, I found a bamboo hut to rent on the beach. Over the next ten days I discovered Koh Phangan’s outstanding features: nasty dogs that bite your ankles wherever you go, the most delicious food in the entire world (noodles with ginger, chilies, cashews, shrimp in coconut milk, sticky rice), full-moon parties where foreign tourists eat magic mushrooms and fly to solitary planets where conversation is neither required nor even possible, and wandering old men who use their thumbs as instruments of torture.
A Danish woman recommended the Thai massage administered by elderly men who stroll the beaches, soliciting willing victims. When the eighty-year-old masseur offered to ply his trade on my body, I eagerly complied, overjoyed at the idea of soothing my aching shoulders, which had heaved a far too heavy backpack far too long. Just before he began, I noticed his thumbs. These were no ordinary thumbs but appendages of astounding proportions, mutated digits, round and flat, the size of dessert spoons. Clearly he had spent his life cultivating his thumbs for the art of massage.
While I lay on the sand, the man with the thumbs prodded and poked his way from my feet up my legs with cruel and unyielding force, even took unnecessary jabs at my knees, showing no mercy at my protests. I had been far less tense before the massage began. He applied his thumbs to the deepest reaches of my body, surely causing irreparable damage to my life-giving organs. By the time he reached my stomach, I was overcome with self-pity. His thumbs forced down into my stomach with such a weight, they seemed to touch the ground beneath me. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his face, which was severe, determined and hardened.
Clearly, massage was serious business to this man, and flinching was for sissies. Clearly, I was a sissy. When he tried to grab hold of my tongue, I clamped my teeth to prevent the intrusion. Then, in a strange and dreadful moment, the giant thumbs were boring into my ears. No one had ever done such a thing, and I stopped the thumbs at that point, but not before I heard something pop. Afterwards, I went for a swim in the sea and couldn’t get the water out of my ears for two days. The thumbs had carved a small cave in my inner ear for water to sit in, resulting in a painful ear infection that lasted two weeks.
Thailand didn’t seem to hold the romance and mystical intrigue I had imagined.
From the moment I arrived in Bangkok, I was shoved up against a human tide, jostled by bodies of every description. Every time I walked out of my guest house, I encountered monsoons of activity: human, animal and vegetable. On the streets, I watched people who had fallen half-mad into the gutters of life. Vacant, destitute faces begged for acknowledgement of their existence. Children with rakes for bodies stared at me with eyes bigger than all the world’s darkest secrets. Mangy dogs ate rotten vegetables off the roads. I gazed into the rich, brown, beautiful faces of the women who sold me combs, cheap soap and pineapples on the sidewalks. I wandered through night markets that sold pig heads, red coiled intestines in glass jars, dripping animal appendages, green leafy vegetable shoots, smoked fish and pyramid mounds of spices. In these markets, every passing scent was either sublime or rank.
Small shops and sidewalk stalls in Bangkok are run by old men with cataracts, who have seen too much and give none of it away. They would wrap my passion fruit carefully in yesterday’s newspaper, fold all the edges as if it were a wedding present. I watched monks on mopeds, sometimes two on a bike, race down the streets, their saffron robes flowing behind them as they sped through the chaos. Glorious smiles, shaved heads, and Doc Martens on their feet.
Bangkok endures annual floods and an eternal stickiness—a stickiness in the air, in the rice, in the sex sold on the streets. This is the city where Japanese businessmen come for sex holidays, whole planeloads of them seeking out the young Thai girls from the hill tribes, whose starving parents sell them into prostitution. Young boys sell themselves for movie tickets. Street life sharpens to a razor’s edge on which few can balance.
It seemed to me that Bangkok lay smouldering under a blue haze of exhaust fumes and smog: the city of perpetually honking horns. Wheels and people are everywhere, all spinning like the city and your head, spinning fast toward the Western world of chaos, Coca-Cola and Internet cafés.
To cross a street in Bangkok is to risk your life. Pedestrians have no rights. I would always have to wait for a flood of rickshaws and careening cabs, tuk-tuks, bikes and buses to cease, and sometimes I waited half an hour. Sidewalks end abruptly with cement walls in your face, and they’re full of gaping holes, wide-open sewage holes that are gateways to the underworld. I worried for the children and dogs who might slip in silently. Somewhere in that city, lost souls must wander in the sewers, like filthy fallen angels.
