Ayun Halliday, author of independent "zine The East Village Inky and The Big Rumpus, a guide to modern mothering, appeared at Atomic Books in Hampden last Friday to give the first in a tour of book readings promoting her latest effort, No Touch Monkey.
Halliday says that when her publisher gave her pressure to come up with a second book, she pitched the idea for a travel memoir thinking they would pass on it. She was wrong. Soon she found herself leafing through old journals she had kept while on the global trail -- dating from the Fall of 1987 at the earliest -- in order to cull material for No Touch Monkey. "I didn't keep my journals as well as I thought," says Halliday, "Sometimes, I just could not have been bothered to write down the name of the damn hotel."
Halliday grew up in Zionsville, Ind. and soon found her self traveling around the world with a theatre degree from Northwestern University, a few changes of clothes, a traveling companion in tow and not much else.
Throughout No Touch Monkey, the earnest Midwesterner in her constantly places her in the most harrowing of situations and then shines through to get her out of them.
For example, on a train on her way to help with the democratic elections in Cambodia, Halliday is informed by an uppity Italian man that U.N. workers themselves are not helping with the elections because, "The Khmer Rouge does not discriminate! They kill everyone equally!" Unfazed by his glee in bursting her bubble of goodwill, she turns to a Thai monk of Dutch descent, sitting across the aisle and procures an invitation to stay at his beachside dwelling for as long as she pleases.
But try as she may to be a savvy world-traveler, Halliday manages to insert herself into a number of comedic mishaps ranging from simple language barrier misunderstandings at a Kashmiri bag inspection checkpoint, ("They're for ladies," she explains to the guards, "bleeding ladies,") to a full-on physical attack inflicted by a madam in Amsterdam's Red Light District.
It's so excruciatingly perfect it's almost as if, somewhere in the back of her head, Halliday knew these journeys would make the basis of a great travel book someday and took pratfalls along the way just for the entertainment of her future readers. But this stuff is too good to be made up. Who else would get motion sickness from riding camels in the desert, get all of her worldly possessions stolen while deep in meditation on a South Pacific beach, or dislocate her old trick-knee miles away from modern medicine?.
Most adventures like Halliday's wouldn't happen if you stayed at the Ritz, and the number of snafus she finds herself ensnared in is directly proportional to the high level of adventures she seeks.
Indeed, throughout the book, Halliday constantly yearns to break out of the bland banana pancake eating, photo snapping world of the backpacker tourist in favor of seeking the "authentic" experience. In one particularly hilarious case, she finds herself crawling across a ravine bridged only by a felled log, deep in the nighttime Monkey Forest of Ubud, Bali on her way to a rumored local wedding -- only to be faced down by a pack of the wild dogs. In such pursuits, it becomes clear that, to Halliday, good stories to tell back home are the real souvenirs of any trip. If that's true, she should consider herself the proud owner of a world class souvenir collection.
Halliday's experience in subsisting on a shoestring travel budget is not only the source of endless campfire stories, but is also the fount of lots of useful advice like: always bring a stash of plastic bags to separate clean clothes from dirty clothes.
But more than anything else, No Touch Monkey paints a guide of what not to do when traveling. For example, don't buy marijuana cigarettes from Vietnamese hustler children. Halliday and her future husband at the time did, and found themselves prostrate on their beds tripping in frightening Apocalypse Now proportions.
Halliday isn't afraid to delve into the Cond?? Nast-y side of traveling either, and offers colorful commentary on the less desirable, but inevitable, facts of itinerant life. Gastrointestinal disorders factor in heavily, as do various accounts of body odor. I think "rank as goats" was my favorite descriptive metaphor for the stench that Halliday explains is characteristic of any cash-poor backpacker traversing Eurail's shower sparse landscape.
Yet the greatest lesson Halliday teaches is nothing of the practical Boy Scout nature like -- always boil one's water before drinking it -- it's that it's OK to laugh at yourself. Her ability to poke fun and give herself up to the gods of travel makes you want to hop on the first trans-Atlantic flight outta Dodge and go collect your own tales of travel triumphs and blunders.
Meanwhile, Halliday hopes that one day, dog-eared copies of No Touch Monkey will be passed around youth hostels around the globe the way Lonely Planet guidebooks are today. One thing's for sure, her warmth and wit makes the planet a little less lonely for travelers everywhere and is sure to bring good companionship to every dusty world wanderer along the way.
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