It sounds like a voice-mail message: "I'm away from my desk. Please leave a message and I'll get back to you." Don't wait for a return call, though; grab this book and find out what happened far away from that desk.

Rif K. Haffar had a good job for a tech firm but out of the blue, a management shakeup forced him to take early retirement. A lifelong traveler, he decided to use his free time by taking a round-the-world motorcycle trip with his girlfriend Tracy L. Cigarski; her photos illustrate Away from My Desk. Their tour took them through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and South America, with North America serving only as a jumping-off point and ultimate destination. Various difficulties (such as their inability to extricate their motorcycle from the Bombay customs office) led to parts of the trip being motorcycle-less but they persevered. Their trip took almost a year; in a few places they stayed with friends and family but for the most part they were on their own.

Any armchair traveler will enjoy this book and real travelers will doubtless find that it provokes memories of their own past trips. Although Away from My Desk does not pretend to be a "how to travel" guide, those who are researching their own future trips will find plenty of tips here. Haffar does an excellent job of balancing the facts of where they went and what they saw with the more subjective part of how they felt about it. He is also good at summing up the historical and social context of a building or a city in a concise way. Lest this sound too bland, Haffar's sense of humor enlivens things. Although he sometimes sounds sarcastic, most of the time his humor is enjoyable and he is as likely to poke fun at himself as anything else. By its nature, any extended journey will have its share of absurd moments and Haffar relates them well. Like the best of traveling companions, he relishes the high points and slogs through the low points while taking the latter in stride.

One interesting aspect of Away from My Desk is its visits to countries that are off the beaten track. Sure, the stay in Australia is a lot of fun (especially the guide to Australian pronunciation), but Laos is another, much less-known stop on the itinerary that offers its own rewards. The itinerary covers major landmarks such as the Taj Mahal and Hagia Sophia, but Haffar believes in getting away from tourist traps whenever possible. The narrative is in the form of a travel journal, which led to my saying, "Just one more chapter," every time I attempted to put the book down.

If one was in a mood to quibble, one could note that a better editing job would've removed sentence fragments and the like in the narrative. On the other hand, I'm usually a stickler for these things but before long I was enjoying the story so much that I didn't care about them. The casual style reinforces the impression that the reader is listening to travel stories and Haffar's references to his previous trips add to that effect. The black and white photos could be bigger, but this would've taken space away from the story and the images are not difficult to make out. One quirk is that the photo captions were not set like the rest of the text but apparently scanned in as part of the images and therefore are fainter than the body of the text, though still legible.

It doesn't matter whether you dream of getting away from your desk or you have already trodden that path. Away from My Desk is a terrific travelogue.

[ by Jennifer Hanson ]
Rambles: 16 November 2002