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Rite of Passage: Tales of Backpacking 'Round Europe

Edited by Lisa Johnson

Lonely Planet Publications

199 pages, $22.95

It's an initiation into adulthood that many North Americans have long seen not only as a rite but as a right: the right, specifically, to amble through a bit of freedom thousands of miles from mom and dad, and far away from the inevitable job interview that will soon enough seal them into a much less exotic adulthood. In Rite of Passage, the people who publish the Lonely Planet travel guides have gathered together several dozen short pieces, mostly by American writers, that aim to capture the backpacking experience. And in general they've achieved their aim, covering not only a wide range of locales but also the grand expanse of preconceptions, experiences and personalities that make up that travel byproduct called culture shock.

Some of the funniest stuff here plays to themes that seem embedded in the Euro-tour script, no matter the particular era or players involved. In a piece called Can You Find the Flusher?, Roberta Beach Jacobson ponders the inevitable challenges posed by distinct national systems of waste disposal. Her bottom-line advice, written after getting lost in the depths of a German toilet cubicle: "Don't panic, just explore. You'll get it."

In a related piece, a writer named Dave Fox expounds on the mysteries of public-sauna etiquette in a tone of perfectly perplexed angst: Wanting to look hip, and figuring Scandinavians are liberal, he sits naked and alone, trying to unwind in a Helsinki spa. But in fact, he's not unwinding at all, instead fretting over "the possibility of an innocent Finnish granny entering upon my inappropriate state of undress."

Anyone who has ever secretly disdained American arrogance in Europe (even while grudgingly acknowledging that some Canadians can be just as bad) will appreciate stories such as the one of the ESL teacher who carries around pictures of the Empire State Building to wow the crowds, and who is haughtily shocked when turned away from teacher's lodgings to which she shows up three days ahead of schedule. "Tonar!" she keeps yelling at her landlady -- "Teacher!" -- as if she were an American liberator who should be greeted only with warm hugs, regardless of her obvious rudeness in arriving early and unannounced.

Arrogance of another sort pervades a piece by Sarah Goodwin, who -- like so many travellers, of whatever tax bracket or national origin -- sees herself as one of the select few capable of enjoying a destination's less-touristy local charms. "[T]hey preferred the places that the tourists went to," she writes derisively of her Paris dormitory mates, "the Eiffel Tower or Champs-Elysées. I was searching for the perfect smoky jazz club with no signs, the hangings of obscure artists' work, the little restaurant off the Seine with a Breton grandmother preparing scrumptious crepes." Yeah, like, who isn't?

Despite such grating snapshots, this collection sometimes offers writing that rises close to the level of literature. In one of the strongest stories, entitled A Longing for Union, Mary Ann Larkin poetically describes the start of a friendship in a café in poverty-plagued Bulgaria, where "the air is thick with cigarette smoke and the leashed energy of men's voices," as a waitress "hurries among them, a nurse tending a ward of feverish, wounded men who have decided they have little to lose."

Rite of Passage even offers some poetry in the literal sense. Describing a night in Venice that clearly swept her off her feet, Marjorie Maddox writes: "An old man asks me to dance, then tips his tattered sailor's cap. I step twice to each of his twirls as his English, his Italian, his wine all slur to a song he once heard at a local café . . ."

Now that's the kind of amore that only Italy can offer.

Such lyrical writing may seem a touch rhapsodic to anyone who missed the backpacking experience, or for whom it is now only a misty memory. But such passages, and this collection as a whole, are also a quiet reminder that schlepping across Europe has always been about more than simply experiencing the exotic. As co-ordinating author Vivke Waglé puts it in the book's introduction, the grand trek is also about becoming "charming, alluring adventurers from a faraway place" -- hoping, if only for a while, to be exotic ourselves, before settling down to lives of apparently more importance.