Toronto’s Women’s Post May 2003 Vol. 2 No. 5
Glossy travel articles are often annoying. I always get the impression they’re leaving key details out to make the experience sound better than it is -- and when something sounds too good it’s usually just advertorial.
What I like most about the collected travel stories in AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds is that the writers are candid enough to describe what traveling is really like.
Editors Jennifer Barclay and Amy Logan thoughtfully compiled 34 travel stories by well-known Canadian writers, including Camilla Gibb, Karen Connelly, Steven Heighton, Mark Anthony Jarman, Andrew Pyper and Michael Winter. It's a good mix of journalists and authors writing in a refreshingly wide range of styles and it’s all cleverly illustrated scrapbook style with photos of travel scenes, artifacts from the road, passport stamps, foreign currency, maps and even handwritten notes.
The book takes us around the world to 18 different destinations, describing not just the surface-level observations of Canadian travelers, but also the experiential and emotional ones. From love affairs in Spain and Ethiopia, to coffee with a trucker in Dallas, to what it feels like to have ants (literally) in your pants the Brazilian Jungle, AWOL delivers a stunning array of scenery, feelings, smells and sensations. It gives us some of the most unforgettable moments in people’s lives, when they’re taken out of their familiar surroundings and forced to pay attention, whether out of remarkable beauty or sheer frustration.
Mark Anthony Jarman describes the impossibility of trying to get a train ticket out of Paris on a hot bank holiday: "Paris eating into my travellers’ cheques, eating into my brain. Must leave and can’t get out -- a strange feeling. . . No one tells you of these scenes when they say how GREAT their trip to Europe was."
Several of the writers describe the traumatic psychological effects of culture shock, not just of traveling and integrating one’s self into different social systems or unusual situations in other places, but also of the re-orientation required in coming home.
One of the most notable pieces of the book is Camilla Gibb’s deeply personal story of an anthropological research visit to Harar, Ethiopia. Her return to England is more difficult than she'd expected. She writes: "I am not crying because I am crazy but because I'm suffering from something that anthropologists call ’reverse culture shock’ -- the disorientation of returning to your own culture as an alien."
There are a few short, snappy pieces in AWOL that seem to have been chosen for the purposes of breaking up the texts with more variety, Yet AWOL's longer, more detailed pieces have a much greater impact than some of its more fleeting excerpts. The editors could have easily pared down their selections to 20 or so longer pieces, allowing the reader to spend more time in the most compelling moments, realizations and destinations.
Nonetheless, AWOL doesn't try to sell a reader on travel. It's honest and that’s precisely what makes it an entertaining and sometimes fascinating bit of realism for the sedentary adventurer in all of us.
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