“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” – St. Augustine.
I used to think I knew what poverty was, but when I backpacked through South America in my early twenties, I had realized I was way off. The poverty in Peru and Bolivia was far worse than I had ever imagined.
But travel has astounded me even earlier than that. When I was nineteen, I first traveled to Rio de Janeiro to visit family. I wasn’t thin nor fat, but I definitely had quite the curvy butt, for which I was teased my entire life. So when I visited my aunt Renata, a plastic surgeon, I asked her if she could operate to reduce its size. To my utter amazement, she said Brazilians love big butts like mine and she refused to operate on it. This was my first encounter with a fundamental difference between cultures. Here were people who accepted you the way you looked and even, heaven forbid, thought you were beautiful!
In Travel Secrets: Book One – Rio de Janeiro, my curvy travel writer, Rachel, is just as astounded as I was to learn this fact. After years of self-critiquing the image in the mirror, she begins to question the convention of thin equals beautiful. The fact that she is forced to come up with a scoop of she’ll lose her job and that she has to star in every story speeds her transformation.
Rachel is transformed thanks to the Brazilians, but her newfound outlook on life is tested amongst the sophisticated French women in Travel Secrets: Book Two – Paris and Bordeaux (to be released this November).
Have you been transformed by your travels?
Travel Secrets: Book One – Rio de Janeiro is available on Amazon at www.tinyurl.com/travelsecretsrio Send yourself the free sample and give it a try! Also free on Kindle Unlimited.
Reasons to Read Travel Secrets – 2 – Transformation
