:: Free Traveler ::

Once a backcountry refuge for draft dodgers and hippie farmers, British Columbia’s Gulf Islands are now home to a new national park reserve and some of the highest-priced real estate in Canada

It’s easy to feel wistful about what might have been when I’m aboard the Spirit of British Columbia, the Vancouver-to-Victoria ferry that weaves through the southern Gulf Islands. Even early European explorers, who found the mountainous West Coast forbidding and gloomy, admired the Gulf Islands. Garry oak meadows give the gentle hills of the islands the appearance of an English garden, and the steely North Pacific bursts into tropical blue-greens at their shores.

For the past 140 years, since non-aboriginal settlement began, the Gulf Islands have been a refuge for adventurers, eccentrics and solitude-seekers. I was almost one of them.

In 1988, when my family lived in Victoria and I was a shy 16-year-old, my mother contacted a real estate agent on the largest and closest of the southern islands, Salt Spring. She dreamt of a waterfront home. True, neighbours said that unwashed people lived in the forest and that the villages were filled with pot-smoking American draft dodgers. Though my mother wasn’t at Woodstock, she’s a free spirit who had variously been an unpublished novelist, a candle-maker and a quilter. So she brushed aside the fears of her neighbours and imagined a quiet, congenial rural refuge of artists and craftspeople. Oh, yes, and it was cheap. She was widowed and had no job, but she was comfortably looking at oceanfront properties.

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By: Manuela Pop

During our four-month trip in India this year, my husband and I stopped in Khajuraho to visit the Erotic Temples. While there, we heard of a small village, Kundalpur, where hundreds of Jain Monks gather in a two-day festival to celebrate fifty women becoming Jain mothers.

We left with a local Jain couple and their family to take part in the festival. Kundalpur turned out to be a very enriching and deeply spiritual experience. It changed our perception of Indian religions forever.

Kajuraho temples are not to be missed. They spread through the entire town. You need to rent a bicycle or a rickshaw to visit those that are far away. You can spend hours admiring the detailed carvings, which portray day-to-day activities. However, their worldwide fame derives from the carvings depicting sexual human acts.

Despite the aggressive touts, Kajuraho can be a laid back place. There isn’t really much else to do aside from visiting the temples and eating good food. Somebody who has been in India for a while learns to appreciate quiet places such as Khajuraho.

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My first dedicated adventure-travel experience came relatively late in life. Until six years ago, most of my ventures abroad revolved around expeditions and long-range treks. The travelling bit consisted of driving from the airport to the (usually skanky) hotel on the first night and the same short journey in reverse at the end of the expedition.

Then, in the summer of 2001, I began packing for a seven-week tour of Peru and Ecuador. I needed to squeeze a sufficient amount of equipment and clothing into a single 50-litre rucksack that would enable me to snorkel in the Galapagos, ride a horse in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, trek around Machu Picchu and travel across Lake Titicaca. I also had to look sufficiently well dressed to meet scientists while researching a story for Geographical.

A few of the items I packed (such as a snorkel and mask) were necessarily sport-specific. The rest of my gear had to be infinitely more versatile. During my 49-day trip, I cursed the over-hyped, under-performing polyester shirt that claimed to resist body odour but left me smelling like last week’s garbage and wished that I’d packed a second pair of the impressively fast-drying and, thankfully, loose-fitting trousers that I had uncovered in a Parisian outdoor store. My boots, lined with a waterproof and not-so-breathable membrane, were aim often unbearably hot.

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By: Carmen Jenner

Paris, France

The computer screen taunts me with photos of charming Parisian apartments with minuscule dimensions. My two-year-old is dancing to Hi-5, having given up on the promised trip to the park. Finding a flat for our six-week stay in the French capital has become my latest obsession.

Our requirements consist of a two-bedroom apartment easily accessible to the Latin Quarter, where I will be studying in July. My research has been enlightening as I learn not to take anything for granted, not even walls.

My findings are baffling: traditional two-bedroom apartments apparently are rare in Paris. Some bedrooms are partitioned off with screens, curtains and “vertically exposed beams.” In some apartments, the number of beds doesn’t equate to the number of people supposedly sleeping there. How French.

Sometimes, the second bedroom is on a mezzanine floor, which is often not full height. Some lofts are only as wide as the bed and others don’t have railings; I guess that’s not a problem as long as you don’t roll out of bed. Although, when you are putting on your jeans while crouching, you could lose your balance and topple over the edge into the living room. Often the beds are hidden away in cupboards, a system known as a Murphy bed.

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Medical advice from Jason Gibbs, head pharmacist at Nomad Travel stores and health clinics

There are many different skin conditions that can manifest while travelling, each with their own modes of transmission, from the bite of an infected mosquito through to sexual contact or poor personal hygiene.

