Cochlear Implant

Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk Across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet
By Will Ferguson, Viking Canada. 398 pages, $32

I admit I get a tad jealous when I hear about people travelling the globe. So, naturally you’d think it would be mildly cheerless for me to read a celebrated author’s tales and talk to him about his extensive travels and the seemingly endless (and equally hilarious) stories that emerge from them. Canadian author and humourist, Will Ferguson’s latest, Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk Across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet is an Ulster Trail choose-your-own-adventure book where the “choices” were perhaps the worst ones, but certainly the most adventurous. Yet, if anything, after reading Beyond Belfast and speaking with its main voyager, I know that now more than ever, I need to travel — just not with Will Ferguson as my tour guide.

“I’m not a good traveller because my mind wanders,” says Ferguson. “If you travelled with me expect to get lost and know that your first goal is to meet people, to hell with the itinerary. If something else comes up contrary to plan, go that way. If you meet people and the entire trip turns, that’s what happens. I mean, you don’t take stupid risks, even though I do more than I should, but the thing is to follow where the trip will take you, not impose an itinerary on the trip.”

And now that I have a nicely-sorted, slightly frightening, yet quite engaging litany of expectations for the Will Ferguson Adventure Co., I now know why they let the professionals set up travel agendas.

“I wrote a guidebook once — it’s now out of print — and I got a letter from someone saying ‘Dude, you led me and my girlfriend into the ocean with your directions’. It turns out I got left and right confused, a pretty important detail. That’s when I realized I’m not cut out for guidebook writing,” Ferguson laughs. “I like writing memoirs. Guidebook writing is completely different than writing memoir. It’s a completely different part of your brain. Some people are great at writing guidebooks. They know when the train left, how much the hotel costs, what the admission is, what the main sites are. I’m not like that, I wander away. Guidebook writers are the really great travellers, they’re efficient. I’m a terrible traveler. I’m always lost, I’m always missing steps, and I’m showing up when the museums are closed.”

Ferguson might not excel at travelling safe or according to any sort of plan whatsoever, but the tales he heaves from the misadventures are hilariously rewarding to the reader. His passion for travel and escapade is no secret, yet he understands that his talents lie in the way in which a story is crafted and delivered, not how immediately impressionable the trip might be.

“It’s not the story, it’s the telling – it’s how you tell them. I have a friend who took a trip across Mongolia and it is the most boring story I`ve ever heard. You’ll never want to go to Mongolia after listening to him. But my neighbour talked about going to the mall with her kids and her husband over Christmas and she’d taken her baby out of the carriage, but they were still using the carriage to open doors and slam things around. She told us about the horrified looks on faces. It took her 20 minutes to tell us the story and we were in tears because we were laughing so hard about it. It was a trip to the mall — and we wanted to hear more,” Ferguson says. “It’s really not where you go and how you do it. It’s how you tell it.”