Laurie Gough - Kite Strings of the Southern Cross: A Womans Travel Odyssey

Table of Contents

TRAVELERS TALES BOOKS

Country and Regional Guides
America, Australia, Brazil, France, Greece, India,
Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand;
Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Hong Kong,
Paris, San Francisco

Womens Travel
A Womans Path, A Womans Passion for Travel,
A Womans World, Women in the Wild, A Mothers World,
Safety and Security for Women Who Travel,
Gutsy Women, Gutsy Mamas

Body & Soul
The Road Within, Love & Romance, Food,
The Fearless Diner, The Gift of Travel, The Adventure
of Food, The Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage

Special Interest
Danger!, Testosterone Planet, Theres No Toilet Paper
on the Road Less Traveled, The Penny Pinchers
Passport to Luxury Travel, The Fearless Shopper,
The Gift of Birds, A Dogs World, Family Travel,
The Gift of Rivers, Shitting Pretty,
Not So Funny When It Happened

Footsteps
Kite Strings of the Southern Cross,
The Sword of Heaven, Storm

Classics
The Royal Road to Romance,
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

PREFACE

WHEN I RETURNED TO CANADA after a year and a half in the South Pacific and Asia I found myself at a loss as to what to do next with my life. Travelers often find it strange to come home after a long journey, to try to make sense out of all those days spent on the road. A traveler has collided with new aspects of the world she never imagined, encountered sounds, sights, smells, and skins of other lands that have left her breathless. Its too vast a universe to leave smoldering in a skull. She might explode. So whats to be done with travel when its over? I did the only thing that made sense at the time: I told my travel stories to friends and family, to those interested and kind enough to listen.

People kept telling me the Canadian economy was in a shambles that fall. You wont find a job if you dont have one already, certainly not a teaching job, they warned me. Since nobody was hiring in southern Ontario, I took off for my old stomping ground up north, back to my cabin in the woods outside of Bancroft, Ontario, near Algonquin Park. Of course there would be no jobs there eitherthe economy is always depressed in those Ozarks of the Northbut at least there Id be like everyone else, jobless, and I was back in the woods. Luckily, I found enough substitute teaching in country schools to get me through the fall. Winter came heavily that year with twelve-foot drifts of snow. Sleeping one night in my cabin warmed by the wood stove, I awoke with a terrifying electric jolt. My God, I thought, Im all alone in the woods, thousands of miles from the South Pacific, from those sultry Fijian nights. Where has it all gone? I could feel my travels dissolving as each cold minute passed, as if my trip were a dream Id invented to keep sane in the solitary woods. Running over to my desk in the dark, I fumbled to find a pen and paper and the light. I was panic stricken that if I waited another minute to write about my travels they would melt away entirely or, worse, become hazy anecdotes. So as the snow fell outside my window and the fire crackled, I began to write. I wrote about another dark night, the night I returned to the island of Taveuni off the boat. That first writing was sappy, too melancholy, I think now when I look back at its original form. Yet it captured something of that night on the road I never want to forget, and it captured me. I was lost to the world of writing for the next four years. That story marked the beginning of Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, although I didnt know it at the time. After writing it I became obsessed with my time in Fiji and the people I had known there. Poring over my Fiji travel journal and all the journals from my other trips, I was shocked to find the wealth of impressions, reflections, joys, traumas, and revelations hidden in their pages. From the passionate writings of a spirited twenty-year-old hitchhiker with a copy of Kerouacs On the Road in her backpack, to the wiser and more worldly narratives of insight from a twenty-seven-year-old still struck with wanderlust, I had much to read, and much to remember.

Why I felt compelled to write the story of returning to Taveuni in particular, I dont know. Far more adventurous stories of my travels awaited my pen and paper (and very soon, my computer) in the months and years to come. But writing that night in my cabin set me on the road to writing my travel stories rather than telling them, just as years earlier I set myself on the road of travel itself.

All the stories in Kite Strings of the Southern Cross are true, more or less. The names of most people have been changed and a few blank spots in my memory have been filled in with details. From my travel journals I chose what intrigued and absorbed me most and tried to bring these things back to life.

Writing, like traveling, deepens my life, and writing about my travels gives them new meaning. Sometimes, it even allows me to live those journeys over again, minus the mosquitoes and sunstroke.

I wanted to set down on paper all that I had seen out there, all my encounters with the world and its people. I didnt want my travels to evaporate.

INTRODUCTION

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER BEEN to the Southern Hemisphere will know that the Southern Cross, that distant constellation of stars so fabled in song and myth, is not all its cracked up to be. In fact, once you finally spot it or, more likely, have it pointed out to you, you may say, Thats it? Thats no cross. Sure aint the Big Dipper. Looks like a little kite up there in the sky.

Thats what I said.

Paradises arent all theyre cracked up to be either. From the outside they may appear heavenly in their mango-treed, smelly-blossomed kind of way. But Ive become suspicious of places that are all smiles and show scant little of themselves on the surface. You know, places where people never talk about sex but you just know it has to go on there. And places where people never say what theyre really thinking from behind their shiny teeth and glazed eyes.

Every place, like each of us, has its dark side. It just takes a while to see it.

But as a traveler and dreamer, I like to cling to the notion of paradise, just as I cling to my travel stories as if theyll hold me up and define me. I like to yank the kite strings of fancy, the kite strings that should be dangling underneath the Southern Cross. Now that would be an impressive constellation.

All stories, like rainstorms and revolutions, must begin somewhere. So let my story begin on the night of my rearrival at a little island in the South Pacific which I then believed to be a place cut out from the peach pie of paradise.

Virginia Woolf

Muriel Rukeyser