Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Travel
Publisher: Createspace
ISBN-10: 1534797335
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 292
Copyright: June 23, 2016
ISBN-13: 978153479338
Price: $9.95 (eBook)
A collection of ten non-fiction travel essays that focus on various islands, including Malta, Bali, Sri Lanka and Cyprus. The collection also includes two articles on Turkey, two essays on Bosnia and Montenegro, as well as an unpleasant journey to the Bay of Montevideo in Uruguay.
Excerpt from the Preface
The Many Faces and Moods of Travel
This collection of travel essays makes for an unusual group of travel companions. Like seasoned travelers themselves, each essay paints a unique experience whose coloration is intended to inspire the reader with their mystery and their magic. Even in today’s prosaic world, with its all-pervasive uniformity encroaching on all sides, the dream of the island paradise still contains an attraction and a lure that is all but irresistible, especially to the voyagers to distant shores in search of the exotic and the unexpected.
Islands, of course, have traditionally won the designation of being exotic, tropical, isolated, confined, and distant, in addition to other names in the lexicon that make them the perfect retreat for idle voyagers, vagabonds and castaways like myself. When you have a limited land-mass surrounded on all sides by water, one cannot but expect that the burgeoning beauty of nature that interrupts the vast oceans of the deep would attract a multitude of people in search of mighty mountains, thrilling waterfalls, dense jungles, tropical rain forests, and slow meandering rivers. These artifacts of nature take a final stand as it were by offering the weary traveler a respite from the onslaught of the endless blue sea and its blinding sea light.
A few years have passed since I published my last book of travel essays. If I had my way, I’d would be on the road as often as possible, gathering impressions, having adventures, unlocking the mysteries of language and communication, and roaming the jungles and mountain wilderness of far-flung countries to my heart’s content. I never tire of the open road and unlike many people who miss their home and can’t sleep in a strange bed, I feel at home in a hotel, as though its open door were just waiting for me to arrive. Give me a hotel room and I settle in like a caterpillar wearing its own cocoon or a tortoise snug in its protective shell. Journeys are taken and voyages made when the time presents itself as an empty cup just waiting to be filled by all the lemons and limes the orchard can produce. After all, there is blessing in being a stranger in a strange land, just as the Bible said (Exodus, II, 22).
Travel has as many moods as it has faces: stern, harsh, friendly, welcoming, reserved, even off-putting and distant. The journey brings us alive with its sense of adventure, tinged with excitement and accompanied by a little foreboding, shaking us out of the familiar sack of our comfort zone with its inevitable strangeness and unfamiliarity. The traveler is lost amid languages he cannot speak; uneasy with circumstances he cannot control; uncomfortable with cultures that seem alien and remote; afraid of the dangers lurking around every corner, and finally unhappy with strange people that seem inflexible and aloof in one’s attempt to relieve the journeyer’s sense of loneliness as chronic symptom of always being the road. In places like Japan, everyone bows out of deference to everyone else; whereas in the Middle East, no one bows on religious grounds to anyone except Allah, and that in full prostration, forehead to the ground. In the desert, rain is a blessing; during the wetness of the monsoons, the rain feels like a curse that never ends, echoing across tin rooftops with a cacophony that is deafening. Every culture seems to have its own manner of expression that the traveler must get used to in order to survive in distant lands.
I take as my inveterate mentor and guide the 19th century Scottish writer and poet, Robert Louis Stevenson. His philosophy was that we are all travelers “in the wilderness of this world”, that the best we can find on our travels is “an honest friend”, that the most memorable aspect of the trip is not arrival at one’s destination but “the journey itself”. One of his earliest travel books was called Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, the Cevennes being a mountain range in central-southern France, a journey that he made when he was in his twenties. His dealings with a contrarian donkey as a traveling companion have got to be unique of its kind. Later, in his travel book In the South Seas, he wrote: “The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.” While every island is an island, no man is an island, according to John Donne.
Every visit to a new island actually represents the thrill of the first island, since they are all different, with different cultures, different peoples, different languages, and thus represent a new beginning, every time a person sets foot on their shore. Landfalls sighted at dawn, a new island peeking over the horizon of a misting sea, new found harbors that offer safety and security against the wild expanse of the vast ocean and its sudden squalls, all capture the sense of the attraction and the allure of an island, just as a poem captures a sense of the miraculous through the discipline of words that a person has never heard before. Such adventure not only excites the blood, it renews and refreshes the human experience with new life and most welcome adventure.
Finally, a travel book offers interested readers a number of journeys they would never take on their own initiative. Hopefully, these ten brief tales will invigorate the reader with a feeling of the “virginity of sense” that Stevenson experienced every time he saw a pale moon rise over the horizon of a palm grove or out of the twilight of a darkening sea. The sense of doing something for the first time recalls the origin and source, the time of Eden before the Fall when the earth was Nature’s paradise, pristine and full of beauty, to be experienced every time as if for the first time. Hopefully, these tales will evoke the dream of a new world of adventure that lies beyond the horizon of the known world and our own selves as we seek adventure, life, friendship and ultimately redemption to be found in the non-man’s lands of distant islands and sea light that belong to time and the witness of the ages.
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