I’m not normally big on travel gadgets or special travel clothing (hey, the biggest problem with packers is simply too much crap and too many shoes) but I do like my new ExOfficio travel shirt.

While enroute the TBEX travel blogger’s conference in New York, I landed at JFK airport and spotted an ExOfficio travel store. It was no use fighting a sudden urge for a new shirt; I was sick of the ones I always pack although they are tried-and-true.

I browsed simple white button-front shirts….classic clothing works best for travel….but the special fast-drying fabric made the ones I looked at way too sheer.  My bra is not so interesting that the whole danged world needs to see every bit of it, you know?

The Women’s DryFlite Long-sleeve shirt in light copper had a peachy orange colored hue; it was the same wicking, sun-protective fabric but the color made it less sheer, so despite the rather steep (for a shirt) price of US$65, I bought it.

It has handy little zip pockets and can be worn short-sleeved or with the sleeves rolled down.  The breathability was tested in hot, humid New York City streets and the quick-drying feature was tested after a slosh in some water in my sink. Check and check.

When I threw on some costume jewelry beaded necklaces as well (from a fun shopping moment at a New York Forever 21 clothing store) it looked rather dressy and took away that air of “I Am A Serious Travel Person, Going On Safari Any MINUTE” that specialized travel clothing often gives the wearer.

Thanks, ExOfficio. Thumbs up from me.

Free Shipping On Orders Over $50 at ExOfficio.com

Talk about a big week: back in 2008, in one seven day stretch, travel writer Michele Bigley was assigned to write a guidebook to Kauai, Hawaii.  She also learned that she was pregnant.

Stories were sure to result from that combination of circumstances, and Michele’s definitely adept at finding and telling them. In addition to Great Destinations: Kauai (Countryman Press 2008), she’s the author of Northern California: An Explorer’s Guide (Countryman Press, 2009). She’s written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Islands magazine, among others.

In the June 2010 issue of Perceptive Travel is Michele Bigley contributed Kauai Footprints: the Dark Side of “Hidden Hawaii”

Alison Stein Wellner: In Kauai Footprints, you describe the process of researching your  guidebook — and some of the resistance you encountered from locals along the way, including resistance about sharing some of the island’s more remote attractions. When did you decide that this, too, was a story?

Michele Bigley: After I wrote the book,  I felt I need to say more about Kauai. I am in a competitive market in the guidebook market in Hawaii,  there are just hundreds of them, and readers are going to pick up the most glossiest beautiful ones that show “the secret hidden places”.  But then there were a string of really bad injuries and deaths — as there are on Kauai because tourists do stupid things in “hidden and secret places”.  And they were often following the advice of guidebooks. A friend of a friend died on the trail — she was walking on a trail recommended to her by a guidebook, and clearly not ready for the intensity. She fell and she died, and her son didn’t have a mom anymore. I had another friend who went to Kauai and walked along a rugged trail with a baby in a backpack, in the rain. I have another friend who knew someone else who died there.

It was one thing after another, and it was like — wait a second. I need to let people know, Kauai is maybe not the place to take your most extravagant risks when you’re traveling.  You have to respect the water, the hiking trails, the weather.

Also, there are places in the world in which you, as a visitor, can immerse yourself in the culture as deeply as you can.  Some cultures are accepting of that, and some cultures want to hold something back. Kauai is like that.  At the same time, they are Americans, and when you’re traveling there, it’s insulting to say something about “back in the United States” or “back in America”.

I addressed this in the intro to my guidebook, and after it was published I received all these emails for readers. Many said, thanks so much for saying what you said, your intro should be required reading for everyone visiting the island.  But then I was getting letters, saying, I wish you put more directions to secret beaches.  I was trying to honor the people of the island, trying to help visitors tread lightly on it. I felt I needed to do more for the people of the island than write a guidebook.

So for this story, it wasn’t so much an aha! moment. The ideas were constantly marinating.

ASW: That’s interesting –  often, travel writers talk about having complete loyalty to our readers. Here it sounds like you were placing emphasis on the interests of locals…

MB: I feel like I have a responsibility to the places that I’m writing about, and I owe readers an honest view of what’s going on. Kauai needs people to travel there, but they also need people who are respectful of the land. I want [travelers] to understand that they’re needed there. If people stopped going, the economy would collapse. But there’s a difference between the traveler who goes to Easter Island and appreciates it, or goes to party it up and leaves their bottles and stuff all over. If you go to a fragile place, treat it gently.

