Rita Goldman Gelman: Tales of a Female Nomad

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

There are all sorts of ways to deal with the end of a comfortable midlife marriage: start a frantic search for the next one, go back to school, embark on a new career or just hunker down and deal with the pain and angst of it all.

Rita Golden Gelman, acclaimed children's book author and Los Angeles socialite, faced her impending divorce at 48 with adventure and bravery.

Not wanting a job and apartment or another marriage, she decided there had to be more than one way to do life and chose the freedom of being a global traveller.

Tales of a Female Nomad recounts the highlights of a subsequent 15 years of world travel, in which she keeps nothing more than a backpack of possessions, essentials for her writing and a mind and heart avid for new experiences with cultures vastly different to her own.

It helps that she has royalties from 70 published books entering her bank account in US dollars, but it still requires a tight budget, a backpacker's ingenuity and a belief in giving and receiving wherever she finds herself to sustain this commitment to what some of her friends first viewed as a geographic cure.

But if it is a cure - for midlife crisis, empty nest and divorce - it becomes a marvellous one as Gelman goes from one seemingly fortuitous encounter to another.

Anyone who has ever backpacked will know the serendipity of this trail, but Gelman has an exceptional gift for opening doors that normally stay closed. Such as her extended stay, four years in all, in the palace of a Balinese scholar and prince, months in Leakey Camp, the orang-utan research base for Professor Birute Galdikas, a renowned primatologist and Leakey protege, where she writes a children's book on Galdikas' work, and a similar period spent in the Galapagos Islands in government-provided accommodation writing another children's book on the islands' animals.

What distinguishes her from the average traveller is her determination to share the everyday lives of the people she meets. It's sometimes an intensely lonely experience, though, because things don't always turn out the way she optimistically expects them to.

After much effort she is permitted to stay in a Mexican Zapotec village where she hopes to become a temporary part of their community.

But only its men, drunkenly passing idle days in the village's dry season, will come near her, and then it's to touch her with an unwanted curiosity.

Children run and hide if she comes near their games and women rush into the nearest house to get away from her approaches.

It's a boring, lonely five days before finally a young woman takes her under her wing by dressing her in traditional costume, the essential element that gets her accepted.

Her book, which she spent six months writing in Coromandel, starts with the first scary moments of being alone in Mexico City - she had never in her whole life eaten a meal out on her own, and it's not actually loneliness she finds difficult but the fact of being publicly alone.

From there, each adventure increases her confidence and optimism.

Most of all, it's the company of other women that gives her emotional sustenance.

But gifts for sharing and for communication, evident in the simple yet engaging manner of this book's writing, are the crucial skills that enable her sustain such an itinerant lifestyle.

Random House

$29.95

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.