Travel Dreams and Nightmares: Four Women Explore the World

By Louise Szabo, Barbara Brown, Jan Jacobson and Wendy Quarry

At a fateful travel writing workshop, Barbara, Louise, and Janet knew they had to collaborate. Soon, Wendy joined them, and the new writing group got to work.

LOUISE enjoys easy travels, wine, and good food. She takes you deep inside a Hungarian wine cellar and travels from Dawson City in the wild north of Canada, to Guadeloupe and Barbados.

JAN adores the sea. She recounts the adventures of flying around Cape Horn, exploring the Galapagos, and learning to jump off a boat near Irelands wild Aran Islands.

WENDY seeks out those places most of us wouldnt dare to visit. Shes been to much of Africa and Asia and calls Pakistan her second home. While sick in Malawi, she found refuge in a tea estate. In Germany, the discovered lost Jewish roots.

BARBARA, the groups hiker, has traveled through Mali, fed hungry children in Kinshasa, and trekked around Mont Blanc and into the Himalayas for a glimpse into the Dragon Kingdom of Bhutan and the Valley of the Flowers in India.

Here, they share adventures and mishaps, frustrations and delights. They invite readers in for intimate reflections on what it means to traveland why they are so drawn in by the planets many siren songs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475982022

Louise Szabo

LOUISE SZABO is a retired computer-systems analyst who enjoys family, cottage life, and traveling. BARBARA BROWN worked in international cooperation, which took her to the Sahara and the Congo. Now retired, she enjoys hiking in far-off places. JAN JACOBSON loves the sea and bad weather. (She is proof that librarians are daredevils.) WENDY QUARRY is a consultant in international cooperation who is obsessed with flying and airports.

Book preview

TRAVEL DREAMS

and

NIGHTMARES

Four Women

Explore the World

Louise Szabo, Barbara Brown,

Jan Jacobson, & Wendy Quarry

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Travel Dreams and Nightmares

Four Women Explore the World

Copyright © 2013 Louise Szabo, Barbara Brown, Jan Jacobson, & Wendy Quarry

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Map of Mali found here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mali2_location_map.svg.

Used with permission by NordNordWest/Wikipedia

Map of Democratic Republic of the Congo found here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Congo_Kinshasa_Template.svg.

Used with permission by Denis Jacquerye. The license can be found here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/legalcode

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-8201-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8203-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8202-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013906170

iUniverse rev. date: 4/26/2013

Contents

Preface

Why We Travel

A Fool for Ships

Jan Jacobson

Learning to Walk

Barbara Brown

Writing Stories in my Head

Wendy Quarry

The Tent

Louise Szabo

What Are We Seeking?

Riding the ZR

Louise Szabo

Finding My Way on the Dragon Path

Barbara Brown

Wild Islands

Jan Jacobson

A Slave to Points

Wendy Quarry

Drinking Bull’s Blood

Louise Szabo

Around the Horn

Jan Jacobson

The Valley of the Flowers

Barbara Brown

They Never Said It Would Be Easy

Staying Still

Wendy Quarry

Mont Blanc Almost Defeats Me

Barbara Brown

The Wallet

Jan Jacobson

Translation Please

Louise Szabo

Leaving Kabul

Wendy Quarry

To Timbuktu by Sand

Barbara Brown

Not Quite What We Expected

The Congo Beckons

Barbara Brown

A Walk in the Cuban Countryside

Jan Jacobson

Ten Days in Ukraine

Wendy Quarry

Off the Rails in Hollywood

Jan Jacobson

Easter on the Beach

Louise Szabo

The Galapagos: Visions of Heaven and Hell

Jan Jacobson

Finding Our Roots

Where It Began

Barbara Brown

Discovering My Father in Dawson City

Louise Szabo

Dear Cousin Robert

Wendy Quarry

Epilogue

To Charlie, Paul, Patrick, Zack and Katie

Preface

Come and travel with Barbara to a museum worthy of London or Paris but found in Timbuktu. Or explore with Jan as she teaches you how to jump off a boat and land on Inishmaan, one of the Aran Islands, when the surge drops the ship 15 feet. Tag along with Louise as she feels the walls of the rhyolite tuff, or kneeling nun tuff, as it is commonly called, in the wine cellars of Eger in Hungary. Follow Wendy who, desperate for a newspaper, defies a security alert and drives out the Jalalabad road in Kabul to pick up the British Saturday edition of the Times.

