Giving in to wanderlust

Photo Credit: Living in Neverland

I went on my first overseas holiday in 1995, as a chaperone for my sister's school trip to New Caledonia.  The idea of me being a chaperone for anyone is as humorous now as it was back then, but I remember the trip being amazing.  The girls in my sister's school group were as excited as I was to be away from home, seeing new sights and grappling with the challenge of applying our limited high school French to everyday situations.

When I got back to Australia after that brief time away, I knew that the travel bug had bitten me.  I wasn't working full time back then, so although my mind and body wanted to be elsewhere, my bank balance kept me grounded.

But it couldn't keep me out of the bookstores.

I became the most prolific armchair traveller you would ever find.  I think I single-handedly kept Lonely Planet in business back then, buying all the visitor guides for destinations I desperately wanted to see (Venice, Rome, Paris).  But I mixed those up with a diverse collection of travel books written by ordinary people who'd had extraordinary adventures in places I probably couldn't find on a map (Bhutan, Greenland, Madagascar).  Their stories taught me the difference between being a tourist and a traveller - and there was no question which one I wanted to be.

In conversation with my friend's great aunt, I learned the word peripatetic, describing a person who travels from place to place.  It gave an air of sophistication to the sort person I wanted to become.  My bookshelf groaned under the weight of journeys not yet taken, and I continued to work and save hard.

The obligatory week in Bali that seems such a right of passage for young Australians was a hedonistic affair.  But even then, I remember preferring the cool tranquility of temples over the gallons of 'jungle juice' and thumping music into the pre-dawn hours.  A month of intensive and immersive French study in Vichy, France left me lonely and sobbing in public phone boxes, regretting my decisions and desperate to come home.  The week-long Contiki tour through Italy afterwards put me back on track.

When my boss gave me permission to take a "gap year" in 2005, I all but put my hand on my heart and vowed to be back at my desk a year later.  As I stood there at my farewell party, colleagues told me "you'll never come back", "you've gone for good now" - and I swear, I didn't believe them.    But then you leave Australia in blistering summer heat, you transit through the cosmopolitan craziness of Hong Kong, you land in Paris where you see snow falling for the first time (outside of the ski resort), and your whole world changes.

Spurred along by that common thread of wanderlust than ran through all the travel stories I'd read at home, my adventure took me back to France, through Italy, Switzerland, Turkey, and finally to rest in Scotland for six months.

I've come to New York via all these places, plus Chicago, and London (stories for another time), so I know how it feels to be in a strange place, surrounded by unfamiliar language.  I'd like to think that I have an affinity with the streams of tourists that come through New York City every year, because even though I've been here for three years already, my tiny bookshelf still strains under the weight of New York travel books.  Photo guides and travel journals sit alongside history books which in turn prop up biographies of famous New Yorkers.  And even though the city is right outside my door, I can't stop reading about how others have experienced it.

Book 3 in the series

Innocent though they are in enabling this compulsion, the fantastic independent bookseller McNally Jackson is a must-visit when you come to New York.  Their mission is to celebrate Manhattan's literary culture - they want you to read about New York and get to know it better through its books and writers.  But of course they offer books from all over the world too.

But naturally I love the place because their travel book section is quite extensive, with maps and stories galore.  I grabbed a couple of titles yesterday including the third - and latest - "Have A NYC" book, an annual anthology of short stories about New York.  This third installment has been dedicated to the memory of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February this year.  I've already finished the book (of course) and while you won't learn any statistics or detailed history about New York from reading it, the book does give you a handle on the diversity of people in the City.  Its stories span the 1960s to present-day, and are set against the backdrop of neighbourhoods that, in many cases, have changed quite substantially over the years.  Whether you're an armchair traveller or an actual one, it's definitely worth keeping an eye out for this series.