Travel Reads

Take a bite out of the globe with Wanderlust

TANYA ENBERG, Chic Savvy Travels

Traveling with Elisabeth Eaves is intoxicating.

The author, now in her 40s, recounts her 20s-something hunger for globe-trotting, while falling in and out of passionate love in Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents (Seal Press).

This is a read worth slowing down for. Spilling over with vivid descriptions and giddy discoveries, rushing the author’s words would be a shame, for if ever there was a chance to live vicariously through the experience of another, Wanderlust, like freshly picked ripe fruit, should be savored.

Eaves’ state of restlessness and perpetual desire to travel leads to the ultimate conundrum — can romantic love and wanderlust not simply mix, but prove lasting and compatible?

Often they both prove tragically, yet wonderfully fleeting, like capturing a brilliant snapshot of a moment in time seconds before it vanishes. When one’s true passion is travel, romantic love may always find itself taking second place.

Inspired by her high school sweetheart who sheds security and leaves his Vancouver roots behind to embrace on-the-edge living and world travels, Eaves soon finds herself aching for adventure of her own. When an opportunity arises to set down temporary roots in the fascinating and strangely exotic Cairo, she leaps at the chance.

Her roots, however, won’t burrow too deeply. What comes next is a series of passion-fueled journeys that keep moving the writer onward. Her heartstrings are either pulling her toward somebody, or urging her to create greater distance between them — both metaphorically and literally — and finding herself once again adrift.

From taking a government internship in Pakistan, to backpacking Malaysia, struggling through the unforgiving jungles of Papua New Guinea and discovering moments of great unease in the familiarities of Australia, the curiousities she reveals are boundless and discoveries inspiring. The splendid backdrop isn’t simply one of time and place, but the mysterious lure of something slightly out-of-focus and faceless — the timeless complexities of lust and love and the insatiable desires that can create great divides.

Warning: Eaves’ youthful chronicles could leave you craving a big moment, searching out random flights and, quite possibly, pulling out your credit card.

Date Added: August 16, 2011 | Comments (0)