1: Natnats, hot sun, and dangerous men.
Four corners is a tale of a 24 year old woman's journey across Papua New Guinea. Her experience makes for a wonderful read, but she overworks the "finding herself" bit. Despite the self obsessive and all too frequent maudlin tangents, Salak writes in tight prose that grips the reader early in the book and doesn't let go until the second to last chapter (the last chapter is so sappy it brought the entire book from a solid 5 stars to a 4. It nearly morphed the read from high adventure to a "chick" book).
Despite the nearly manic determination it took to make the journey, Salak is quick to acknowledge the help she got from others. There is very little chest thumping and unlike so many other adventure writers, she never claims to have "conquered" the island. Much of the writing is about the nature of the people she comes in contact with and I finished the book feeling like I had been personally touched by the peoples of PNG. I am grateful for her story and ordered a hard bound version to last another reading before passing it on to my daughter.
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5: A harrowing journey of self-discovery
A compulsive traveler to remote and dangerous places, Kira Salak is on a journey of self-discovery. The trouble is, she keeps making the same mistakes. Intent on proving that she, a young, single woman, can go anywhere she pleases, she keeps setting the bar higher.In Africa, 1992, age 20, she decides to cross war-torn Mozambique on the lawless, mine-riddled road known as the Bone Yard Stretch. Natives and tourists alike point out the dangers, but Salak convinces a reluctant trucker to take her. A former runner with Olympic aspirations, when the inevitable happens Salak manages to escape her captors. "No one knows where I am....If I died here no one would ever know." Guilt stricken, she realizes that her "self-indulgent, foolish trip" has probably cost the lives of the men whose need for money induced them to risk bringing her. Several years later, Salak is bound for Papua New Guinea with a vague plan to "get from the south to the north of the country via the major rivers." Or, as she explains to a fellow traveler, "Actually, I have no idea what I'm going to be doing. I'm just going to wing it as I go." Again, no one knows where she is and all advice falls on deaf ears. "The only rule I try to follow religiously in life is not to listen to most people." And I suspect the "most" was an editing afterthought. But Salak grows on you. The child of Ayn Rand fanatics, she struggles to overcome a loveless childhood through self reliance and searches for epiphany through ordeal. And she gets plenty of that, from guides who take her money and strand her in the jungle to hordes of mosquitoes, armies of roaches and plagues of leeches. She nearly repeats her Mozambique experience on a trek to a camp of refugees from Irian Jaya (invaded by Indonesia), suffers serious sunstroke after a harrowing jungle trek, gets lost on land and water and meets an amazing variety of kind and vicious people, native and foreign. This is a colorful odyssey by a quirky narrator who both exasperates and inspires.
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