We think of the word "passion" in connection with something fiery, sensual, daring. It's a sort of full-tilt concept. And it's true that there are stories in A Woman's Passion for Travel by women who brave too-big river rapids, angry gorillas, or the Arctic wilderness.

But many stories in this latest Travelers' Tales opus are about homely connections made across seeming cultural chasms. While others are on the tour bus to view the ruins, these writers are gaining entry to the kitchen, ferreting out the women whose lives are lived behind curtains, seeking the hidden story. They become part of the family. They find, as Marybeth Bond does in "Guardians of the Dark," that there are women watching over them from the rooftops.

Where's the passion in that? In a very real sense, it is in the determination to step off the tour bus, to find the real heart of a culture. To risk the unknown by going where one's own cultural cues don't apply. To travel again and again as a means of exploring the unknown and unexpected outside of one's cultural borders.

Readers of A Woman's World, O'Reilly's bestselling and award-winning travel book, will find A Woman's Passion for Travel a fitting complement to the earlier collection. A Woman's Passion offers a broader mix of writers from more diverse cultures.

Who should read these stories? Women who travel. Women who dream of travel but are not yet ready to take the plunge. Women who long to be on the road again. And men. For just as these women gain a special knowledge of other women and, through them, their children and husbands, men who read their stories will gain an intimate glimpse into the inner world of the women in their own lives--the women who travel.

Marybeth Bond edited the first woman's book in the Traveler's Tales series, A Woman's World. She also authored Gutsy Women and Gutsy Mamas. Pamela Michael is editing the upcoming The Gift of Rivers for Travelers' Tales. A Woman's Passion for Travel is their second collaboration, the first being A Mother's World. Their comments here are woven together from separate interviews.

Allen:

A Woman's Passion for Travel continues in the tradition of A Woman's World. What was the motivation for doing a second book of these stories?

Bond:

Because women worldwide wrote to me saying they loved A Woman's World and asking, "When will you do a second edition?" [laughs] So here it is--more great narratives for women to identify with and to inspire them.

Travel offers more opportunities to change your life than perhaps any other human endeavor. We experience a tremendous increase in self-confidence, self-esteem, poise; we find greater intimacy with ourselves and with our travel partner, and with people we've met along the road. We experience more fearlessness, we become greater risk takers. We're better problem solvers, more adaptable and more flexible to our ever-changing world because, in travel, the circumstances are changing all the time. But most of all my books illustrate how travel teaches us about ourselves.

Michael:

We've had so many letters from women who were emboldened to take that first step out the door after reading a whole book of tales of women's adventures. Women from a variety of walks of life and age groups and cultures read these stories and think, this is something I could do, too.

Allen:

How might a book of travel stories by women be different from a non-gender-specific travel book?

Michael:

For one thing, travel literature historically has not highlighted women's travels. In the not-too-distant past, Alexandra David Neel had to disguise herself as a man in order to travel in parts of the world. Even now, women's lives are very different from men's. Consequently, women's travel experiences are quite different. I think, as a body of work, all assembled in one place, these stories really empower women.

Allen:

As a woman thinking about travel, I would have certain concerns that men don't necessarily have: Will I be safe? And what about cultural taboos women face in some countries?

Bond:

Women travel differently than men do. We're more concerned for our personal safety, so we're more tuned in to what's around us. From the moment we step out the door we're aware of the footsteps behind us, we're haunted by different fears. Often, that leads us to make more connections with people. When we travel we pause more to listen, to assimilate, to move in and out of the lives of those we meet on the way. Where women go, relationships follow; we make connections. And this book is about some of the very special relationships and connections that we make along the road and how these travels have changed us.

We make more connections with other people, especially women. We have one distinct advantage over men traveling: we can go almost anywhere in the world and look another woman in the eye and not be intimidated or intimidating. We have an instant connection with other women. And the average woman traveler is very responsive to people she meets along the way. She's interested in all the small details of their lives and the subtle nuances of their family lives, of their religious/economic backgrounds. She's very open to meeting new people. She learns a few words in the local language.

Michael:

Because of safety considerations, I think that travel is much more of an adventure for women. We tend to prepare more, partly because we have to. We have to know, for instance, if we're arriving at midnight in a town, is it safe for us to try to make our way from the train station to the hotel? We have to do a little bit of advance work that perhaps men don't do.

But this book is not just about women traveling solo. A lot of our stories are about women traveling in groups or with partners. There are reading groups traveling to Italy together and women traveling with spouses and with parents and children.

Allen:

In what other ways are women different in how they approach travel and maybe in the way that they talk about travel? What kinds of subjects appear in these stories that might not appear in stories by men?

Bond:

The inner world. Women talk about their fears and about the journey along the way. It's not conquering the mountain or even getting to the summit that's important, it's the people and the flora and the fauna that they see along the way and what kinds of experiences they have.

Michael:

I also think that women are natural storytellers, so they are interested in the stories of the places where they're going. They're interested in the culture and in the people and the art and the cooking. Not only do they explore those things more when they are on the road, but they often take the time in advance of leaving, which is where a book like A Woman's Passion for Travel comes in so handy--or any of the Travelers' Tale books, particularly destination ones--to give them a sense of that place in advance of going.