I took a bus north out of Bangkok. I wanted to breathe oxygen again. Just outside a village, I stayed at a guest house run by a woman with too many children to count. Sumalee started working before the sun came up and didn’t stop until after it set. She cooked, cleaned, gardened, took care of her children, and in the evenings, if she had foreign guests, she practised other languages. She loved singing and knew all the words to “Over the Rainbow.” Although she said she didn’t keep track, she thought she was close to thirty-five years old. When I asked where her husband was, she told me, very poetically I thought, that he was experimenting with different hearts.
In the lantern-lit evening, I watched the rich communal life of Sumalee’s family. As in many non-Western countries, everyone is related and no one is ever alone. Mothers are never isolated and burdened with small, bored children. Children have many mothers, most of them cousins, aunts and older sisters. Social intimacy comes at the cost of privacy, however. Everybody in that extended family seemed to know each other’s business. They also seemed to know intimate details about every person in the village.
A week later, I camped in the countryside near a wide glassy river. All night long I gagged from the sickly sweet stench of a burning pile of organic matter and garbage near my tent. I had seen these fires from bus and train windows all over the country. So overpowering were the fumes that I tried to put out the fire, and when that didn’t work, I uprooted and moved my tent in the middle of the night. To think I had left Bangkok because of its noxious fumes. Smoke choked even the country skies in an eternal season of burning. Where was the ancient soft pure air of Thailand?
In Chiang Mai, I hooked up with my Canadian friend Charlie. We stayed at the Be Happy Guest House, run by an elderly couple who fed us sticky rice and vegetables with fish sauce. After dinner we explored Chiang Mai and discovered the Be More Happy Guest House, just down the street. If only we’d known. The next morning when we were eating breakfast at an outdoor restaurant, a little boy came by, holding a cage full of birds. “Give me five baht and I’ll let the birds go,” he said to us. We refused to pay the wildlife kidnapper’s ransom and he moved on to other tourists at the next table.
Charlie and I continued north. In Chiang Rai, everyone and his brother tried to get us to go on a hill tribe trek. These treks were all the rage. Ride elephants into the past, see hill tribe people untouched by the modern world, they advertised. A Dutch couple, recently returned from one of the more popular expeditions, told us they had walked ahead of their group and arrived at the hill tribe station an hour before they were expected. Through the tre
es they watched the hill people preparing for the visitors by changing from their ordinary ragged clothes into bright costumes, traditional elaborate hats, and jewellery.
Charlie and I decided to do our own exploring of northern Thailand. We rented a motorcycle in Chiang Rai and set off early one morning into the hills. On the main road north we learned the only law of Thai highway travel: might is right. Every vehicle larger than our motorcycle bullied us over to the extreme edge of the road, beside the gutter. We drove on the shoulder—one dead dog and we’d be dead too—and let the wailing, streaking, hurtling consciousness of the highway leave us in the dust.
Soon we escaped the main highway and, on our rickety motorcycle with its sputtering engine, began to follow switchback roads that led into the sky. Thai soldiers had warned us of the danger in the green terraced mountains leading to the Golden Triangle, danger from drug dealers and thieves, communist terrorists and Laotian soldiers who might fly out of the hills to attack travellers at any time. Higher up into the clouds, the mountains become tough and weather-worn, like the skin of the barefoot people who stood and watched us from the roadside. These northern hills were inhabited by ten thousand lives, people eking out their existence in tattered dirt villages that cling to the sides of mountains like bats to cave walls.
TO CROSS A STREET IN BANGKOK IS TO RISK YOUR LIFE.
When our motorcycle needed a rest, we stopped in a village where we saw a woman smoking opium from a pipe as she breast-fed her baby. She looked fifty but was probably much younger. I smiled at her and she thrust her hand out toward me. “Five baht to make picture,” she said.
Farther up the road we found a Buddha statue inside a cave. The cave was deliciously cold and tranquil after the thick heat of the day. A monk from a nearby temple came to greet us. He wore biker sunglasses and an orange robe; tattoos laced his forearms. In broken English, he told us about his simple life in the hills and how much happier he was now than when he was young. “Life is a handful of days, then poof,” he blew on his hands, “then it’s all over.” He laughed and bowed for us as he turned to leave. His jack-o’-lantern robe ruffling in the wind as he walked up a wooded path was a scene of golden beauty.