Caribbean Sunset

Destination: The Caribbean

Book: A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean: A Grump in Paradise Discovers that Any Place it’s Legal to Carry a Machete is Comedy Just Waiting to Happen,  by Gary Buslik

A Guest Post by Jessie Voigts of Wandering Educators

I am happy to share with you today a book that just made me laugh, and laugh – and learn about Caribbean cultures.  Gary Buslik has written one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean (Travelers’ Tales).

When I first opened the book, the VERY FIRST chapter made me laugh (The Time I Accidentally Urinated on Idi Amin). It gets even funnier from there – Gary explores different cultures, ethics, philosophy, race, religion, and more – all the while making the reader laugh, with his wry sense of humor.

Gary explores different places in the Caribbean, the various people he meets as he travels, and of course the ever-present dilemma of intercultural differences. This book truly is a gem, in that it humorously explores some of the cultural differences the traveler experiences while in the Caribbean. I’ve only been to the Bahamas in the Caribbean (YET!), but I could still relate to the book – nodding my head yes at certain aspects of travel in the Caribbean, and making notes NOT to go to certain places (cockfighting). He certainly brings a great sense of place to his book – you feel like you are there, with him.

Here is an excerpt from our interview with Gary – you can read the rest at Wandering Educators .

WE: What is your favorite thing about the Caribbean? Least favorite?

Caribbean Drummers

GB: A lot of newbie travelers rave about gorgeous sunsets and sugary sand and exotic cuisine, but my favorites are the small things. I love meeting stray dogs you see on almost every beach, giving them a good scratch on their bellies, and telling the locals to shut up and mind their own business when they try to shoo the dogs away. Last December I found a sweet cat on the beach in St. Maarten, and every morning we had breakfast together in the hotel lobby café, with me sitting in front of one plate, she another, her dirty little butt on a placemat. It drove the manager stark raving nuts, so it was a double pleasure. I also enjoy stepping on the flip-flops of margarita-slurping tourists walking in front of me.

My least favorite thing about the Caribbean are mosquito nets. Any membrane that gets between my bladder and the bathroom at two in the morning—and I include pajamas here—is never my friend. If you turn on a light in the middle of the night, your “mosquito” net—a misnomer if there ever was one; they should be called “large-furry-things-with-buck-teeth” net—resembles a Night of the Living Dead reunion. The result being that while trying to make a mad dash from under the elastic, I get more tangled up in netting than a drunken groom in a garter belt, and my wife comes to my rescue by spraying my face with something that smells suspiciously like nuclear waste.

My other least favorite thing is steel drum music. West Indian bands never take breaks. I was not alive when they built the Panama Canal, but in hearing “Yellow Bird” for the zillionth time, my eardrums can imagine what the isthmus must have felt like when that huge, hardened-steel, saw-toothed gnawing wheel ground its way from one ocean to the other.

Dr. Jessie Voigts

Dr. Jessie Voigts is the Publisher of  WanderingEducators.com and will be contributing each month to A Traveler’s Library. She has a doctorate in International Education, and is passionate about intercultural learning. She and her husband are Worldschooling their daughter, and enjoying every minute of it. She is also a nature photographer and lives on a lake.

Caribbean photos by Vera Marie Badertscher, all rights reserved.

Thanks Jessie–even the subtitle has me rolling on the floor. Readers–any humor books about travel that you would like to share?

You might also want to read related posts about other islands:  Hawaii, Indonesia, the Caribbean by Patrick Leigh Fermor, not to mention beaucoup about Greek Islands (search for Greece).

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

On Siphnos, Greece

Siphnos, Greece

Fishing Boat, Siphnos, Greece

Do summer days make you wish you were on an island? See some books about about Greek Islands, and specifically about Crete. And over at Spot Cool Stuff, I wrote about my idyll on the island of Siphnos.

Or journey to the Caribbean with this British travel writer.

St. Lucia, Caribbean

Have a nice trip to the islands!

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Caribbean stormDestination: Caribbean and British Guiana

Book: The Middle Passage by V. S. Naipaul

Quotable Thursday quote: I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. V. S. Naipaul

The question is, if a man writes well, does it matter what kind of human being he is?

I delayed reading V. S. Naipaul because although he is always listed as one of the great travel writers, excerpts indicated that he is of that school that dwells on the negative wherever he goes.  ( I learned after I read the book, that he is an abuser of women and a racist.)

How, I wondered, could Naipaul be so revered as a writer if his travel writing consistently discouraged going to the places he explored? In order to find my own answer, I would have to read his work.

