Review of Chasing Africa: Fear Won’t Find Me Here -A Memoir
By Lisa Duncan
Published by Rocky Mountain Books (October 2022)
9781771605816-trade paperback   Also available as an e-book.

 

Originally published in the Fall 2022 BC Bookworld magazine.



Lisa Duncan’s memoir shows us the lifelong value of the Grand Adventure we chose when we were young. Our travels can be our escape hatches, our tickets to places where we can be whoever we want to be in the company of strangers. Like Duncan, we’ll learn lessons, harsh and hurtful as well as gloriously life-affirming,  lessons we have the rest of our lives to comprehend and to write about, if we so choose. If life favours us with good health, we may travel again. We’ll know what to pack and we’ll learn what emotional baggage to leave behind too.

 As readers, we can be grateful to have had armchair African adventures along with Duncan’s 24 year old self in 1996 but also, we’ll have been spared her difficult family history. What are the odds, in a family of six, for one member, the father, being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in his late fifties and another, a brother in his early twenties learning he has primary progressive multiple sclerosis? There is no known genetic link between these diseases and the father, an angry man, suffers from depression too. The author’s mother, a Dutch immigrant and briefly a free spirit in her own youth, became a a devoted caregiver to both men while in her early sixties.

Youngest-born of the four siblings, the author knew she wanted to travel so, with her mother’s blessing, she flew to Japan to study the language for a year when she was only seventeen. Among other jobs, she worked as a bilingual clerk at Vancouver Airport’s foreign exchange wicket. She attended UBC to study art history for her bachelor’s degree which her father, unable to further his own post-secondary education, scoffed at. But Duncan inherited her mother’s talent with languages as well as a strong and healthy body. She went on to teach Japanese as a second language and also visual arts history for several decades before earning her Masters in environmental education.

Where her life became most sadly conflicted was when she discovered rock climbing. She could not bear to share her passion for being outdoors and up high in the mountains with her brother and her father trapped in their deteriorating bodies or her mother trapped in the never-ending work as their care-giver. Guilt and self-censorship kicked in, guilt for having that strong and healthy body and an increasingly independent mind.

The maternal Dutch side of her family had settled on four different continents, one of which was Africa. Her long-standing dream of travelling to Africa took hold as a child, twirling the  globe to find her far-flung cousins. She began saving for her dream trip and she had the confidence to travel solo after her Japanese experience, and knowing she would meet her family in Johannesburg to begin with. She pored over guide books in the pre-Google era and carefully picked her must-see and-do destinations given her time frame, three and a half months, and a backpacker’s budget.

Lisa Duncan writes like a painter and brings her trained eye to every landscape, looking down at the view from her airplane window of the Zambezi River gleaming far below or up at the red dunes of Namibia in the early morning sun. She kept a travel diary and brings a charged immediacy to all the sights, smells, and sounds as she takes us with her in a cramped Volkswagen with no air-conditioning in 40 C heat. Or on the same Zambezi River in an inflatable kayak, having water fights with her fellow paddlers while keeping an eye out for lethal hippos and crocodiles. She loves meeting people and exploring the land and water, the spice-scented roads of Zanzibar or swimming across Lake Malawi to another island -and sensibly taking a boat ride back again.

The serendipity of backpacker travel, those magical moments which stay in the mind’s eye forever, are wonderfully presented here. Singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ to children while waiting hours for a bus to arrive is just one such moment. Yes, of course there are the skilled pickpockets, the romantic infatuations, the dysentery (a guaranteed romance killer), and the frustrations of dealing with bureaucracies but also the sheer happiness of meeting kind and generous locals and fellow travellers.

Even if your own mind and body no longer tolerate overnight twelve hour bus rides or long hikes down unlit roads to find a campground in the pouring rain, you can still enjoy the thrills of intrepid and thoughtful adventurers like Lisa Duncan.

Lisa Duncan now lives with her family in Squamish where she loves to hike, cycle, paddle and write. She has travelled widely, often on long-distance bicycle adventures.