A life and love of travel

Hanka: Passionate Exile
Hanka Kawecka Lee

Passionate Exile is a beautiful coffee table book, rich in colourful, exotic photography and fascinating, evocative travel journalism.

This collection of selected travel articles by Hanka Kawecka Lee was compiled and published posthumously, each article individually and lovingly prefaced by her husband Michael.

Articles that originally appeared in the UK's Sunday Observer and the altogether more exotic Jakarta Post and Dziennik Polski, are brought together in vivid relief with lush imagery.

Hanka, an environ­mentalist originating from Poland, lived with multiple sclerosis (MS) for the latter 12 years of her life. Her debilitating condition, however, is a mere footnote to the life of a charismatic and compassionate humanitarian.

Hanka's writing breathes vitality into the colourful characters and cultural traditions to which she bore witness whilst journeying across Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. She recounts conversations overheard between a shop assistant and her patron in a newly-privatised Warsaw marketplace grocery, in sharp contrast to stark but sympathetic accounts of the rituals of the Maasai tribe, making situations that are alien to most of us seem both familiar and fascinating. If MS hampered her enjoyment of life, or hindered her travels, Hanka chose not to reveal it to us through her writing.

Hanka was 53 when she was diagnosed with MS, and while some of the writings in this collection date back to the 1960s, many articles were penned post-diagnosis. Yet MS is explicitly mentioned in only the final few articles, most notably in the curiously titled "My hospital, my home". In this tribute to the (aptly-named?) Royal Free, Hanka describes the London hospital as a "safe haven" which afforded her the time to reflect on her adventures, although her description of some nursing staff as "careless and cruel" perhaps belies her true journey though the NHS system of care.

As this collection was not compiled by Hanka herself I wonder whether she would have chosen to include an article about her declining health as the afterword to a set of accounts otherwise so rich in joy and wonder, and which to me seems a sad adjunct to the chronicle of an otherwise exhilarating life.

Julie Howell

- Hanka Passionate Exile; Hanka Kawecka Lee; Published 17 September 2010; Amber & Turquoise Books; amberandturquoise.com