Lead Review (Repacking for Greece)
- Book: Repacking for Greece
- Location: Greece
- Author: Sally Jane Smith
As legions of travel influencers swarm the globe, packaging destinations into color coordinated IG posts of pristine beaches, luscious food, and luxury accommodations, some readers long for an authentic travel story. What’s it really like to explore an unfamiliar place and discover the rewards it holds for the attentive, solo traveler? This is what Sally Jane Smith delivers in her series Packing for Greece: Unpacking for Greece (vol 1) and Repacking for Greece ( vol 2)
The first book, Unpacking for Greece, is a quest as the author follows the Greek itinerary her mother took in the nineteen seventies. But it is also a story of transformation for Sally made the trip alone, hoping to conquer her fear of traveling by bus. Years earlier, she survived a deadly crash in Asia which left her with physical and psychological challenges to overcome.
Repacking for Greece tells the story of an accidental journey. She hadn’t intended to go to Greece at all, but to Canada. An unforeseen bureaucratic glitch forces her to change her plans – and thereby hangs a tale. That tale gives us a fascinating glimpse into other aspects of the author’s life. South African by birth, in high school, Sally Jane Smith was an activist against apartheid, like many other young people, and was arrested numerous times for attending pro- Mandela demonstrations . All this was ages ago. The protestors of that era are heralded now as heroic supporters of democracy.
To travel to Canada today, visitors must apply on line for an ETA visa, a simple procedure anyone can do. Before boarding a plane, you need to receive confirmation that your ETA has been approved. One of the questions on the application is “Have you ever been arrested?” To which she replied truthfully and clicked, expecting to receive an automatic confirmation. Instead, she found herself in one of the traveler’s worst nightmares. Entry Denied.
Before she could be approved, she would have to produce a mountain of court documents relating to all her past arrests. Many of those papers were packed away in dusty boxes, forgotten in old archives, relics of a regime discredited long ago. Still they had to be produced and this took weeks. Approval finally came through and all was resolved only after she had cancelled her trip to Canada and booked a flight to Greece, her spiritual home, and the place where she became a writer. Although this preamble doesn’t tell us much about Greece, it does tell us a lot about the author and about the role chance may play in the traveler’s life.
Repacking for Greece is less a memoir than a traveling companion. As you read it, you feel you are talking with a veteran traveler who knows the routes, the ways, the words—who can decipher bus schedules and find the best inexpensive accommodations, chats easily with taxi drivers, doesn’t mind if the food is less than stellar, and knows sometimes it’s best just to have a snack in your room, wash out your underwear in the sink, and go to bed early. But this companion is also someone who has studied the history of places in depth and can explain it in an engaging manner, providing personal insights, so that you want to go there too and see it for yourself. Her chapter on Aegina, and the sanctuary of Aphaia, whose name means “she who disappeared” is particularly intriguing. Although her tone is conversational, now and then we have flashes of the extraordinary.
As in Unpacking for Greece, we follow her trips to the power spots of ancient Greek culture, shrines, sanctuaries, ruins, still steeped in myth with which she connects in a personal way, weaving in details from her childhood or references from her favorite fiction. She pushes herself physically here, too, jumping over fences, picking her way along treacherous paths, descending dizzily into cisterns. “Aware I had left the tourist circuit behind, I knew that, if I fell, I might lie in the dark under the Bastion of Fokion until morning. At best.” Getting outside her comfort zone, some might call it –trying to absorb as much of the place and the experience as possible, as true travelers do. “Adventure,” she claims “is wherever you happen to find it.”
“Do you like walking?” asks the hotel receptionist, recommending a tough climb up to the sacred site of Paleochora on Aegina. This excursion will turn out to be one of Sally’s most “precious memories” of Greece. “I tell everyone,” the receptionist says, “But nobody goes.” This in itself is a telling difference between tourists and travelers.
If Unpacking for Greece was a quest to learn more about her mother by following a path eked out in a diary – Repacking for Greece pushes her forward into territory of her own. Sally Jane Smith shows us how through travel we reassemble fragments of ourselves and make ourselves new by opening to adventure— wherever accidents happen to take us.
LINDA LAPPIN
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