The Travel Avatar

It started with a simple suggestion from Chileans Robert and Killy Stanton: Why don’t you let your readers decide where you go next?

I rather liked that idea. But I thought, there has to be more to it than that. It seemed too whimsical to simply go wherever the winds blew. There had to be a reason for the travel; there had to be a story. Yes, okay, I’ll go where you suggest, but tell me why. And it has to be more than, “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

Think of it this way: Let’s say that I’m god and I decide that I’m going to bring back the Beatles—all of the Beatles—for a circa 1970 concert. And I’ve picked you and 2,000 other fans to see them in some fabulous intimate setting. Better yet, the fans get to determine the set list. So you’re sitting in your seat in the front row (I give you very good tickets) and the boys come on stage and John looks right at you and says, “So what shall we play for our first number, mate?”

Lots of pressure. You could just call out “Strawberry Fields Forever!” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps!” but that isn’t good enough. John wants you to explain why you want the song you want. So you bravely stand up and say, “I’d like to hear “A Day in the Life” because the first time I heard it was the summer I turned 13, after my mother had died and my father moved us to a little town in the Texas panhandle where my grandparents lived and I hated everything about it from the dust to the drawl and I’d walk around the empty streets of this town late at night, feeling like I was going to dry up and blow away like the tumbleweeds rolling down the street, and one night I heard some music coming out of a window of a house even smaller and crummier than ours and I stood out on the sidewalk, in the heat and the humidity of a Texas summer, listening to this amazing song—“A Day in the Life”—and I knew I would be okay.”

And with that, John smiles, and begins: “I read the news today, oh, boy…”

Hold on to that image and imagine how it might work for travel. Everyone out there has a “Top 10” list in their head of places they’d like to go before they put away their passport for good. But for whatever reason, they haven’t made it there yet. Maybe a career got in the way or it cost too much money or they’re just not physically able to do it. So I’m going to go there for you. I’ll be your Travel Avatar. But, just as with the Beatles, it can’t just be people shouting out, “Go to Paris!” or “I’d love it if you went to Rio!”

I need a story. Like the one I got from a reader who told me about a distant relative of hers, Osa Johnson. “She was probably the most famous female explorer of her time back in the ‘20s and ‘30s but now everyone has forgotten about her.” She traveled with her husband, Martin, to the South Seas to film cannibals and headhunters, sometimes running for her life when they thought perhaps they were meant to be the next meal, and spent three years living at a “lost” lake in Northern Kenya shooting hundreds of thousands of feet of film documenting the wildlife, including massive herds of elephant and rhino, that even then were dying out.

“She was barely five-feet-tall, but Osa was larger than life to me when I was growing up,” said this reader. “And I always wondered what it would be like to have been her. To go where she went and see what she saw. My dream was to get to that lost lake in Kenya and pick up where she and Martin left off. But one thing or another kept me from that trip and now I’m in my 70s. But it would be wonderful if you could go there and tell me if it’s still there. If, in the mornings, the mist around the lake carries the scent of wild jasmine, as she wrote, and if, at night, the light from the moon still silhouettes the domelike forms of elephants come to drink at the lake. I fear it is all gone now. But I wonder. I wonder all the time.”

So that’s what I’m going to do. Sometime this summer I’ll head for Northern Kenya and look for Osa’s lost lake to see if the elephants are still there. But first, it’s off to the South Seas—to Vanuatu (which was called New Hebrides when Osa and Martin Johnson visited back in the ‘20s). Not to look for cannibals, of course, but just to see the islands they saw, meet the descendants of the Chief Nihapat and the other islanders to see how life has changed for them in the last 90 years. And to tell stories about all of it.

I’m going to take a break for a few days while I travel to the South Pacific. We’ll begin our adventure reliving the journey of Osa and Martin Johnson next Monday. In the meantime, if you’ve got a story of your own to tell, a place you’d like me to visit, please write me at david@davidlansing.com. Not all of my travels will come from your suggestions (after all, I still have lots of places I want to go for my own reasons), but if I get a good story, who knows, I may pick that destination next. Maybe it will be your adventure. Why not?