I think too that women often make more personal connections on the road with other women and that more lasting friendships develop. It's interesting because on the one hand women are constrained by safety and cultural taboos when traveling, but they also have a wonderful gift of being able to approach another woman without being murdered by her husband. [laughs] So women can connect with other women in a way that a man probably wouldn't with another man, and in a way that a man certainly wouldn't with another woman on the road. So women, under their "veil" of womanhood, are able to reach out to other women when traveling in a way that men aren't.

Allen:

I found from reading the book that I learned a lot about women in other parts of the world that I might not have learned otherwise. The other travel books I've read seem to focus on more external kinds of things--where to eat, where to find art, where to find entertainment, but not a whole lot on family life--which is, afterall, the backbone of a culture.

Michael:

There's a real cultural richness that I think comes through in our book. And part of that is that women are able to go into people's homes in a way that men aren't--because in many cultures, women can't be seen by men outside their families.

Allen:

There's a great deal here about the smaller aspects of people's lives, family stuff. I find it fascinating.

Bond:

Yes, the tiny details of daily life. We like to go into a kitchen with another woman, see how she's organized it, how she feeds her family, how she makes the basics. And that's where connections are made woman-to-woman.

Allen:

What did you find particularly challenging about putting this group of stories together?

Michael:

One challenge was including stories that are not necessarily upbeat, without scaring women into thinking that traveling is too risky to take on. Travel is not just about how lovely your trip was, but also perhaps about the time that you were alone in the back alley and a man came out of the shadows and how you reacted.

Also, we really worked very hard with this book to include a broader cultural mix of writers, and along with that goes age differences. We really wanted it to be more diverse. Very few travel anthologies do that.

Allen:

Tell us about some of the authors.

Michael:

One of the wonderful things about doing this anthology, I think, was giving voices to women who had not been published before, along with some of the most well-known and respected women writers around.

Marilyn Lutzger ("Bathing Suit Anxiety") is an interesting example. She's a retired librarian I met at a writers' conference where I was teaching. She's maybe in her early 60s and has only recently begun to write about her travel experiences. She came up to me after the class and said, "You know, I have this story that I wrote about wearing a bathing suit in public in a spa in Iceland--would you be interested in it?" I thought it fit. I mean, body image is such a major issue for so many women, [laughs] and one dear to my own heart as well.

Allen:

A Woman's Passion for Travel includes quite a few writers in their sixties and older.

Bond:

Yes, senior women are taking to the road in greater and greater numbers. With a friend, a sister, a daughter, or alone.

Many of the women whose stories are in A Woman's Passion for Travel discuss personal journeys--there are journeys of discovery, of inner reflection. The inner journey is just as important as the outer journey, and women's writing is infused with feeling, emotion, honesty. So women do write differently about their experiences than men and, hence, women like to read what other women have had to say because they identify with it so clearly.

Virginia Barton Brownbeck ("Unpaved Roads") is a role model for me. She began traveling in her late 50s. Now, twenty years later (at 76), she told me she knew she'd had a rich life, she had children, she had romances, she'd gone back to school. But she told me that the excitement that she had in traveling throughout the Third World alone equals any of the rest. She's a writer, a photographer, an amazing woman. I love the beginning of her story because it tells how she had gotten into kind of a grandmommy role. She said she had to get her hands out of the diaper bag and into the backpack again.

We all pass through those moments where we feel a little stuck. It's a very comfortable rut, but the only difference between the rut and the grave is the depth of it. Virginia came out of a marriage and started traveling later in life and hasn't stopped. I want to be like these women. In A Woman's Passion, we share these gutsy women's stories and they empower me.

Allen:

I sense that travel can be a rite of passage.

Bond:

Yes, and the passage often is after a divorce or when the kids have finally left the house--now, what am I going to do for me? Where do I go from here? I wasn't kidding when I said travel offers more opportunities to change your life than any other human endeavor because it gives you the distance, the perspective; you do more than get away from the daily pressures, relax, or see the sights. Travel offers much more than that, and I think that when women tap into this it gives us a time to get in touch with the strength that's deep down inside at the core, but also to make decisions to reinvent ourselves, and women do reinvent themselves many times during their lives.

And that's why it's so good to have those stories by mature women, to show that you can do really marvelous things at any age. I think that what the book tells us, the subliminal message, is that you can begin at any age to travel in any way, whether it's alone, with a group, on adventure trips, your first risk taking, or your first time out after raising children and overcoming that fear again.

Allen:

How did your background prepare you for your role as editor of these books?

Bond:

Well, I've been a travel editor for a magazine, I've written two travel books, and edited two travel anthologies prior to A Woman's Passion for Travel. I understand travel and travel writing because I have been immersed in both for decades. I have been blessed with opportunities to experience life in 57 countries through six continents.

I have lived overseas in Europe and the South Pacific for five years. I've traveled alone; I've traveled with men, with women, my children, and my mother. I've been lonely; I've been penniless; I've traveled on a shoestring; and I've traveled in the luxury of a palace on wheels in India.

