Romance

Rich Zubaty relates his adventures living and loving his way through 25 countries.

Romance is glorious and frightening, stimulating and enervating, loud and quiet – a rare atmosphere beyond pleasure and pain. Romance is not about "feeling", it is about "being". It is about cooking monkeys on a balsa fire in the Peruvian jungle, catching sharks in a too-small boat, landing on uninhabited coral atolls, scraping bat droppings from your hair in a Honduran cave, cooking a slab of tuna on a beach in Marseilles, having raw animal sex with Asian girls in Paris and Thailand, singing Christian hymns with brown kids on the shore of a turquoise lagoon. Forgoing food and drink, radio, TV, speech, smoke – any and all sense distractions – on a ten day forest retreat in a Thai/Buddhist monastery – coming face to face with your demons.

Romance is watching kangaroos scamper away from the lush grass around your garden when you go to pick tomatoes in New South Wales, burning your draft card and leaving…