Every year, thousands of hours are spent earnestly debating whether Christopher Columbus was a brave explorer or a genocidal imperialist. Vancouver poet, writer, and academic Gary Geddes’ new book brings to a mainstream audience a much more interesting debate that has roiled in the halls of academe for many years: the idea of pre-Columbian Asian contact with North America.

Geddes, his imagination and intellect captivated by stories of an obscure, widely-travelled, fifth-century Afghan Buddhist monk named Huishen, sets out to trace the steps of the monk’s epic voyage. Huishen, who allegedly spent upwards of 40 years in North America about 1,000 years before the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria set sail from Italy to “discover” the New World, is mostly elusive. Many learned scholars Geddes encounters have never heard of him. Taken variously on foot, in overcrowded buses, by train, in a Datsun on its last legs, and in the belly of a massive container ship as it crosses the International Date Line, Geddes’ journey is as much into himself as it is across a map.

In an academically grounded but informal travelogue, Geddes travels the ancient Silk Road from pre-9/11, Taliban-ruled Afhanistan to Western China in search of enlightenment and wisdom and mostly encounters bored, officious bureaucrats, kids peddling trinkets, and abject poverty. Mexico, Guatemala, and the Queen Charlotte Islands also figure prominently in the mix.

The peripatetic sixtysomething author has a penchant for the world’s hotspots, having visited Chile, Nicaragua, Israel, and Gaza, among other destinations, when they were seething with unrest. It is the unrest in his own soul, however, that drives Geddes’ journey, which is told here with a gentle sense of humour and always with Canadian-style dollops of deference to local custom. He is looking to satisfy something undefined in himself with his peregrinations. If Huishen didn’t exist, Geddes surely would have had to invent him.

At one point, while trying to take a photo of a nondescript sculpture, he is overcome by the solitary nature of his travels: “I sat there, wiping my tears, imagining all the poverty and pain and grime of this world whirl up and disappear into the endless reaches of the universe.…” After traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere, Geddes, in an irony perhaps fitting a Buddhist monk, finally comes closest to wisdom while practically back in his own backyard. In between, he also discovers that artists and scholars, not just dictators and their armies, can be as territorial about their own mythologies as the masses.