We—Barbara, Jan and Louise—met a few years ago at a travel-writing workshop. To keep moving forward with what we had learned in the course, we organized our own travel-writing group for encouragement and critique. Wendy took a chance on us and joined the group. In a moment of madness we agreed we would work toward publishing the stories we were working on. Travel Dreams and Nightmares is the result.

Each author’s passions are reflected in the stories. Barbara loves to hike; Jan adores the sea; Louise enjoys easy travels, wine and good food and Wendy is the world traveller. The idea of creating a travel book came easily.

On roads less traveled to out-of-the way places, the stories are filled with our adventures and mishaps, frustrations and delight and are as diverse, entertaining and enlightening as the countries travelled to. Together, with visits to more than 55 different cities in more than 20 countries, we have compiled 26 of our favourite travel stories. We invite you to join us as we explore the world.

WHY WE TRAVEL

A Fool for Ships

Jan Jacobson

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Peggy’s Cove. Photo by Zack Jacobson.

The sound and rhythm of moving water has been a source of both serenity and excitement for me ever since I can remember. If I’m anxious I listen to a rainstorm on a CD and it calms me. If I listen to surf, it excites me.

I lived in foster homes until I was 4 years old. Being an imaginative child, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about who I was and where I’d come from. Water often figured in my dreams. The first dream I remember is being on an island with a unicorn, surrounded by ocean, after making my way down a cliff. I felt safe but knew I had to swim to another island farther away where there were no unicorns.

My interest in ships began with trading model boats with my brother Gordon in my second home when I was 4 and he was 9. We were best friends, being the two youngest in the household, and we shared everything. I still remember my foster mother explaining why I couldn’t stand up to pee in the outhouse. I suppose I’ve been somewhat envious of boys ever since.

During those years I also remember a lovely evening during a heavy rainstorm, when Gordon, his 12-year-old sister Eleanor and I sat under the roof on the front porch of their modest house in the country near Etobicoke and played I spy. I heard the individual drops of rain falling on the tin roof. Rain, especially on a tin roof, is still a comfort to me.

My summers after my adoption reinforced my love of water. I spent time imagining my future at my parents’ cottage on Chemong Lake in the Kawarthas. I fished for catfish in a small rowboat with my friends down the road or wandered around the small, wooded point of land at the end of our property where I could hear water lapping on all sides.

As I grew up, I was thrilled with movies or books about sea voyages. I remember reading John Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever when I was in grade 3, and I still recall the first verse:

I must go down to the seas again,

To the lonely sea and the sky.

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star

To steer her by.

Later in grade 6 I discovered the great explorers in what was then called social studies class. We heard about Columbus and his discovery of America, Hudson and his explorations and Fraser and his discovery of the mighty river named after him. Something in the spirit of those adventurers struck a chord. I started to read adventure literature. Looking at my bookshelves now, I can see Richard Burton’s The Source of the Nile, Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World and Tim Severn’s The Brendan Voyage. My fiction collection includes Moby Dick (Call me Ishmael), The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Gabriel Roy’s The Road Past Altamount, in which her protagonist, Christine, discovers the great inland sea of Lake Winnipeg in the middle of a waterless prairie.

