Famous Faces, Famous Places and Famous Foods
The Gift of Travel: The Best of Travelers' Tales
The Gift of Travel: The Best of Travelers' Tales, Edited by Larry Habegger, James O'Reilly and Sean O'Reilly. Published by Travelers' Tales Inc., San Francisco, CA US$14.95.
It's Not the Destination -- It's the Journey In These
Travelers' Tales. Encounters with strangers in distant lands often lead to the discovery
that the most thrilling adventure is the journey within. The landscape of the heart may be
the most wonderful or dangerous place on earth.
Editors of Travelers' Tales have a unique sensibility for finding storytellers who can identify the common thread that binds us all together no matter where we are located on Planet Earth. Panning for gold among the many volumes of Travelers' Tales they have published during five years in the business, they have come up with the most brilliant nuggets for this collection.
Each tale was written by a meticulous observer who is a master at evoking the little acts of kindness that turn strangers into friends, fleeting moments into lifelong memories.
Writers of these tales are often at a crossroads in their lives; their wanderlust fueled by the desire not so much to go somewhere but to go. Destinations range from the luxurious palace of a maharajah's son in Rajasthan, India, to a bleak sado-parlor in San Francisco. Every destination turns out to be more lively, various or mysterious than most travelers can imagine.
"No Distance in the Heart," by Thom Elkjer, is a tender story of love, loss and renewal that plays out in Barcelona, Spain, while he is on a business trip. He is grieving the disappointing news that after his wife's miscarriage and cancer, they will probably never have a child of their own. His wife is at home in California and their marriage is floundering under the weight of aching hearts.
One day while Elkjer is waiting for a train back to his hotel he saves a little girl from falling to certain death down a gap in the platform. The hair-raising incident happened so fast his fellow passengers, all of them reading or conversing, were not aware of this selfless act of heroism. In one of those inexplicable tricks of telepathy, his wife dreamed he had been pulled under a train by a little girl. The knowledge that they experienced a similar shock almost simultaneously while thousands of miles apart made them promise to begin again.
In "Seeing Red," Louis De Bernieres, with his bare hands, squeezed adventure from what might have been a day wasted in searing heat at a harvest festival in a small village near Valencia, Spain. After being pelted with tomatoes during the annual La Tomatina fiesta, he abandoned his notebook along with his British reserve and put up a gallant fight in the tomato wars. He left covered in pulp and "hysterical with happiness."
Some of the storytellers are young, earnest and impressionable. Their reactions to a particular time and place are immediate. Others, older and more contemplative, filter their journeys through wiser eyes.
Andrew Bill, who confesses to a lifelong travel habit, slips back in memory to a journey in the Sinai Peninsula during the chaos following the Camp David Accords in the early 1980s. Towns were empty, food was scarce, and the heat of the desert in summer was oppressive. Bill, eventually as hungry and bedraggled as the poorest nomad, was taken in by a group of Bedouins. He was almost certain they planned to rob him. Instead, they fed him and gave him a wad of bills to speed him on his journey. They thought he was a beggar. His guilt trip over his preconceptions and prejudices may finally be put to rest by this elegant recounting of the incident.
"When the energy is exactly right, it doesn't seem to matter where you are. Things just happen as they should," is the way Paula McDonald introduces her journey to the "End of the Earth," at the southern tip of Hainan Island in the South China Sea. "To this day, I can vividly remember every moment of that journey."
Beautiful memories are among the "gifts" travelers receive from unfamiliar people and places. The Gift of Travel: The Best of Travelers' Tales is a book to be read and savored story by story.