Fungal Infections: This covers a broad spectrum of skin infections from athlete’s foot and dhobi or ‘jock’ itch through to ringworm and thrush. Both athlete’s foot and dhobi itch are caused by the proliferation of a type of fungus that grows on us already. Given the right warm, moist environment, the fungus will proliferate and start to cause problems. Ringworm is a fungal infection transmitted by direct and generally close personal contact — usually person-to-person, but sometimes through contact with animals such as cats. Thrush is also typically caused by environmental factors. However, in female travellers, it can often be a side effect of taking the anti-malarial drug doxycycline, which causes a reduction in ‘healthy’ bacteria in the body, allowing candida — a yeastlike parasitic fungus — to grow. All of these infections are easily treated with the wide variety of anti-fungals on the market, but it’s worth remembering that fungal skin infections can be treated to the point where they are no longer causing itching, but are still present. Be sure to follow the instructions carefully.

Sensitivities to the sun: About ten per cent of people will suffer, to one degree or another, from hypersensitivity to the sun. It’s more common in younger women with lighter skin tones and presents itself as a very itchy eczema-type rash. Some medications can make skin more sensitive to the sun. Doxycycline and other chemicals may actually be altered within the skin by UV radiation and form a chemical that causes an allergic reaction that looks like chronic eczema. All of these sun-related problems can be reduced by covering up and using good sunscreens that protect against both UVB and UVA radiation.

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Ruth Boreham outlines the history of the famous publishing dynasty whose archive has been preserved for the nation and is now accessible to all at the National Library of Scotland.

IN MARCH 2006 THE JOHN MURRAY ARCHIVE moved from Albemarle Street, London, to its new, permanent home in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Change of ownership was made possible by a major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, a large contribution by the Scottish Executive and a sustained and ongoing fundraising campaign. It is the most significant archive to become publicly available in the last 100 years. Since the 1760s seven generations of the Murray family have maintained an archive of 150,000 items, including business papers, correspondence and original manuscripts. The archive at present available at the National Library of Scotland covers the years 1768 to the 1920s. Its richness derives from the range of individuals represented, including great thinkers and writers who shaped the nineteenth century in literature, travel and exploration, science, engineering and technology, politics and religion.

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By Patricia C Behnke

Learning to Be a Small Part of the Whole, Not the Center

Travel brings us out of ourselves and allows us to observe the world from other’s perspectives. I have found in my travels that where we come from predisposes others to form judgments, if we allow it.

It is up to us as members of the world community to dispel the negative and embrace the uniqueness of each of us.

My daughter and I flew to Milan to begin our month-long stay in Italy. Our first night in the city where Mussolini preached, built, and died, we wandered the piazzas. We sat and observed under the watchful eye of Leonardo da Vinci in the Piazza Scala next the La Scala Opera House. A dozen Italian men stood in the square arguing passionately.

It was too precious an opportunity to pass up as I watched the waving hands and shaking fists. I began snapping photos surreptitiously, moving closer with each shot. Finally one of the men spotted me and smiled. I walked over to him and explained I was an “autore” or author. In broken English they began talking excitedly about The New York Times and the front page.

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Just seconds before this sentence was committed to the digital realm of a Gateway laptop computer, several ounces of hot “white mocha” splashed down the writer’s throat — an appropriate beginning for this particular article, the epilogue to a marvelously coffee-soused endeavor. We began this paper as a lark on a spare day in Jamaica in the midst of a non-coffee-related research project. How to fill the time? The answer was obvious: abandon the subtle charms of Kingston in favor of the rarified air of the Blue Mountains . Of course, every road trip requires a destination, even if only a symbolic one. Our goal, quickly arrived at, was a coffee estate. After years of coffee consumption, we decided that we owed it to both ourselves and also to those who produce coffee to investigate the origins of the brew that enable us to get through the workday.

We are not alone in our fixation on coffee; the average American consumes ten pounds of coffee each year (Pendergrast 1999). The chemical effects and social significance of this beverage, derived from the pit of an Ethiopian berry, have earned it a warm (forgive the pun) place in many people’s hearts around the world. Still, like most commodities, coffee has an ever-changing geography that is less obvious to the consumer. The closest most consumers (including the 46 people currently sharing this Starbucks coffee shop with me) will come to an understanding of its spatial and global interconnections is when their eyes glance over the names of the coffee beans sold by the pound Guatemala Antigua, Ethiopia Sidamo, etc. Even then, these labels are simply commodity labels meant to signify different flavors and not recognizable as signifiers of real localities and individuals whose identities, economic situation, and everyday life are inextricably tied to this commodity chain.

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By Felix LeRoy Perry