ENGLISH STUDIES

ON THE ROAD
ENGLISH AND THE EXPERIENCE OF TRAVEL

Name

OFFICIAL
1
Unpacking the Rubric
What you are expected to learn -
Through a study of this module, students develop
highlight understanding and proficiency in the use of language related
Text types or various topics/ideas you to travel. For example, the language used by journalists,
will examine - underline filmmakers and those in the travel industry.
Students develop knowledge, skills and understanding in
comprehending and using appropriate terminology, styles
and language forms for analysing, discussing, responding to, and evaluating, issues and topics
related to travel. They have opportunities to make judgments about travel advertisements, and
locate and comprehend government advice about travel in various overseas countries.
Students experience, engage with and critique literary texts that communicate, through an
imaginative use of language, the profound effects that travel and journeying can have on human
lives, and appreciate how literature can teach us about distant and different places and cultures.
Texts may include longer works, such as novels, autobiographies, films, anthologies, television
series, websites and plays.

excursion
expedition
fly
journey
meander
move
passage
pilgrimage
roam
step
travels
trek
trip
venture
voyage
wander
wayfaring

OFFICIAL
2
Why Does Traveling Make You Feel Like Your Best Self?
by DANIELLE DESIMONE
Why do we feel so great when we travel? Is it the prospect of finally snapping that perfect
picture of the Eiffel Tower? Is it the endless amount of delicious, new food (probably not,
but it certainly helps!)? Is it meeting new people from exciting new places? Or maybe it’s
something on a much deeper level that keeps us coming back for more, always pushing
ourselves to see more, eat more (seconds? thirds?), learn more. Oftentimes, our passion and
drive for travel is personal, but the reasons why we are our best selves when we travel are
largely universal.

Here are a few reasons why traveling makes you feel like your best self:

Travel teaches us to be flexible.

Anyone who has ever flown on a discount airline understands the meaning of the word
“patience.” Just the act of getting from one place to another can be a seemingly
insurmountable hurdle, with flight delays, lost luggage, getting off at the wrong train stop,
or bus drivers going on strike. Navigating a city in another country is not always the picture-
perfect experience that Instagram would have us believe.

OFFICIAL
3
Even when at home and not traveling, when problems arise, we’re not fazed by them. Travel
teaches us that when things are challenging or if everything goes wrong (like that one time
you got food poisoning – probably should’ve skipped the fermented shark meat), we have
to roll with it and make a new plan, without letting it affect our trip (....very much). Facing
these struggles head-on makes us feel accomplished and satisfied – and these crazy-transit
stories often turn into our best ones.

Travel allows us to trust the world.

The news sure has a way of making the world seem like a scary place. While we should
always be aware of our surroundings and the climate of safety in certain countries, the
reality is that even within countries that seem epicly foreign or frightening, there’s probably
a lot of beauty, too. Just like how the streets of south Chicago don’t fully represent all of the
magnificence of the Windy City, so too are there adventures to be had in destinations we’re
unfamiliar with (or slightly apprehensive of). But boy, does it feel good to trust your gut,
squash the stereotypes, and move to a place of understanding and compassion rather than
fear.
Now, we’re not telling you to pull up your bootstraps and head into the uncharted
wilderness of a dangerous place. But what we are saying is that much of travel forces us to
put our trust in the kindness of strangers. When asking for directions on the street,
recommendations for the best restaurant in town, or trading stories with new friends in a
hostel, we have to constantly rely on others, many of whom might not even speak our same
language. When exchanging money at the market, walking down an unknown street, or
jumping onto the bus, we still have to rely on the goodness of others.
It’s hard to be afraid of entire regions or countries once you’ve interacted in these
otherwise-mundane ways. Seeing foreigners live their lives, smile and laugh, wash their
clothes, walk their dogs, sharing ice cream with their kids, sitting on a bench with an elder,
all of these experiences complicate our feelings of hate or prejudice, so much that it will
probably make those feelings vanquish entirely. It allows us to be open, to trust, to break
down cultural barriers, and turn a once stranger into just another human (or better yet a
friend).

Travel allows us to trust ourselves.

Navigating the Polish train system without a map (or a dictionary)? Haggling in a foreign
market, or planning an entire travel itinerary through three separate countries on the fly?
Travel not only makes us capable of handling ourselves, it empowers us to accomplish what
we put our mind to, too. In travel, road bumps (literally and figuratively) are a-plenty, and
we must be able to problem-solve as quickly, and creatively, as possible.
This ability to be adaptable and tackle challenges, regardless of difficulty or language
barriers, makes the challenges day-to-day life throws our way seem far more manageable.

OFFICIAL
4
Pursuing our passions and creating meaningful lives seems more in the realm of possibility.
We see what happens when you live life free of the chains of responsibilities” and
“expectations” – often those that are put on us by others, like our parents, or that little thing
called society.
We’ve crossed paths with those who shun the “norm” of life and recognize not only is that
a possibility for the shape of our lives, but a really strong one at that. We’re empowered,
baby! And we know that if we trust ourselves and follow our gut, good things are to come.

Travel makes you fall in love with learning.

Traveling rekindles the thirst for learning that we once had as a child, when we marvelled
at something we had never seen, turned to the person beside us, and demanded with
bursting curiosity, “What’s that?” Traveling is basically a never-ending learning experience
disguised as adventure. History books are one thing, but exploring another country brings
the pages of that history book back to life. We learn from museums and galleries, from café
corners and late-night conversations with locals, from the language of our host country.
Traveling reacquaints us with the joy of learning, exploring for the sake of exploring, and
knowing we don’t have to cram certain facts and details into our memory for some stupid
test. We can observe at our own pace, reflect as we must, and absorb all we can. For
ourselves and no one else.
A love for learning can make life seem a whole lot more beautiful.

Travel makes us more social.

Even when flying solo, the act of travel is inevitably a social endeavour. When we travel, we
are always making polite conversation, building new friendships, and testing existing ones.
People are generally curious about newcomers – especially in small, rural areas – and eager
to speak with them. The travel community is one built on friendships forged quickly in the
common rooms of hostels, where young travellers from all corners of the world come
together.
Sure, you’ll be able to make small talk, but after having literally the same conversation with
everyone you meet (where they’re from, where they’re going, how long they’ve been on the
road), you’ll soon learn how to ask the important questions – the ones that help you really
get to know someone. The ability to make small talk and deep conversation (sometimes in
a foreign language) is true skill that carries through in all aspects of life.

OFFICIAL
5
Travel puts our lives in perspective.
When traveling, we see corners of the world that are entirely different from our own. These
differences can be social, cultural, or economic, but regardless, they often let us view our
own lives through a new lens. This does not always mean that we see what others lack in
life, and in turn, we realize how lucky and #blessed we are to have all that we do. Some
cultures are content to live with much less, which can make our lives back home seem
extravagant and materialistic. These sometimes harsh realities, and awareness towards
how sheep-like our previous lives have been, can be just the reality pill that we needed to
swallow.
By introducing us to new ways of living, travel forces us to re-evaluate our own lives, get
comfortable with uncomfortable truths, and pledge to look at our lives from new perspectives,
often for the better.

Travel challenges us.

As human beings, it’s not in our nature to sit idly by and accept things as they are. From
building the first fire, to exploring the “surely-dragon-filled” edges of the world, to putting
a man on the moon, humans are constantly looking for what’s “next.”
For those of us who are not astronauts, travel is, essentially, our moon. We are constantly
pitting ourselves against challenging (and not always the safest) adventures when we

OFFICIAL
6
travel, but the act of plunging ourselves into a new and unknown environment tests our
limits and ourselves. Travel is the ultimate “Truth or Dare” on a physical, emotional, and
personal level, showing us just what we are made of when things are difficult or
uncomfortable or even just different from what we’re used to.

Travel is good for our health.

Taking us out of our comfort zone, teaching us how to deal with new environments,
challenging us to get off our phones and actively seek out new experiences, and helping us
to develop our sense of self, these are all reasons why travel is good for our health. No
matter what your motivation for booking your next trip, you will always reap enormous
benefits both mentally and physically. You will grow to understand yourself better by
overcoming challenges, and you will literally boost your health by getting outdoors, walking
miles through new cities, hiking to the tops of mountains, and diving off cliffs into crystal
blue waters.

Travel makes us appreciate home.

It can be easy to become enamoured with distant, rugged cliffs, the sounds of bells chiming
from a Buddhist temple, or the thrill of local Spanish salsa club dancing in the streets. When
experiencing these things, our first reaction might be to compare it to home, where our lives
seem very mundane and safe. But really, traveling is a lesson in appreciating where we
come from. Differences between our culture and the ones we are immersed in during our
travels make us realize just how much we take from granted in our lives back home, from
big things, like how we actually like the tipping system, to smaller things, like that we prefer
seedless grapes.
You’ll quickly realize that your relationships with people are your most treasured
possessions and find yourself feeling overwhelming gratitude for the support system in
your life. There’s nothing like spending the holidays in another country, seeing other family
units and communities coming together, to make you miss your family back home!

Travel opens us to new experiences.

Since the days of the first explorers, the ones that stepped into unsteady, wooden boats and
pushed them out into open waters, travel has been about finding a new world. Each time
we board a train, plane, or boat, we are embarking on something new. Exploring another
country introduces us to new languages, new landscapes, and new ways of living. Trying
deep fried scorpion as a snack? Ziplining through the Amazon Rainforest? Embracing the
sometimes-awkward silence with my homestay family? Sure, why not!
When you’re in another country, every new experience is exciting and worthwhile, so we
are eager to try more. But, traveling doesn’t just open us up to new experiences when we’re

OFFICIAL
7
in another country, it affects us even when we’re at home. We realize that adventure is a
mindset, one that we don’t have to pack away with our prized souvenirs.
Travel alters our entire approach to life, making us adventurers.

Travel connects us with the world beyond our front doorstep.

Although we encounter many cultural differences in our travels, it is actually incredible how
similar we are to people who live across the globe. Despite our diverse cultural
backgrounds and daily lifestyles, travel allows us to connect with others and realize that we
actually have a lot in common with that one friend living in Sweden. We also enjoy spending
time with family, listening to indie pop music, and dancing on the weekends.
Once we’ve pulled ourselves outside of the safe, protective bubble of home, we can clearly
see that we are just like those people hundreds of miles away. We are all a part of a bigger
story; we all have more bringing us together than tearing us apart. It’s this realization that
breaks down fear and prejudices, making the world a much smaller, more welcoming, and
connected place.

Traveling helps us feel like our best self because we are more willing to receive the world’s
many lessons, no matter their shape or size. It helps us recognize our shared humanity with
others and dissipates fear or misunderstandings. After all, it’s much more fun to love the
world than to be afraid of it.

OFFICIAL
8
In travel, we find the best in ourselves and in others. We become the person that we had
hoped we would become as a child: an explorer, open to meeting new people, and learning
new things. And maybe, just maybe, someone who is brave enough to eat scorpions off a
stick.

What is a Journey?
A journey is a term that implies travel, which can offer up new sights, experiences, cultures
and perspectives. The passage between places or circumstances can be positive or negative
in nature, physical or emotional, active or intellectual.
Regardless of the form that this journey make take, it tends to consist of many challenges
or barriers that have to be met before the final goal is reached. A journey can be internal or
external.
Some journeys have repercussions that last long after the journey itself has been completed,
providing a benchmark for what life was like before the journey and what it was like
afterwards. Some journeys, especially if they are spiritual or intellectual in nature, may last
a very long time, if not a lifetime. The concept can often mean a change or transition of some
kind that leaves its mark on the traveller.

OFFICIAL
9
 Lesson 13
Conquering an Infinite Cave
Vietnam, a country you came for culture but stayed for the caves. As recently as 2008, the biggest
cave in the world was discovered in Phong Nha national park. How big, you ask? Well, the cavern
is so big it has its own weather system.

I was fortunate enough to be passing through the centre of Vietnam and I decided to stop in Phong
Nha. This was mainly because of my curiosity about the cave system there, but also because the
long bus ride from Hoi An to Hanoi didn't sound very attractive to me.

One full day. I gladly gave this to trek through a dark cave that took me to the cavern lost in nature
and time. Vietnam truly holds one of the best cave experiences in the world.

The day began with a cloudy and rainy weather. That did not matter because we were exploring
a cave after all. Poor weather made cave exploration even more spectacular. There were five of
us on the tour. After being transferred from the hostel, we met our hilarious guide who promised to
play the Jingle Bell song with the rocks in the cave. He gave us all the gear we needed from jackets
and pants to shoes and safety helmet.

The first kilometre of the cave is set up to be a museum with lights and walkways installed to make
it convenient for visitors. The museum part was pretty impressive in itself as the rock formations were
formed millions of years ago. Our guide said that more exciting things awaited us. And he was right.

After the end of the walk path, a security guard let our group off the usual path and into the darkest
and deepest area of the cave. With our headlamps, we walked through the dark caves. Step by
step, we marvelled at the scale of the caverns. One of them was so big that you could fit a small
stadium inside.

The guide told us that during the rainy season, this area would fill with water that prevents trekkers
from going further. Resting in hollows, there was still some remaining water so we had to take a
paddle boat and paddle our way through.

As we approached the end of the trek, we were rewarded with a view of a giant cavern. It was
gigantic! It was almost impossible for me to capture the open ceiling and the ground in one frame.
Raindrops dripped from the open sky above and dropped several meters to the ground. We
watched… entranced.

No wonder, we stopped here for

lunch and took the time to swim
through one of the wonderous
waterfalls. The water was cold but
refreshing. It was a perfect rest stop
from a two-hour hike in humid,
tropical weather.

After an hour at the cavern, we

trekked back the same way to the
entrance with a much faster pace.

Even though the price was a little

steep for me, knowing that they
took us through a private trail with all
of the gear provided and an
awesome guide, I think it was worth
the price.
Social Media travel posts
EXAMPLES

Pretty epic day today. Took a bus ride at 5 in the morning up north into the Mexican
jungle. Was pouring with rain when we got to Agua Azul, which is a long series of
cascades that were overrunning with water due to the weather. Walked out onto a
rickety wooden bridge because, you know, no one cares about safe construction in
Mexico! From there we went to an awesome waterfall called Miso-Ha, got so close
that the mist drenched us. After this we went to the Mayan ruins at Palenque, which
would have to be my favourite ruins so far. Currently hunkered down in Palenque for
the night, hoping to see a zoo tomorrow before we head off to the next city.

Last night in America. It's been a great ride so far. We've driven over 1000 miles,
mostly in Arizona, and fly into Mexico City tomorrow. Not sure how much internet
access I'll have in Mexico – time will tell! Our time spent on the Navajo Reservation
was unforgettable, and we got up close and personal with black bears, wolves and lots
of 800 year old Native American ruins. I also ate a really good American steak tonight,
so lots of boxes ticked!

OFFICIAL
11
 Why I hate Paris
Travel Fearlessly Blog Post

“I hate Paris.”

Those were words that my husband had spoken just a few hours
after stepping off the train from Germany. I admit that walking
around the Gare de l’Est station left me feeling a little
disappointed in my perfect vision of Paris but I told him to just
wait until we get to the city centre tomorrow to make his
judgement. Just wait until you try the food and see Notre Dame
and have your first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower!

By the third day I too was hating Paris.

Well, hate is a pretty strong word to describe a city that so many

others love. Now that I’m home and have had time to ponder my travel experience I think it’s more accurate to
downgrade my emotions to “dislike”. I dislike Paris. Sure, there were some things I enjoyed about the City of Lights
such as the unique bouquinistes (booksellers along the Seine River) but there were more things I didn’t enjoy.

Dust and Dirt Everywhere

Parisian parks have little paving or gravel and lots of dirt. Gusts of wind can create tiny tornadoes that blast you with
dust. Playgrounds are no different. At the end of each day we would dump out the accumulation of dirt from our
daughter’s shoes and hose her off in the shower. Luckily there are plenty of laundromats in Paris so doing laundry
wasn’t a problem at all. But if you’re traveling to Paris with kids be sure to bring plenty of clothes, close-toed shoes
and find a laundromat close to your hotel. Trust me, you’ll be doing lots of laundry!

Too Crowded

Paris was extremely crowded when we visited. To be fair it was a holiday weekend with excellent weather and a
tennis match at the Eiffel Tower so the crowds were probably much higher than normal. Still, Paris is a popular tourist
destination and that many people in one small city made me feel a little too claustrophobic.

The line to get into Notre Dame was about 1/4 mile long, zig-zagging along the plaza in front of the cathedral. The
crowds under the Eiffel Tower were so thick with people that we didn’t even want to attempt to cross through them
to reach the beautiful carousel on the other side. There were even lines to get into some of the playgrounds! That’s
simply too many people for my comfort level.

*Bonus* The Dog Poop

Let’s not forget the poop. I don’t know what it is about Parisians and their refusal to pick up after their dogs but this
was a big pet peeve of mine (pun intended). We walked by piles of dog poo, from tiny tootsie rolls to giant butt
nuggets. Some were in the grass and most were right on the sidewalk where they were unavoidable. If you’ve been
to Paris then you probably know exactly what I’m talking about!

Will we visit Paris again?