Travel has changed my life. I met my future husband, a fellow trekker, while traveling in Kathmandu. I changed my career, leaving the high tech computer world where I worked for Xerox, Honeywell, and the United Nations, to become a travel writer and speaker. I'm now more challenged, fulfilled, and happy than I ever imagined possible.

When I'm not writing, I'm speaking and listening. I've lectured internationally for over ten years about risk taking, success, and travel. And I've been listening to women for decades, on long train rides through Europe, on bus rides across Asia, in the ladies' compartment in the train in India for 72 hours. I've been listening to women's stories of why they travel, what their motives are, and what they get out of it, and I want to share that. My mission, my purpose is to share women's stories because, as I said earlier, when we share our stories we share our strengths.

And perhaps that's why my story in this book is about feeling vulerable. My story is about traveling with my daughters and wanting to share the world with them. Yet there's the old fear: will we be safe, and can I do this? And that is the core of the book: no matter how gutsy we are, we aren't that way all the time. Even the most unassuming woman can learn to be a gutsy traveler. I really believe that because I have witnessed it in many women and in myself.

Michael:

Part of my delight in working on this book was working with Marybeth. We met when I was a contributor to her first book, A Woman's World, and we did a lot of readings together and developed a real friendship. We worked together on A Mother's World and developed a pretty effective working relationship that continued with this book.

She's married and has two children still at home. My son is out of the house, I've been a single parent for many years, and I've had an empty nest for many years, so our lifestyles are pretty different. I think we both brought something of our own life experiences to the table that really gave a much broader perspective than one person alone might have been able to.

Concerning my background, I always thought of myself as a writer. I started my actual writing career after raising my son, doing technical writing for pro audio magazines. Then I wrote a grant proposal for an international media and education task force for the UN, and they liked the grant proposal so much that they offered me the executive director job. As head of this UN task force for two years, I made a lot of contacts in the education world internationally, and then started doing curriculum development for The Discovery Channel and writing screenplays.

Then I went into radio and spent five years writing and producing a four-part series on Buddhism in the United States for National Public Radio, narrated by Richard Gere. It was quite an undertaking. Everybody who is anybody in American Buddhism is in the series--including the Dalai Lama, Robert Thurman, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Allen Ginsberg.

Five years ago, I started working with a group called International Rivers Network. I direct a project called River of Words, which is an annual children's environmental poetry and art contest sponsored by the Library of Congress and the International Rivers Network. Robert Hass (former U.S. poet laureate) and I created the project in 1995.

Allen:

What was your first travel experience like?

Bond:

My first travel experiences were camping with my family as a child. Every summer all six of us would pack into the family car, with our 16-foot trailer hooked on the back, and we'd head out of Ohio. We'd drive for days--east to the ocean or west for the Rocky Mountains and beyond. I was weaned on exploring new vistas.

However, my first real "journey" occurred when I was 29. For two years I worked, saved, and planned to make my great escape from the business world and the stagnant life I'd created for myself.

Buying a one-way ticket to Bangkok, I set out alone to travel in Asia for a year and in Europe and Africa for a second year. This solo journey became a passage in my life to self-discovery, inner strength, and peace.

In Asia I pushed my personal envelope--climbing a 20,000-foot mountain in the Himalayas, riding on a camel alone for a week in the remote Indian desert, and exploring Buddhist philosophy and thought in an ashram. That was just the beginning of a life-long passion for travel!

Michael:

My first real travel experience was a gift. I think it's one reason I'm so zealous about travel. I was over 40. I had been a single mother, too poor and tied down to go anywhere. A dear friend who traveled a lot thought that was a terrible state of affairs, so for my fortieth birthday she gave me a trip to Paris and Italy.

Allen:

What a wonderful gift!

Michael:

Isn't it? And when I do readings I always say to the audience, if there's any way you're ever in a position to give the gift of travel to somebody, do it. It truly changed my life. As did a trip I gave my son to Mexico when he graduated from college. He was on a business school track. He fell in love with Latin culture and went into Latin American studies, ultimately receiving a graduate degree from Oxford. It completely transformed his life!

After I got the travel bug at 40, I still couldn't afford to travel, so I had to figure out a way to make it support me. [laughs] I signed up for the Book Passage Travel Writers' Conference in Corte Madera, California. When you register you're encouraged to submit a 1,000-word travel piece. The prize for the winning essay was a trip to Verona.

For my UN job I had been to India the year before and I thought, wow, I'll try to write about that. I wrote a piece about the Khan Men of Agra (later published in A Woman's World) that won the grand prize--and it was the first travel piece I'd ever written!

Allen:

So your experience is different from the usual one of learning to cope with a lot of rejection at first.

Michael:

Right, my first time out I won this giant prize and was sort of catapulted into visibility. [laughs] I tell about it when I teach because I think it is really inspiring, and I hope it can give some women the idea that this could happen to them. I mean, there's nothing like hard work and really learning your craft, which I also did, but sometimes magical things happen. And they seem to happen more often on the road than at home--that's one of the things I like about travel.