Hoping to recreate a freewheeling world tour from their youth, two retirees set themselves a ‘no itinerary’ challenge: Can they improvise their way across seven countries?
4 min
In our 20s, my new husband and I took a year off from our fledgling careers to travel in Southeast Asia. Equipped with paper maps, we began in China and improvised each day’s “itinerary” on the go. A gap year for grown-ups, I called it, although I scarcely qualified as one.
Nearly 40 years later, we are new retirees with the same wanderlust. We wondered: Could we recapture the thrill of winging it, enduring rough roads and cheap hotels?
We could and did, but for 2½ months instead of 12. We mapped out a route that would take us up Africa’s east coast and then—who knows where? Here’s how we rolled and five important lessons we learned on a 6,000-mile trip.
Our first stop was the tiny, car-free island of Lamu, well-known for its high-profile visitors, from Kate Moss to the Obamas. This low-key getaway offered white-sand beaches, dhows — boats you can rent for day cruises and snorkelling — and lots of donkeys, the main mode of transport.
We considered the beachside Peponi Hotel in Shela, a hot spot since the 1960s (Mick Jagger bunked there). But room rates start at $250, far above our per-night budget of $70 or less. When contemplating almost 100 nights of travel, price matters.
So we chose a villa in the dunes called Amani Lamu, $61 per night for an en suite room with a private terrace and shared plunge pool.
We still had a cool Peponi moment come sunset: On the hotel’s whitewashed veranda, we sipped Pepotinis and plotted our next day’s interlude at the Majlis, Lamu’s fanciest resort (from $580).
With a $20 day pass, we could lounge around its pools and beach bars like proper resort habitués.
Lesson learned: Live like billionaires by day and frugal backpackers by night.
Must-go: Across the bay on Manda Island, bunk a night in a thatched-roof bungalow on stilts at Nyla’s Guest House and Kitchen (from $48 with breakfast).
After a dinner of doro wat, a spicy Ethiopian chicken stew and rice, the sound of waves will lull you asleep.
From Lamu, we flew to Aswan in Egypt. Our “plan”: Cruise down the Nile to Luxor, then take a train to Cairo, and venture to Giza’s pyramids.
Turns out it’s the kind of thing one really should book in advance. But at our Aswan hostel, the proprietor, who treated us like guests deserving white-glove service, secured a felucca, a vessel manned by a navigator and captain-cum-cook.
Since we’d booked fewer than 24 hours in advance and there were no other takers, we were its sole passengers for the three-day trip.
One day, we stopped to tour ancient temples and visit a bustling camel fair, but otherwise, we remained on board watching the sunbaked desert slide by.
We slept on futons on the deck under the stars. The cost: about $100 per night per person, including three meals.
Lesson learned: Ask for help. We found Egyptians kind and unfazed by our haplessness, especially when we greeted them respectfully with assalamu alaikum (“Peace to you”).
Must-go: For buys from carpets to kebabs, don’t miss Cairo’s massive Khan el-Khalili bazaar, in business since 1382. We loved the babouche, cute leather slippers, but resisted as our packs were full.
Next stop Tunisia, via a cheap flight on EgyptAir. We loved Tunisia, but left after six days because the weather got chilly.
Fair enough, it was January. We hopped continents by plane and landed in Istanbul, where it snowed. Fortunately, two of Istanbul’s main pleasures involve hot water. We indulged in daily hammams, or Turkish baths, ranging from $30 to $60 for services that included, variously, a massage, a scrub-down and a soak.
Beneath soaring ceilings at the temple-like Kılıç Ali Paşa Halamı, brisk workers sternly wielded linen sacks to dowse my body in a cloud of hot foam.
In between visits to Ottoman-era mosques and the city’s spice markets, we staved off the chill by drinking fruity pomegranate tea and sampling Turkish delight and baklava at tea salons.
A favourite salon: Sekerci Cafer Erol in Kadıköy, a ferry-ride away on the “Asian” side of Istanbul, where the city adjoins Asia.
Lesson learned: Pay attention to the weather gods. We foolishly took the concept of travelling off-season too far.
Must-go: Don’t miss the Istanbul Modern, the Renzo Piano-designed art museum in the historic Beyoğlu district.
After a long flight from Istanbul, we spent two weeks in Laos and then hopped another plane to Cambodia, specifically Koh Rong Sanloem, another car-free island.
Like vagabonds, we lolled by the warm, super-blue water of Sunset Beach, steps from our bungalow at Sleeping Trees (from $54 per night).
A caveat: You have to sweat to get to this island paradise. We took a bus, a ferry and then hiked for 40 minutes up and down a steep hill and through a jungle. You’ll find only a handful of “resorts”—simple bungalow complexes like ours. There’s nothing much to do. I’ll be back.
Lesson learned: Until our week in Cambodia, we’d been travelling too much and too fast, prioritising exploration over relaxation. This island taught us the pleasures of stasis.
Must-go: Spend one day in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh, to delve into its sobering history. Tour the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, site of a Killing Field, where nearly 9,000 Cambodians died.
We spent our last two weeks on the island of Ko Samui, where season three of “The White Lotus” was shot.
We went there for its astounding beauty, not the luxury resort experience that comes with too many boisterous lads on vacation, snake farms and traffic jams in town.
Truth be told, we flouted our budget rules to book an Airbnb with a pool (from $300) in the hills of Lipa Noi on the island’s quiet side. We joined the nearby Gravity Movement Gym to work out, but cooked our own meals to keep our final tabulation of expenses within reach.
Lesson learned: Pinching pennies feels restrictive, no matter how lush the surroundings. And it leads to bickering, as partners tally up who squandered how much on what.
With the end in sight, we splurged on the villa and even bought souvenirs, knowing we’d lug them for days, not weeks.
Must-go: Take the 30-minute ferry to sister island Ko Pha Ngan for its peace, love and yoga vibe and, once a month, full-moon parties.
Via Airbnb, we bunked at a Thai house called Baan Nuit, run by the Dear Phangan restaurant proprietors.
We sampled steamed dumplings, white fish in a Thai basil sauce and spicy noodles for a mere $15 apiece.
Hey, indulge in that “White Lotus” moment if you dare!
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The Australian leather house has opened an immersive four-day pop-up in Manhattan, unveiling its Bloom Collection and redefining what a product launch can look like.
Following the successful launch of its Palais Collection, MAISON de SABRÉ has unveiled a new modular handbag system offering more than 720 styling combinations.
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