Probably not, though I would love to visit the smaller villages in France. From now on I think I will just fall in love with
Ernest Hemingway’s or Julia Child’s Paris and enjoy the City of Lights between the pages of a book.
The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton
On Anticipation
1.
It was hard to say when exactly winter arrived. The decline was gradual, like that of a person
into old age, inconspicuous from day to day until the season became an established, relentless
reality. First came a dip in evening temperatures, then days of continuous rain, confused gusts
of Atlantic wind, dampness, the fall of leaves and the changing of the clocks—though there were
still occasional moments of reprieve, mornings when one could leave the house without a coat
and the sky was cloudless and bright. But they were like false signs of recovery in a patient upon
whom death has already passed its sentence. By December the new season was entrenched,
and the city was covered almost every day by an ominous steel-grey sky, like one in a painting
by Mantegna or Veronese, the perfect backdrop to the crucifixion of Christ or to a day beneath
the bedclothes. The neighbourhood park became a desolate spread of mud and water, lit up at
night by rain-streaked street lamps. Passing it one evening during a downpour, I recalled how,
in the intense heat of the previous summer, I had stretched out on the ground and let my bare
feet slip out of my shoes to caress the grass, and how this direct contact with the earth had
brought with it a sense of freedom and expansiveness, summer breaking down the usual
boundaries between indoors and out and allowing me to feel as much at home in the world as
in my own bedroom.
But now the park was foreign once more, the grass a forbidding arena in the incessant rain. Any
sadness I might have felt, any suspicion that happiness or understanding was unattainable,
seemed to find ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings and low skies
tinged orange by the city's streetlights.
Such climatic circumstances, together with a sequence of events that occurred at around this
time (and seemed to confirm Chamfort's dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning
to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead), conspired to render
me intensely susceptible to the unsolicited arrival one late afternoon of a large, brightly
illustrated brochure entitled 'Winter Sun'. Its cover displayed a row of palm trees, many of them
growing at an angle, on a sandy beach fringed by a turquoise sea, set against a backdrop of hills
where I imagined there to be waterfalls and relief from the heat in the shade of sweet-smelling
fruit trees. The photographs reminded me of the paintings of Tahiti that William Hodges had
brought back from his journey with Captain Cook, showing a tropical lagoon in soft evening light,
where smiling local girls cavorted carefree (and barefoot) through luxuriant foliage—images
that had provoked wonder and longing when Hodges had first exhibited them at the Royal

OFFICIAL
13
Academy in London in the sharp winter of 1776, and that continued to provide a model for
subsequent depictions of tropical idylls, including those in the pages of 'Winter Sun'.
Those responsible for the brochure had darkly intuited how easily their audience might be
turned into prey by photographs whose power insulted the intelligence and contravened any
notions of free will: overexposed photographs of palm trees, clear skies and white beaches.
Readers who would have been capable of scepticism and prudence in other areas of their lives
reverted, in contact with these elements, to a primordial innocence and optimism. The longing
provoked by the brochure was an example, at once touching and bathetic, of how projects (and
even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of
happiness; of how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set into motion by
nothing more than the sight of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze.
I resolved to travel to the island of Barbados.
2.
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much
about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They
express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the
constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present
philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are
inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go,
even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple
nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what
the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or 'human flourishing'.
3.
One question revolves around the relationship between the anticipation of travel and its reality.
I came upon a copy of J. K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours, published in 1884, whose effete
andmisanthropic hero, the aristocratic Duc des Esseintes, anticipated a journey to London and
offered in the process an extravagantly pessimistic analysis of the difference between what we
imagine about a place and what can occur when we reach it.
Huysmans recounts that the Duc des Esseintes lived alone in a vast villa on the outskirts of Paris.
He rarely went anywhere to avoid what he took to be the ugliness and stupidity of others. One
afternoon in his youth, he had ventured into a nearby village for a few hours and had felt his
detestation of people grow fierce. Since then he had chosen to spend his days alone in bed in
his study, reading the classics of literature and moulding acerbic thoughts about humanity. Early

OFFICIAL
14
one morning, however, the duc surprised himself by experiencing an intense wish to travel to
London. The desire came upon him as he sat by the fire reading a volume of Dickens. The book
evoked visions of English life, which he contemplated at length and grew increasingly keen to
see. Unable to contain his excitement, he ordered his servants to pack his bags, dressed himself
in a grey tweed suit, a pair of laced ankle boots, a little bowler hat and a flax-blue Inverness
cape and took the next train to Paris. With some time to spare before the departure of the
London train, he stopped in at Galignani's English Bookshop on the Rue de Rivoli and there
bought a volume of Baedeker's Guide to London. He was thrown into delicious reveries by its
terse descriptions of the city's attractions. Next he moved on to a nearby wine bar frequented
by a largely English clientele. The atmosphere was out of Dickens: he thought of scenes in which
Little Dorrit, Dora Copperfield and Tom Pinch's sister Ruth sat in similarly cosy, bright rooms.
One patron had Mr Wickfield's white hair and ruddy complexion, combined with the sharp,
expressionless features and unfeeling eyes of Mr Tulkinghorn.
Hungry, des Esseintes went next to an English tavern in the Rue d'Amsterdam, near the Gare
Saint Lazare. It was dark and smoky inside, with a line of beer pulls along a counter spread with
hams as brown as violins and lobsters the colour of red lead. Seated at small wooden tables
were robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette knives, cheeks as red as
apples and long hands and feet. Des Esseintes found a table and ordered some oxtail soup, a
smoked haddock, a helping of roast beef and potatoes, a couple of pints of ale and a chunk of
Stilton.
But as the moment to board his train approached, along with the chance to turn his dreams of
London into reality, des Esseintes was abruptly overcome with lassitude. He thought how
wearing it would be actually to make the journey—how he would have to run to the station,
fight for a porter, board the train, endure an unfamiliar bed, stand in lines, feel cold and move
his fragile frame around the sights that Baedeker had so tersely described—and thus soil his
dreams: 'What was the good of moving when a person could travel so wonderfully sitting in a
chair? Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizens, food, and even cutlery
were all about him? What could he expect to find over there except fresh disappointments?'
Still seated at his table, he reflected, 'I must have been suffering from some mental aberration
to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination and to have believed like any old ninny
that it was necessary, interesting and useful to travel abroad.'
So des Esseintes paid the bill, left the tavern and took the first train back to his villa, along with
his trunks, his packages, his portmanteaux, his rugs, his umbrellas and his sticks—and never left
home again.

OFFICIAL
15
4.
We are familiar with the notion that the reality of travel is not what we anticipate. The
pessimistic school, of which des Esseintes might be an honorary patron, therefore argues that
reality must always be disappointing. It may be truer and more rewarding to suggest that it is
primarily different.
After two months of anticipation, on a cloudless February mid-afternoon, I touched down, along
with my travelling companion, M., at Barbados's Grantley Adams Airport. It was a short walk
from the plane to the low airport buildings, but long enough to register a revolution in the
climate. In only a few hours, I had travelled to a heat and a humidity that at home I would not
have felt for another five months, and that even in midsummer there never achieved such
intensity.
Nothing was as I had imagined it, which is surprising only if one considers what I had imagined.
In the preceding weeks, my thoughts of the island had circled exclusively around three immobile
mental images, assembled during the reading of a brochure and an airline timetable. The first
image was of a beach with a palm tree against the setting sun. The second was of a hotel
bungalow with a view through French doors into a room decorated with wooden floors and
white bedlinen. And the third was of an azure sky.
If pressed, I would naturally have recognised that the island had to include other elements, but
I had not needed them in order to build an impression of it. My behaviour was like that of a
theatregoer who imagines without difficulty that the actions on stage are unfolding in Sherwood
Forest or ancient Rome because the backdrop has been painted with a single branch of an oak
or one Doric pillar.
But on my actual arrival, a range of things insisted that they, too, deserved to be included within
the fold of the word Barbados. For example, a large petrol storage facility, decorated with the
yellow and green logo of British Petroleum, and a small plywood box where an immigration
official sat in an immaculate brown suit and gazed with an air of curiosity and unhurried wonder
(like a scholar scanning the pages of a manuscript in the stacks of a library) at the passports of
a line of tourists that began to stretch out of the terminal and onto the edge of the airfield.
There was an advertisement for rum above the baggage carousel, a picture of the prime minister
in the customs corridor, a bureau de change in the arrivals hall and a confusion of taxi drivers
and tour guides outside the terminal building. And if there was a problem with this profusion of
images, it was that they made it strangely harder for me to see the Barbados I had come to find.
In my anticipation, there had simply been a vacuum between the airport and my hotel. Nothing
had existed in my mind between the last line on the itinerary (the beautifully rhythmic 'Arrival
OFFICIAL
16
BA 2155 at 15.35') and the hotel room. I had not envisioned, and now protested inwardly the
appearance of, a luggage carousel with a frayed rubber mat; two flies dancing above an
overflowing ashtray; a giant fan turning inside the arrivals hall; a white taxi with a dashboard
covered in fake leopard skin; a stray dog in a stretch of waste ground beyond the airport; an
advertisement for 'luxury condos' at a roundabout; a factory called Bardak Electronics; a row of
buildings with red and green tin roofs; a rubber strap on the central pillar of the car, upon which
was written in very small print 'Volkswagen, Wolfsburg'; a brightly coloured bush whose name
I didn't know; a hotel reception area that showed the time in six different locations and a card
pinned on the wall nearby that read, with two months' delay, 'Merry Christmas'. Only several
hours after my arrival did I find myself united with my imagined room, though I had had no prior
mental image of its vast air-conditioning unit or, welcome though it might be in the event, its
bathroom, which was made of Formica panels and had a notice sternly advising residents not
to waste water.
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate,
then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of
simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations
of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator
journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval
monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit
in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at
a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness. We notice a
luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the
window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends
a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look
back out at the field. It continues to rain. At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge,
after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window. And still we may have reached the
end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the
deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'.
A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening.
Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with
repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak
Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first
on the rim and then in the centre of a laden ashtray.
Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to
experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations

OFFICIAL
17
omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical
moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a
coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
As I lay awake in bed on my first Caribbean night, thinking back over my journey (there were
crickets and shufflings in the bushes outside), already the confusion of the present moment was
receding, and certain events had begun to assume prominence, for memory is in this respect
similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
The present might be compared to a long-winded film from which memory and anticipation
select photographic highlights. Of my nine-and-a-half-hour flight to the island, active memory
retained only six or seven static images. Just one survives today: the appearance of the in-flight
tray. Of my experience at the airport, only an image of the passport line remained accessible.
My layers of experience had settled into a compact and well-defined narrative: I became a man
who had flown in from London and checked into his hotel.
I fell asleep early and the next morning awoke to my first Caribbean dawn—though there was,
inevitably, a lot more beneath these brisk words than that.
Copyright © 2002 by Alain de Botton

OFFICIAL
18
Roam by the B52s
I hear a wind
Whistling air
Whispering
In my ear
Boy Mercury shooting through every degree
Oh girl dancing down those dirty and dusty trails
Take it hip to hip, rocket through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without wings, without wheels
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without anything but the love we feel
Skip the airstrip to the sunset, yeah
Ride the arrow to the target, one
Take it hip to hip, rock it through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without wings, without wheels

OFFICIAL
19
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without anything but the love we feel
Fly the great big sky
See the great big sea
Kick through continents
Busting boundaries
Take it hip to hip, rocket through the wilderness
Around the world the trip begins with a kiss
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without wings, without wheels
Roam if you want to
Roam around the world
Roam if you want to
Without anything but the love we feel
Take it hip to hip
Rocket through the wilderness
repeat

OFFICIAL
20
Paul Kelly - From St Kilda to Kings Cross
From St Kilda to Kings Cross is thirteen hours on a bus
I pressed my face against the glass and watched the white lines rushing past
And all around me felt like all inside me
And my body left me and my soul went running
Have you ever seen Kings Cross when the rain is falling soft?
I came in on the evening bus, from Oxford Street I cut across
And if the rain don't fall too hard everything shines just like a postcard
Everything goes on just the same
Fair-weather friends are the hungriest friends
I keep my mouth well shut, I cross their open hands
I want to see the sun go down from St Kilda Esplanade
Where the beach needs reconstruction, where the palm trees have it hard
I'd give you all of Sydney Harbour (all that land, all that water)
For that one sweet promenade

OFFICIAL
21
The Passenger - Iggy Pop
I am a passenger
And I ride, and I ride
I ride through the city's backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight
I am the passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright
I see the stars come out tonight
I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the city's ripped back sky
And everything looks good tonight
Singin' la la la la la la la la
Get into the car
We'll be the passenger
We'll ride through the city tonight
See the city's ripped backsides
We'll see the bright and hollow sky
We'll see the stars that shine so bright
Oh, stars made for us tonight
Oh, the passenger
How, how he rides
Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the silent hollow sky
He sees the stars come out tonight
He sees the city's ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
'Cause it just belongs to you and me
So let's take a ride and see what's mine
Singin' la la la la la la la la
OFFICIAL
● Lyrics begin in first person with the claim
that the persona is 'a passenger'.
● The metaphor in 'city's backside' conveys
negative inferences of both the outer or
end parts of a city as well as the idea of a
person's buttocks.
● The alliteration and assonance in the
phrase 'stars come out of the sky'
emphasises the beauty of the image. This
is then contrasted with the sky being
described as 'hollow'.
● Evocative imagery in the line 'I stay under
glass' - creates the sense of the persona
being contained and a barrier is between
them and the world they are seeing.
● The metaphor of 'ripped back sky' creates
a violent comparison of the night sky
appearing as if ripped from the day.
● Despite the negative imagery of a ripped
back sky that is hollow and travelling
through the back sides of the city - to the
passenger 'everything looks good
tonight'.
● The second verse now includes another
persona - 'we'll be passengers' . This pair
of passengers have a similar experience
to that described in verse one. Together
these two people feel as if the stars were
'made for' them 'tonight.
● For a third time the point of view of the
lyrics changes and moves to a third
person description of the passenger -
'how he rides'.
22
Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He sees things from under glass
He looks through his window's eye
He sees the things that he knows are his
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the city asleep at night
He sees the stars are out tonight
And all of it is yours and mine
And all of it is yours and mine
So let's ride and ride and ride and ride
Singin' la la la la la la la la
Songwriters: James Newell Osterberg / Ricky
Gardiner
The Passenger lyrics © BMG Rights
Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing
LLC
OFFICIAL
● This shift in point of view creates the
sense that the passenger is now someone
who owns the world - 'He looks through
his window's eye / He sees the things that
he knows are his' - and this begins to
develop the theme that the passenger is a
God-like figure and modern life is like a
journey by car with 'God'.
● When we experience life we are riding in
the car with the passenger -'let's take a
trip and see what's mine'.
● Viewing life in this way results in a strong
sense of communion - where the
passenger and the person who
accompanies them feels that the world
belongs to all of us - 'And all of it is yours
and mine'.
23
Road to Nowhere
Well, we know where we're goin'
But we don't know where we've been
And we know what we're knowin'
But we can't say what we've seen
And we're not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
We're on a road to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride
I'm feelin' okay this mornin'
And you know
We're on a road to paradise
Here we go, here we go
We're on a ride to nowhere
Come on inside
Takin' that ride to nowhere
We'll take that ride
Maybe you wonder where you are
I don't care
Here is where time is on our side
Take you there, take you there
OFFICIAL
TITLE
The 'road' symbolises the journey of life. The
'nowhere' at the end of the road could be death.
There is a sense that life as most of us are living it is
meaningless - there's no order and no plan and no
scheme to life and death and it doesn't mean
anything.
PART ONE
• Collective pronoun - 'we' creates a sense of a
unity amongst an unnamed group of people.
• Imagery of uncertainty - 'we don't know' and 'we
can't say'.
• Rhyming of ' goin' with 'knowin' makes the
connection between travelling and learning.
• The imagined responders are not 'children' but
they are young people at the start of their life's
journey with a clear sense of 'what they want'.
• While the future is 'certain' (everyone dies in the
end) as we are living life we are simply trying to
'work it out' - to give meaning and significance to
our life.
• The imperative to 'come on inside' is an invitation
for everyone to get on board the same journey so
that we can 'take the ride' together.
PART TWO
• An individual persona is introduce with a singular
pronoun in the line 'I'm feelin' okay this mornin'.
And another persona is introduced with the
second person pronoun 'you' in the line 'and you
know'. This establishes the sense of a couple -
potentially in a relationship.
• For this couple - there is the potential that
'paradise' is at the end of the road.
• Connotations of excitement and possibility come
the repetition of the line 'here we go'.
• There will be times when the second persona may
not be sure of the direction their life is taking -
'maybe you wonder where you are' but that is
okay because the first persona is confident they
have time to work it out 'time is on our side'
because of their youth.
24
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's all right, baby it's all right
And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's all right, baby it's all right
Would you like to come along?
And you could help me sing this song
And it's all right, baby it's all right
They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
And it's all right, baby it's all right
There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's all right, baby it's all right
And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's all right, baby it's all right
Would you like to come along?
You could help me sing this song
And it's all right, baby it's all right
They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
OFFICIAL
PART THREE
• Perspective shift in the lyrics with the line 'there's
a city in my mind' and we now have the first
persona describing an imagined utopian city as
the possible destination for their journey instead
of a 'nowhere.
• This persona is inviting their 'baby' or loved one
to join with them and take the ride together -
even though they may be apprehensive the first
persona is optimistic 'it's all right'.
• The extended metaphor of the city continues with
the idea that the city is 'far away' but this life goal
is achievable because it is 'growing day by day'.
This may mean that there are more and more
people going to the city (choosing to live their life
differently).
• Finally, the first persona directly asks the second
persona 'would you like to come along?'
• The use of the metaphor 'sing this song'
represents living life together and sharing with
others the optimistic message of a utopian city
that young people could be a part of and create.
Travelling to this city is an alternative to travelling
on a road to nowhere.
PART FOUR
• The final lines of the song make clear the anti-
establishment, non-conformity message of the
song with the lines 'they can tell you want to do'
that infer ideas of social conformity, authority and
social expectations.
• The irony of doing what is expected though is that
'they will make a fool of you'.
• The lyrics end in a circular way back at the
beginning with the collective sense of all us
currently being on a road to 'nowhere'. This
implies that at the moment this journey of life is
meaningless but it doesn't have to be because
you can choose a different destination and go the
city.
• It could also be interpreted as the destination is
not the goal but it is the journey that matters - it's
not important that the end of the road is
'nowhere' - as long as you aim for the city.
25
And it's all right, baby it's all right
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere
We're on a road to nowhere

Travel Writing
Travel writing is a genre that is becoming increasingly popular. It
seems that each week a new travel book gets published and every day
more writers are interested in writing one. These books are often
classified as travelogues.

