The Last Tourist by Nowick Gray - Book Tour
Travel, Memoir
Date Published December 2020
Publisher: Cougar WebWorks
Midlife crisis, his life’s dreams at an early end, it was time to bust out and see the world.
Nowick Gray sets out with backpack and drum to find out what he’s been missing. Tropical warmth, better health, inner peace… He scours Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Latin America for that perfect beach, a new tribe, a winter home. Will ayahuasca heal his woes, or an ayurvedic cleanse? Beset by desperate touts on an abandoned Bali shore, he knows he’s a dying breed: the last tourist.
With this fourth book in the My Country series, Nowick’s travels extend across the globe, caught in fresh prose reminiscent of Chatwin, Grant, Iyer, Matthiessen, Gilbert, Theroux. His creative nonfiction “shows the reader all the ways in which one can perceive, digest, and make sense of the world.” With “language that is superb: detailed yet economical; vivid and appealing,” The Last Tourist invites you to join an intrepid traveler “in the midst of the action as if walking alongside.”
Excerpt
Part I – Paradise Lost and Found
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been.
Travelers don’t know where they’re going.
— Paul Theroux, The Happy
Isles of Oceania
Hawai’i: Gateway to the Tropics
Return to Paradise (1998)
Fourteen-year-old Nashira and I are en
route to Hawaii; our first trip outside of continental North America. The most
trying part of the journey is already behind us. It’s winter in the British
Columbia mountains, and the Castlegar airport was socked in, so our initial
flight was canceled. The airline offered to bus us instead, but by a roundabout
route that would have arrived too late for our early-morning flight from
Vancouver to Kauai. So we piled back into our pickup truck at four o’clock,
with a twelve-hour window to complete what normally is an eight-hour trip to
the coast. We would need that cushion, encountering snow in all three passes.
Nashira took it all like a trooper. We
lifted our spirits with stops every hour and a half: more gas, a stretch, snacks,
new music tapes to keep us rolling. But it was a grueling trip, with slippery
pavement and poor visibility: faint clues of tracks on the snowy highway ahead,
with only glimpses of a center or side line here or there; heavy clumps icing
the windshield wipers; a pair of red lights to follow when I was lucky.
Manning Park in silence was a snowy,
treacherous dream, forcing me to be calm, relaxed, attentive. I followed the
lights of one car most of the way through, coasting in soft communion behind
it, pacing my distance, breathing, sweating lightly, coming finally to a
peaceful revelation of being home again, truly at home, on the road. In that
breathing space of acceptance expanding suddenly to all of my world, wherever I
now would move, my center would come with me, a home mobile and live and
adaptable to any contingency. Facing death on every curve, with every passing
truck a whisper away, I knew that in that calmness and steady awareness is the
power to protect, to guide, to hold the life force in sacred responsibility.
Snow turned to rain as we approached the
coast, but there were more challenges to come. In Abbotsford the wind buffeted
the truck and it was hard to hold it steady on the road. Through the outlying
areas of Vancouver, hazard lights were flashing with this or that minor
disaster everywhere: a tree across the left lane of the Trans-Canada Highway
that we almost hit, blinded by the warning lights; an overturned vehicle at a
dead-end crossroads where I took a wrong turn to the airport near Langley; a
taped-off area of several blocks in Vancouver; another tree blocking both lanes
of the Trans-Canada eastbound; another blinding repair light; whole sections of
the city darkened with a power outage (affecting 200,000 people, we heard
later). The plane even now, two and a half hours after takeoff, is rocking
through 200 km/hr winds.
About the Author
Nowick Gray makes his home on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he writes fiction and creative nonfiction. A frequent contributor to The New Agora online magazine, Nowick also works as a freelance copyeditor. When not engaged with words, he enjoys hiking, kayaking, and playing African drums. In winter months, if not seeking unspoiled tropical locations, he settles for cozy hibernation at home.
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