Gina Gaille - Strange Tales of World Travel: * bizarre * mysterious * horrible * hilarious *

A S ELECTION O F T RAVELERS T ALES B OOKS

Country and Regional Guides

30 Days in Italy, 30 Days in the South Pacific, America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, San Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

Womens Travel

100 Places Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Greece Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in the USA Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Cuba Every Woman Should Go, 50 Places in Rome, Florence, & Venice Every Woman Should Go, Best Womens Travel Writing, Gutsy Women, Mothers World, Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Wild with Child, Womans Asia, Womans Europe, Womans Path, Womans World, Womans World Again, Women in the Wild

Body & Soul

Food, How to Eat Around the World, A Mile in Her Boots, Pilgrimage, Road Within

Special Interest

Danger!, Gift of Birds, Gift of Rivers, Gift of Travel, How to Shit Around the World, Hyenas Laughed at Me, Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana, More Sand in My Bra, Mousejunkies!, Not So Funny When It Happened, Sand in My Bra, Testosterone Planet, Theres No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, Thong Also Rises, What Color Is your Jockstrap?, Wake Up and Smell the Shit, The World Is a Kitchen, Writing Away, China Option, La Dolce Vita U

Travel Literature

The Best Travel Writing, Soul of a Great Traveler, Deer Hunting in Paris, Fire Never Dies, Ghost Dance in Berlin, Guidebook Experiment, Kin to the Wind, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, Last Trout in Venice, Marco Polo Didnt Go There, Rivers Ran East, Royal Road to Romance, A Sense of Place, Shopping for Buddhas, Soul of Place, Storm, Sword of Heaven, Take Me With You, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Way of Wanderlust, Wings, Coast to Coast, Mother Tongue, Baboons for Lunch

Copyright 2019 Gina and Scott Gaille. All rights reserved.

Travelers Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc., Palo Alto, California. travelerstales.com | solashouse.com

Art Direction: Kimberly Nelson

Cover Design: Kimberly Nelson

Interior Design and Page Layout: Howie Severson/Fortuitous Publishing

Photo Credits:

Chapters 7, 10-11, 15, 21, 25-27, 31, 36, 41, 43-44, 47, and 49-50 (Gina & Scott Gaille)

Chapter 9 (Ariyo Olasunkanmi/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 12 (EQ Roy/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 13 (Bumihills/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 17 (Art Konovalov/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 19 (An Aussie Airliners Copyright Image)

Chapter 20 (WJR Visuals/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 32 (La Zona/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 35 (Brian Kimball/Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 39 (Amophoto_au/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 45 (Xuanhuongho/Shutterstock.com)

Chapter 46 (Chameleons Eye/Shuttersock.com)

Chapter 48 (Gary Roberts/Alamy Stock Photo)

Others (Shutterstock.com)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

978-1-60952-169-1 (paperback)

978-1-60952-170-7 (ebook)

978-1-60952-171-4 (hard cover)

First Edition

Printed in the United States

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all those who have been kind enough
to share their stories with us

This book is a memoir. It reflects our current recollections of our experiences over time and the stories we have heard. Some names and details have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated. We also would like to thank the many people we have met on our travels for being generous enough to share their stories with us. We recognize that their memories of the events described in this book may be different from those of others who experienced them. The tales in this book were represented to us as being factual. Whether entirely true or not, each story conveys meaning about a place, how someone has experienced it, and how we remembered it.

DON GEORGE

Whats the strangest thing you have ever experienced or seen?

This simple question beats at the heart of this extraordinary collection.

For more than two decades, Scott Gailles work as an international corporate lawyer has taken him to the farthest corners of the globe. Rather than fly home as soon as business is done, he has used these assignments to explore local countries and cultures, frequently accompanied by his wife and partner in wanderlust, Gina.

Through these explorations, they have met an astonishing variety of people. Fueled by a deep curiosity about human nature and an appetite for adventure, they have asked these people that simple question: Whats the strangest thing you have ever experienced or seen? Then they have listenedand amazing tales have unfolded.

This book collects 50 of those tales.

The storytellers range richly in geography and social stratum: from a Mauritanian diplomat and an Omani government minister to an Icelandic farmer and a Tanzanian miner, a British secret service agent to a masseur in Madagascar to a Galpagos wildlife naturalist. They include an Australian road kill artist, an American oil executive, a South African big game guide, the first Hmong lawyer in Laos, the English fourth girlfriend of a Russian tycoon, and dozens more.

As this marvelously motley cast of storytellers suggests, Strange Tales of World Travel presents a world you will not find in glossy magazine articles, breathless blogs, or self-adulatory Instagrams. Instead, its a world of adventures gone awry with gorillas, Cape buffalos, tiger snakes, and other wildlife, of rare Vodun and Mayan rituals, of intimate glimpses of unimaginable wealth and unquestionable power, of close encounters with the wilder edges of human culture, including Ebola, shrunken heads, and ancient shamanistic rites.

The result is a collection that is, as the books subtitle suggests, bizarre, mysterious, horrible, and hilariouslike travel, and life, itself.

When Gina and Scott approached me about working with them to assemble a collection of their travel tales, my initial reaction was extreme hesitation. Over 40 years as a travel writer and editor, Ive met dozens of people who have wandered fervently to far-flung places, penned detailed journals, dispatched epic emails, and become convinced that their accounts were destined to become bestsellers. Great travel writing, of course, requires more than outlandish adventures in exotic places, and I was worried that Gina and Scott might turn out to be two more members of this tribe of travelers whose worldly passions far surpass their wordly talents.

Then they sent me a sampling of their talesand I was hooked.

From their first story, a sea-guides account of a seemingly hapless (but ultimately charmed) tourists encounter with a predatory shark, the Gailles tales charted a territory that was delightfully different from the travel stories I was used to reading.