Jennifer Barclay - AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro

Gleams that untravelld world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

What you hold in your hands is a treasure trove of travel tales from people gone AWOLabsent 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 comfortableits 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 weve 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 truethe truth, of course, often being stranger than fiction.

Deliberately approaching an unusual mix of writerssome new, others established, among them poets and novelists and journalistswe 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 peoples 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 theyd 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 Jarmans romp through Europe, Hemingway filling his head, or in Deirdre Kellys 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 worldthe quest for identity is the only journey, said Northrop Fryetheir 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 travelin Brazil, India, China, Greece, Iceland, Thailand, Australia, the United States or Canadacan inspire in many different ways. Because these stories are personal, they dont 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 itgo AWOL!

Jennifer Barclay and Amy Logan

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 didnt 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 Phangans 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.