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WORK TITLE: Boarding Passes to Faraway Places
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Sibilla, Guy Murashige
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://guysibilla.com/
CITY: Honolulu
STATE: HI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Phone: 808.258.5297
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:George Mason University, University of Virginia; College of William and Mary, B.A.; Marshall-Wythe School of Law, law degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Lawyer, travel writer.
AWARDS:Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, Finalist Award, 2001, for his photographic essay entitled “Sleeping with the Moai” published in Honolulu magazine; Hawaii Chapter of Recording Artists, Best DVD, 2008, for the “Raiatea Live!” video at Hawaii Theatre Center.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Honolulu, DestinAsian, Hawaiian Airlines, Pacific, HiLuxury, Arabian Horse Times, Village Voice, USA Today, Honolulu Advertiser, and Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
SIDELIGHTS
An avid traveler, Honolulu, Hawaii-based freelance journalist and photographer Guy A. Sibilla, also known as Guy Murashige Sibilla, writes articles about travel. With a father in the U.S. Army, he and his family moved around a lot. He also climbed his first mountain in Kandersteg, Switzerland with the American Boy Scouts and developed a love of the outdoors. Sibilla holds a law degree from the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, and practiced law for a dozen years in Honolulu until the writing bug bit him. Over the past thirty years, he has traveled to every continent but Antarctica and has written for many magazines including Hawaiian Airlines, Pacific, HiLuxury, and Arabian Horse Times.
In 2017, Sibilla published Boarding Passes to Faraway Places, a collection of eight travelogues from the various unique places he has visited around the world. With a knack for knowing who to trust and where to go, Sibilla wanders off the beaten path to sleep among the moai statues of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), live in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Uttar Pradesh, India, visit cities and deserts of Syria and Jordan, enter the war zone of Timor-Leste, trek the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, and learn the voodoo culture of Togo in West Africa. Following Robert Louis Stevenson’s manta of “the great affair of travel is to move,” Sibilla ventures to new destinations with wonderment and exuberance.
In describing great travel writers, Sibilla told Christine Thomas online at Honolulu Advertiser that they give their readers a foundation of the places and cultures so travelers are not completely ignorant when they get there, this “gives you a way to negotiate a foreign place and gives you some guideposts in your head. It helps make rich the experience I convey.” It also gives you something beyond the tourist brochure level experience, he added. “Conversational in tone and thoroughly engaging, the narrative expresses both the dangers encountered and the joy of seeing just how many good, kind people there are in the world. There is also plenty of wry humor,” declared Kristine Morris in Clarion Reviews. Morris added that Sibilla celebrates the act of movement itself and that his message with the essays exudes excitement, adventure, living a day exceptionally well, and not letting fear keep you from taking chances.
With the minor quibble that the essays don’t have a uniting theme and may not be in the order that Sibilla experienced them, a contributor in Kirkus Reviews nevertheless praised Sibilla for being “an able evoker of detail and the various mists of mise-en-scenes. He shares the sensations of the places he visits via elegant metaphors.” Overall, the book is an earnest if unmoored collection of international reports from an accomplished travel writer, according to the contributor.
A writer on the BlueInk Review website remarked how the book is “excellent not only as adventure/travel writing, but as a look at people from different cultures who aren’t so different after all. Readers don’t have to be travelers to appreciate this book.” The writer explained that Sibilla’s focus is more reflective than naming fine hotels and restaurants. For example, he recounts the devastation and horror that remained in East Timor after two decades of war with Indonesia. But he was reinvigorated by seeing four young boys playing and laughing at a waterfront pier.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Clarion Reviews, February 1 2018, Kristine Morris, review of Boarding Passes to Faraway Places.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Boarding Passes to Faraway Places.
ONLINE
BlueInk Review, https://www.blueinkreview.com/ (February, 2018), review of Boarding Passes to Faraway Places.
HonoluluAdvertiser.com, http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/ (February 24, 2008), Christine Thomas, author interview.
Posted on: Sunday, February 24, 2008
What I'm reading: Guy Sibilla, Adventure photographer and journalist
By Christine Thomas
Special to the Advertiser
Guy Sibilla, Adventure photographer and journalist.
Advertiser library photo
What are you reading?
