I have been invited to go to a writing retreat in Crete next month. I was really excited until I read that the participants were to bring several “totems” of importance with them. Totems. Totems? Panic.

Just in case I was jumping to conclusions about New Age wank, or clan of the bare bears stuff, I looked up “totem” in every dictionary and reference book imaginable. I was right. This is not my bag, though I know that there are people who LOVE this sort of thing. It just isn’t how I work. 

It reminds me of exercises I faked my way through in theatre school decades ago. But I’m a grown-up now. So instead of pretending that I have totems, I contacted the two fabulous poets running the retreat and said, “Look, I don’t do totems. I don’t have them. Years ago I’d have brought ben wa balls to the retreat and would have pretended they were important to me but I don’t actually own any.” I think I was the only person laughing about ben wa balls. I told them that I couldn’t be trusted to behave and wouldn’t be attending the totem talks or other show and tell sessions.

Of course then I started picturing the other participants with their pet rocks and old locks of hair tied in tartan ribbons - and I started to spend a lot of time thinking about if I had a totem, what would I bring? I considered my grandma’s ashes - that would be dramatic. But my grandma would have been annoyed by that - if she was alive and wasn’t just a pile of ashes.

And then it occurred to me that this was a wonderful excuse to get something I’ve wanted ever since I was a little girl - a shrunken head. And here he is - all the way from the Amazon - the totem to top the totem pole. That’s if I was going to the totem talks, but I’m not.

I’d like to bring him to Crete because I’m Olympic competitive. But there’s a problem. My shrunken head stinks. Not a little - I can smell him across the room which means a sniffer dog could smell him from another airport terminal. And I’d hate to lose my tsantsa before he’s had a chance to dictate his book to me. He says it’s called The Body. I told him Stephen King already wrote that. Now he’s sulking in his box. (I made that last bit up. If I was going to the totem talks, that would have been the sort of thing I’d have said, but I’m not going. I’ll be in my room finishing my next book.)

Ooooo, now I’m getting excited about going to Crete again - and I own a shrunken head. My hand smells. I’m going to go wash it now.

The team at Leap Local spent 17-hour days/nights for weeks developing Leap’s new website, and What on Earth?, our new travel magazine. This magazine isn’t a glossy brochure for fantasy and unrealistic dream trips, but revels in the hilarious, gritty, heart wrenching, stupid, maddening, culture clashing, wonderful adventures, and misadventures of travel. The launch issue contains the winning local guides & services and the winning travel stories from our competitions. And it has my own story, “Thou Shalt Not Snore”, about a diabolical night in Jordan, in the WTF (weird travel files) section of the magazine.

Yes, I’ve broken my own cycling record, even. I think there are glaciers that can move faster than me. I achieved a blistering speed (blisters to my bum that is) of 3.8 kilometres per hour climbing an off road track to a high plateau above Petra, while accompanied by one of Jordan’s fastest men, Anas, my mountain bike guide. I’m sure he regretted his words, “we have all day.” 

I’m pretty sure Raslan (Jordanian cycling champion and guide) had no idea how slow he could go until Terhaal (a Jordanian adventure tour operator) assigned him to me. Raslan now can boast a 4.7 kilometre per hour ascent outside Madaba and another near the Dead Sea. It’s tough to stay upright when you’re going that slow. I hope Jordan appreciates how I’ve helped train Raslan for his next event.

I had the massive honour of being asked to give a cover quote for the soon-to-be-released book, Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls. I was given a sneak peek of the cover art (still a work in progress) today and read my praise for this politically incorrect work of comic genius and thought, “It’s probably a good thing that Gary’s new book isn’t coming out until after my trip to the Middle East, as I wouldn’t want to have such an infamous association at a time when I’m going to be smuggling my grandmother’s remains while using a passport that has been red flagged by Canadian Immigration.”