What is a travelogue?
A travelogue is a truthful account of an individual’s experiences traveling,
usually told in the past tense and in the first person.
The word travelogue supposedly comes from a combination of the two words
travel and monologue. In turn, the word monologue comes from the Greek
words monos (alone) and logos (speech, word). A travelogue is then, in its most
basic form, a spoken or written account of an individual’s experiences traveling,
which usually appears in the past tense, in the first person, and with some
verisimilitude.
Because a travelogue aims to be a true account of an individual’s experiences
traveling, descriptions of what the traveller sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels
in the external world while traveling are essential components.
Of course, thoughts, feelings, and reflections are important parts of our
experience of travel. So, descriptions of a traveller's inner world are not out-of-
place in the travelogue.
Likewise, notes and observations on history, society, and culture are also
common features of travelogues, as we certainly learn about the world when we
travel.

OFFICIAL
26
 “Travel literature” – or let’s say, “the literature of wandering” is low budget,
somewhat open-ended, random and glorying in having a bad time full of life
lessons. It encompasses autobiography, mythomania, memoir, and topographical
observation as well as adventures, exotic romances and ordeals.
Paul Theroux

At five o’clock, the dazzling light of sunrise wriggled through the stretched curtain cloth and
filled our room, signalling the start of the day.
Before the rays fully took on their ferocious heat, the inhabitants of the coastal town of
Mocìmboa da Praia, in Mozambique, were beginning to stir.

OFFICIAL
27
In the central yard of the family compound in which we were staying, Mama was banging a
clay burner on the floor, removing ash and giving life to the dampened embers from the
night before. Her daughter swept away the dust with a hand-held brush made from a thick
bundle of reeds. She scolded her brother as he got in her way, coming back from the water
tank on the far side of the yard.
We stepped outside, snapping on our sunglasses as the whitewashed walls blinded us. After
trying to coax our tongues around the morning sounds of Portuguese, we walked through
the gates on to the dirt-packed road that would soon be bustling.
For now, the frames of empty stalls stood like skeletons as their owners ate breakfast.
Turning right, we walked a short distance through a hotch-potch of shadows created by the
swiftly rising sun until we neared the end of the road and found Selima.
In a patched-together shack, Selima, a Tanzanian of 40, was frying chips glued together with
egg on his gas stove – chipsi maiai. We exchanged Swahili greetings, this time with more
ease, and ordered two deep-fried eggs. While they bubbled we crossed the street to find a
crate of fresh rolls that were offered warm, dusty and chewy from the bake-house. As this
fishing town took its first breaths of the day, we feasted and inhaled with it.
Over a cup of tea, we chatted to passers-by in a concoction of Portuguese, French, English
and Swahili that somehow was understood, and watched as life flooded the street.
Stalls began to fill with vegetables, clothes and trinkets, shops unbarred their doors and
music floated from the record hut. Women walked down the road selling home-made goods,
such as boiled cassava, rice cakes and doughnuts from plastic buckets balanced on their
heads.
Children scampered around legs, avoiding the motorbikes that wove through the human
traffic. We listened to the sounds of life as they rose, blissfully happy on our broken chairs.
Now, the business of a morning enveloped this untarmacked road in northern Mozambique.

OFFICIAL
28
Rebecca Lennard
Batman meets Spider-Man: that’s how you could sum up our cave adventures in Cambodia.
My boyfriend and I had been driving mile after mile on dusty dirt-tracks, through the rural
countryside of Kampot, actively searching for Phnom Chhngok Cave (don’t even start me
on trying to pronounce it). We soon realised that the cave temple, which is set inside
towering limestone mountains, might prove to be like finding the proverbial needle in a
haystack.
However, as luck would have it, as we approached the foot of the next mountain, we were
greeted by a rowdy bunch of friendly local kids.
“Hello! Hello!” they chanted. “We can show you around!”
A young boy guided us to the base of the limestone mountain and up a flight of 203 stairs.
“Where are you from?” he asked, to which we answered: “England”.
In the same jolly spirit as Del Boy, they responded with “Lovely jubbly!” This seemed to be
a common response among locals in south-east Asia when we revealed we were English.
Only Fools and Horses gone global.
As we climbed the last few stairs, the young boy accidentally dropped his headtorch, and
laughed as we taught him the phrase “Oopsy daisy”.

OFFICIAL
29
Eventually, we reached the cave entrance and discovered a well-preserved shrine to the
Hindu god Shiva, dating back to the seventh century. The young boy also pointed out the
elephant-shaped stalagmite next to the shrine.
We headed down to a small opening at the back of the cave. It looked like we were going in.
Flip flops were definitely not a good idea.
The young boy made caving look effortless as he gracefully climbed the rock formations. By
contrast, we were slipping and sliding around the cave as if it were a water park.
“Watch out! Batman!” the boy warned, as tens of bats bolted over our heads. They may have
lacked black capes, but these bats certainly showed off their powers in achieving supersonic
speeds. We were also tickled by the young boy remarking “Spider-Man!” whenever an eight-
legged beast scuttled past us.
After venturing through numerous nooks and crannies, we could eventually see the light at
the end of the tunnel. As caving amateurs, we had certainly gained our adventure fix for the
day. Indeed, our caving experience turned out to be a highlight of our visit to Kampot.
Besides, it’s not every day that you see real superheroes.

OFFICIAL
30
It is 5.45am when I emerge from my bed-and-breakfast accommodation. In the dim pre-
dawn light a hooded figure slips silently by. He is barefoot and carries a large flat board
under his arm. With head bowed, he is walking purposefully. I follow. He pads down the
main street under the fig trees, past a row of shops and cafés not yet open.
The hooded man is gliding on and I quicken my pace. Already I can hear the sound of the
ocean. We make our way down the stone steps, past the memorial to the Australian dead of
two world wars, across the promenade and on to the soft sandy beach. The surf is rolling
in. The young man, now bare chested, is running down the beach, splashing through the
waves and swimming out. The sea is studded with flotsam, as though a ship has been
wrecked. I look again and realise that the black debris is scores of surfers waiting on their
boards like praying mantises.
This is Bondi Beach, Australia. The air is still cool and as the sun rises it seems the whole
beach begins to move, gyrating and pumping in a fitness frenzy. A group of soft-sand
runners, the desert camels of Bondi, are ploughing deep in the sand, lifting feet high only to
sink down again.
Other runners, sleek as panthers, are pacing along the promenade and, on the grass,
muscles are expanding and contracting rhythmically in the green gym. In the pool at the
southern end of the beach swimmers pound up and down in training. This is the other face
of Bondi, one of Sydney's most fashionable beaches, which you have to rise early to witness.

OFFICIAL
31
As the rays strengthen, the intensity of activity fades and the beach takes on a relaxed,
chilled-out feel, with bronzed bodies lazing in the heat.
The evening rituals are quite different. The beach closes and, as the sun goes down, young
and old retreat to their favourite bars for refreshment. At the north end the surfers and
sunbathers make for the RSL (Returned and Services League) Club for cheap beer and
camaraderie. Every night at sundown the same ceremony takes place. The lights are
dimmed and all are asked to stand and face west. Over the loudspeaker the "Ode of
Remembrance" is read: "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not
weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we
will remember them."
There is a pause and then the words "Lest we forget". There was another sandy beach at
Gallipoli, not unlike Bondi, where Australians soldiers fought for the freedom the young
people enjoy today. Remembering that sacrifice is not left to chance in Australia. There is a
daily reminder, at sunset in Bondi and in RSL clubs throughout the land.

OFFICIAL
32
The flea market in Apia, Samoa’s only town, burnt down this week. It’s probably not
surprising since this gloomy wooden structure selling lots of carved goods, T-shirts,
coconut shell jewellery and lavalavas (wraparound skirts worn by both sexes), had at one
end a café selling chicken, pork buns and doughnut-type cakes – everything deep-fried –
from a variety of stalls, all of which looked like a fire hazard.
For islands that are green and lush year round producing a fantastic variety of fruits, the
local diet is surprisingly bad.
You need to walk through or around the market to reach the bus “station” on the edge of
the sea with a large stepped concrete sea wall to sit on. It’s a place for lovely sea breezes
and swift sunburn. From about 3pm the bus station and the market are full of
schoolchildren in their uniforms of white shirts and lavalavas for the boys and pinafore-
style dresses for the girls.
Buses are old, brightly painted often with religious messages. There are no printed routes
and no official timetables. Pop music blares out from each one at such a volume I took my
hearing aid out – and didn’t replace it until I got back to England.
The buses arrive, open their doors and the children, like children all over the world, pour
in. But that’s where similarities stop. When the bus is full, every seat taken, younger
children will get up from their seat and sit on the lap of the older person who takes their
place. Nothing is said. No one looks at anyone. No “thank you” or eye contact.
A crowd of teenage boys get on. Strapping lads; Samoan rugby players in the making. The
bus is full of younger girls. A few of them get up to accommodate the number needing a seat.
The boys sit down. The girls sit on their laps. No words, no glances exchanged. This is
neither sexual nor submissive behaviour. It’s just getting a seat. Adults do the same. Women
sit on men’s laps or on another woman’s lap. The only people not expected to provide a lap
to sit on are the very elderly and “palangi” (Europeans or white).
By about 6pm the bus station is quiet. The buses stop running. Their driver/owners go
home for a dinner of fried chicken and taro. Do your weekend shopping on a Saturday
morning because you can’t rely on buses running in the afternoon and there are none on
Sundays.
Taxis are plentiful and not that expensive but they lack the exotic experience of a bus full of
Samoans, bootlegged pop music at full volume, boxes of produce piled around the driver so
he can only drive with his elbows round his ears and the blast of exhaust smoke trailing out
the back.

OFFICIAL
33
Clutching our one-dollar tickets, we board Yangon’s circular commuter train, pushing past
saffron-robed monks and bellowing snack-sellers to find a place to sit. The train’s meander
belies its busy interior, in which benches are crammed with chatting women and betel nut-
chewing men, who flash red-teethed grins our way.
Vendors strut up and down the planked aisles, while washing lines flash by our windows.
It is the first day of Thingyan, the water festival of the New Year, and we feel the fleeting
spray of celebratory water as trackside boys hurl cups our way. Mobile phones flash and
jingle and shopping bags rock impatiently; everyone, it seems, has somewhere to be.
Forty-five minutes later, shaken and damp, we alight at Hledan Market. Here we find fruit
and vegetable stalls in happy coexistence with fashion brands blasting Western pop music,
and the insistent sounds of One Direction follow us along the street. The market is heaving
with industrious women, who, caked in thanaka, a powdered yellow cooling agent, set to
work buying and selling, defying the 40C heat for the sake of their wares. Younger shoppers
OFFICIAL
34
sport towering hairstyles, heavy with gel, which begin to wilt beneath the oppressive sun.
Along the road girls loiter in leather jackets and hefty heels, shrinking behind parasols to
protect their porcelain-white skin.
Snacking on a bag of lychees, we watch this community of fast-paced shoppers, before
hopping into a cab for our next stop: the feted Pegu Club. Built in the late 19th century, this
mansion served for several decades as a gentlemen’s club; it now stands neglected.
We walk into the enormous buildings, which are surrounded by unkempt wildlife and
water-throwing children. A guide appears out of nowhere and silently motions for us to
follow. He ushers us through derelict ballrooms and along ornate verandas. Dusty squash
courts sit in a patch of jungly garden. Our host leads us through room after high-ceilinged
room, around long-forgotten courtyards and down precarious staircases. Mute families eye
us from hidden corners; they have made this ghost-ridden building their home.
A commotion slows our taxi-ride back and we step out to find ourselves beside the house
of Aung San Suu Kyi. She peers over her wall momentarily, then gives a wave before
disappearing. The Thingyan dancers who have assembled to perform for Daw Suu begin to
disperse. The faces around us bear a wild expression of cheerfulness. Perhaps they hope,
through her, to exorcise their ghosts, to realise an untroubled, pop music-playing future.
Together they turn back to the constancy of the circle train, and we are left in the sweating,
century-spanning afternoon.

OFFICIAL
35
Bedraggled and bewildered, I emerged from the murky water, gasping. While I grabbed at
the riverbank, my recovering senses became aware of euphoric shrieks and hoots. I turned
to gaze at my point of entry. The vine still hung in place, swaying precariously. Beyond that,
a sea of brown bodies danced triumphantly on the opposite bank, punching the air and
cheering. “Lo hiciste!” (“You did it”) they chimed in unison, congratulating me on my Jungle
Jane-style success. “De nuevo, de nuevo!” they pleaded. “Again?” I thought to myself. “Fat
chance.”
Perhaps it was the rapturous response to my vine-swinging, or the threat of incessant
whining should I refuse to jump again, but a new morning ritual was born the day I arrived
at the jungle community of Wachimak in the Ecuadorean Amazon.
After a breakfast of tropical bird stew and caterpillars, local children and adults would
gather at the river to marvel as a seemingly deranged white creature with orange locks
hurled herself screaming from a tree.
The joy that my aerial activity brought was far from rare, however. In this community,
smiles aren’t rationed. Joy is commonplace. The delight locals took in watching a fearful,
freckled foreigner falling from the sky was indistinguishable from the gleeful satisfaction
they displayed when peeling a fresh banana.

OFFICIAL
36
As the days passed, I learnt the mesmerising song of the toucan, gulped mysterious molluscs
as if eating jelly, and watched in wonder as a 56-year-old local woman scaled a 30ft papaya
tree in seconds.
I swilled and spat an unidentified sour substance on my feet to ward off snakes, had an
unnervingly close encounter with a large wildcat, and planted hundreds of yuccas while
battling a torrential rainstorm.
But amid all the adventure, by far the most striking quality of this community was its
willingness just to be. One man, Fabrizio, epitomised this. Like a cat slinking around the
back garden, he would meander between sun-dappled trees in the soft glow of dusk,
pausing to gaze peacefully at the same view he had seen every day for the past 28 years.
Socrates said that “the secret of happiness is not found in seeking more, but in developing
the capacity to enjoy less”. I come from a society plagued by its own propensity to consume.
Yet in that moment, as I stood watching Fabrizio and the sun set on another day, I glimpsed
the world through his eyes. It was magnificent.

OFFICIAL
37
Clare Welham
My friends and family seemed confused when I told them I was going to Laos.
“Is that the capital of Vietnam?” my mum asked. She was even more perplexed when I told
her I was (sort of) going alone.
I met Fabrice when he flailed up to me, lost and sweaty, in Bangkok train station.
My French was rusty, his English non-existent, yet three months and three countries later
we were squashed together on an antique local bus heading for Nong Khiaw.
I was so overwhelmed with joy at finally stretching my legs that it took me a few moments
to notice the painting I was now immersed in.
Bright white clouds bounced off lush mountains that rose from the Nam Ou river. It
resembled Willy Wonka’s chocolate stream, with guesthouses jostling for prime position on
either side.
While I was still taking off my backpack and taking in the view, Fabrice hastily booked
himself into a private room.
I opted for a cheaper dorm and, to his dismay, had the entire 32-person room all to myself,
complete with riverside hammock.

OFFICIAL
38
We met the next morning to trek to the viewpoint – Fabrice was worse for wear after too
much local whisky.
The sign that greeted us read “Danger – Unexploded Bombs”, and the man with a toothy
smile who greeted us thrust a bamboo walking stick in my face. It was an uphill struggle for
an hour and a half, in humid jungle weather with twisted clay-sodden paths.
Nothing prepared me for the view that awaited us. It left me speechless then and I am
wordless now. We took it all in for the most peaceful hour of my life before the weather
took a turn for the worse.
The path was now a mudslide – if trekking up had been hard, trekking back down again felt
like proper torture!
Fabrice laughed as I fell on my rear, trying to grab hold of anything on the way down. His
laughter stopped when I was back on my feet and musing over a huge nest by my head.
“Frelon, frelon!” he shouted, sliding past me, falling headfirst in the mud.
“You know I don’t comprend you,” I said in between bursts of laughter at his clay-covered
body.
Bedraggled and earthy, we toasted our trek with a fellow Canadian traveller who told me:
“If there’s a day in Laos when you’re not covered in mud, you’re doing it wrong.”
Back in my hammock and the land of Wi-Fi, I remembered to Google the word frelon. I’d
been an inch away from a giant hornet’s nest.