Also, after my guidebook was finished and I started writing articles about Kauai, I realized that the stories that people wanted were all about the beautiful  beaches and the top 5 luaus  — no one really wanted to talk about the rest of the reality.

“Kipu Falls, for example, happens to be one of those Kauai gems that guidebooks don’t have to twist your arm to visit. Hordes of tourists hike the short (and privately owned) trail to get to this waterfall that locals have been using as a diving board for years. Unfortunately, visitors do not understand the water levels or mood of the water flow and have (on more than one occasion) plummeted into some serious doctor bills. Because of this, locals are very territorial of the falls—which you can tell by the graffiti scrawled on the rocks. Who wants to clean up some drunken Iowans bloodied body on your day off?” – From Kauai Footsteps.

ASW: I’ve gotta say, I’m not terribly surprised to hear that!

MB: Yeah, the editors I spoke to about [the idea that became Kauai Footprints] are so swamped, they barely had time to say why it didn’t work for them. I heard: this is negative. It doesn’t want to make people want to go to Hawaii. But knowing this reality should make people want to go Hawaii!   You know, people when they’re traveling, they don’t experience “The Best of Everything”. They should be prepared for that. And also to have a deeper glimpse of the culture — that’s why we travel. Read about some of Michele’s “less than best”/life threatening moments while traveling here.

ASW: Since you wrote this story after you were finished with your guidebook, how did you keep track of the experiences that you recounted in Kauai Footprints?

MB: I keep a number of journals when I’m traveling: a travel writer’s journal, with  sensory details, images, of everything I visited. I also keep a journal where I note down facts and such.  I had a blog for the  guidebook, and  I also would journal there. But this story really stuck with me, the feelings behind the story weren’t something I needed to write down. I’d been having them every since I first visited Hawaii as a kid.

ASW: And where did you write this piece?

MB: I wrote it at home. I’d had my son Kai by then, so I’d sit on the couch, plop him down on My Brest Friend, nurse him to sleep and write while he was sleeping.  I wrote for as long as my son would sleep. It worked!

ASW: Any advice for travel writers?

MB: If you want to write and travel, you just have to do it. You just have to make it happen.  Someone will always find your experience of a culture interesting — even if it’s you! There’s always something to say about a culture and a place.

Circa 1630, a Dutchman named Wilem Blaeu faced a not uncommon challenge for his time and trade: he was a mapmaker, and his clients, demanding maps of the New World.  So Baleu did what he could – he created detailed maps of the known areas, mostly around the coasts. But when it came time to draw the maps just a little way inland, all credible knowledge ceased. It was terra incognita, and one of the largest areas of the unknown left in the world at that time.

When mapmakers of that time encountered a blank spot, they had a couple of options. Often they inserted a cartouche. It’s a word with a number of meanings, for instance it can be a piece of paper containing a charge inserted into a pistol. The rolling of that paper may be how the word also came to refer to an ornamental scroll (rolled on the sides), which you might find carved into marble on an Ionic column.  In this case, a cartouche is a map’s label, bearing the map’s title or information about its maker.

On this world map, Blaeu used the space for something a little more jazzy: a one-sentence history of how the New World was discovered by Christopher Columbus, encapsulated with intricate scrollwork and laurels, further embellished with what I presume were his idea of Native Americans. One seems to be wearing a grass skirt.

If you don’t know what’s there, at least make it look pretty.

I’ve been thinking of this today because I’m about to set off for my own personal terra incognita: Marrakech, Morocco, a place I’ve never been.

I’ve got a few guidebooks, but I always find them hard to read before I arrive in a destination –  for whatever reason they just don’t compute for me until I’m actually on the ground. So the picture in my mind of any place I’ve yet to visit is like is like Wilem Blaeu’s portrayal of the American Midwest — it’s basically blank, with whatever facts and pretty images I can super impose on the blankness.

Imagination always precedes exploration, and imagination can be so peculiar.

When I’m imagining a place I’ve yet to visit, my mind tends to conjure up the name of the place rendered in those big block letters that you’d see on a vintage Route 66 postcard. Those postcards usually had drawings of the place inside the letters, and so do mine.  For Morocco, inside the letter M, there’s the face of a classmate of mine from elementary school who was from that country originally. I can’t remember her name, or anything else about her. Inside the R there is a gleaming copper tagine pot, and inside one of the Cs, there are preserved lemons. Scattered throughout are pieces of décor from the last Moroccan restaurant I ate at — Kasbah, in Berlin.

