TRAVEL WRITING – from Galapagos to Bermuda - how to fall in love with the world over and over.
If you fear Hawaii will trap you in a picture-postcard of palm trees, think again. You can certainly have palm trees, perfect beaches, dramatic surfing, sensual hula dancing, even more sensual massages, delicate Asian food, beautiful waterfalls and continuous divine weather; but the real reason to come all this way is, in some curious way, to make you touch base.
The sassy, amoral, very female musical Chicago changed my mind with the gaiety of its lyrics: “Let’s go to hell in a fast car”; “He ran into my knife... he ran into my knife 10 times”; “There’s men everywhere, booze everywhere, jazz everywhere, joy everywhere”. So I went for a long weekend to get a bit of the razzle-dazzle for myself.
A huge land iguana, rusty skin like chain mail, stands under a prickly pear cactus with what looks like a broad smile as he waits all day on the off chance that a fruit will drop; he peers at me across the gulf between the species. A little way away is another iguana, under another prickly pear cactus, and another, and another. Some of the cacti are 200 to 300 years old. There is no sense of rush here in the Galapagos Islands. The giant tortoises on Santa Cruz are up to 150 years old.
I started travelling quite young. When I was five, my father worked in a hospital in Brooklyn for a year, so I went to school there. Brooklyn back then was much rougher than it is now. Teachers used to get stabbed with great regularity, which was a bit of a shock after Wimbledon. However, my parents used this placement to see something of the country. I still vividly recall much of the travelling — going down to the Great Smoky Mountains and seeing the Indians and black bears, for instance.