Techniques used by Successful Travel Writers

Successful travel writers take an active approach to travel and position themselves
as the protagonist in the narrative.
Travel writers are not tourists, although sometimes it seems like they’re one and the same.
Here’s what I mean:
Tourists take a passive approach to travel. They purchase package tours where the hotels
and sights are selected for them. They travel around in an air-conditioned coach with lots
of other tourists. They’re herded around on guided group tours. The main attractions are
presented in short sound bites.
Traveling as a tourist is a comfortable, easy way to travel but so much is missed. It would
be difficult to write a unique, compelling article if you always travel this way.

OFFICIAL
39
Traveling as a writer is the opposite. It's active and engaging, and requires your full
participation.

Successful travel writers use all their senses and attention detail to create a mood
and atmosphere.
Good travel writing involves using all your senses when visiting a place. The photographs
that accompany your article give a good sense for visuals. But without using your other
senses it only provides one dimension for your article.
But what about your other senses? How can you describe the sounds and smells in a
bustling outdoor market in tropical SE Asia? What about tastes? Was that sweet, sour, salty,
pungent, bitter, or does it defy description?
Food, wine and beer writers need to pay particular attention to these skills because you
want to make your readers salivate while they read your article.
Use all your senses in your descriptions and your stories will become multi-dimensional.
Using this travel writing characteristic will make your prose shine.

Successful travel writers share their opinions and attitudes to create tone.
Successful travel writers enjoy sharing their opinions about destinations, tourist
attractions, hotels, restaurants, wines, beaches, and much more.
They write about things that shock them, surprised them, upset them, and of course, the
things they enjoyed the most.

Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea

Adventure travel writer Kira Salak's Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea
is her epic travelogue of becoming the first woman to traverse the treacherous mountains and
jungles of that island country solo.
● The New York Times Book Review selected Four Corners as a Notable Travel Book of the
Year, writing, "Kira Salak is tough, a real-life Lara Croft."
● Book Magazine calls her "the gutsiest—and some say craziest—woman adventurer of our
day."
● Edward Marriott proclaims Four Corners to be "a travel book that transcends the genre.
It is, like all the best travel narratives, a resonant interior journey, and offers wisdom for
our times."

OFFICIAL
40
An excerpt from Four Corners, by Kira Salak:
I left Tahiti behind, still hearing Coco’s words, You always go, non?
The plane rose and I watched the shores of French Polynesia fade to a spread of blue ocean.
The fragrance of Tahiti seemed to linger on my skin, in my hair, like a memory that couldn’t be
washed away.
A flight attendant handed me an Air New Zealand survey. One of the questions asked: “How do
you generally prefer to travel?”
I smiled to myself as I checked the box, “Independently, without prior arrangements.” A lifetime
summed up.
I began to look forward to Papua New Guinea; it was one of the most unfamiliar and daunting
places I could think of choosing for a journey. In particular, it had a vast, uninhabited jungle that
would be so indifferent to my presence that it could consume me without a trace. I would go
way into that jungle and get myself out again. It would be hard. It would be the ultimate test. I
knew that Papua New Guinea had a reputation for being especially dangerous, was overrun with
gangs of hoodlums and terrorized by violence. So here again was the challenge: Get yourself
out of the place. I would have to toughen up like never before. No fear. I would be forced to
have confidence in myself, and to trust in my capabilities. I would need to become someone
new, altogether, an entirely different kind of person. A fighter.
I tried to imagine what the country would look like, and recalled the photos from National
Geographic and other magazines showing a jungle so thick it resembled the entrails of a giant
beast, vines winding about primordial trees. Here, here, was the place for accomplishing
something, for transforming.
And who knows? Maybe through the process I would emerge in some new wild and fantastic
place like one of the lands of my childhood imagination. It might be a place similar to what
Gauguin had found when he left Tahiti in 1901, fleeing to the remote Marquesas Islands, where
he’d written that “poetry wells up of itself, and one has only to drift into dreaming….” I imagined
some similar untouched and sacred land, an entry into a true paradise that would offer the kind
of rest and peace that I would never want to leave.
Down below, Tahiti’s perfect illusion was succumbing to the chaos that had started just as I left.
French authorities seized Greenpeace’s ship, Rainbow Warrior, arrested the crew, and went on
with the first of five nuclear tests on the Mururoa atoll. Papeete’s idyllic harbor, its quaint
oceanfront stores, became the scene of riots. A state of emergency was declared. The airport

OFFICIAL
41
was firebombed. Looters destroyed and ransacked shops and businesses until French forces
were called in to restore order. Through it all, I knew only one thing: The sunsets would look the
same, as aloof and splendid as always.
---
Cairns, Australia. I sit at a café table, sipping from my third glass of Fosters. The beer does little
to calm my nerves. Tomorrow morning I’ll be flying to Papua New Guinea, and if even a shred
of what I’ve heard about the place is true, I’ve got reason to be nervous. The country’s
reputation for violence has been backed up by every Aussie I’ve talked to. Port Moresby, the
capital, ranks among the most dangerous cities in the world.
Add to these facts the difficulty of altogether abandoning the familiar— the difficulty of
abandoning it on my own. No more of the safety and luxury that a place like Australia offers. I
can only hope I’ll be strong enough for this trip, that I’ll have what it takes, whatever it might
be.
But maybe if I can get a vague plan going, I can waylay the anxiety. I take out my map of Papua
New Guinea and smooth it down on the table, my beer bottle putting a wet ring in the middle
of the Coral Sea. The map shows a marvelous mass of jungle without roads or railroads. One big
landmass with tiny circles to mark the occasional village—lone circles a hundred miles from
each other, circles in the midst of mountain ranges, circles hidden in swamps. Many of the
circles don’t have a name. I try to imagine reaching the circles. Surely it can be done. Rivers
branch into streams, which branch into creeks and swamps, all of which one could conceivably
cover by canoe. And, for those lonely circles in the mountains, one merely has to walk.
Drunk—or nearly—I see that PNG has two main rivers: the Fly River in the south, and the Sepik
River in the north. In between them is the Highlands, a 14,000-foot-high backbone that
traverses the island of New Guinea. British explorer Ivan Champion had been the first European
to cross PNG by going up the Fly, over the Highlands, and down the Sepik in 1927. Why not try
doing the same thing? Does it make any difference that I’m a woman, wanting to do it alone?
Should it make any difference?
Of course none of the New Guinea explorers were women. Men were always the ones surveying
the new terrain, figuring out convenient routes from one valley to another. The jungle had been
informally declared off-limits for women: It was considered too hot and dangerous; it had an
annoying habit of muddying up clothes, sweating up bodies. And women were supposed to be
too frail to go climbing up mountains by themselves, too squeamish to tolerate the assorted
jungle creatures. Men in the adventure stories were always intentionally leaving their women
behind—burdensome, awkward charges— only to discover, paradoxically, that they were the
OFFICIAL
42
reason to return home. I’m not ready to buy any of it, though. I want all the mud, sweat, bugs,
toil. Worse, if possible. I haven’t a single romantic notion in my head about this trip: I know it’s
going to be the hardest thing I’ve done yet.

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

A WOMAN'S SOLO TREK ACROSS 1700 MILES OF AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK

I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate
clothes. 'Bring a cardigan for the evenings,' the brochure said. A freezing wind whipped grit
down the platform and I stood shivering, holding warm dog flesh, and wondering what
foolishness had brought me to this eerie, empty train-station in the centre of nowhere. I turned
against the wind, and saw the line of mountains at the edge of town.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns-small
intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think
you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this
was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence-and lasted about ten
seconds.

Diggity wriggled out of my arms and looked at me, head cocked, piglet ears flying. I experienced
that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something
difficult and there's no going back. It's all very well, to set off on a train with no money telling
yourself that you're really quite a brave and adventurous person, and you'll deal capably with
things as they happen, but when you actually arrive at the other end with no one to meet and
nowhere to go and nothing to sustain you but a lunatic idea that even you have no real faith in,
it suddenly appears much more attractive to be at home on the kindly Queensland coast,
discussing plans and sipping gins on the verandah with friends, and making unending lists of
lists which get thrown away, and reading books about camels.

The lunatic idea was, basically, to get myself the requisite number of wild camels from the bush
and train them to carry my gear, then walk into and about the central desert area. I knew that
there were feral camels aplenty in this country. They had been imported in the 1850s along with
their Afghani and North Indian owners, to open up the inaccessible areas, to transport food,
and to help build the telegraph system and railways that would eventually cause their economic
demise. When this happened, those Afghans had let their camels go, heartbroken, and tried to
find other work. They were specialists and it wasn't easy. They didn't have much luck with
government support either. Their camels, however, had found easy street-it was perfect
country for them and they grew and prospered, so that now there are approximately ten
thousand roaming the free country and making a nuisance of themselves on cattle properties,
getting shot at, and, according to some ecologists, endangering some plant species for which
OFFICIAL
43
they have a particular fancy. Their only natural enemy is man, they are virtually free of disease,
and Australian camels are now rated as some of the best in the world.

The train had been half empty, the journey long. Five hundred miles and two days from Adelaide
to Alice Springs. The modern arterial roads around Port Augusta had almost immediately
petered out into crinkled, wretched, endless pink tracks leading to the shimmering horizon, and
then there was nothing but the dry red parchment of the dead heart, god's majestic hidy-hole,
where men are men and women are an afterthought. Snippets of railway car conversation still
buzzed around in my head.

'G'day, mind if I sit 'ere?'

(Sighing and looking pointedly out the window or at book.) 'No.'

(Dropping of the eyes to chest level.) 'Where's yer old man?'

'I don't have an old man.'

(Faint gleam in bleary, blood-shot eye, still fixed at chest level.) 'Jesus Christ, mate, you're not
goin' to the Alice alone are ya? Listen 'ere, lady, you're fuckin' done for. Them coons'll rape
youze for sure. Fuckin' niggers run wild up there ya know. You'll need someone to keep an eye
on ya. Tell youze what, I'll shout youze a beer, then we'll go back to your cabin and get
acquainted eh? Whaddya reckon?'

I waited until the station had thinned its few bustling arrivals, standing in the vacuum of early
morning silence, fighting back my unease, then set off with Diggity towards town.

My first impression as we strolled down the deserted street was of the architectural ugliness of
the place, a discomforting contrast to the magnificence of the country which surrounded it. Dust
covered everything from the large, dominant corner pub to the tacky, unimaginative shop fronts
that lined the main street. Hordes of dead insects clustered in the arcing street lights, and four-
wheel-drive vehicles spattered in red dirt, with only two spots swept clean by the windscreen
wipers, rattled intermittently through the cement and bitumen town. This grey, cream and
hospital-green shopping area gradually gave way to sprawling suburbia until it was stopped
short by the great perpendicular red face of the Macdonnell Ranges which borders the southern
side of town, and runs unbroken, but for a few spectacular gorges, east and west for several
hundred miles. The Todd River, a dry white sandy bed lined with tall columns of silver eucalypts,
winds through the town, then cuts into a narrow gap in the mountains. The range, looming
menacingly like some petrified prehistoric monster, has, I was to discover, a profound
psychological effect on the puny folk below. It sends them troppo. It reminds them of
incomprehensible dimensions of time which they almost successfully block out with brick
veneer houses and wilted English-style gardens.

OFFICIAL
44
I had planned to camp in the creek with the Aborigines until I could find a job and a place to
stay, but the harbingers of doom on the train had told me it was suicide to do such a thing.
Everyone, from the chronic drunks to the stony men and women with brown wrinkled faces and
burnt-out expressions, to the waiters in tuxedos who served and consumed enormous amounts
of alcohol, all of them warned me against it. The blacks were unequivocally the enemy. Dirty,
lazy, dangerous animals. Stories of young white lasses who innocently strayed down the Todd
at night, there to meet their fate worse than death, were told with suspect fervour. It was the
only subject anyone had got fired up about. I had heard other stories back home too-of how a
young black man was found in an Alice gutter one morning, painted white. Even back in the city
where the man in the street was unlikely ever to have seen an Aborigine, let alone spoken to
one, that same man could talk at length, with an extraordinary contempt, about what they were
like, how lazy and unintelligent they were. This was because of the press, where clich?d images
of dirty, stone-age drunks on the dole were about the only coverage Aborigines got, and
because everyone had been taught at school that they were not much better than specialized
apes, with no culture, no government and no right to existence in a vastly superior white world;
aimless wanderers who were backward, primitive and stupid.

It is difficult to sort out fact from fiction, fear from paranoia and goodies from baddies when
you are new in a town but something was definitely queer about this one. The place seemed
soulless, rootless, but perhaps it was just that which encouraged, in certain circumstances, the
extraordinary. Had everyone been trying to put the fear of god into me just because I was an
urbanite in the bush? Had I suddenly landed in Ku Klux Klan country? I had spent time before
with Aboriginal people-in fact, had had one of the best holidays of my entire life with them.
Certainly there had been some heavy drinking and the occasional fight, but that was part of the
white Australian tradition too, and could be found in most pubs or parties in the country. If the
blacks here were like the blacks there, how could a group of whites be so consumed with fear
and hatred? And if they were different here, what had happened to make them that way? Tread
carefully, my instincts said. I could sense already a camouflaged violence in this town, and I had
to find a safe place to stay. Rabbits, too, have their survival mechanisms.

They say paranoia attracts paranoia: certainly no one else I met ever had such a negative view
of Alice Springs. But then I was to get to know it from the gutters up, which may have given me
a distorted perspective. It is said that anyone who sees the Todd River flow three times falls in
love with the Alice. By the end of the second year, after seeing it freakishly flood more often
than that, I had a passionate hatred yet an inexplicable and consuming addiction for it.

There are fourteen thousand people living there of whom one thousand are Aboriginal. The
whites consist mainly of government workers, miscellaneous misfits and adventurers, retired
cattle or sheep station owners, itinerant station workers, truck drivers and small business
operators whose primary function in life is to rip off the tourists, who come by the bus-load
from America, Japan and urban Australia, expecting high adventure in this last romantic
outpost, and to see the extraordinary desert which surrounds it. There are three major pubs, a

OFFICIAL
45
few motels, a couple of zed-grade restaurants, and various shops that sell 'I've climbed Ayers
Rock' T-shirts, boomerangs made in Taiwan, books on Australiana, and tea towels with noble
savages holding spears silhouetted against setting suns. It is a frontier town, characterized by
an aggressive masculine ethic and severe racial tensions.

I ate breakfast at a cheap cafe, then stepped out into the glaring street where things were
beginning to move, and squinted at my new home. I asked someone where the cheapest
accommodation was and they directed me to a caravan park three miles north of town.

It was a hot and dusty walk but interesting. The road followed a tributary of the Todd. Still,
straight columns of blue smoke chimneying up through the gum leaves marked Aboriginal
camps. On the left were the garages and workshops of industrial Alice-galvanized iron sheds
behind which spread the trim lawns and trees of suburbia. When I arrived, the proprietor
informed me that it was only three dollars if I had my own tent, otherwise it was eight.

My smile faded. I eyed the cold drinks longingly and went outside for some tepid tap water. I
didn't ask if that were free, just in case. Over in the corner of the park some young folk with
long hair and patched jeans were pitching a large tent. They looked approachable, so I asked if
I could stay with them. They were pleased to offer me shelter and friendliness.

That night, they took me out on the town in their beatup panel-van equipped with all the
trappings one associates with free-wheeling urban youth-a five million decibel car stereo and
even surf-boards . . . they were heading north. We drove into the dusty lights of the town and
stopped by the pub to pick up some booze. The girl, who was shy and very young, suddenly
turned to me.

'Oo, look at them, aren't they disgusting. God, they're like apes.'

'Who?'

'The boongs.'

Her boyfriend was leaning up against the bottle-shop, waiting.

'Hurry up, Bill, and let's get out of here. Ugly brutes.' She folded her arms as if she were cold
and shivered with repulsion.

I put my head on my arms, bit my tongue, and knew the night was going to be a long one.

The next day I got a job at the pub, starting in two days. Yes, I could stay in a back room of the
pub, the payment for which would be deducted from my first week's wages. Meals were
provided. Perfect. That gave me time to suss out camel business. I sat in the bar for a while and
chatted with the regulars. I discovered there were three camel-men in town-two involved with
tourist businesses, and the other an old Afghan who was bringing in camels from the wild to sell
to Arabia as meat herds. I met a young geologist who offered to drive me out to meet this man.

OFFICIAL
46
The minute I saw Sallay Mahomet it was apparent to me that he knew exactly what he was
doing. He exuded the bandy-legged, rope-handling confidence of a man long accustomed to
dealing with animals. He was fixing some odd-looking saddles near a dusty yard filled with these
strange beasts.

'Yes, what can I do for you?'

'Good morning, Mr Mahomet,' I said confidently. 'My name's Robyn Davidson and um, I've been
planning this trip you see, into the central desert and I wanted to get three wild camels and
train them for it, and I was wondering if you might be able to help me.'

'Hrrrmppph.'

Sallay glared at me from under bushy white eyebrows. There was a dry grumpiness about him
that put me instantly in my place and made me feel like a complete idiot.

'And I suppose you think you'll make it too?'

I looked at the ground, shuffled my feet and mumbled something defensive.

'What do you know about camels then?'

'Ah well, nothing really, I mean these are the first ones I've seen as a matter of fact, but ah . . .'