I bought two books, The Middle Passage (1962), his first travel book, and An Area of Darkness (1964) which relates to his first journey to India. In an introduction to the edition I read,  he introduces The Middle Passage as his first travel book, but it was not his first published work. He had already gained a reputation as a writer of fiction by 1962. I unwittingly picked up the two books which drew the most criticism to Naipaul as non-sympathetic to third-world countries.

For those who want to know more about the man behind the writing, Paul Theroux, former friend turned caustic truth-teller,wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow in 1998. An authorized biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, was published in 2008 and is no less disturbing, according to Theroux himself in a lengthy piece for the London Times (unfortunately that article is now available only to subscribers).

In The Middle Passage, Naipaul writes with the observant eye of a sociologist or anthropologist, but without the scientific detachment. The title refers to the route taken by slave ships between Africa and the Caribbean, and tips off his focus in the book.  His visit to Trinidad (where he grew up), British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica constantly circles back to race relations. Allegedly, he is comparing the effect of colonizers from Britain, France and Holland on the West Indies and the northern edge of South America. In fact, he pretty much lumps the colonizers together and lines up with them.

Although he refers to his family history–India to Trinidad to England–he does not openly acknowledge the personal prejudice this brings to his observations.  In each society he mocks the people in power, but lives with them and complains about hardship, while he claims to be wanting to find out about those on the bottom rung and wondering aloud why they don’t feel more pride.  He seeks out connections to slavery and racial division wherever he goes.

The cynicism wears thin, and yet–a big fat “yet”–I don’t believe I have ever read anyone who could as deftly bring to life a character and a setting.  I could see the buildings, rooms, and people he described.

With his pompous air of superiority, Naipaul is not a person I would want to dwell with on a desert island . (Particularly after reading about the way he has treated the women in his life.) However, that biting intelligence and felicity of expression would make for an interesting dinner party.

And, oh, yes, I am going to read the second book.

Now please let me know if the kind of person an author is in “real life” affects your enjoyment of his or her work? Would you rather just not know? Or do you think it is important to know something of the life of the author in order to understand the work?  Let’s have some exchange of views on this. I know you have an opinion.

Photograph by Vera Marie Badertscher. All rights reserved.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Chickens on the street

Destination: Caribbean Islands

Book: The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor

When last seen in A Traveler’s Library, Patrick Leigh Fermor was hiking across the rough landscape of the Mani peninsula in Greece’s Peloponese.  His journey to the Caribbean came between his adventures in Crete during the war and the many Greek  journeys that he took in the following thirty years.

In The Traveller’s Tree, Fermor tells us about a journey by plane and boat through the islands of the lesser Antilles, Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba in 1946.  Be warned that the islands he described no longer look and sound the way they did when he was there. Life moves on.  But with his fine eye for detail and his love of learning, he brings a depth to the experience of island culture far beyond what you might glean from today’s slick advertising.

St. Lucia beach

His is not a book full of white sands and hammocks slung from palm trees. Instead he quotes frequently from the earliest travel writer to visit the Caribbean, the French Monk, Father Labat, as he weaves a picture of the islands as they are in 1946 against their history, from native Caribs through Columbus to the Europeans who established dominion.

You can read present day guidebooks for weeks on end, and never learn about Labat, to whom Fermor says all students of the area owe a large debt. “He is a sort of monastic West Indian Pepys.  He has the same devouring curiosity and sense of humour and practical flair, and, above all, the same lucid and indefatigable garrulousness. Nothing is too important or too trivial for him to set on record in his vigorous and entertaining prose.”

What more could we ask for in a travel writer than a “devouring curiosity and sense of humor and practical flair?” In my opinion, those same qualities distinguish Fermor.  He talks knowledgeably about the flora and fauna, the music, the food, the clothing and the houses of the people.  He describes in detail the fast-disappearing native Caribs on Dominica and predicts they will be completely gone in a generation or two.  Actually a few still live on the island in the 21st century, their lifestyle changed (improved if made easier and more healthy count for anything).

He says that Castries, St. Lucia seems cursed by fire, citing the last time it burned to the ground in 1927. However, that turned out not to be the last time, for shortly after Fermor visited, Castries burned to the ground one more time. I read the book on my way to St. Lucia, and found myself writing in the margins and earmarking pages to remember gems of information.

Fermor really fell for Haiti. I want to reread that section and see if I can see the relationship between the Haiti he experienced and the sad Haiti of today.  I also want to re-read the few pages on Cuba, now that the possibility of opening up travel between the U.S and Cuba has my mind wandering in that direction. Fermor is always worth rereading.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.