Transcendent and Engrossing Travel Memoir

With Good Morning Diego Garcia: A Journey of Discovery (Journeys – Book 2), talented author Susan Joyce relates her further memoirs, which she began in The Lullaby Illusion: A Journey of Awakening (Journeys – Volume 1). The result is a fascinating book, combining the genres of memoirs and travel books, relating the author’s further adventures, when she and her husband, Charles, are invited by friends to travel in a yacht they are breaking in on its maiden voyage, and they travel to many exotic locations. Like in the first book, the author undergoes an internal journey of self-discovery as well as experiencing the journey of a lifetime places many people only dream of seeing.

Good Morning Diego Garcia begins with the narrator and Charles back in Ojai, California, after having spent a tumultuous time in Cyprus, living through the 1974 coup and war there. The couple are settling into a house they have rented, with Charles waiting on his old job to call him back and let him know work is available for him. They do not seem to be worried about financial matters very much, as Charles has money socked away in at least a couple of bank accounts for them to get by on.

A momentous letter arrives in the mail, that changes the lives of the narrator and her husband forever. The letter is from friends of theirs, Mia and Dylan, who are currently in Taiwan. Their friends are also the friends of a Swedish millionaire, who owns several yachts, and has purchased a new one. The Swedish millionaire always has the yachts broken in on their maiden voyages before he travels on them, and Mia and Dylan invite the narrator and Charles on the voyage, to “help crew the yacht from Trincormalee, Sri Lanka to the Seychelles. All the way across the Indian Ocean, and on north through the Suez Canal.”

They made plans to meet up with Dylan and Mia at the port city of Trincomalee on the east coast of Sri Lanka. The name of the yacht they traveled on was ZoZo.

Just to get to where the narrator and Charles eventually met up with Dylan and Mia was an adventure, in itself. They travel to Bombay, where Charles scores some hashish, and they get to stay in beautiful 5-star hotels, while they see the great disparity between the rich and the poor in Bombay and India, when they have a hotel located near the Taj Mahal.

The narrator notes in several places in Good Morning Diego Garcia that she was keeping a journal of her travels. She must have been thorough as the descriptions of the people they meet and the sights that they see are wonderfully described, making the narrator’s adventures become very real for readers of her books.

Though the narrator and her husband have never crewed a yacht before, they are thrilled, at first, about the prospect of traveling on a yacht to various destinations around the Indian Ocean. However, they discover that the voyage will be occurring during the monsoon season, and their journey will not be quite as pleasant as they had anticipated it would be.

Along with their journeys, the narrator recounts her fascination with the books of Edgar Cayce, and the importance of dreams to him and to herself. She also asks philosophical questions, at times, for instance, wondering why cows in India are considered to be sacred, but not humans.

That’s all before they even meet up with Dylan and Mia, and start on a journey that will take them the destinations like the Seychelles and the island Diego Garcia, a volcanic atoll in the Indian Ocean that is the largest of the 60 small islands comprising the Chagos Archipelago, before they return eventually to India and then head on to Brussels, Belguim, in 1976.

Good Morning Diego Garcia: A Journey of Discovery (Journeys – Book 2), is an extremely well- written account about the narrator’s travels to exotic locales, as well as being a story of her emotional and spiritual growth as a person. It is a Must Read for anyone who loves reading captivating and engrossing travel memoirs, and especially for fans of the author’s first book in the series, The Lullaby Illusion: A Journey of Awakening (Journeys – Volume 1).