'Hrrmmph. And what do you know about deserts?'

It was painfully obvious from my silence that I knew very little about anything.

Sallay said he was sorry, he didn't think he could help me, and turned about his business. My
cockiness faded. This was going to be harder than I thought, but then it was only the first day.

Next we drove to the tourist place south of town. I met the owner and his wife, a friendly woman
who offered me cakes and tea. They looked at one another in silence when I told them of my
plan. 'Well, come out here any time you like,' said the man jovially, 'and get to know the animals
a bit.' He could barely control the smirk on the other side of his face. My intuition in any case
told me to stay away. I didn't like him and I was sure the feeling was mutual. Besides, when I
saw how his animals roared and fought, I figured he was probably not the right person to learn
from.

The last of the three, the Posel place, was three miles north, and was owned, according to some
of the people in the bar, by a maniac.

My geologist friend dropped me off at the pub, and from there I walked north up the Charles
River bed. It was a delightful walk, under cool and shady trees. The silence was often broken by
packs of camp dogs who raced out with their hackles up to tell me and Diggity to get out of their

OFFICIAL
47
territory, only to have bottles, cans and curses flung at them by their Aboriginal owners, who
none the less smiled and nodded at us.

TOUCHNG THE VOID by Joe Simpson

I was lying in my sleeping bag, staring at the light filtering through the red and green fabric
of the dome tent. Simon was snoring loudly, occasionally twitching in his dream world. We
could have been anywhere. There is a peculiar anonymity about being in tents. Once the zip
is closed and the outside world barred from sight, all sense of location disappears.
Scotland, the French Alps, the Karakoram, it was always the same. The sounds of rustling,
of fabric flapping in the wind, or of rainfall, the feel of hard lumps under the ground sheet,
the smell of rancid socks and sweat – these are universals, as comforting as the warmth of
the down sleeping bag.
Outside, in a lightening sky, the peaks would be catching the first of the morning sun, with
perhaps even a condor cresting the thermals above the tent. That wasn’t too fanciful either
since I had seen one circling the camp the previous afternoon. We were in the middle of the
Cordillera Huayhuash, in the Peruvian Andes, separated from the nearest village by twenty-
eight miles of rough walking, and surrounded by the most spectacular ring of ice mountains
I had ever seen, and the only indication of this from within our tent was the regular roaring
of avalanches falling off Cerro Sarapo.
I felt a homely affection for the warm security of the tent, and reluctantly wormed out of
my bag to face the prospect of lighting the stove. It had snowed a little during the night, and
the grass crunched frostily under my feet as I padded over to the cooking rock. There was
no sign of Richard stirring as I passed his tiny one-man tent, half collapsed and whitened
with hoar frost.
Squatting under the lee of the huge overhanging boulder that had become our kitchen, I
relished this moment when I could be entirely alone. I fiddled with the petrol stove which
was mulishly objecting to both the temperature and the rusty petrol with which I had filled
it. I resorted to brutal coercion when coaxing failed and sat it atop a propane gas stove going
full blast. It burst into vigorous life, spluttering out two-foot-high flames in petulant revolt
against the dirty petrol.
As the pan of water slowly heated, I looked around at the wide, dry and rock-strewn river
bed, the erratic boulder under which I crouched marking the site at a distance in all but the
very worst weather. A huge, almost vertical wall of ice and snow soared upwards to the
summit of Cerro Sarapo directly in front of the camp, no more than a mile and a half away.
Rising from the sea of moraine to my left, two spectacular and extravagant castles of sugar
icing, Yerupaja and Rasac, dominated the camp site. The majestic 21,000-foot Siula Grande
lay behind Sarapo and was not visible. It had been climbed for the first time in 1936 by two

OFFICIAL
48
bold Germans via the North Ridge. There had been few ascents since then, and the true
prize, the daunting 4,500-foot West Face had so far defeated all attempts.
I turned off the stove and gingerly slopped the water into three large mugs. The sun hadn’t
cleared the ridge of mountains opposite and it was still chilly in the shadows. ‘There’s a
brew ready, if you’re still alive in there,’ I announced cheerfully.
Extract taken from Touching the Void by Joe Simpson, published by Vintage

On the way no travel story can ever evoke the true lived
experience

Extract from Alain de Botton - The Art of Travel

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book
may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill
town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never
simply ‘journey through an afternoon’. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The
seat cloth is gray. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties
revolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above
the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger
catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window.
We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back out at the field. It continues to rain. At last
the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on
the window. And still we may have reached the end only of the first minutes of a comprehensive
account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence “He journeyed through the
afternoon.”

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening.
Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with
repetitions, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak
Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first
on the rim and then in the center of a laden ashtray. Which explains the curious phenomenon
whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality.
The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of
boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or
embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting
wooliness of the present.

OFFICIAL
49
According to De Botton, travel writing and other artistic representations of travelling omit
many of the boring and mundane aspects of the real experience - they abbreviate reality.
Rather than simply being inaccurate representations of the experience of travel - for de Botton
this cutting away of boredom means that in travel writing what we get is only the valuable
elements travel, the critical moments which allows readers to imagine and empathise with
the vivid and coherent aspects of the writer's travels. There is an irony here because the
valuable elements of travel are easier to experience in art rather than doing the travelling
yourself.

Extract from Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island

My first sight of England was on a foggy March night in 1973 when I arrived on the midnight
ferry from Calais. For twenty minutes, the terminal area was a swarm with activity as cars and
lorries poured forth, customs people did their duties, and everyone made for the London road.
Then abruptly all was silence and I wandered through sleeping, low-lit streets threaded with
fog, just like in a Bulldog Drummond movie. It was rather wonderful having an English town all
to myself.

The only mildly dismaying thing was that all the hotels and guesthouses appeared to be shut up
for the night. I walked as far as the rail station, thinking I’d catch a train to London, but the
station, too, was dark and shuttered. I was standing wondering what to do when I noticed a
grey light of television filling an upstairs window of a guesthouse across the road. Hooray, I
thought, someone awake, and hastened across, planning humble apologies to the kindly owner
for the lateness of my arrival and imagining a cheery conversation which included the line, `Oh,
but I couldn’t possibly ask you to feed me at this hour. No, honestly well, if you’re quite sure it’s
no trouble, then perhaps just a roast beef sandwich and a large dill pickle with perhaps some
potato salad and a bottle of beer.’ The front path was pitch dark and in my eagerness and un-
familiarity with British doorways, I tripped on a step, crashing face-first into the door and
sending half a dozen empty milk bottles clattering. Almost immediately the upstairs window
opened.

`Who’s that?’ came a sharp voice.

I stepped back, rubbing my nose, and peered up at a silhouette with hair curlers. `Hello, I’m
looking for a room,’ I said.

`We’re shut.’
`Oh.’ But what about my supper?
`Try the Churchill. On the front.’
`On the front of what?’ I asked, but the window was already banging closed.

OFFICIAL
50
The Churchill was sumptuous and well-lit and appeared ready to receive visitors. Through a
window I could see people in suits in a bar, looking elegant and suave, like characters from a
Noel Coward play. I hesitated in the shadows, feeling like a street urchin. I was socially and
sartorially ill-suited for such an establishment and anyway it was clearly beyond my meagre
budget. Only the previous day, I had handed over an exceptionally plump wad of colourful francs
to a beady-eyed Picardy hotelier in payment for one night in a lumpy bed and a plate of
mysterious chasseur containing the bones of assorted small animals, much of which had to be
secreted away in a large napkin in order not to appear impolite, and had deter- mined
thenceforth to be more cautious with expenditures. So I turned reluctantly from the Churchill’s
beckoning warmth and trudged off into the darkness.

Further along Marine Parade stood a shelter, open to the elements but roofed, and I decided
that this was as good as I was going to get. With my backpack for a pillow, I lay down and drew
my jacket tight around me. The bench was slatted and hard and studded with big round headed
bolts that made reclining in comfort an impossibility ± doubt- less their intention. I lay for a long
time listening to the sea washing over the shingle below, and eventually dropped off to a long,
cold night of mumbled dreams in which I found myself being pursued over Arctic ice floes by a
beady-eyed Frenchman with a catapult, a bag of bolts, and an uncanny aim, who thwacked me
repeatedly in the buttocks and legs for stealing a linen napkin full of seepy food and leaving it
at the back of a dresser drawer of my hotel room. I awoke with a gasp about three, stiff all over
and quivering from cold. The fog had gone. The air was now still and clear, and the sky was
bright with stars. A beacon from the lighthouse at the far end of the breakwater swept endlessly
over the sea. It was all most fetching, but I was far too cold to appreciate it. I dug shiveringly
through my backpack and extracted every potentially warming item I could find a flannel shirt,
two sweaters, an extra pair of jeans. I used some woollen socks as mittens and put a pair of
flannel boxer shorts on my head as a kind of desperate headwarmer, then sank heavily back
onto the bench and waited patiently for death’s sweet kiss. Instead, I fell asleep.

I was awakened again by an abrupt bellow of foghorn, which nearly knocked me from my
narrow perch, and sat up feeling wretched but fractionally less cold. The world was bathed in
that milky pre-dawn light that seems to come from nowhere. Gulls wheeled and cried over the
water. Beyond them, past the stone breakwater, a ferry, vast and well lit, slid regally out to sea.
I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it. Another booming moan
from the ship’s foghorn passed over the water, re-exciting the irksome gulls. I took off my sock
mittens and looked at my watch. It was 5.55 a.m. I looked at the receding ferry and wondered
where anybody would be going at that hour. Where would I go at that hour? I picked up my
backpack and shuffled off down the prom, to get some circulation going.

Near the Churchill, now itself peacefully sleeping, I came across an old guy walking a little dog.
The dog was frantically trying to pee on every vertical surface and in consequence wasn’t so
much walking as being dragged along on three legs.

OFFICIAL
51
The man nodded a good-morning as I drew level. `Might turn out nice,’ he announced, gazing
hopefully at a sky that looked like a pile of wet towels. I asked him if there was a restaurant
anywhere that might be open. He knew of a place not far away and directed me to it. `Best
transport caff in Kent,’ he said.

`Transport calf?’ I repeated uncertainly, and retreated a couple of paces as I’d noticed his dog
was straining desperately to moisten my leg.

`Very popular with the lorry drivers. They always know the best places, don’t they?’ He smiled
amiably, then lowered his voice a fraction and leaned towards me as if about to share a
confidence. `You might want to take them pants off your head before you go in.’

I clutched my head `Oh!’ and removed the forgotten boxer shorts with a blush. I tried to think
of a succinct explanation, but the man was scanning the sky again.

`Definitely brightening up,’ he decided, and dragged his dog off in search of new uprights. I
watched them go, then turned and walked off down the promenade as it began to spit with
rain.

The cafe was outstanding lively and steamy and deliciously warm. I had a platter of eggs, beans,
fried bread, bacon and sausage, with a side plate of bread and marge, and two cups of tea, all
for 22p. Afterwards, feeling a new man, I emerged with a toothpick and a burp, and saun- tered
happily through the streets, watching Dover come to life. It must be said that Dover was not
vastly improved by daylight, but I liked it. I liked its small scale and cosy air, and the way
everyone said `Good-morning,’ and `Hello,’ and `Dreadful weathe but it might brighten up,’ to
everyone else, and the sense that this was just one more in a very long series of fundamentally
cheerful, well- ordered, pleasantly uneventful days. No-one in the whole of Dover would have
any particular reason to remember 21 March 1973, except for me and a handful of children
born that day and possibly one old guy with a dog who had encountered a young fellow with
underpants on his head.

I didn’t know how early one could decently begin asking for a room in England, so I thought I
would leave it till mid-morning. With time on my hands, I made a thorough search for a
guesthouse that looked attractive and quiet, but friendly and not too expensive, and at the
stroke of ten o’clock presented myself on the doorstep of the one I had carefully selected, taking
care not to discompose the milk bottles. It was a small hotel that was really a guesthouse,
indeed was really a boarding-house. I don’t remember its name, but I well recall the
proprietress, a formidable creature of late middle years called Mrs Smegma, who showed me
to a room, then gave me a tour of the facilities and outlined the many complicated rules for
residing there ± when breakfast was served, how to turn on the heater for the bath, which hours

OFFICIAL
52
of the day I would have to vacate the premises and during which brief period a bath was
permitted (these seemed, oddly, to coincide), how much notice I should give if I intended to
receive a phone call or remain out after 10 p.m., how to flush the loo and use the loo brush,
which materials were permitted in the bedroom waste- basket and which had to be carefully
conveyed to the outside dustbin, where and how to wipe my feet at each point of entry, how
to operate the three-bar fire in my bedroom and when that would be permitted (essentially,
during an Ice Age). This was all bewilderingly new to me. Where I came from, you got a room in
a motel, spent ten hours making a lavish and possibly irredeemable mess of it, and left early the
next morning. This was like joining the Army.

`The minimum stay,’ Mrs Smegma went on, `is five nights at one pound a night, including full
English breakfast.’

`Five nights?’ I said in a small gasp. I’d only intended to stay the one. What on earth was I going
to do with myself in Dover for five days?

Mrs Smegma arched an eyebrow. `Were you hoping to stay longer?’

`No,’ I said. `No. As a matter of...’

`Good, because we have a party of Scottish pensioners coming for the weekend and it would
have been awkward. Actually, quite impossible.’ She surveyed me critically, as she might a
carpet stain, and considered if there was anything else she could do to make my life wretched.
There was. `I’m going out shortly, so may I ask that you vacate your room within quarter of an
hour?’

I was confused again. `I’m sorry, you want me to leave? I’ve just got here.’

`As per the house rules. You may return at four.’ She made to depart but then turned back. `Oh,
and do be so good, would you, as to remove your counterpane each night. We’ve had some
unfortunate occurrences with stains. If you do damage the counterpane, I will have to charge
you. You do understand, of course?’

I nodded dumbly. And with that she was gone. I stood there, feeling lost and weary and far from
home. I’d spent an hysterically uncomfortable night out of doors. My muscles ached, I was
dented all over from sleeping on boltheads, and my skin was lightly oiled with the dirt and grit
of two nations. I had sustained myself to this point with the thought that soon I would be
immersed in a hot, soothing bath, followed by about fourteen hours of deep, peaceful,
wallowing sleep, on plump pillows under a downy comforter.

OFFICIAL
53
As I stood there absorbing the realization that my nightmare, far from drawing to a close, was
only just beginning, the door opened and Mrs Smegma was striding across the room to the strip
light above the sink. She had shown me the correct method for turning it on `There’s no need
to yank it. A gentle tug is sufficient’ ± and evidently remembered that she had left it burning.
She turned it off now with what seemed to me a sharp yank, then gave me and the room a final
suspicious once-over, and departed again.

When I was sure she was quite gone, I quietly locked the door, drew shut the curtains and had
a pee in the sink. I dug a book from my backpack, then stood for a long minute by the door
surveying the tidy, unfamiliar contents of my lonely room.

`And just what the fuck is a counterpane?’ I wondered in a small, unhappy voice and quietly
took my leave.

.....

I didn’t know anything really, which is a strangely wonderful position to be in. Everything that
lay before me was new and mysterious and exciting in a way you can’t imagine. England was
full of words I’d never heard before streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon,
serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet. I didn’t know how to pronounce `scone’ or `pasty’ or
`Towcester’ or `Slough’. I had never heard of Tesco’s, Perthshire or Denbighshire, council
houses, Morecambe and Wise, railway cuttings, Christmas crackers, bank holidays, seaside rock,
milk floats, trunk calls, Scotch eggs, Morris Minors and Poppy Day. For all I knew, when a car
had an L-plate on the back of it, it indicated that it was being driven by a leper. I didn’t have the
faintest idea what GPO, LBW, GLC or OAPstood for. I was positively radiant with ignorance. The
simplest transactions were a mystery to me. I saw a man in a newsagent’s ask for `twenty
Number Six’ and receive cigarettes, and presumed for a long time afterwards that everything
was ordered by number in a newsagent’s, like in a Chinese takeaway. I sat for half an hour in a
pub before I realized that you had to fetch your own order, then tried the same thing in a tea-
room and was told to sit down.

The tea-room lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called
me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me. And everyone ate the
way I did. This was truly exciting. For years I’d been the despair of my mother because as a left-
hander I politely declined to eat the American way, grasping the fork in your left hand to steady
the food while cutting, then transferring it to your right hand to lift the food to your mouth. It
all seemed ridiculously cumbersome, and here suddenly was a whole country that ate the way
I did. And they drove on the left! This was paradise. Before the day was half over, I knew that
this was where I wanted to be.

OFFICIAL
54
I spent a long day wandering aimlessly and happily along residential streets and shopping
streets, eavesdropping on conversations at bus stops and street corners, looking with interest
in the windows of greengrocers and butchers and fishmongers, reading fly-posters and planning
applications, quietly absorbing. I climbed up to the castle to admire the view and watch the
shuttling ferries, had a respectful look at the white cliffs and Old Town Gaol, and in the late
afternoon on an impulse went to a movie, attracted by the prospect of warmth and by a poster
depicting an array of scantily clad young ladies in seductive mood.

`Circle or stalls?’ said the ticket lady.

`No, Suburban Wife-Swap,’ I answered in a confused and furtive voice.

