For someone who has just published a travel book, Wade Davis is surprisingly dismissive of the genre.


“These travel books where you read about how tiny the room was, or how horrible the bathroom was, or how long the ticket line was, they miss the point,” he says over the phone from northern B.C. “I consider myself a wanderer, and in my travels I’ve tried to understand other peoples and other cultures.”

Davis’s new book, The Clouded Leopard, to be published this fall by Douglas & McIntyre, is a collection of essays detailing his voyages around the globe, from Haiti to Tibet and from the Sahara to the Arctic. The B.C.-born, Harvard-educated anthropologist and ethnobotanist has spent the past quarter-century studying the sacred hallucinogenic plants of indigenous peoples. While his previous books have explored some of these experiences, The Clouded Leopard is his first foray into travel writing as such.

“Anthropologists are natural travellers,” says Davis. But he adds that it was his botanical studies that provided the most effective gateway to learning about other cultures. “Indigenous people are notorious for playing tricks on anthropologists,” he says. “But if you are studying plants, that makes sense to them. You are exploring their base of knowledge, their wisdom. People think you are the most reasonable white man they’ve ever seen, and you can find out anything you want about the culture.” He has made use of this opportunity, learning and recording the customs and myths of indigenous peoples along with their use of psychotropic drugs.

Davis has lived, for months at a time, among some of the peoples he writes about. “Everyone who travels has a certain nervousness,” he says. “The usual inclination is to fill the void with noise, with words. I try to listen. I look for the conduit to the culture, the way to break through the inevitable barrier that is there.” On a very basic level, that has meant sharing in the communal life and activities of the group. “Empathy is the way to understanding,” he says. “I would sleep beside these people. I would eat a plate of food that I knew would give me dysentery. I used to call it the Dysentery Breakfast. As long as it doesn’t kill you, you eat it.”

Davis recalls an incident that occurred in the company of two reporters. They were travelling along the Amazon when the aboriginal guides who accompanied them joyfully discovered a termites’ nest; the insects are considered a tasty snack. Davis joined them, scooping up the termites and eating them – “Of course, they were alive until you bit into them,” he laughs – while the reporters stood back. Their reticence was noted by the aboriginal people, as was Davis’s enthusiastic participation. “If another human being can eat something, then you can, too,” he says. “Sharing food is an important gesture, it’s part of building a rapport and it’s an element of basic friendliness. If someone came to your house and wouldn’t touch your food, it would be an insult. It’s the same principle.”

Davis has had to do more than devour squirming bugs to gain access and acceptance. “One way I did it was to become a hunter,” he says. He was living in Northern Ontario at the time. “I asked about the old stories that grew out of the hunting myths, and I was told that no one could remember them,” he says. “I hunted with them for two seasons before I heard a story.” But the tales came pouring out once the native people came to believe in his respect for their ways and for their land. But in imersing himself in the local customs, he believes that he did go too far in one situation. While he was in Haiti studying voodoo and in particular the potion used in the creation of zombies, he participated in exhumations of human bodies – an experience he later wrote about in The Serpent and the Rainbow. “That was an ethical Rubicon I should not have crossed,” he admits.

One of the paradoxes Davis explores in The Clouded Leopard is that the more people travel, even for purposes of learning, the further they move away from their roots.“The genie has been let out of the bottle in terms of large groups of people travelling around the world. It’s inevitable,” he says. “Ecotourism increases penetration into these areas. People feel if they show up wearing a flak jacket instead of Bermuda shorts that somehow what they’re doing is better.”

He is particularly alarmed by the dwindling number of indigenous languages, which he sees as a side effect of the growth in global tourism. “There is a continuing collapse of linguistic diversity,” says Davis. “Back when my father was born, there were 15,000 languages worldwide. Now there are only 6,000, and the prediction is that in another century, there will be only 300.” His concern is based on his belief that “language is not just about words, it’s about a way of thinking.” When he was in the Amazon rain forest Davis learned of a tribe that used the same word, munse, to mean both “dawn” and “vagina.” “What would it mean to think like that?” he wonders aloud.

Still, Davis acknowledges that “some good things have come out of [the trend toward globalism]. At the [1992 Earth Summit] in Rio, these little NGOs that were working in isolation suddenly got the chance to connect.” But there are deeper, less obvious benefits of exploration. “In travel, you discover other ways of being,” he says. “We take for granted the way we live, but it is not the human norm. It is the result of the aberrant success of one particular intellectual lineage. We still have time to learn from other cultures, to balance ourselves so that we do not destroy what is around us.”

One stumbling block that Davis sees is travellers’ understanding of what aboriginal peoples have to offer.“Even many of those who are sympathetic to native societies consider them to be marginal,” he says. “They don’t realize that [the natives’] reality is based on a set of choices, just as our own reality is created on one set of choices.”

He is also disturbed by people who have a preconceived idea of what aboriginal life should be like. “Anthropologists are sometimes accused of trying to ‘lock up’ certain groups,” says Davis. “What I find interesting is that I’ve seen snotty tourists complaining that they saw an Inuit with a Walkman, as if the Inuit shouldn’t be allowed to use such things.”

Despite the disturbing environmental and cultural trends he’s witnessed, he remains eternally hopeful. “I am an optimist. I have idealism, and I believe the world is wonderful.” He wants to instill this sense of magnificence in his own children, Tara, 10, and Raina, 7. To this end he and his wife, anthropologist Gail Percy, recently took their daughters with them to the Amazon; in January the family will travel to Peru. “All I want to do is fill their eyes with wonder,” says Davis.

He also feels an affinity for a core group of his readers. “I resonate with people in their 20s and 30s,” he says. “The pressure they feel – to get the right job, do the right things – is artificial. They will look back later and every choice they made will have been the right one.” Davis speaks from experience: he was 20 when he first made his way to the Amazon rain forest, where he spent 15 months studying coca, a plant revered by local aboriginal peoples, and reviled by others as the source of cocaine. His book One River, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 1996, chronicles the experience.

Of all the places Davis has travelled to, and lived in, the Andes of Peru remain his sentimental favourite. “I love the land, the people, the history, the language, the traditions,” he says. “It is the way things are supposed to be.”