Trish Boland Africa book
Trish Boland with her new book Emails from Africa. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
The experience of spending months travelling through eight countries in Africa has inspired Twin Waters lodge owner Trish Boland to publish her own book about the continent.
Emails from Africa had its launch at the Takaka Library in early November, and is based on Trish’s first trip in 2003, at age 50, when she travelled through eight countries - Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia. Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. She has since visited twice more. Her 229-page account, lavishly illustrated with her photos, takes the form of emails to friends.
“My obsession with Africa goes back a long way—to the age of seven, in fact, when Born Free came out. I was captivated by that movie. And the moment I stepped on African soil confirmed to me that I was meant to be there.”
She recounts rush hour in Nairobi, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, a wildlife-watching safari in Botswana and the sheer daunting poverty of Zimbabwe. “That country was a huge revelation to me. To think it used to be the food basket of Africa before Mugabe started his purge. It’s just devastated now.”
Trish says she wrote the book for those who have already been to Africa and want to compare experiences, those who want to go and are looking for some “real” info, but especially for those who want to share a vicarious African experience from the comfort of their armchairs. The book also includes a section of practical information for would-be travellers, such as the best times to travel, what to take, inoculations required, and currencies.
“I didn’t actually find Africa scary in any way. But you certainly do have to keep your wits about you. I recall in Malawi some locals tried to climb into our truck, obviously intending to steal it, but we managed to chase them off before anything serious happened. You have to realise they have so little, and they see us as having so much.”
It’s the third book Trish has self-published, this time through the New Plymouth company Publish Me. The other two are a book of Twin Waters’ gourmet recipes, The Best of the West, and a combined poetry and photographic work called Through my Lens – From my Pen which reflects on her travels to places as diverse as Mt Erebus, the sub-Antarctic islands, the Catlins, D’Urville Island and Fiji.
Born in Dunedin, Trish is a qualified nuclear medicine technologist, while her husband Mike Boland is a research food scientist who regularly commutes to Palmerston North, where he works at Massey University. Before they moved to the Bay, Mike’s postdoctorate work and special projects took the couple to live for extended periods in America, the UK and Germany.
Their Twin Waters lodge, on the inlet side of Totara Avenue, was built in 1991 and was originally called Northwest Lodge. The Bolands purchased it nearly five years ago and built on another four guest rooms and a guest lounge totalling 180 square metres.
Talking to Trish, it’s easy to get the feeling that it could be time again to move on. “We love Golden Bay, so we’ll probably always have a place here, but I’d love to manage a safari lodge over in Africa,” she says. With that in mind, she is now studying a South African correspondence course on nature guiding.
Emails from Africa is available from the author (ph 524 8014) or from Take Note in Takaka, for $49.99.
Gerard Hindmarsh