I didn’t actually see the ocean until I was 22. When I graduated from university, I took the train to Vancouver, thinking I might like to work there. It’s beautiful, but English Bay wasn’t my vision of what an ocean should be. It wasn’t until I got engaged to Zack, who comes from the Maritimes, that I saw the ocean of my dreams. He took me to Cranberry Cove and Peggy’s Cove, where wild waves curl up around vast stretches of granite, sometimes sweeping onlookers out to sea. I thought I would like to have my ashes scattered there until the Swissair disaster in 1998 when a fire caused flight 111 on route to Geneva to crash nearby, killing all passengers and crew aboard. Remains of the plane and some of the bodies are still there. What if there are ghosts? I shuddered and reconsidered my final resting place.

When she came to visit us when I was a child, my grandmother, who was a great storyteller, told me about the sinking of the Titanic not far from Peggy’s Cove. Later, Zack and I explored the rugged coasts of the South Shore, where many victims had been recovered. Some were buried in Halifax or on the small coastal communities on these wild, sandy coasts of Nova Scotia.

My first seagoing trip was on the luxurious Cunard Line of the Queen Elizabeth II from Southampton to New York following a hiking vacation in Wales. The lowest passenger deck was so far from the ocean waves that I might as well have viewed them from an airplane. It didn’t match the memories of those wonderful ocean-based novels I had read, or the accounts of the adventurous explorers who had mapped the inland waterways of Canada or discovered new continents.

My first real ocean voyage was to the Canadian Arctic with a small adventure company. The company had rented a Soviet research ship for its ice-breaking capabilities. My husband was sure it was a spy ship when he saw its electronics and underwater listening antennas. After exploring the part of Greenland where icebergs calve with a noise like distant thunder, we crossed the strait to Baffin Island and then journeyed north past Arctic Bay to land on Beechey Island. The gravesites of the three crewmen from the lost Franklin Expedition who died there in the winter of 1845 loomed out of the mist, a reminder of the dangers faced by real adventurers.

Since that trip I have been to the barren, windswept Aran Islands, viewed Viking gold in Stockholm, and travelled to Cape Horn. I will keep running away to sea to listen to the calming sounds of lapping water, and I will read about the adventures of those who explore the thunder and power of the waves.

Learning to Walk

Barbara Brown

I was alone on a track high in the Himalayas and couldn’t see either the lake or the waterfall that were our destination for the day. The first three days of the hike had been in bright sunshine, but now we were walking through low-hanging cloud. The mist was turning the surrounding hills into the elusive and mysterious paradise that we had all been looking for. The clouds closed in. Several small paths led off at each switchback. I started to feel anxious. Was I still on the right trail? Should I wait for the others? I didn’t want to hike downhill in the wrong direction and have to climb up again. I kept on. Then I heard the waterfall. I was fine.

Around a bend came a hiker with a fishing pole over his shoulder. Don’t worry, you’re almost there, he called out. Relief and sadness swept over me. I wanted to be on the road to almost there, but I wasn’t quite ready to arrive. In a flash of clarity I realized that despite my many doubts, I could do this. I could walk for seven hours at an altitude of four thousand metres. I wasn’t fighting with my knees, my aching back and most importantly my aching soul. Everything still hurt. But now I knew I would get to camp. I would be okay. I had learned at last, here in the mountains of Bhutan, how to walk at peace with myself.

My almost obsessive need to hike in the high mountains had emerged three years before, when I stopped working. I had collapsed in a heap on the finish line of retirement and crawled across. The last year of work had turned into a marathon. I was exhausted. I was also burying my father, dividing up his estate and selling the family home where I had grown up.

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Barbara on the Druk Path in Bhutan

For years I had been longing for the time when I would no longer have to use every ounce of my energy on the job. But I had forgotten what it was to have days and weeks of freedom. What would I do with all that time? How would I function on my own, alone at home without work colleagues to listen to my daily woes? I took a couple of retirement courses and read several books. My anxiety level fell; most of my questions remained.

