AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds - Softcover

Barclay, Jennifer; Logan, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679312153 ISBN 13: 9780679312154

Publisher: Vintage Canada, 2003

Synopsis

AWOL: absent without leave; absent from one’s post or duty without official permission but without intending to desert. Originally a military term, it gradually entered the vernacular for when someone goes missing unexpectedly. Jennifer Barclay and Amy Logan thought it fit well with the kind of travel pieces they wanted to publish -- irreverent but thoughtful, emotionally honest and opinionated, bold and provocative. AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds would be dedicated to the perspectives we gain when away from our regular circumstances.

They were tired of opening newspaper travel sections to accounts of five-star hotels or hip restaurants, package holidays and cruises, or extreme, death-defying feats. The tales that excited them were more personal. They wanted to bring back a sense of wonder about the world out there. “Rejecting the consumerist attitude of always wanting something better, which seems to go hand in hand with the concept of extreme travel, we wanted to show that there are different kinds of adventures -- the ones that are more by-the-seat-of-your-pants and that all of us can afford. It’s about slowing down the way we travel, learning to observe and to relish all the moments.”

Inviting authors to contribute, they stressed they weren’t looking for detached reportage, but unpublished true tales of pleasure or pain or hilarity that would move and inspire. “Travel has become an important aspect of our lives, and we felt it was important to explore what we get out of it: Whether it makes us better citizens of the planet or enriches our lives. How discovering the world can be about discovering yourself, or help you see life afresh.” They wanted writing that was exciting and creative, that fired the imagination, dazzled with language, captured something emblematic or unique. The stories are full of telling details and do not shirk from emotion. The trips range from a short break close to home, to years living on the other side of the world.

When Rick Maddocks leaves for Mexico, his father says “I hope you find what you’re searching for.” But you don’t always find what you expect. “What was I expecting...?” asks Andrew Pyper on arriving in Brazil. Karen Connelly tries to switch off the chattering of her brain in Burma, so she can just “shut up and see.” After a year in China, Rui Umezawa is utterly disoriented: “The world as I’d known it no longer existed. Neither did the man I believed myself to be.” However far or near you travel, an AWOL destination is a place where, says Brad Smith, “the usual rules don’t apply.” Myrna Kostash muses, roaming through Greece, “I cannot be further away from the rest of my life.” But when Camilla Gibb comes home from Ethiopia, her own culture seems bleak, “devoid of all colour, all meaning.”

The authors in AWOL have collectively won or been nominated for practically every literary prize in Canada, making it an extraordinary collection of original writing. The editors also decided to add another dimension to the book, a sense of fun and accessibility, by pasting in trip memorabilia -- tickets, snaps, sketches and odd mementoes -- to divide up the text and draw the reader into the stories. They wanted AWOL to feel a bit like a magazine: a reader-friendly paperback with big pages and great design, something to read on the bus for inspiration and escape, or to amble through at the cottage.

The Toronto Star called AWOL a “decidedly quirky collection that follows no obvious theme or point of departure -- except the delicious need to go away.” If travel is about broadening the mind and having fun, AWOL is to get us through the rest of the year. The Winnipeg Free Press called it “an all-encompassing armchair travel experience ... the kind of collection that, once read, will beckon from the bookshelf to fill a particular longing when it strikes.”

For those who dream of having no fixed address, and those happy simply to read about it, AWOL is filled with entertaining, enriching and edifying stories of people getting away from the familiar.

About this title

About the Author:

Jennifer Barclay was born in 1968 and grew up with one younger brother in a village on the edge of Saddleworth Moor in the north of England. The family travelled to Europe every summer in search of sunshine. Her father is a football journalist while her mother has worked variously in catering, care for handicapped kids, and as information officer for an automobile company.

After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English, and gaining some journalism experience with The Independent and student magazines like the Oxford Author, she ended up teaching English in Greece. Following a roller-coaster year and a summer job in a hotel overlooking a volcano, she had caught the travel bug and saved up to follow a friend to Guyana, to learn the thrill of jungles, rivers and wild savannahs. Eventually a career beckoned. She found herself in Toronto, working for a large literary agency, and in a few years became an agent, representing Canadian authors.

Though being an agent was exciting, she wanted to do something about her love of travel and her creative itch. At 32, she left and headed to Korea and China. Returning, she set up as an editor and writer, published travel articles and book reviews in the Globe and Mail, and researched the idea of a travel magazine. Then she met Amy, and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds was born.

She enjoyed living in Canada, but after a decade felt drawn to Europe again. She and her partner currently live in Montpellier, a lively and historic university town in southwest France. Email allows her to continue assessing and editing manuscripts in English from Canada, the U.K. and elsewhere. The country and sea are easy to reach. “It’s great to be in love with where you live.”