Inside, another new world opened for me. I saw my first cinema adverts, my first trailers
presented in a British accent, my first British Board of Film Censors certificate (`This movie has
been passed as suitable for Adults by Lord Harlech, who enjoyed it very much’), and discovered,
to my small delight, that smoking was permitted in British cinemas and to hell with the fire risks.
The film itself provided a rich fund of social and lexical information, as well as the welcome
opportunity to rest my steaming feet and see a lot of attractive young women disporting in the
altogether.

Among the many terms new to me were `dirty weekend’, `loo’, `complete pillock’, `au pair’,
`semi-detached house’, `shirt-lifter’ and `swift shag against the cooker’, all of which have proved
variously useful since. During the interval - another exciting new development for me - I had my
first Kia-Ora, purchased from a monumentally bored young lady who had the remarkable ability
to pull selected items from her illuminated tray and make change without ever removing her
gaze from an imaginary spot in the middle distance. Afterwards I dined at a small Italian
restaurant recommended by Pearl and Dean and returned contentedly to the guesthouse as
night stole over Dover. It was altogether a thoroughly satisfying and illuminating day.

I’d intended to turn in early, but on the way to my room I noticed a door marked RESIDENT’S
LOUNGE and put my head in. It was a large parlour, with easy chairs and a settee, all with
starched antimacassars; a bookcase with a modest selection of jigsaw puzzles and paperback
books; an occasional table with some well-thumbed magazines; and a large colour television. I
switched on the TV and looked through the magazines while I waited for it to warm up. They
were all women’s magazines, but they weren’t like the magazines my mother and sister read.
The articles in my mother’s and sister’s magazines were always about sex and personal
gratification. They had titles like `Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms’, `Office Sex - How to Get
it’, `Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex’ and `Those Shrinking Rainforests - Are They Any Good for
Sex?’ The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They had titles like `Knit Your
Own Twinset’, `Money- Saving Button Offer’, `Make This Super Knitted Soap-Saver’ and
`Summer’s Here - It’s Time for Mayonnaise!’

OFFICIAL
55
The programme that unfolded on the television was called Jason King. If you’re of a certain age
and lacked a social life on Friday evenings in the early Seventies, you may recall that it involved
a ridiculous rake in a poofy kaftan whom women unaccountably appeared to find alluring. I
couldn’t decide whether to take hope from this or be depressed by it. The most remarkable
thing about the programme was that, though I saw it only once more than twenty years ago, I
have never lost the desire to work the fellow over with a baseball bat studded with nails.

Towards the end of the programme another resident came in, carrying a bowl of steaming water
and a towel. He said, `Oh!’ in surprise when he saw me and took a seat by the window. He was
thin and red-faced and filled the room with a smell of liniment. He looked like someone with
unhealthy sexual ambitions, the sort of person your PE teacher warned that you would turn into
if you masturbated too extravagantly (someone, in short, like your PE teacher). I couldn’t be
sure, but I would almost have sworn that I had seen him buying a packet of fruit gums at
Suburban Wife-Swap that afternoon. He looked stealthily at me, possibly thinking something
along the same lines, then covered his head with the towel and lowered his face to the bowl,
where it remained for much of the rest of the evening.

A few minutes later a bald-headed, middle-aged guy - a shoe salesman, I would have guessed -
came in, said `Hullo!’ to me and `Evening, Richard,’ to the towelled head and took a seat beside
me. Shortly after that we were joined by an older man with a walking-stick, a dicky leg and a
gruff manner. He looked darkly at us all, nodded the most tinily precise of acknowledgements,
and fell heavily into his seat, where he spent the next twenty minutes manoeuvring his leg this
way and that, as if positioning a heavy piece of furniture. I gathered that these people were all
long-term residents.

A sitcom came on called My Neighbour is a Darkie. I suppose that wasn’t its actual title, but
that was the gist of it - that there was something richly comic in the notion of having black
people living next door. It was full of lines like `Good lord, Gran, there’s a coloured chappie in
your cupboard!’ and `Well, I couldn’t see him in the dark, could I?’ It was hopelessly moronic.
The bald-headed guy beside me laughed until he was wiping tears from his eyes, and from under
the towel there came occasional snorts of amusement, but the colonel, I noticed, never laughed.
He simply stared at me, as if trying to remember what dark event from his past I was associated
with. Every time I looked over, his eyes were fixed on me. It was unnerving.

A starburst briefly filled the screen, indicating an interval of adverts, which the bald-headed
man used to quiz me in a friendly but confusingly disconnected way as to who I was and how I
had fallen into their lives. He was delighted to find that I was American. `I’ve always wanted to
see America,’ he said. `Tell me, do you have Woolworth’s there?’

`Well, actually, Woolworth’s is American.’

OFFICIAL
56
`You don’t say!’ he said. `Did you hear that, Colonel? Woolworth’s is American.’ The colonel
seemed unmoved by this intelligence. `And what about cornflakes?’

`I beg your pardon?’

`Do you have cornflakes in America?’
`Well, actually, they’re American, too.’
`Never!’
I smiled weakly, and begged my legs to stand me up and take me out of there, but my lower
body seemed oddly inert.

`Fancy! So what brings you to Britain then if you have cornflakes already?’

I looked at him to see if the question was serious, then embarked reluctantly and falteringly on
a brief resume of my life to that point, but after a moment I realized that the programme had
restarted and he wasn’t even pretending to listen, so I tailed off, and instead spent the whole
of part two absorbing the heat of the colonel’s glare.

When the programme finished, I was about to hoist myself from the chair and bid this happy
trio a warm adieu when the door opened and Mrs Smegma came in with a tray of tea things
and a plate of biscuits of the sort that I believe are called teatime variety, and everyone stirred
friskily to life, rubbing their hands keenly and saying, `Ooh, lovely.’ To this day, I remain
impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited
by the prospect of a hot beverage.

`And how was World of Birds tonight, Colonel?’ asked Mrs Smegma as she handed the colonel
a cup of tea and a biscuit.

`Couldn’t say,’ said the colonel archly. `The television - ’ he smacked me in the side of the head
with a meaningful look `- was tuned to the other side.’ Mrs Smegma gave me a sharp look, too,
in sympathy. I think they were sleeping together.

`World of Birds is the colonel’s favourite,’ she said to me in a tone that went some distance past
hate, and handed me a cup of tea with a hard whitish biscuit.

I mewed some pitiful apology.

`It was puffins tonight,’ blurted the red-faced fellow, looking very pleased with himself.

Mrs Smegma stared at him for a moment as if surprised to find that he had the power of speech.
`Puffins!’ she said and gave me a still more withering expression that asked how anyone could

OFFICIAL
57
be so lacking in fundamental human decency. `The colonel adores puffins. Don’t you, Arthur?’
She was definitely sleeping with him.

`I do rather,’ said the colonel, biting unhappily into a chocolate bourbon.

In shame, I sipped my tea and nibbled at my biscuit. I had never had tea with milk in it before
or a biscuit of such rocklike cheerlessness. It tasted like something you would give a budgie to
strengthen its beak. After a minute the bald-headed guy leaned close to me and in a confiding
whisper said, `You mustn’t mind the colonel. He hasn’t been the same since he lost his leg.’

`Well, I hope for his sake he soon finds it,’ I replied, hazarding a little sarcasm. The bald-headed
guy guffawed at this and for one terrifying moment I thought he was going to share my little
quip with the colonel and Mrs Smegma, but instead he thrust a meaty hand at me and
introduced himself. I don’t remember his name now, but it was one of those names that only
English people have - Colin Crapspray or Bertram Pantyshield or something similarly
improbable. I gave a crooked smile, thinking he must be pulling my leg, and said, `You’re
kidding.’

`Not at all,’ he replied coldly. `Why, do you find it amusing?’

`It’s just that it’s kind of . . . unusual.’

`Well, you may think so,’ he said and turned his attention to the colonel and Mrs Smegma, and
I realized that I was now, and would doubtless forever remain, friendless in Dover.

Over the next two days, Mrs Smegma persecuted me mercilessly, while the others, I suspected,
scouted evidence for her. She reproached me for not turning the light off in my room when I
went out, for not putting the lid down in the toilet when I’d finished, for taking the colonel’s hot
water - I’d no idea he had his own until he started rattling the doorknob and making aggrieved
noises in the corridor - for ordering the full English breakfast two days running and then leaving
the fried tomato both times. `I see you’ve left the fried tomato again,’ she said on the second
occasion. I didn’t know quite what to say to this as it was incontestably true, so I simply furrowed
my brow and joined her in staring at the offending item. I had actually been wondering for two
days what it was. `May I request,’ she said in a voice heavy with pain and years of irritation,
`that in future if you don’t require a fried tomato with your breakfast that you would be good
enough to tell me.’

Abashed, I watched her go. `I thought it was a blood clot!’ I wanted to yell after her, but of
course I said nothing and merel skulked from the room to the triumphant beams of my fellow
resident

OFFICIAL
58
After that, I stayed out of the house as much as I could. I went to the library and looked up
`counterpane’ in a dictionary so that I might at least escape censure on that score. (I was
astonished to find out what it was; for three days I’d been fiddling with the window.) Within the
house, I tried to remain silent and inconspicuous. I even turned over quietly in my creaking bed.
But no matter how hard I tried, I seemed fated to annoy. On the third after- noon as I crept in
Mrs Smegma confronted me in the hallway with an empty cigarette packet, and demanded to
know if it was I who had thrust it in the privet hedge. I began to understand why innocent people
sign extravagant confessions in police stations. That evening, I forgot to turn off the water
heater after a quick and stealthy bath and compounded the error by leaving strands of hair in
the plughole. The next morning came the final humiliation. Mrs Smegma marched me
wordlessly to the toilet and showed me a little turd that had not flushed away. We agreed that
I should leave after breakfast.

I caught a fast train to London, and had not been back to Dover since.

Travel Fiction - generic conventions

Travel fiction is a genre of creative writing that focuses on the settings of an unusual
environment. The setting for travel fiction can influence the mood, themes, and actions of
the plot, as well as provide a metaphor or overarching image for the story itself. In travel
fiction, it may be the characters themselves that are traveling, but it may also be the reader
who is taken on a journey to an exotic, unfamiliar, or even fantastical setting.
One of the most common themes in travel fiction is self-discovery; as the main character
explores his unfamiliar destination, he or she is also undergoing a mental journey as well.

As a genre, travel tales are more ancient than might be expected. One of the oldest pieces of
travel fiction, Homer's The Odyssey, is still frequently regarded as one of the best. Written
around 750 BCE, The Odyssey set many of the rules for the genre that are still in force in
modern novels.
The plot of this ancient story follows the war hero Odysseus, as he travels through many
strange lands on his quest to return home. As in many stories of this genre, when Odysseus
finally does return home, he bears new knowledge and power from his adventures.
Travel fiction also frequently parallels the classic story structure of the hero's journey,
where the hero must set out from his familiar surroundings, undergo difficult trials, and
return with a boon that will help in his or her ordinary life.

OFFICIAL
59
 Name: Class:

The Hero's Journey

By Jessica McBirney
2017

Joseph Campbell was an American mythologist, writer, and lecturer. His book The Hero with a
Thousand Faces explores the common journey that heroes from different works of literature
take. In this informational text, Jessica McBirney further discusses this common structure of
storytelling that Campbell identified. As you read, take notes on the different parts of the Hero’s
Journey.

[1] When we follow a good story, we tend to

follow the journey a character makes from
beginning to end. We can’t wait to find out
what happens next. It’s a page-turner; there
are obstacles at every stage and crucial1
choices that characters have to make in order
to overcome these obstacles. Eventually, we
pick up another story. We have an appetite
for stories. There are so many for us to
choose from — in libraries, in bookshops, and
on our screens — and each story seems new
and exciting. "Leaving Hobbiton" by Jeff Hitchcock is licensed
under CC BY 2.0.
Well, in fact, oftentimes this is not true. We
are led to believe these stories are new even though a lot of them follow a simple formula.
When we stop to think about it, many of these stories have more similarities than we might
think.

In the 1940s, the writer and professor, Joseph Campbell, noticed that a lot of his favorite stories
shared a similar structure. He decided to write about it in his book, The Hero with a Thousand
Faces. Today, this story structure is popularly known as “The Hero’s Journey.” Stories that use
this structure loosely follow a similar series of general events, otherwise known as plot points.

The hero is the main character in the story. He or she sets off on an adventure, or quest, to
accomplish a specific goal. Below are just a few of the steps all heroes face in the “Hero’s
Journey” story plot. Popular stories like The Hobbit and The Hunger Games follow this structure.

1. Crucial (adjective) of great importance

1
 The Ordinary World

[5] The story usually opens with the hero’s normal life: their ordinary world. This “world” can
include their home and family life, their job, their personal history, and more. The author does
this to introduce their hero and explain certain things about their personality and actions.

In the ordinary world, the hero often feels uncomfortable in some way. There is something they
don’t like about their normal life, something that causes them stress or discomfort. Others in
the ordinary world might think the hero is odd in some way.

Call to Adventure

According to Campbell’s formula, something will then occur that disrupts our hero’s life in the
ordinary world and causes them to face a decision. It could be an event, a discovery, an added
danger, or something new from within the hero. It requires the hero to do something; they are
the only person who can fulfill this call or accomplish this goal. The call to adventure provides a
first look into what Campbell calls “a new world,” one very different from the ordinary world.

Refusing the Call

The hero may not immediately accept their call to adventure. They might be afraid of entering
the new world or of the tasks they have to do. If this is the case, they will initially refuse to
accept the call. If the hero initially refuses their call to adventure, bad things usually begin to
occur.

Crossing the Threshold

In some stories, before the hero accepts the call to adventure, they meet with a mentor. This
person will be a mature person who has experienced the new world before. The mentor offers
advice that convinces the hero to accept the call and enter the new world.

[10] “Crossing the threshold” happens when the hero finally accepts the call to adventure and enters
the new world. The new world is very different from their ordinary world. It has unfamiliar rules
and values that the hero must navigate.

Tests, Allies, and Enemies

In the new world, the hero faces a variety of tests and obstacles. Sometimes the hero is
successful and sometimes they fail. All the tests serve to make the hero stronger and more
determined to accomplish their goal. The hero encounters other people during his journey.
They usually have at least one ally, someone who travels with them and supports them in the
mission. Together they may encounter other helpful people.

2
 2
The Ordeal

According to Campbell’s formula, midway through the story, the hero will face their hardest test
yet, a test that will make them confront their greatest fear or insecurity. This often includes a
brush with death. The hero overcomes this test, or escapes death, and finds new hope as they
push towards their ultimate challenge or goal.

The Supreme Ordeal

At the climax of the story — the most intense, exciting or important point of the story — the
hero faces one final test, which is often their absolute greatest challenge. Campbell calls this
plot point the “Supreme Ordeal.” The hero is close to being able to return to the ordinary world,
but they must overcome this final test to return. This is the moment where the hero
accomplishes their goal; their quest has succeeded.

During the “Supreme Ordeal,” the hero will tend to experience a lot of turmoil.3 Maybe they
face death again, or have to make a great sacrifice. They defeat the internal and external
conflicts they have been facing throughout the story.

Reward and the Journey Home

[15] After they’ve accomplished their mission, the hero collects some type of reward from their
journey. Usually this is a physical reward, anything ranging from treasure, a prince or princess,
to even the rulership of a kingdom.

The hero returns, with this reward, home to their ordinary world. Because of all they have
experienced and accomplished, they are changed from the beginning of the story. The story
may or may not have a happy ending, but a lot of the tension or discontent they felt has now
been resolved because of what they accomplished on their journey.

Where can we find The Hero’s Journey formula?

Campbell’s Hero’s Journey structure shows up all over literature, no matter the genre. The
Hero’s Journey stories are so compelling because we like to see heroic characters overcoming
great obstacles; we admire these heroes and hope to be like them. You don’t have to be a
character in a book to be a hero in your own life.

2. Ordeal (noun) a severe trial or experience

3. Turmoil (noun) a state of great disturbance or uncertainty

3
 Now that you are familiar with the Hero’s Journey story structure. Let’s try it out on the two
popular hero stories mentioned earlier, The Hobbit and The Hunger Games. A warning for those
readers who haven’t read these books, the examples carry spoilers!

The Hobbit

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel, The Hobbit, the hero is the Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo’s “Ordinary
World” is his hobbit hole in Bag End in the Shire. At first glance, Bilbo Baggins seems to be the
most comfortable hobbit4 in all of Hobbiton. However, after hearing the dwarves' song, a part
of Bilbo begins to long for adventure. His “Call To Adventure” comes when the wizard, Gandalf,
approaches him and asks if he wants to go on an adventure. Bilbo, at first, refuses to go with
Gandalf on the adventure (“Refusing the call”). Gandalf puts a sign on Bilbo’s door and a band of
dwarves come to his house and eat all his food. This is extremely unnerving for Bilbo (bad
things happening after refusing the call). Gandalf serves as Bilbo’s “Mentor” throughout the
story. Bilbo agrees to go with the dwarves to try and reclaim the treasure from a place called
Lonely Mountain (“Crossing the Threshold”), and they begin their journey. One of Bilbo’s “Tests”
is his encounter with the trolls in the woods. When they capture the dwarves, he must rescue
his friends. The elves (“Allies”) in Rivendell take care of Bilbo and the other dwarves and prepare
them for the journey ahead. They will also face various “Enemies” who want to prevent them
from finishing their goal. Bilbo’s “Ordeal” is his journey to the heart of the goblin mountain and
his encounter with Gollum, a twisted character, who he must outwit to save his own life. His
“Supreme Ordeal” is when he participates in ‘the Battle of Five Armies,’ and his side succeeds.
Bilbo’s “Reward” is his share of the dwarves’ treasure from the mountain.

