Jeremy Ferguson:  

I've spent the past 35 years of my life as a professional wanderer, a travel writer and photographer. I've journeyed more than 100 countries. as diverse as India, China, Myanmar, the Kingdom of Bhutan, Yemen, France, Italy, Peru and Argentina.. The most important lesson I've learned is that our world isn't the frightening prospect you'd think from scanning the daily headlines. The constant pounding of bad news--revolution, mass murder, catastrophic climate change, plagues, bus plunges, Trump--infects us with cumulative trepidation. Some of us stop travelling altogether. Others never start. Yet the world remains a wonderful place to explore. Our travels enriches our bug-brief lives immeasurably and bless us with an exhilarating sense of adventure. I've written many hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles ,photographed dozens of magazine covers and color spreads and won national and international awards for both words and images. My wife Carol and I live in Victoria, BC. I'm 75, and finally retired to devote my spare time to my first love, the camera. .. I look back on my high-school years as an old horror movie on a 19-inch, black-and-white TV screen. The time was the 1950s, when people were just over the Depression and WWII, and thirsting for stability, forged one of the most conservative--"conformist" was the buzzword of the day--decades in our history.. I was the fat kid with the brush cat. Humiliation was my closest companion. Nobody gave it a thought. But we weren't taught to think. There was an English teacher, Gordon Johnson, a gay man who helped me find my words, and a very kind history teacher Ms. MacKay (later Mrs. Davies) who came to our house for dinner and later attended my first wedding. English teachers were the most thoughtful I encountered, and phys ed teachers, unqualified to teach anything at all. My best friends were Paul Guest and Robert Evans. Paul and Robert--who was relentlessly bullied and persecuted because of conditions that cursed him from birth--died. I will always miss them.. I'd hoped to drink with Paul and Robert in my old age, and take mutual pleasure in how we put the stifling Earl Haig years behind us. I've published, a number of coffee-table an...Expand for more