Born in 1972, Amy Logan says it was excellent growing up in Bowmanville, Ontario, where her “family is loving, incredible friends were abundant, the schools encouraged creativity, and summer jobs like strawberry-picking and working at the local marina made life even more interesting.” She moved to Montreal in 1990 to attend McGill University, and her original plan was a B.A. majoring in political science, followed by law school. She enjoyed university and completed the degree, but once the LSAT time came around, law was no longer of interest.

She soon found herself on a plane to Japan, where she lived for eighteen months on the island of Shikoku: a palm- and orange-treed place largely known to the Japanese as “the sticks.” She met wonderful people and filled journal after journal. Her favourite memories include standing transfixed at the edge of a volcano with friends yelling “Amy, no!” and road-tripping around Kyushu with three Japanese friends in a tiny, doily-laden car. Japan is also where she learned to love mountains.

On a flight layover on her way home from Japan Amy took one look at Vancouver and cancelled her plans to move to London, England. She lived in Vancouver for three years, working at a newspaper, in a marketing department, and finally a publishing house called Hartley & Marks. She found her niche working in books and hasn’t left since.

Now based in Toronto, Amy works full-time for the International Festival of Authors and the Harbourfront Reading Series. Prior to that, she worked with ECW Press. She edits and writes on her nights and weekends, and has two passports, Canadian and British, which she tries to use as much as possible.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The Tea House on the Mountain
Rabindranath Maharaj

Maybe it’s a good idea for us to keep a few dreams of a house that
we shall live in later, always later, so much later . . .
-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Sometimes I would read of travel writers miraculously stumbling upon a remote gem, cached away from everything that had made them uncomfortable and itchy. I was usually skeptical of these miniature paradises and particularly of their descriptions: frozen in time, lush and verdant, wreathed in mist. I felt that these writers needed to isolate some redemptive nugget from their montage of irritation. But then I discovered just such a spot. In Trinidad, of all places.

During each of my summer visits back to Trinidad as an adult, I got the sense of an island hastily constructed and waiting to be pulled down, like a movie set with actors bustling along temporary streets and sometimes disappearing into temporary buildings. And as though it were a movie set, buildings constructed centuries ago were routinely destroyed, with the actors wandering aimlessly, waiting for another production to take over the island. The most recent was the bother about corruption and about American influence.

On my last visit, a recently retired teacher was complaining that the malls and shopping areas were being converted into American monstrosities. He placed his glass of Coke on the circular table set at the edge of his porch and glanced at his overdressed daughter. “This is the younger generation for you. Follow fashion. Monkey see, monkey do.” He leaned back. “This damn nonsense start the minute the English pull out from here. Now them fellas did know how to run a place.” After two weeks of listening to mauvais langue, a potent form of gossip, I decided to escape to Mayaro Beach on the eastern tip of the island.

On the road from the small agricultural town of Rio Claro, the approach to the beach is signalled when the teak plantations shift to coconut palms, and the small, modest houses with perfect lawns and croton hedges give way to newer concrete homes owned by employees of the various oil companies. The house where I was to spend the weekend was a two-storey structure, part of a semicircular compound at the edge of the beach. The first night, I slept on the porch, listening to the wind prowling through the leaves of the coconut palms, and the tumbling of the waves. Once, I heard a metallic knocking and footsteps, but when I looked over the balcony, I saw no one.

The next morning, I was awakened by a fierce argument. Two men, one accompanied by a woman and three boys, were quarrelling in the sandy yard in the middle of the compound. The single man saw me and shouted, “You get any water last night? Tell me one time.”

“I just woke up,” I told him.

He took this as some sort of confirmation. “You see? Is the same thing I was saying.”

The man with the family looked at me. “You sure you didn’t get any water?”

“I just woke up.”

“You sure?” After a while, he added, “You better go and check again.”

“Why you making the man waste he time so? It have no water in the whole compound.”

“But I turn on the pump last night.”

“Turn on, turn on, turn on. You don’t know nothing about this damn job. I never had no problem when I was caretaking this place. Since you start caretaking is problem on all side.” He glanced at me. “True or not true, mister?”

Just then, a stubby man emerged with a wrench from one of the houses. “I was a plumber. I will fix it.” He tapped the iron water pipe with the wrench, held a steel crossbar with his other hand and torturously hoisted himself up to the tank. A woman came to the doorway and said tiredly, “Take care you don’t fall down again.”

After about twenty minutes of knocking and tapping, the ex-plumber announced that someone had turned off a valve. “It look like sabotage to me.”

I headed for the beach, the argument still simmering. I walked along the shore, trying to memorize the pattern of the waves, the position of the driftwood on the sand, and the varieties of shell strewn about. Beyond the crashing breakers, a fishing boat skimmed the small rippling waves. Seagulls dipped into the boat’s trail, foraging for fish trapped in the seine. Soon the net would be stretched along the shore, and carite and kingfish and moonshine heaped into aluminum pails.

