George - The kindness of strangers

IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of wandering the world, I have learned two things: the first is that when you travel, at some point you will find yourself in a dire predicament out of money, out of food, unable to find a hotel room, lost in a big city or on a remote trail, stranded in the middle of nowhere. The second is that someone will miraculously emerge to take care of you to lend you money, feed you, put you up for the night, lead you to where you want to go. Whatever the situation, dramatic or mundane, some stranger will save you.

The moral of this is simple and clear: human beings care about each other. Whatever their background, religion, culture and condition, on a person-to-person level, just about everyone everywhere wants to be good to others.

This message, which we all know in our hearts, periodically gets beaten down or drowned out by world affairs. Then ignorance, greed and divisiveness take hold. Despair and distrust abound. Stereotypes are sown and spread. Threats are brandished; missiles are primed. Fearful spectres are invoked and dispatched. The global rifts grow.

This book is meant to bridge those rifts, to remind us that we are all members of one grand, globe-encircling family.

The Kindness of Strangers itself is a product of many kindnesses. When I began to compile this book, I asked some of my favourite writers if they had their own examples of kindness on the road. Everyone did, and many interrupted all-consuming projects to compose pieces. At the same time, Lonely Planet sponsored a competition on its website, inviting readers to send in their tales; we received hundreds more entries than we expected. Encouraged, I dared to dream and wrote to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, asking if he might be willing to write a preface for the book. Over the ensuing months, I and a team of other Lonely Planet editors steeped ourselves in the more than four hundred stories we received our dispositions growing brighter and brighter as we read until we narrowed the selection to the twenty-six pieces in this collection. Wonderfully, and fittingly, the resulting book presents world-renowned authors side by side with writers who have never been published before. And as a final blessing, His Holiness the Dalai Lama contributed an eloquent and inspiring preface.

This anthology is a celebration of kindness and of the connections that kindness creates: those unexpected encounters that transfigure and transform us and forge living links with the larger world. For Pico Iyer, this connection comes in the form of a trishaw driver in Mandalay; for Alice Waters, it is a meagre meal with a boy in rural Turkey. It strikes Dave Eggers on a simple stroll along Havanas Malecn, and Tim Cahill when he tracks a rare tiger on the Turkish border with Iraq. For Simon Winchester, kindness is personified in an English vicar and his wife on a remote Atlantic island; for Sarah Levin, it is a bony bicyclist in Tanzania. For Beth Kephart, it appears as a bowl of soup in Seville; for James D. Houston, its the gift of a coat hanger on Hawaiis Big Island.

Sometimes the kindness connection is fused with humour, as Rolf Potts discovers when he is adopted by a gregarious businessman in Beirut, Douglas Cruickshank learns from a loquacious London cabbie in whose cab he leaves all his money and Carolyn Swindell finds when she tries to buy suitable Argentinean underwear.

And sometimes it arrives in a more threatening guise: Nicholas Crane goes to Afghanistan to help the locals, but ends up needing their help to get out alive; Laurie McAndish King and her friend are enjoying the ride to their Tunisian hotel offered by a seemingly generous man they met at a bar, until two locals follow them and run his car off the road; Amanda Jones loses the trail back to camp on a midnight walk in the Sahara, and ends up relying on a Wodaabe tribesman with whom she cannot even speak; Anthony Sattin undertakes a Palestinian pilgrimage and finds himself facing a hostile crowd of rock-toting teenagers; and Jeff Greenwald embarks on a joyride through the US Southwest with an odd couple who turn out to be much more dangerous than he ever dreamed.