A writer pens his wish list
Canadian essayist contemplates destinations he is hungry to visit in the coming months or years
Travel is an education. It is life-changing at its best, although the reasons for choosing one place over another can be marvelously trivial.
Like, for instance, the fact of a woman I work with being entertaining and vivacious — as is her friend (and compatriot), the actress Arsinee Khanjian, whom she brought into the office one day.
Sure, I do have better reasons for wanting to visit Armenia: The extraordinary 13th-century Noravank monastery, for instance, built of reddish stone and sitting in a gorge cut by the Amaghu river, that appears a site steeped in fascinating melancholy, and I would love to be able to walk the rough pasture around it.
But I always come back to the country’s soulful people and its artists, in particular: Toronto’s Egoyans, the film director Atom and pianist Eve, and the opera singer Isabel Bayrakdarian are Canadian-Armenians whose work has always interested me.
A better reason to visit may be the Armenian Massacres that started under the Ottomans exactly a century ago. I am not advocating grim tourism, but, in fact, the spirited opposite.
A couple of the most interesting trips I have taken in the past several years have been to parts of Europe whose character has been forged in disturbing histories of which Canada, through immigration, has been the unlikely benefactor. (Croatia and Ukraine come to mind.) I know this will also be true of Armenia. And another incentive is love. I am married to an impossibly hard-working woman, and she and I share a predilection for colour — heady, intoxicating, wonderful colour. Sarah has never been to India.
It is impossible not to be inundated in Canada by South Asia’s enormous cultural influence: the books, art, food and films we consume so joyously. (She and I are inveterate readers of Indian literature, we’re regulars at the Lahore Tikka House, and The Lunch Box was one of our favourite movies of 2014.) But really I want to watch my favourite travelling companion be overcome by the colours of Indian art, markets, landscapes and daily life.
I shall demand an insider’s guide of my Vancouverite, Mumbai-raised pal, the enviably talented author Anosh Irani, and I shall enlist my erstwhile Young Centre resident artist colleague, the beautiful and unfailingly smiling Autorickshaw a cappella artist Suba Sankaran for tips, too. Maybe we shall even find a wedding to watch when we’re there, which is easier than you might think.
The reason for my third choice of the destinations I’d like to visit in 2015 is more selfish and has to do with work. At the moment, I am working on a book about a retired East Coast scallop fisherman who was inadvertently caught up in a massive drug bust when he found work on a coast guard vessel that he helped sail from the Caribbean to Spain. The intrigues and excitements of the story are something of an antidote to the last book I wrote, which was very political and distressing, and the tale has marvellous locations: the Caribbean, Spain, England, Ireland and Romania.
Especially, I want to visit the cities of the “autonomous region” of Galicia, in the northwestern corner of Spain, where the ship was impounded and my friend imprisoned. Santiago de Compostela, at the end of the famous pilgrimage, has the largest cathedral in the country. Vigo is home to the largest fishing fleet in Europe and (forgive me, Brian Tobin) some of the best seafood dishes.
I’m unlikely to travel to all these places this year, not least because I love home so and Canada exerts a constant pull. Nova Scotia always beckons; the Arctic, too. If I was able to visit Quebec’s Îles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence — rugged, picturesque and historic — I’d be thrilled.
Noah Richler is the author of the awardwinning This is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada and can be found @knowwhereyouare.