The Hunger Games

[20] In Suzanne Collins’ dystopian5 novel, The Hunger Games, the main hero is Katniss Everdeen. Her
“Ordinary World” is in District 12, an impoverished region in the fictional country of Panem
where she lives with her mother and little sister, Prim. She struggles to support her family,
often hunting illegally to keep them fed, but poverty is not the only stress in her life. Every year,
children between the ages 12 to 18 face the ‘reaping’: a ceremony that chooses participants for
the Hunger Games, a contest where those participants must fight to the death. In the beginning
of The Hunger Games, Katniss experiences her “Call to Adventure” while on a hunting trip with
her childhood friend, Gale. He talks about running away, leaving District 12 to live in the woods.
Katniss dismisses Gale's suggestion to run away because they both have families to take care of
(“Refusing the Call). After refusing to run away, she attends the reaping ceremony. Out of the
hundreds of entries, her little sister's name is chosen, which forces Katniss to volunteer in her
sister's place in order to save Prim's life. Bad things have happened after Katniss “refused the

4. a member of an imaginary race similar to humans, of a small size and with hairy feet
5. relating to an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad

4
call,” which leads to her “Crossing the Threshold” and participating in the Hunger Games.
Haymitch Abernathy is her “Mentor” figure, a former victor of the Hunger Games from District
12. He advises Katniss and the other District 12 champion, Peeta, on how to survive the Hunger
Games. The Gamemakers test Katniss and the other tributes on their skills, and their score
usually determines how well they will do in the game (“Tests”). Katniss encounters allies and
enemies both in and out of the arena. Cinna, her stylist and only friend in the Capitol,
encourages Katniss and helps her win over the audience in her interviews. Peeta and Haymitch
also work to help Katniss survive (“Allies”). Many of Katniss' competitors resent her and see her
as a challenge (“Enemies”), but others, like the character Rue, create an alliance with Katniss.
For the participants, the game itself is an ordeal; it forces them to kill or be killed. But for
Katniss, the “Ordeal” occurs when Rue is killed. Rue's death forces Katniss to confront the
injustice of the Hunger Games. Shortly after, Katniss is motivated to defy the Capitol by making
sure she and Peeta survive. “The Supreme Ordeal” arrives at the end of the game, the
Gamemakers announce that only one tribute may win, despite their earlier rule change that
declared two could survive. Rather than attack each other, Katniss and Peeta agree to eat
poisonous berries. They are stopped by the Gamemakers before they can do so, but their
willingness to sacrifice their own lives instead of killing each other saves them. Survivors of the
Hunger Games receive money and fame (“Reward”), though at a terrible cost.

As you can see, both The Hobbit and The Hunger Games follow Campbell’s formula for “The
Hero’s Journey”. So the next time you read a book, or watch a movie, check to see if it follows
the formula and ask yourself: is this story really new?

"The Hero's Journey" by Jessica McBirney. Copyright © 2017 by CommonLit, Inc. This text is licensed
under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Unless otherwise noted, this content is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

5
 Text-Dependent Questions
Directions: For the following questions, choose the best answer or respond in complete
sentences.

1. PART A: Which sentence best expresses the central idea of the text?
A. While different genres of literature exist, all of them follow the Hero's
Journey.
B. When authors are writing novels, they intentionally adhere to the Hero's
Journey.
C. The Hero's Journey establishes the structure of a story that countless
stories follow.
D. The Hero's Journey is a helpful outline for authors to follow when writing.

2. PART B: Which detail from the text best supports the answer to Part A?
A. "There are so many for us to choose from — in libraries, in bookshops,
and on our screens — and each story seems new and exciting." (Paragraph
1)
B. "Popular stories like 'The Hobbit' and 'The Hunger Games' follow this
structure." (Paragraph 4)
C. "Campbell's Hero's Journey structure shows up all over literature, no
matter the genre." (Paragraph 17)
D. "So the next time you read a book, or watch a movie, check to see if it
follows the formula and ask yourself: is this story really new?" (Paragraph
21)

3. Which of the following describes the author's main purpose in the text?
A. to encourage authors to move away from the structure of the Hero's
Journey
B. to show how common the structure of the Hero's Journey is in literature
C. to prove that essentially every story follows the Hero's Journey
D. to help readers understand how Campbell came to identify the Hero's
Journey

6
4. Which statement describes how the author develops their analysis of the Hero's
Journey?
A. The author describes the structure of the Hero's Journey and then
explores how it translates to popular books.
B. The author discusses the Hero's Journey as Campbell describes it and then
shows how it has changed over time.
C. The author describes what the Hero's Journey is and then discusses the
pros and cons of following such a structure.
D. The author discusses Campbell's discovery of the Hero's Journey and then
explores how the structure of stories has changed since then.

5. How does the author's discussion of "The Hobbit" and "The Hunger Games"
contribute to the development of ideas in the text? Cite evidence from the text in
your response.

7
 Discussion Questions
Directions: Brainstorm your answers to the following questions in the space provided. Be
prepared to share your original ideas in a class discussion.

1. McBirney asserts that the Hero's Journey structure can be found across genres. What
is another book or movie that follows the Hero's Journey? Describe how your chosen
book or movie fills the requirements for the Hero's Journey.

2. In the text, the author claims that the Hero's Journey requires a main character who
is the hero. Do you think any main character can be the hero? Why or why not? What
makes an ideal fictional hero for you? Who is your favorite fictional hero and why?

3. McBirney claims that the Hero's Journey is so popular because people aspire to be
like the hero and can relate to them. How do stories help us understand our world?
Can we learn lessons that apply to our world from stories that follow the Hero's
Journey? Explain.

8
 Name: Class:

Excerpt from Heart of Darkness

By Joseph Conrad
1899

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish-British writer and is considered one of the greatest
novelists in the English language. Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charles
Marlow's voyage to Africa and explores themes of imperialism and racism. In this excerpt, the
narrator describes Marlow, who then imagines what it must have been like for Romans when
they first came to England. As you read, take notes about how the narrator characterizes
Marlow, especially as compared to other seamen.

[1] The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and
lights began to appear along the shore. The
Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing
erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of
ships moved in the fairway — a great stir of
lights going up and going down. And farther
west on the upper reaches the place of the
monstrous town was still marked ominously
on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a
lurid1 glare under the stars.

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has "Before the storm" by kilarov zaneit is licensed
been one of the dark places of the earth.” under CC0.

He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst that could be said of him was
that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most
seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary2 life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home
order, and their home is always with them — the ship; and so is their country — the sea. One
ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability3 of their
surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing
mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as
inscrutable4 as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on

1. Lurid (adjective) shinning with a bright and unpleasant color

2. Sedentary (adjective) somewhat inactive
3. Immutable (adjective) unchanging over time or unable to be changed
4. Inscrutable (adjective) impossible to understand or interpret

1
 shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the
secret not worth knowing. The yarns5 of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of
which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin
yarns6 be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but
outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the
likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No
one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow —

[5] “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years
ago — the other day... Light came out of this river since — you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a
running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker — may it last
as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of
a commander of a fine — what d’ye call ‘em? — trireme7 in the Mediterranean, ordered
suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls8 in a hurry; put in charge of one of these
craft the legionaries, — a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too — used to build,
apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him
here — the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, a kind of
ship about as rigid as a concertina9 — and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what
you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, — precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a
military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay — cold, fog, tempests,
disease, exile, and death, — death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have
been dying like flies here. Oh yes — he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without
thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his
time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness.”

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) is in the public domain.

Unless otherwise noted, this content is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

5. a long or rambling story

6. tell stories
7. an ancient type of vessel
8. a region of Western Europe
9. a musical instrument resembling an accordion

2
 Text-Dependent Questions
Directions: For the following questions, choose the best answer or respond in complete
sentences.

1. PART A: In the passage from Heart of Darkness, the narrator and his companions are
sailing on the River Thames near London, England. What does Marlow mean when he
says in paragraph 2 that England "has been one of the dark places of earth"?
A. It was formerly corrupt and full of criminals.
B. It was once a place beyond the limits of civilization.
C. It has been the location of many violent confrontations.
D. It has been less technologically developed than other countries.

2. PART B: Which quotation from Marlow's speech in paragraph 5 best supports the
answer to Part A?
A. "you say Knights? Yes"
B. "a wonderful lot of handy men they have been too"
C. "Imagine him here — the very end of the world"
D. "Did it very well, too, no doubt"

3. PART A: How does the author's comparison of Marlow to other sailors impact the
reader's understanding of Marlow?
A. It shows that he is of a different social class than other sailors.
B. It shows that he is more intelligent than most sailors.
C. It shows that he is interested in the deeper significance of events.
D. It shows that he is quiet and leads a solitary existence.

4. PART B: Which quotation from Heart of Darkness best supports that answer to Part
A?
A. "The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his
class." (Paragraph 3)
B. "generally he finds the secret not worth knowing." (Paragraph 3)
C. "to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale" (Paragraph 3)
D. "It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence." (Paragraph 4)

3
 Discussion Questions
Directions: Brainstorm your answers to the following questions in the space provided. Be
prepared to share your original ideas in a class discussion.

1. How can traveling the world further our understanding of it? How do you think a
sailor's understanding or appreciation of the world might be different from that of
someone who stays on land? In the context of the text, how do most seamen
approach their travels to other places? How does that compare to what you think
travelers should do when they visit other places?

2. How does Marlow portray the Romans who first came to England? Why did they
embark on these dangerous journeys to largely unknown territories? What traits do
you think it's important for travelers, such as the Romans and Marlow, to have?

4
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch
the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray
each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming
away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away
the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked
toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened
he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over
the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward
parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling
in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years
without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake.
And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and
stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung
its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching
there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the
rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It
swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched
away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and
squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the
month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were
moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything
paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He
studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees.
Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered
the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the
back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the
binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that
the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and
folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their
plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread
the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took
the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep.
He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He
watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a

OFFICIAL
62
safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the
blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said.
I'm right here.
I know.
An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried
knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the
cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle
mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his
shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the
little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a
burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along
the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world
entire.

They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a
roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should check it
out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They
crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The cap was gone
and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a
rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with
their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was open
and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers
but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet.
He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office.
Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister.
Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and
curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked
up the phone and dialed the number of his father's house in that long ago. The boy
watched him. What are you doing? he said.

A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We're not thinking, he said.
We have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it could not
be seen and they left their packs and went back to the station. In the service bay he
dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all the quart plastic
oilbottles. Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one, leaving
the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a
half quart of motor oil. He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a
rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the
long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said.
I can.
On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred
and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road
and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly
in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark

OFFICIAL
63
and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were
billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered.
At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked
at the boy. I'm all right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded
toward the open country below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in
the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the
grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke.
Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and
adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses.
It's raining. Yes, the man said. I know.

They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope through
the dark poles of the standing trees to where he'd seen a running ledge of rock and they
sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley.
It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over their coats
and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.

When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their
blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and
made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around
the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come
to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night's onset like an
apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked out
to the road and he took the boy's hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road
crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south, standing
there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp.
There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a
mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. They
ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding with the lamp between them. He'd
brought the boy's book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave the lamp on
till I'm asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.

He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His
face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian.
Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?

Excerpted from The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Copyright © 2006 by M-71, Ltd.
Excerpted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