I knew I needed to stay healthy. Both my parents had lived beyond 90, my mother with a heart condition from childhood, and later, congestive heart failure; my father with polyneuropathy, a nerve disease that rendered his feet without feeling and withered his legs to sticks. Neither was an athlete, but both had walked every day until just before they died. I can still see my father at 93, mowing his lawn the summer before he left us, laying out row after careful row of neat designs in the grass.

With these thoughts in my head, I sat down with Janet, my walking companion, and together we planned a hiking trip for the September after I retired. She was in a demanding job and needed a break; I was feeling destabilized. I was not a distance hiker. Janet and I walked once a week near her house in Ottawa or in the Gatineau hills. Our walks lasted one or two hours, sometimes three, but never more. I had never hiked at high altitudes.

Fortunately for me, I was completely naive about what lay ahead. Janet had hiked in Ladakh the year before, crossing 5,000-metre passes. She had found it hard but manageable. She wanted to go back to India. She had friends there to visit and memories to relive. I was not a big fan of India—too many people for this wilderness junkie—but we were going to be high up in the mountains. How many people could there be? So I said yes. We signed up for a 15-day trek at the introductory level, near India’s second highest mountain, Nanda Devi, and the die was cast.

*

September came. Janet and I checked the trekking company’s packing list many times and climbed on the bus for Montreal where we were to catch our flight to Delhi. My diary notations, written two days later in our guest house in Delhi, listening to the rain beating on the roof and worrying about the misery of camping in the wet, carry the first hints of why I am there:

Delhi, September 9, 2009: Thoughts are less dark tonight; probably I am better rested. I am still looking for some moments of great joy or great peace or both. I’ll see if I find that here, now. Must get these legs in gear—am sure I’ll be fine despite my panic attacks. Sure hope it doesn’t rain during the trek and that all goes well …

Several sleepless nights later, I started the India trek in the bright sun. We did not see rain again.

I came back to Canada after that hike in the Indian Himalayas feeling proud. I had not been carried off the trail in ignominy, banished to a hotel to wait for Janet to finish. On the contrary, the end of the hike left me sad at the thought of leaving:

September 26, 2009: Truly our last day with the team. Back in the same hotel in Rudraprayag, very comfortable but very sad—it almost all feels like a dream. Did it really happen?

Emboldened by this first success, I quickly made plans for a new mountain hike for the fall of 2010. I chose Europe and a hike around Mont Blanc. But I misunderstood that in this case around meant up and down 1,000 metres every day. I soon learned that my 64-year-old knees did not love me. They screamed in protest at every step I took downhill. Only my innate stubbornness kept me going. Rather than finding either peace or joy on the Mont Blanc circuit, I had moments of wondering what I was doing there, spending good money, good time and good will to be miserable.

September 15, 2010: Day three was horrendous. It’s day four, and I simply couldn’t have written last night. Without Florent (our guide) insulting me for the last half of the climb, I could not have done it. It took me more than five hours to get to the top and four hours to get down. I promise never to do this to myself again …

Only later did I realize everyone has bad days on the mountain. For those days it’s important to have a friend nearby. On the Mont Blanc circuit I hiked with an injured knee and in a group of strangers. I promised myself I would not do that again. After the hike I could barely walk. I had not an iota of sadness at the end.

A year later, as I made my way toward that elusive waterfall in the mountains of Bhutan, did I find the peace or joy that I had been looking for? Not really. I did have moments of quiet happiness: the first morning at the hotel, stepping out onto the porch of our cottage, the mist rising from the river and the mountains bright with orange sunlight; arriving at Taktsang Monastery, the oldest Buddhist temple in Bhutan, after hiking up to 3,300 metres without any problems, just like that; sleeping soundly every night; having a small epiphany of sorts alone on the trail upon realizing that I could hike without pain and misery at these altitudes; leaving my panic attacks far behind.

Why do I do this, beating up my aging body on rocky tracks at altitudes that left even the guides gasping for breath?