The first time Kami Kanetsuka travelled by herself, it was not intentional.
She and some friends had arranged to meet at the train station in London, England, to start their journey to France. When she got to the station, her friends weren’t there. Since cellphones were the stuff of science fiction, she simply shrugged her shoulders and got on the train anyway. She was 17.
The second time she was 21 and bound for Israel in “a very cheap — in vogue, mind you — ship that went from Venice to Haifa.”
In hindsight she realized she should have gone to a kibbutz; instead she got an office job in old Tel Aviv and hated it. When she decided to quit and take the return trip back to Venice, there was a slight complication: the ship had sunk.
She met an American woman who wanted to go to Italy so they ended up travelling to Rome, where young Kami got a job looking after the children of a tremendously wealthy aristocratic family. “I’d never even babysat before.”
Despite the lavish surroundings, the work conditions were less than desirable so she went to work for a woman who had just left her husband and then….
Thus begins what Kanetsuka describes as a peripatetic life of “adventures.”
It’s also what makes her a perfect contributor to Caitlin Press’s new book, This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone. Her chapter — What Am I Doing Here? — describes one of those adventures in Nagaland, India, the tribal state of former headhunters.
“I’m much better on the road than dealing with things here,” she says, sitting under the shade of a tree on Bowen Island, where she’s based her life for the past several years. “I’m scared of heights, I don’t swim, but travel and trying something new has never scared me.
“I’ve always wanted something different,” says the woman who has slept under the stars in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, backpacked through India, been changed forever by living five years in Nepal, accepted invitations from strangers and been able to deal with unwelcome advances from men with a shriek or slap across the face. (Not surprisingly, she’s writing her memoirs.)
In her heart, she is still the young woman who felt that England “was too small for me” but now that she’s in her seventies, she’s faced with a new reality: even though in many ways it’s far easier to get to any corner of the world, travel is much more complicated than it was when she kept opting for the road less taken.
Her advice to solo travellers used to include hints on how to pack light and save money. She’d tell the story about a farmer in Afghanistan who came across Kanetsuka and her female travelling companions and locked them in a shed before taking them back to his village. “Everyone filed in to take a look at us. I don’t remember feeling fear because he was very nice to us.”
In today’s world, however, she says only the very naïve think they don’t have to plan or be careful about where they venture, which deeply saddens her. “I can’t relate to modern-day times, the stories and the wars. You’re seeing the worst of people today but in those days you saw generosity. People always wanted to open their doors and feed us. It’s always confusing to me because you know most people are really kind deep down.”
Nonetheless, she says, it’s vitally important that wherever you go, you respect the mores of the country you’re visiting. “You can’t want to impose your own culture on a country,” she says. i.e. Don’t take nude photographs of yourself atop a sacred mountain in Malaysia.
This doesn’t mean people should stop venturing outside of tourist areas or their own comfort zones.
“Just go,” she says to people who want to get into another country’s skin. Life will always give you lots of reasons not to travel but it’s important to listen to your heart. “If you have the feeling to go, it’s something you must do.”
This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone is available at either Phoenix or the Bowen Island Library.