When I envision these postcards, I am usually somewhere inside the third or fourth letter wearing a big floppy hat.  Now, I have never owned a big floppy hat, so I’m not exactly sure where that image comes from, but I do have a theory about why my mind uses the vintage Route 66 template: I would have been a young teenager when the Route 66 nostalgia/preservation movement started, so I must have received more than a few of those vintage-style Route 66 postcards from friends who were on family trips out west.

On a map, a cartouche doesn’t just cover over a blank spot, it fills it with whatever’s known, even if it’s just the mapmaker’s name. Your mind probably doesn’t use a Route 66 postcard as a template for imagining places before you visit – you have your own unique way of knitting up the images you have about a place, from your own personal experiences and fantasies. You have your own style of a cartouche.

There are two things that I like the best about a cartouche, either on a map or in the mind: first, it’s accurate: there’s no place in the world that we have no preconceptions about, leaving an entirely blank spot on the map would be less accurate than filling it up fancifully.   And second, I like that a cartouche is provisional, its place is just temporary.  It can be replaced with better information when the map is re-drawn.

Part II: Imagining Places After You Travel

A Navajo chant, a song from the Zulu tradition, two songs that suggest that God is present in the atheist as much as the believer, a song from the Cuban Santeria practice, Gregorian chant, and a variety of songs, recently created and older, which deal with how people connect with and express faith: that is the collection called Prism.
You might think, from that description, that it is a collection of the work of many artists. In fact, there is the voice of one artist which anchors all the tracks.

A dozen years a ago Beth Nielsen Chapman was asked to sing a Tibetan chant on a project a friend was doing, “and I got this crazy idea that I’d create this collection of chants and hymns from all different paths of faith, with my voice as the thread pulling through,” she said. She realized the idea resonated with her past.

“I grew up on Air Force bases, and they had this building that was the church, and the church would change. They would roll in the star of David for the Jewish services, and roll things in for the protestant services, and then they’d roll in the crucifix for the Catholic services. Even then, from a young age, although my family was Catholic and we went to the Catholic mass, my sense of spirit was that it showed up in all sorts of cultures.” Music was there, too. “I always thought music was the greatest connector. It didn’t have to be a religious song just anything musical,” said Chapman, who recalled figuring out guitar chords by ear while the family was stationed in Germany and being busted from piano lessons because “the teacher told my mom Beth’s acting like she’s reading music, but really she isn’t, she’s learning it all by ear.”

Chapman made that gift her career. She’s a top songwriter, who has written hits for artists including Trisha Yearwood, Bette Middler, Neil Diamond, Elton John, and Faith Hill. Her own solo recordings rate high with adult contemporary listeners and are favorites on BBC2. Chapman has not always stuck with commercial music, however. One of her best known albums, Sand & Water, is a collection of songs she created while dealing with her young husband’s unexpected struggle with cancer and his subsequent death, “songs I never thought would make it out the door of my house,” she said. Several years ago she recorded an album called Hymns, mainly music from the Catholic tradition and most sung it Latin. Meanwhile, as she continued to write radio friendly material, she was working, off and on, on what would become Prism.

Thinking about what to include, what to leave out, and how to sing all the varied styles in respectful ways proved daunting at times, and Chapman set the project aside for a while. Hearing Bishop Desmond Tutu speak about the interconnectedness of the human family gave her a key as to how to go forward. Chapman had a chance to talk with the bishop and sought his advice about how to choose the music. “He said, ‘You know, if you stop worrying about the how and just say yes, the people will show up as you need them, and when it’s finished, in your mind and in your heart, you’ll know.’ I started doing that, and it was uncanny,” she said, relating how a contact with master musicians who could help her with Sufi music came from a chance conversation with an acquaintance, how her son’s classmate read a piece of poetry that became part of the project, and how hearing a song at a folk festival stage added another color to the mix.

Chapman’s ear and musical instincts, and her trust in the bishop’s words, served her well. Through twenty three tracks on two discs, the songs unfold in both natural and surprising ways. From the beat driven contemporary song God Is In, through the eighteenth century hymn Be Still My Soul, to the traditional Hebrew song Shalom Aleichem, through a wide range of songs arising from of how people connect with faith and spirit in differing cultures and languages, to the close of Navajo Chant, Chapman proves herself an artist in service to the song.

