FOREWORD
Our Infinitely Surprising World
By Don George
“What’s the strangest thing you have ever experienced or seen?”
This simple question beats at the heart of this extraordinary collection.
For more than two decades, Scott Gaille’s work as an international corporate lawyer has taken him to the farthest corners of the globe. Rather than fly home as soon as business is done, he has used these assignments to explore local countries and cultures, frequently accompanied by his wife and partner in wanderlust, Gina.
Through these explorations, they have met an astonishing variety of people. Fueled by a deep curiosity about human nature and an appetite for adventure, they have asked these people that simple question: “What’s the strangest thing you have ever experienced or seen?” Then they have listened—and amazing tales have unfolded.
This book collects 50 of those tales.
The storytellers range richly in geography and social stratum: from a Mauritanian diplomat and an Omani government minister to an Irish farmer and a Tanzanian miner, a British secret service agent to a masseur in Madagascar to a Galápagos wildlife naturalist. They include an Australian road kill artist, an American oil executive, a South African big game guide, the first Hmong lawyer in Laos, the English “fourth girlfriend” of a Russian tycoon, and dozens more.
As this marvelously motley cast of storytellers suggests, Strange Tales of World Travel presents a world you will not find in glossy magazine articles, breathless blogs, or self-adulatory Instagrams. Instead, it’s a world of adventures gone awry with gorillas, Cape buffalos, tiger snakes, and other wildlife, of rare Vodun and Mayan rituals, of intimate glimpses of unimaginable wealth and unquestionable power, of close encounters with the wilder edges of human culture, including Ebola, shrunken heads, and ancient shamanistic rites.
The result is a collection that is, as the book’s subtitle suggests, bizarre, mysterious, horrible, and hilarious—like travel, and life, itself.
~ ~ ~
When Gina and Scott approached me about working with them to assemble a collection of their travel tales, my initial reaction was extreme hesitation. Over 40 years as a travel writer and editor, I’ve met dozens of people who have wandered fervently to far-flung places, penned detailed journals, dispatched epic emails, and become convinced that their accounts were destined to become bestsellers. Great travel writing, of course, requires more than outlandish adventures in exotic places, and I was worried that Gina and Scott might turn out to be two more members of this tribe of travelers whose worldly passions far surpass their wordly talents.
Then they sent me a sampling of their tales—and I was hooked.
From their first story, a sea-guide’s account of a seemingly hapless (but ultimately charmed) tourist’s encounter with a predatory shark, the Gailles’ tales charted a territory that was delightfully different from the travel stories I was used to reading.
Their accounts didn’t focus so much on what they had done as on the people they had met, and on those people’s most unforgettable stories. By turning their spotlight on others, the Gailles illuminated a wide and wondrous world that was new to me—and in so doing, they renewed my sense of just how rich and varied our planet is.
As I worked with Gina and Scott, I felt like I was journeying deeper and deeper into an enchanted landscape. I met characters I could vividly imagine but had never met, listened to stories that I had never heard and that blazed new mind-trails for me.
Now, rereading the completed collection, I realize that while the Gailles may not be professional travel writers, their stories embody three of the greatest lessons I have learned from a lifetime of travel writing.
The first is that after all the monuments, markets, and museums, our most memorable travel experiences almost always involve the people we meet.
The second is that everyone has a story, and often the people we least suspect have the most fascinating stories.
The third is that if we approach people with respect and appreciation, they will warmly welcome us into their lives, with respect and appreciation too.
A fourth corollary truth that this book abundantly proves is that if we ask the right questions, in the right spirit, the world will grace us with tales that we could not have imagined in our wildest dreams.
That’s finally why I love this book. In the age of the selfie and the social mediafication of the planet, it is profoundly refreshing to be reminded that our world is infinitely full of surprises, if only we open ourselves to them, and that the ultimate reward of travel is connection—and the resulting richer appreciation of the human map of the world.
~ ~ ~
Don George has been called “a legendary travel writer and editor” by
National Geographic. He is the author of
The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don Georg” and Lonely Planet’s
How to Be a Travel Writer. He has been Global Travel Editor at Lonely Planet and Travel Editor for Salon.com and the
San Francisco Examiner/Chronicle. He is currently Editor at Large for
National Geographic Traveler. Don has edited twelve award-winning travel anthologies, including
The Kindness of Strangers,
An Innocent Abroad, and
Travelers’ Tales Japan.
