En route to the beaches of Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, Shelley Buck encounters her first suicide shower. My husband is sick. En route to Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, we’ve driven all day from the Central Valley in an unfamiliar diesel four-wheel-drive vehicle and crossed to the Nicoya Peninsula over an uneven bridge built recently by […]
Entries Tagged as 'Shelley Buck'
The Goose Woman
March 27th, 2015 · No Comments · on foot
Sometimes a frequently-asked question creates a bridge between worlds, as Shelley Buck learns during a chance encounter in the Himalayan foothills. I’m on a hillside not far from the Tibetan refugee village in Northern India, climbing through the forest on the mountain’s flank on my way to somewhere, when I meet a tiny old woman […]
Tags: Himalayas·India·Shelley Buck
When Pigs Take Flight
January 31st, 2015 · 2 Comments · Road Less Travelled
Shelley Buck’s sudden introduction to recycling during her visit to Goa turns out to be unexpectedly intimate. By the time I arrive in Goa, my eyeballs are creamy again and my skin color’s no longer yellow, but I am still weak after the bout with food-borne hepatitis. A quiet stay in Goa—known for its broad […]
Tags: Goa·India·Shelley Buck
A Misadventure in Hat-Yai
September 27th, 2014 · No Comments · En Route
Border areas can bring surprises, as travel memoir writer Shelley Buck learns during an overnight stay near Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia. Our landlord is wailing and exclaiming. The porcelain sink, which was so proudly and tenuously attached to the wall of our hotel room, has tumbled and shattered. Lee and I had both just […]
Tags: Shelley Buck·Thailand
The Boomerang Travel Book
March 23rd, 2014 · 1 Comment · Books
As Shelley Buck sat down to write East: A Woman on the Road to Kathmandu, chance delivered an incredible surprise. In the year 2012, a strange thing happened. After finishing writing my first book and duly marching Floating Point to a series of readings and events, I turned to another I had meant to write […]
Tags: adventure·Afghanistan·California·East·Greece·hippie trail·India·Istanbul·Kathmandu·Paris·Shelley Buck
An Education in Greece
December 18th, 2013 · No Comments · Adventure, Travel Memoir
When Shelley Buck set out on her own in 1972, hoping to travel overland from Europe to India, she did not realize how resourceful she would need to become in order to make the trip. In this selection from her travel memoir, East: A Woman on the Road to Kathmandu, Shelley tells how she acquired […]
Tags: East·Greece·Shelley Buck
A Cowtown Hula
November 15th, 2011 · 1 Comment · Road Less Travelled, Time and Place
On a visit to Hawaii’s Big Island during a recent recession, Shelley Buck learns it’s not necessary to buy a luau show ticket in order to experience the hula. Forget the bare lava fields, palm trees, and rain forest. On a flattish area of the Big Island of Hawaii, just to the northwest of mist-shrouded […]
Tags: Hawaii·Shelley Buck
Swept Away in Felton, California
June 18th, 2011 · No Comments · Eating, travel near home
On Father’s Day, Shelley Buck discovers an exotic destination may sometimes lie quite close to home. “Write about a cultural stretch,” the instructor in my TEFL* program had told me, raising fantasies about dining on lamb’s eyes or chocolate-covered crickets at some exotic San Francisco eatery. But since it was Father’s Day, and the choice […]
Tags: California·Shelley Buck
Aloft on Google Earth
March 8th, 2011 · 5 Comments · Looking Homewards
You can go home again. I don’t very often. I wasn’t that fond of growing up in the boxy Washington, D.C. suburbs. When I was there, I was always burning to be somewhere else: India, Japan, Hawaii, Cambridge, (never New York, but that’s perhaps because I already had an aunt there and it was known […]
Tags: Google Earth·Shelley Buck
The Language of Boats
February 9th, 2011 · 1 Comment · Travel Memoir, travel near home
Shelley Buck had to tackle an ancient and very foreign language as she searched for a boat to live on. This excerpt is from her 2010 eBook, Floating Point, which chronicles her move to the water as a means to shorten an awful commute. The book is due out in paperback in 2011. “Go see […]