Tales from Nowhere
Edited by Don George
Lonely Planet, R175 at takealot.com
We’ve all been to Nowhere. It might have been in the middle of Mongolia or Manhattan. It might have been at a Zen monastery, a no-man’s-land border outpost, or a six-palm island in an endless sea. You may have found Nowhere on a sultry summer night in Paris when you’d spent your last euro and had no place to sleep; or on a midnight jeep safari in the Tanzanian bush after you’d blown your last spare tyre, with your campsite a distant pinprick of light; or in the comforting cocoon of an all-night train compartment, sharing soul-secrets with a total stranger. Nowhere is a setting, a situation and a state of mind. It’s not on any map, but you know it when you’re there. […] The world has an inexhaustible ability to surprise us, and grace us, with revelations. If we embark on each adventure with an open heart and an open mind, trusting in the journey, travel will take us places we never planned to go, and enrich and enlighten us in ways we never otherwise would have known.
These inspiring words are from the Introduction of this anthology, which was published in 2006 and edited by the legendary travel writer Don George. It’s a collection of 30 travel tales from around the world, written by experienced journalists and authors including Pico Iyer, Pam Houston and Rolf Potts. The experiences are vastly different, but all have one thing in common: an encounter with “nowhere”.
In “North of Perth”, Pam Houston sets the scene:
I first noticed we had officially entered Nowhere thirty kilometres after we left Northampton, a sweet-looking little town 450 kilometres north of Perth. We lost the farms first, then the fences, then all other traffic in either direction. We lost the Nuytsia floribunda, the Australian Christmas tree with its explosions of bright yellow and orange flowers. We lost the stunningly beautiful but slow-moving galah, grey-bodied cockatoos with rose-colored hearts and fat cheeks, and the smaller, quicker brightgreen budgies. Eventually we lost the line down the middle of the road.
But “nowhere” isn’t necessarily somewhere remote. Simon Winchester writes about a rather harrowing experience in a small African country:
Equatorial Guinea, we discovered, was as close to being nowhere as any place could be. Nothing good ever happened there – and indeed, there really was no there there. Malabo was a shanty town, without palaces or offices or hotels (hence our need to sleep in the warehouse.) There was a scattering of markets, and a restaurant that served us an unremitting diet of bananas and stewed rats – except for one golden day when we were given a plate of a darker and marginally more succulent meat that, after we had eaten it, was said to have been cat. The streets were lonely places, populated only by slack-jawed youths and suspicious-looking thugs and a scattering of very large Algerian soldiers, and with the occasional lugubrious East German spy to add a bit of social sparkle to the scene. And the night was all quiet, except for the intermittent rattle of gunfire and the hooting of vultures out in the abandoned cacao plantations.