Working on the project also opened wider doors of service for Chapman, who has become involved with PeaceJam, a group which brings Nobel peace prize winners such as Tutu to meet in mentoring sessions with students, helping them see ways they could contribute to peace in the world. She’s since completed another album of her own songs, as well, called Back to Love, and is giving part of the proceeds to the Whole Planet Foundation, which offers micro finance programs to people in developing countries.

“Do you ever walk alone, like a drifter in the dark?” – Ween, “Drifter in the Dark”

We were lost, lost, hopelessly lost, and our only lifeline, a string of digits scrawled onto a scrap of paper, was as apparently as much a dead end as the one our tuk-tuk was currently parked in. Here in the charcoal-black night we roasted in the sticky, suffocating Sri Lankan humidity and pondered our next move.

We’d led our driver down the wrong fork in these unmarked, unlit roads two or three times already, and now we found ourselves in the heart of this hillside labyrinth, alone, isolated, with a man who’d barely said a word from the moment he picked us up in front of Cargills Food City.

He turned the engine off, then the headlights, and plunged us into skittish silence broken only by the creaking of the crickets’ violins, the croaks of frogs, and the ravenous buzz of mosquitos. The driver reached into a small bag on the floor, pulled something out, and swiveled around.

Our first taste of Kandy was, indeed, anything but sweet.

Seeking out what isn’t there…

Kumar, the kind-hearted live-in manager of Kandy Cottage, assured us that it was an easy 10 – 15 minute walk from the guesthouse to downtown, where we planned to grab some dinner and a few beers at a local bar before calling it a day. It was nearly 8pm, and we’d just arrived after a sweaty, spectacular train ride from Colombo.

Easy enough, we thought, as he pointed us in the right direction and jotted down his phone number just in case we got lost. There were street lights up here, but they weren’t on. Why? “The power was down earlier and they are still fixing it,” he said. “Oh, the phone line is still down too I think. No problem, you will be okay… and maybe it will be back up soon.”

We made it into town without much incident, but the streets were emptying quickly. Stores were closing, lights were dimming, and the typically bare-bones map in our Lonely Planet guidebook offered little navigational assistance. A few wrong turns down a few dark streets later, and suddenly we realized we were the only foreigners in sight and probably looking every bit the cliché part—is there anything more embarassing than hunching over your guidebook on a street corner and looking like a clueless tourist?

Looks from passing locals I’d normally take as innocently curious suddenly seemed darkly sinister. Such is the sometimes-byproduct of exploring new, foreign cities after dusk; gathering accurate first impressions can be a fool’s errand. We kept walking in the direction that seemed most sensible, but found no restaurants open, no bars period.

We finally gave up and backtracked to Cargills, seemingly the only place in town still open, and grabbed a few Kinder Bueno chocolate bars, a bag of deviled cashews, and two bottles of warm water before hailing one of the tuk-tuk drivers parked outside. And that’s how we thought our false-start introduction to Kandy would end that night, on a quick, breezy jaunt back up the hill to the guesthouse.

Our driver knew the turn-off road, but didn’t know Kandy Cottage; the walk down seemed straightforward enough and we didn’t think we’d have trouble finding the place, but with no street lights, no signs, and choose-your-own-adventure turns in the road every 100 feet, our confidence soon faded into exasperation.

Like a shadow in the night…

For all I knew we were about to be mugged. Oh, god, he has a knife! No, a gun! No, a knife and a gun! We’re fucked!

Actually, all he had was a cell phone in that bag—two, thankfully, since the battery was dead on the first one—and with a smile he shyly asked if we had the number of our guesthouse. I doubtfully handed him the piece of paper, warning him that the line was probably down. He dials, the call connects, and Kumar’s crackling voice breaks the still evening quiet.

It turns out that we were just down the road and around a bend from the guesthouse, and as we pulled up we saw Kumar standing there in the driveway, fatherly, concerned, arms folded and a look of relief creeping across his face. We felt like teenagers out way past our curfew; surely we’d be grounded.

The next evening, after a fine, full afternoon in Kandy, we happened to run into the same driver outside of Cargills again; I think his name was Rastika. We all laughed about the previous night’s escapade as he wheeled us back once again, this time from memory.

He asked us how long we’d be in Kandy, and when we said that we’d take a day trip to Dambulla and Sigiriya in the morning, he offered to take us, by tuk-tuk, but we knew the journey would be much too far (and dusty, and hot, and cramped) and was best taken by car. He smiled wide, wobbled his head, and made his last, earnest pitch:

“Don’t worry, I’m good Christian boy.”