Jan Westmaas, old school humanist, linguist, teacher and traveller extraordinaire has self-published Out of the Box–what he calls "tales of travels," a collection of some 57 travel articles written over a period of 40 years (1972-2013).
However, at the risk of contradicting one of my oldest friends in Trinidad and certainly my very first guide to local topography and culture, his travelogue combine in a genre defying oeuvre: part family history and personal anecdotes; part socio-cultural, historico-political analysis of the Caribbean, Central and Latin America; geographical and archaeological reference to the same, with forays across the Atlantic to west, central and east Europe, north and south Africa.
For those with neither the time, money, nor inclination to leave the comfort of home, Out of the Box will satisfy the most sedentary of wanderlusts.
The book, with its plethora of photos, maps and hand-drawn illustrations (by fellow traveller and Art teacher Andre Reyes) is as visually attractive as its text is informative and entertaining.
Jan mentions en passant that he abandoned a career in journalism (after a brief stint at the T&T Guardian in the early 1970s) to return to language teaching. His reader-friendly, conversational style makes his wide-ranging content and commentary easily accessible–necessary criteria for the best in travel, rather than tourist writing.
Similarly after studying law at Aberystwyth University in Wales from 1983-6, he rejected the lucrative career of a Trinidad attorney to return to what must have been his true vocation: teaching Spanish and French.
But Jan is not your regular secondary school language teacher, content to instruct the obstreperous and indifferent in verb conjugations and the tortures of desiccated grammar.
Language is as organic as music, constantly shifting to meet the demands of time, place and user. It's virtually impossible to teach a foreign language solely in the classroom, out of its own unique context.
Speaking, rather than writing, a language, requires engagement with the native environment.
So for Jan the teacher, it made perfect sense to extend the hitchhiking travels of his youth, and many of the articles reproduced in his book are records of trips he began organising initially for his own pupils and then for schools throughout Trinidad.
The Grand Tour of Europe undertaken by the young and wealthy after a graduating from university from the 17th century onwards, encouraged language acquisition along with exposure to the artefacts of Ancient Greece and Rome, the cornerstones of western civilisation. The premise behind the tour being that travel is the best education possible.
Jan is an egalitarian, rather than an elitist like those Euro Grand tourists of the past, but he's still young at heart.
Writing in 2009 about a tour of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands he recalled his first trip to Ecuador on his honeymoon in 1974: "I was just thrilled to leave our familiar, predictable and narrow-minded twin-island cocoon and venture to somewhere larger, more challenging and most of all, vastly different."
His entire book breathes with the thrill and adventure of travel in a never-get-old style, capturing some of what the students and later the retirees he led on tours would have experienced: the exhilaration of the unknown; the encounters with peoples and places, time past and present, which makes travel such a holistic education.
While the title he's chosen for his genre-defying book may initially seem hackneyed, his explanation for his choice is not: "Even as a teenager, I always felt that the island of my birth was a box that ever so often I would have to jump out of in order to experience what lay beyond."
He speculates that his wanderlust may well have been a genetic affair. His seafaring Afghan maternal grandfather sailed first to Brazil and then onto Trinidad where he met and married a descendant of East Indian indentured labourers; one of the daughters of this union married a descendant of Dutch Creole planters and colonists.
Given the Caribbean truism that "Everyone (bar the indigenous survivors) comes from somewhere else," Out of the Box functions as a continuing family travelogue, beginning with Jan's hitchhiking tours of Europe, while still a student at UWI and ending with his daughter Nadia's nostalgic account of revisiting the village in Wales where she spent three childhood years.
For romantics, and true travellers are all romantics, there's the account of Jan and wife Christine's 1974 lunamiel (honeymoon) tour of Latin America.
Jan's tales will appeal to readers anywhere but from a Trinidadian perspective they do much to introduce us small islanders to the South American mainland, which we are so close to and yet so far removed from.
His insights into the ancient civilisations–Olmec, Kiminaljuya, Izapan, Toltec, Maya, Aztec, Inca–is a salutary reminder that civilisation is not simply a western concept and that there is much for us still to learn about our western hemispheric antecedents.
?Photos of pyramids and mountain cities bring us marvels of engineering, maths and astronomy, which modern physics cannot explain.
Romantic as he is, Jan has the enquiring eye of the participant observer sociologist/ethnographer.
He's not beyond critical observation and gives a voice to contemporary issues such as the sexploitation which sadly is a very real aspect of tourism in the region.
Researching the Mayan culture in the crime-ridden Yucatan peninsula he meets a young Mexican woman with her own explanation: "She blamed wealthy American women who came south of the border to play out their sexual fantasies with tall, dark Mexican strangers. She said that very often they ended up being raped and robbed."
When visiting Cuba, which has occupied such an important place both in realpolitik and revolutionary imaginary, he's honest enough to record his misgivings: "I wonder what Che would say of the Cuba today: 'Can't you see the dream's gone sour?' my alter ego intones.
"I'm trapped between an absolutely delightful vacation...and a compulsion to get to the ugly truth...I'm torn between romance and cynicism.
My mind turns to my conversation with a retired army captain whose pension can't even buy him a decent pair of shoes to replace the shredded ones he wears."
For Caribbean readers the accounts of his travels across the Iberian peninsula, will be especially relevant, once again allowing vicarious insights into the people and cultures responsible for initiating the New World project.
But for any reader, Out of the Box will provide a cornucopia of information, stories of ordinary and extraordinary lives and the marvels, natural and man-made of the planet.
This is a book you'll never finish reading, or returning to, as travelling with Jan succeeds in allowing us to be wherever he was, to experience the sights, sounds, smells, highs and lows of the human condition. Just as Beyond A Boundary is about much more than cricket, Out of the Box is about much more than travel.
Out of the Box is available at most bookshops in T&T.
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