Celebrity Travel: Go Away With Billy Campbell
A. Junk food. Hostess Snowballs in particular. They are disgusting. I love them.
Q. What kind of research do you do before you go away on a trip?
A. Very little. I like to be surprised. But I will read a very good book about the place, fiction or nonfiction, while I'm there.
Q. What is your best and/or worst vacation memory?
A. Worst? Commercial air travel in general. Best? Dropping the anchor of a three-masted, square-rigged sailing ship, at Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, home to the descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty and their Polynesian companions. They are as salty and rough and generous and jocular a people as you'd imagine necessary, having successfully clung 220 years to a windswept mountaintop, poking nearly 900 feet up out of the center of the planet's greatest ocean.
The Island is tiny, two miles by one, but the warmth and hospitality of its folk are boundless and instant. I guess it's the only way for a people for whom the few yearly ships stopping by provide such fleeting contact with the outside world. The only thing better than going to Pitcairn in the first place, is going again. I did last year. It was like seeing family.
========
Jae-Ha Kim is a New York Times bestselling author and travel writer. You can respond to this column by visiting her website at www.jaehakim.com. You may also follow "Go Away With..." on Twitter at @GoAwayWithJae where Jae-Ha Kim welcomes your questions and comments.
(c) 2012 DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