When I returned to the compound, the ex-plumber, looking quite pleased, was sitting on a bench, nibbling at mango slices seasoned with lemon, pepper and shadow beni, a local herb. He raised the bowl toward me, “You want some chow?” I took this as a hint that he wanted to talk about his mediation. Later in the day, the bench grew crowded as friends and relatives dropped by. A group of government workers descended on another building in the compound and off-loaded a few cases of Carib, a local beer, from their vehicles. They discussed the political situation in a noisy, partisan manner. A foreigner could easily have imagined that they were quarrelling.

In Trinidad, these intricate arguments are often a prelude to astonishing revelations about shady deals, and for the next few days, I regularly encountered similar boisterous conversations, where opinions and “inside info” were flung at friend and stranger alike. A man in his sixties, a friend of my uncle, told me, “I hear you is a sorta writer. Make sure you don’t say my name when you write about who greasing the Minister hand. Make sure you don’t say that is Maniram who clue you in.” He spelled his name slowly. “That is M-a-n-i-r-a-m.” Before I left, he recanted and said I could mention his name.

After less than a week of this, I asked my sister, a doctor at St. Ann’s Hospital, known locally as the Madhouse, if there were any quiet places nearby. She mentioned a tea house at Mount St. Benedict. I had been up the mountain a few times. The estate, about seven hundred acres of misty, forested mountains and sharp valleys and once-thriving coffee plantations, is studded with distinctive red-roofed and white-walled buildings. There are partially concealed chapels, natural trails favoured by bird watchers searching for euphonies and woodcreepers, a rehab centre, and the monastery, built a century ago by Benedictine monks from Brazil. I remembered it as a place to which troubled families turned as a last resort. This bushy Benedictine outpost, shaded by palmistes, was also a perfect place for young couples to visit, and there was a steady stream of cars trekking up the hill.

To get there, my sister and I had to pass through Tunapuna, a busy town about half an hour from Port of Spain, the nation’s capital, and a few minutes from the University of the West Indies. As we crawled along the crowded road–here pedestrians veered in and out of the traffic and occasionally slowed to respond to an irate, swearing driver–I noticed that not much had changed since my last visit, two years earlier. The roads were lined with hardware stores and rum shops and vendors selling doubles and pudding and souse. Everyone seemed busy, but there was no discernible pattern to the constant motion; from a distance it might have seemed as if the pedestrians, many with cellphones clapped to their ears, were going round in circles.

Soon we were out of the tangled traffic and at the foot of the northern range. On both sides of the narrow, precipitous road were old wooden houses crowded together, but as we drove up, I was able to see the Aripo Savannah and the Caroni Swamp, and from this elevation, the landscape simplified into an uncluttered pattern of towns, villages, plains and mangrove swamp. We drove past the monastery and then up a winding road, almost missing the tea house, an incongruous building at the apex of a sharp curve. There were two cars parked close to an iron railing at the brink of the hill, but from the road, I noticed the tea house was empty. In Trinidad, buildings are usually renovated in an elaborate and gaudy manner, but the guest house and the adjoining tea house, built during the Second World War (and favoured by American soldiers, my sister mentioned), retained all the architectural characteristics of the period. The garden was noisy with bananaquits, tanagers and unrecognizable seed-eaters. I thought: This place is perfect. There was just the correct mix of desolation and sanctity.

We chose a table close to the garden, and a woman dressed in white brought over a menu that listed Dutch and Chinese and American and presidential teas and a variety of fruit-flavoured ice creams. A few minutes after we ordered, she returned with a tray smelling of cinnamon and honey and faintly of molasses. The home-baked bread and cakes were soft and warm, the tea perfectly blended. A young man, also dressed in white, emerged from the kitchen a few times, but for the rest of the afternoon, my sister and I were the only visitors.

From the tea room, partially encircled by the hill’s arm, I saw starthroats and copper-rumped hummingbirds buzzing around a bird feeder wreathed in serpentine orchids and set against the edge of a slope. The waiter walked to the garden and, with his back to me, joined in my examination. After a few minutes, he returned to the kitchen. I tried to read his face as he passed.

On an island where there is an interminable stream of conversation, it was easy to be lulled into a pleasant languor by the singing of the birds, the remoteness of the tea house and the unexpected reserve of the workers. But all too soon, it was six o’clock and the tea shop was closed.

I returned alone to the mountain a few days later, just before my departure from the island. On the way, I paid a visit to the monastery, which was so quiet that my footsteps e...

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Canada
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0679312153
• ISBN 13: 9780679312154
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288