OFFICIAL
64
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

OFFICIAL
65
0$5&+

³: H¶UHJRLQJWKURXJK´7KH&RPPDQGHU¶V
YRLFHZDVOLNHWKLQLFHEUHDNLQJ+H
ZRUHKLVIXOOGUHVVXQLIRUPZLWKWKHKHDYLO\
EUDLGHGZKLWHFDSSXOOHGGRZQUDNLVKO\RYHURQH
FROGJUD\H\H³:HFDQ¶WPDNHLWVLU,W¶VVSRLOLQJ
IRUDKXUULFDQHLI\RXDVNPH´³,¶PQRWDVNLQJ
\RX/LHXWHQDQW%HUJ´VDLGWKH&RPPDQGHU
³7KURZRQWKHSRZHUOLJKWV5HYKHUXSWR
:H¶UHJRLQJWKURXJK´7KHSRXQGLQJRIWKH
F\OLQGHUVLQFUHDVHGWDSRFNHWDSRFNHWDSRFNHWD
SRFNHWDSRFNHWD7KH&RPPDQGHUVWDUHGDWWKH
LFHIRUPLQJRQWKHSLORWZLQGRZ+HZDONHGRYHU
DQGWZLVWHGDURZRIFRPSOLFDWHGGLDOV³6ZLWFK
RQ1RDX[LOLDU\´KHVKRXWHG³6ZLWFKRQ1R
DX[LOLDU\´UHSHDWHG/LHXWHQDQW%HUJ³)XOO
VWUHQJWKLQ1RWXUUHW´VKRXWHGWKH&RPPDQGHU
³)XOOVWUHQJWKLQ1RWXUUHW´7KHFUHZEHQGLQJ
WRWKHLUYDULRXVWDVNVLQWKHKXJHKXUWOLQJHLJKW
HQJLQHG1DY\K\GURSODQHORRNHGDWHDFKRWKHU
DQGJULQQHG³7KH2OG0DQ¶OOJHWXVWKURXJK´WKH\VDLGWRRQHDQRWKHU³7KH2OG0DQDLQ¶W
DIUDLGRI+HOO´
³1RWVRIDVW<RX¶UHGULYLQJWRRIDVW´VDLG0UV0LWW\³:KDWDUH\RXGULYLQJVRIDVW
IRU"´
³+PP"´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\+HORRNHGDWKLVZLIHLQWKHVHDWEHVLGHKLPZLWKVKRFNHG
DVWRQLVKPHQW6KHVHHPHGJURVVO\XQIDPLOLDUOLNHDVWUDQJHZRPDQZKRKDG\HOOHGDWKLPLQ
DFURZG³<RXZHUHXSWRILIW\ILYH´VKHVDLG³<RXNQRZ,GRQ¶WOLNHWRJRPRUHWKDQIRUW\
<RXZHUHXSWRILIW\ILYH´:DOWHU0LWW\GURYHRQWRZDUG:DWHUEXU\LQVLOHQFHWKHURDULQJ
RIWKH61WKURXJKWKHZRUVWVWRUPLQWZHQW\\HDUVRI1DY\IO\LQJIDGLQJLQWKHUHPRWH
LQWLPDWHDLUZD\VRIKLVPLQG³<RX¶UHWHQVHGXSDJDLQ´VDLG0UV0LWW\³,W¶VRQHRI\RXU
GD\V,ZLVK\RX¶GOHW'U5HQVKDZORRN\RXRYHU´
:DOWHU0LWW\VWRSSHGWKHFDULQIURQWRIWKHEXLOGLQJZKHUHKLVZLIHZHQWWRKDYHKHUKDLU
GRQH³5HPHPEHUWRJHWWKRVHRYHUVKRHVZKLOH,¶PKDYLQJP\KDLUGRQH´VKHVDLG³,GRQ¶W
QHHGRYHUVKRHV´VDLG0LWW\6KHSXWKHUPLUURUEDFNLQWRKHUEDJ³:H¶YHEHHQDOOWKURXJK
WKDW´VKHVDLGJHWWLQJRXWRIWKHFDU³<RX¶UHQRWD\RXQJPDQDQ\ORQJHU´+HUDFHGWKH
HQJLQHDOLWWOH³:K\GRQ¶W\RXZHDU\RXUJORYHV"+DYH\RXORVW\RXUJORYHV"´:DOWHU0LWW\
UHDFKHGLQDSRFNHWDQGEURXJKWRXWWKHJORYHV+HSXWWKHPRQEXWDIWHUVKHKDGWXUQHGDQG
JRQHLQWRWKHEXLOGLQJDQGKHKDGGULYHQRQWRDUHGOLJKWKHWRRNWKHPRIIDJDLQ³3LFNLW
XSEURWKHU´VQDSSHGDFRSDVWKHOLJKWFKDQJHGDQG0LWW\KDVWLO\SXOOHGRQKLVJORYHVDQG
OXUFKHGDKHDG+HGURYHDURXQGWKHVWUHHWVDLPOHVVO\IRUDWLPHDQGWKHQKHGURYHSDVWWKH
KRVSLWDORQKLVZD\WRWKHSDUNLQJORW
³,W¶VWKHPLOOLRQDLUHEDQNHU:HOOLQJWRQ0F0LOODQ´VDLGWKHSUHWW\QXUVH³<HV"´VDLG
:DOWHU0LWW\UHPRYLQJKLVJORYHVVORZO\³:KRKDVWKHFDVH"´³'U5HQVKDZDQG'U
%HQERZEXWWKHUHDUHWZRVSHFLDOLVWVKHUH'U5HPLQJWRQIURP1HZ<RUNDQG'U3ULWFKDUG
0LWIRUGIURP/RQGRQ+HIOHZRYHU´$GRRURSHQHGGRZQDORQJFRROFRUULGRUDQG'U
5HQVKDZFDPHRXW+HORRNHGGLVWUDXJKWDQGKDJJDUG³+HOOR0LWW\´KHVDLG³:H¶UH
KDYLQJWKHGHYLO¶VRZQWLPHZLWK0F0LOODQWKHPLOOLRQDLUHEDQNHUDQGFORVHSHUVRQDOIULHQG
RI5RRVHYHOW2EVWUHRVLVRIWKHGXFWDOWUDFW7HUWLDU\:LVK\RX¶GWDNHDORRNDWKLP´³*ODG
WR´VDLG0LWW\
,QWKHRSHUDWLQJURRPWKHUHZHUHZKLVSHUHGLQWURGXFWLRQV³'U5HPLQJWRQ'U0LWW\
'U3ULWFKDUG0LWIRUG'U0LWW\´³,¶YHUHDG\RXUERRNRQVWUHSWRWKULFRVLV´VDLG3ULWFKDUG
0LWIRUGVKDNLQJKDQGV³$EULOOLDQWSHUIRUPDQFHVLU´³7KDQN\RX´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\
³'LGQ¶WNQRZ\RXZHUHLQWKH6WDWHV0LWW\´JUXPEOHG5HPLQJWRQ³&RDOVWR1HZFDVWOH
EULQJLQJ0LWIRUGDQGPHXSKHUHIRUDWHUWLDU\´³<RXDUHYHU\NLQG´VDLG0LWW\$KXJH
FRPSOLFDWHGPDFKLQHFRQQHFWHGWRWKHRSHUDWLQJWDEOHZLWKPDQ\WXEHVDQGZLUHVEHJDQDW
WKLVPRPHQWWRJRSRFNHWDSRFNHWDSRFNHWD³7KHQHZDQDHVWKHWL]HULVJLYLQJZD\´
VKRXWHGDQLQWHUQH³7KHUHLVQRRQHLQWKH(DVWZKRNQRZVKRZWRIL[LW´³4XLHWPDQ´
VDLG0LWW\LQDORZFRROYRLFH+HVSUDQJWRWKHPDFKLQHZKLFKZDVQRZJRLQJSRFNHWD
SRFNHWDTXHHSSRFNHWDTXHHS+HEHJDQILQJHULQJGHOLFDWHO\DURZRIJOLVWHQLQJGLDOV
³*LYHPHDIRXQWDLQSHQ´KHVQDSSHG6RPHRQHKDQGHGKLPDIRXQWDLQSHQ+HSXOOHGD
IDXOW\SLVWRQRXWRIWKHPDFKLQHDQGLQVHUWHGWKHSHQLQLWVSODFH³7KDWZLOOKROGIRUWHQ
PLQXWHV´KHVDLG³*HWRQZLWKWKHRSHUDWLRQ´$QXUVHKXUULHGRYHUDQGZKLVSHUHGWR
5HQVKDZDQG0LWW\VDZWKHPDQWXUQSDOH³&RUHRSVLVKDVVHWLQ´VDLG5HQVKDZQHUYRXVO\
³,I\RXZRXOGWDNHRYHU0LWW\"´0LWW\ORRNHGDWKLPDQGDWWKHFUDYHQILJXUHRI%HQERZ
ZKRGUDQNDQGDWWKHJUDYHXQFHUWDLQIDFHVRIWKHWZRJUHDWVSHFLDOLVWV³,I\RXZLVK´KH
VDLG7KH\VOLSSHGDZKLWHJRZQRQKLPKHDGMXVWHGDPDVNDQGGUHZRQWKLQJORYHVQXUVHV
KDQGHGKLPVKLQLQJ
³%DFNLWXS0DF/RRNRXWIRUWKDW%XLFN´:DOWHU0LWW\MDPPHGRQWKHEUDNHV³:URQJ
ODQH0DF´VDLGWKHSDUNLQJORWDWWHQGDQWORRNLQJDW0LWW\FORVHO\³*HH<HK´PXWWHUHG
0LWW\+HEHJDQFDXWLRXVO\WREDFNRXWRIWKHODQHPDUNHG³([LW2QO\´³/HDYHKHUVLW
WKHUH´VDLGWKHDWWHQGDQW³,¶OOSXWKHUDZD\´0LWW\JRWRXWRIWKHFDU³+H\EHWWHUOHDYHWKH
NH\´³2K´VDLG0LWW\KDQGLQJWKHPDQWKHLJQLWLRQNH\7KHDWWHQGDQWYDXOWHGLQWRWKHFDU
EDFNHGLWXSZLWKLQVROHQWVNLOODQGSXWLWZKHUHLWEHORQJHG
7KH\¶UHVRGDPQFRFN\WKRXJKW:DOWHU0LWW\ZDONLQJDORQJ0DLQ6WUHHWWKH\WKLQN
WKH\NQRZHYHU\WKLQJ2QFHKHKDGWULHGWRWDNHKLVFKDLQVRIIRXWVLGH1HZ0LOIRUGDQGKH
KDGJRWWKHPZRXQGDURXQGWKHD[OHV$PDQKDGKDGWRFRPHRXWLQDZUHFNLQJFDUDQG
XQZLQGWKHPD\RXQJJULQQLQJJDUDJHPDQ6LQFHWKHQ0UV0LWW\DOZD\VPDGHKLPGULYHWR
DJDUDJHWRKDYHWKHFKDLQVWDNHQRII7KHQH[WWLPHKHWKRXJKW,¶OOZHDUP\ULJKWDUPLQD
VOLQJWKH\ZRQ¶WJULQDWPHWKHQ,¶OOKDYHP\ULJKWDUPLQDVOLQJDQGWKH\¶OOVHH,FRXOGQ¶W
SRVVLEO\WDNHWKHFKDLQVRIIP\VHOI+HNLFNHGDWWKHVOXVKRQWKHVLGHZDON³2YHUVKRHV´KH
VDLGWRKLPVHOIDQGKHEHJDQORRNLQJIRUDVKRHVWRUH
:KHQKHFDPHRXWLQWRWKHVWUHHWDJDLQZLWKWKHRYHUVKRHVLQDER[XQGHUKLVDUP
:DOWHU0LWW\EHJDQWRZRQGHUZKDWWKHRWKHUWKLQJZDVKLVZLIHKDGWROGKLPWRJHW6KHKDG
WROGKLPWZLFHEHIRUHWKH\VHWRXWIURPWKHLUKRXVHIRU:DWHUEXU\,QDZD\KHKDWHGWKHVH
ZHHNO\WULSVWRWRZQKHZDVDOZD\VJHWWLQJVRPHWKLQJZURQJ.OHHQH[KHWKRXJKW
6TXLEE¶VUD]RUEODGHV"1R7RRWKSDVWHWRRWKEUXVKELFDUERQDWHFDUERUXQGXPLQLWLDWLYH
DQGUHIHUHQGXP"+HJDYHLWXS%XWVKHZRXOGUHPHPEHULW³:KHUH¶VWKHZKDW¶VLWVQDPH"´
VKHZRXOGDVN³'RQ¶WWHOOPH\RXIRUJRWWKHZKDW¶VLWVQDPH´$QHZVER\ZHQWE\VKRXWLQJ
VRPHWKLQJDERXWWKH:DWHUEXU\WULDO
³3HUKDSVWKLVZLOOUHIUHVK\RXUPHPRU\´7KH'LVWULFW$WWRUQH\VXGGHQO\WKUXVWD
KHDY\DXWRPDWLFDWWKHTXLHWILJXUHRQWKHZLWQHVVVWDQG³+DYH\RXHYHUVHHQWKLVEHIRUH"´
:DOWHU0LWW\WRRNWKHJXQDQGH[DPLQHGLWH[SHUWO\³7KLVLVP\:HEOH\9LFNHUV´KH
VDLGFDOPO\$QH[FLWHGEX]]UDQDURXQGWKHFRXUWURRP7KH-XGJHUDSSHGIRURUGHU³<RX
DUHDFUDFNVKRWZLWKDQ\VRUWRIILUHDUPV,EHOLHYH"´VDLGWKH'LVWULFW$WWRUQH\
LQVLQXDWLQJO\³2EMHFWLRQ´VKRXWHG0LWW\¶VDWWRUQH\³:HKDYHVKRZQWKDWWKHGHIHQGDQW
FRXOGQRWKDYHILUHGWKHVKRW:HKDYHVKRZQWKDWKHZRUHKLVULJKWDUPLQDVOLQJRQWKH
QLJKWRIWKHIRXUWHHQWKRI-XO\´:DOWHU0LWW\UDLVHGKLVKDQGEULHIO\DQGWKHELFNHULQJ
DWWRUQH\VZHUHVWLOOHG³:LWKDQ\NQRZQPDNHRIJXQ´KHVDLGHYHQO\³,FRXOGKDYHNLOOHG
*UHJRU\)LW]KXUVWDWWKUHHKXQGUHGIHHWZLWKP\OHIWKDQG´3DQGHPRQLXPEURNHORRVHLQWKH
FRXUWURRP$ZRPDQ¶VVFUHDPURVHDERYHWKHEHGODPDQGVXGGHQO\DORYHO\GDUNKDLUHG
JLUOZDVLQ:DOWHU0LWW\¶VDUPV7KH'LVWULFW$WWRUQH\VWUXFNDWKHUVDYDJHO\:LWKRXWULVLQJ
IURPKLVFKDLU0LWW\OHWWKHPDQKDYHLWRQWKHSRLQWRIWKHFKLQ³<RXPLVHUDEOHFXU´
³3XSS\ELVFXLW´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\+HVWRSSHGZDONLQJDQGWKHEXLOGLQJVRI:DWHUEXU\
URVHXSRXWRIWKHPLVW\FRXUWURRPDQGVXUURXQGHGKLPDJDLQ$ZRPDQZKRZDVSDVVLQJ
ODXJKHG³+HVDLGµ3XSS\ELVFXLW¶´VKHVDLGWRKHUFRPSDQLRQ³7KDWPDQVDLGµ3XSS\
ELVFXLW¶WRKLPVHOI´:DOWHU0LWW\KXUULHGRQ+HZHQWLQWRDQ$ 3QRWWKHILUVWRQHKH
FDPHWREXWDVPDOOHURQHIDUWKHUXSWKHVWUHHW³,ZDQWVRPHELVFXLWIRUVPDOO\RXQJGRJV´
KHVDLGWRWKHFOHUN³$Q\VSHFLDOEUDQGVLU"´7KHJUHDWHVWSLVWROVKRWLQWKHZRUOGWKRXJKWD
PRPHQW³,WVD\Vµ3XSSLHV%DUNIRU,W¶RQWKHER[´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\
+ LVZLIHZRXOGEHWKURXJKDWWKHKDLUGUHVVHU¶VLQILIWHHQPLQXWHV0LWW\VDZLQORRNLQJDW
KLVZDWFKXQOHVVWKH\KDGWURXEOHGU\LQJLWVRPHWLPHVWKH\KDGWURXEOHGU\LQJLW6KH
GLGQ¶WOLNHWRJHWWRWKHKRWHOILUVWVKHZRXOGZDQWKLPWREHWKHUHZDLWLQJIRUKHUDVXVXDO
+HIRXQGDELJOHDWKHUFKDLULQWKHOREE\IDFLQJDZLQGRZDQGKHSXWWKHRYHUVKRHVDQGWKH
SXSS\ELVFXLWRQWKHIORRUEHVLGHLW+HSLFNHGXSDQROGFRS\RI/LEHUW\DQGVDQNGRZQLQWR
WKHFKDLU³&DQ*HUPDQ\&RQTXHUWKH:RUOG7KURXJKWKH$LU"´:DOWHU0LWW\ORRNHGDWWKH
SLFWXUHVRIERPELQJSODQHVDQGRIUXLQHGVWUHHWV
³7KHFDQQRQDGLQJKDVJRWWKHZLQGXSLQ\RXQJ5DOHLJKVLU´VDLGWKHVHUJHDQW
&DSWDLQ0LWW\ORRNHGXSDWKLPWKURXJKWRXVHOOHGKDLU³*HWKLPWREHG´KHVDLGZHDULO\
³:LWKWKHRWKHUV,¶OOIO\DORQH´³%XW\RXFDQ¶WVLU´VDLGWKHVHUJHDQWDQ[LRXVO\³,WWDNHV
WZRPHQWRKDQGOHWKDWERPEHUDQGWKH$UFKLHVDUHSRXQGLQJKHOORXWRIWKHDLU9RQ
5LFKWPDQ¶VFLUFXVLVEHWZHHQKHUHDQG6DXOLHU´³6RPHERG\¶VJRWWRJHWWKDWDPPXQLWLRQ
GXPS´VDLG0LWW\³,¶PJRLQJRYHU6SRWRIEUDQG\"´+HSRXUHGDGULQNIRUWKHVHUJHDQWDQG
RQHIRUKLPVHOI:DUWKXQGHUHGDQGZKLQHGDURXQGWKHGXJRXWDQGEDWWHUHGDWWKHGRRU
7KHUHZDVDUHQGLQJRIZRRGDQGVSOLQWHUVIOHZWKURXJKWKHURRP³$ELWRIDQHDUWKLQJ´
VDLG&DSWDLQ0LWW\FDUHOHVVO\³7KHER[EDUUDJHLVFORVLQJLQ´VDLGWKHVHUJHDQW³:HRQO\
OLYHRQFH6HUJHDQW´VDLG0LWW\ZLWKKLVIDLQWIOHHWLQJVPLOH³2UGRZH"´+HSRXUHG
DQRWKHUEUDQG\DQGWRVVHGLWRII³,QHYHUVHHDPDQFRXOGKROGKLVEUDQG\OLNH\RXVLU´VDLG
WKHVHUJHDQW³%HJJLQJ\RXUSDUGRQVLU´&DSWDLQ0LWW\VWRRGXSDQGVWUDSSHGRQKLVKXJH
:HEOH\9LFNHUVDXWRPDWLF³,W¶VIRUW\NLORPHWUHVWKURXJKKHOOVLU´VDLGWKHVHUJHDQW0LWW\
ILQLVKHGRQHODVWEUDQG\³$IWHUDOO´KHVDLGVRIWO\³ZKDWLVQ¶W"´7KHSRXQGLQJRIWKH
FDQQRQLQFUHDVHGWKHUHZDVWKHUDWWDWWDWWLQJRIPDFKLQHJXQVDQGIURPVRPHZKHUHFDPH
WKHPHQDFLQJSRFNHWDSRFNHWDSRFNHWDRIWKHQHZIODPHWKURZHUV:DOWHU0LWW\ZDONHGWR
WKHGRRURIWKHGXJRXWKXPPLQJ³$XSUqVGH0D%ORQGH´+HWXUQHGDQGZDYHGWRWKH
VHUJHDQW³&KHHULR´KHVDLG
6RPHWKLQJVWUXFNKLVVKRXOGHU³,¶YHEHHQORRNLQJDOORYHUWKLVKRWHOIRU\RX´VDLG0UV
0LWW\³:K\GR\RXKDYHWRKLGHLQWKLVROGFKDLU"+RZGLG\RXH[SHFWPHWRILQG\RX"´
³7KLQJVFORVHLQ´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\YDJXHO\³:KDW"´0UV0LWW\VDLG³'LG\RXJHWWKH
ZKDW¶VLWVQDPH"7KHSXSS\ELVFXLW":KDW¶VLQWKDWER["´³2YHUVKRHV´VDLG0LWW\
³&RXOGQ¶W\RXKDYHSXWWKHPRQLQWKHVWRUH"´³,ZDVWKLQNLQJ´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\³'RHVLW
HYHURFFXUWR\RXWKDW,DPVRPHWLPHVWKLQNLQJ"´6KHORRNHGDWKLP³,¶PJRLQJWRWDNH\RXU
WHPSHUDWXUHZKHQ,JHW\RXKRPH´VKHVDLG¶

7 KH\ZHQWRXWWKURXJKWKHUHYROYLQJGRRUVWKDWPDGHDIDLQWO\GHULVLYHZKLVWOLQJVRXQG
ZKHQ\RXSXVKHGWKHP,WZDVWZREORFNVWRWKHSDUNLQJORW$WWKHGUXJVWRUHRQWKH
FRUQHUVKHVDLG³:DLWKHUHIRUPH,IRUJRWVRPHWKLQJ,ZRQ¶WEHDPLQXWH´6KHZDVPRUH
WKDQDPLQXWH:DOWHU0LWW\OLJKWHGDFLJDUHWWH,WEHJDQWRUDLQUDLQZLWKVOHHWLQLW+HVWRRG
XSDJDLQVWWKHZDOORIWKHGUXJVWRUHVPRNLQJ+HSXWKLVVKRXOGHUVEDFNDQGKLVKHHOV
WRJHWKHU³7RKHOOZLWKWKHKDQGNHUFKLHI´VDLG:DOWHU0LWW\VFRUQIXOO\+HWRRNRQHODVW
GUDJRQKLVFLJDUHWWHDQGVQDSSHGLWDZD\7KHQZLWKWKDWIDLQWIOHHWLQJVPLOHSOD\LQJDERXW
KLVOLSVKHIDFHGWKHILULQJVTXDGHUHFWDQGPRWLRQOHVVSURXGDQGGLVGDLQIXO:DOWHU0LWW\
WKH8QGHIHDWHGLQVFUXWDEOHWRWKHODVWƇ

6XEVFULEHQRZWRJHWPRUHRI7KH1HZ<RUNHU
VVLJQDWXUHPL[RISROLWLFVFXOWXUHDQGWKHDUWV