Ryszard Kupuscinski. He wrote a number of books, one called "The Shadow of the Sun," which I just finished, and "Travels with Herodotus." He wrote in Polish and now a lot of his books are being translated into English. He has a truly poetic flair for language. Another great writer I like a lot is Simon Winchester. He wrote a book called "River at the Center of the World," about traveling the Yangtze.
Did you bring them on your recent trip to the Middle East?
I usually travel with just one book — poetry written by an author from the region I'm traveling to, because poets have a way of using words to convey the emotion of the place. So I took a book called "The Gift" by Hafiz, a Sufi poet from Shiraz in Iran. You can spend days on one poem because it's so heavy, and as you're traveling your interpretation of what the poet says changes. I find that to be illuminating.
How do these writers help you bring your own travel experiences home through writing and photography?
First of all, I think when you read great travel writers they give you such a foundation, so when you're going into a place you've never been before you're not completely ignorant. Number two, because you're learning something about that region before you go you're not just pointing out, oh that's a mosque, but that's an Umayyad mosque — it gives you a way to negotiate a foreign place and gives you some guideposts in your head. It helps make rich the experience I convey and gives you something underneath the tourist brochure level experience — for me, anyway.
Guy Murashige Sibilla is a freelance journalist and photographer living in Honolulu, Hawaii. As a contributing editor with Honolulu Magazine for 20 years, his award-winning stories and photographs have appeared in Honolulu Magazine, DestinAsian (P.T. Mahapala Mahardhika; Indonesia, Singapore, and Hong Kong), Hawaiian Airlines In-Flight Magazine, Pacific Magazine, HiLuxury Magazine, Arabian Horse Times Magazine; Pacific Edge Magazine, America West In-Flight Magazine, IN Magazine (Honolulu), Gannett News Service (USA Today), No Limits (Italy), The Honolulu Advertiser in the Travel, Editorial, and Island Life Sections, The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and the Village Voice (NYC). He has traveled extensively for over thirty years throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Basin.
A Little More “About the Author”
While living in Germany (with his parents and siblings courtesy of the U.S. Army) and attending Wurzburg Junior High School, Guy was introduced to poetry in his fifth grade class with a reading of “Sea Fever” by John Masefield. From that moment onward, a lifetime of joy with the written word had begun and a brave new world opened up with his friends: Walt Whitman; Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson; John Keats; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; William Wordsworth; George Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Charles Baudelaire; Thomas Moore; Aloysius Bertrand; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Theophile Gautier; Sir Walter Scott, and some others who were not dead.
He also climbed his first mountain in Kandersteg, Switzerland with the American Boy Scouts (Trans Atlantic Council). The love of the outdoors, like poetry, became a life long pursuit. Since then, he has climbed mountains across the North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. And on occasion crossed a desert or two.
Upon returning stateside, there was no denying his destiny as a book worm as he was elected simultaneously as President of the Literature Club AND the Spanish Club in Killeen Junior High School, Killeen, Texas. As President, one of his first of his declared policies was to organize a student letter writing campaign protesting the proposed cancelation of the TV show: “Star Trek.” Needless to say, the show was not cancelled until 2 years later.
He entered college at George Mason University in northern Virginia. Then, in a stroke of good fortune, he was able to transfer to The College of William and Mary in Virginia in Williamsburg, Virginia. After three more years of college, he matriculated miraculously with an Artium Baccalaureus Degree in English Literature and Government (Philosophy).
Five years of college apparently was not enough. He continued his studies in Government at the Advance School for Political Science at the University of Virginia. There, he became extremely bored and left a year later.
He then sought but did not find employment as a poet.
So he took the LSATs for the “fun of it.” As with all things not sought or desired, he was accepted into The Marshall-Wythe School of Law, achieved Law Review status, published two articles as a 2L and 3L respectively, and later served as a Law Clerk with the Virginia Supreme Court. He is remembered mostly for reciting his contracts case (Professor Sullivan) in Shakespeare inspired iambic pentameter and rhyme. The raucous laughter of his classmates so disturbed the solemnity of the Socratic method lovingly employed by Professor Sullivan that Guy was never, ever called upon to recite a case again.
He practiced law for dozen years in Honolulu until writing called to him again. This time, his mistress could not be denied. These stories are the result of that love affair.
The author enjoys one of the great luxuries of desert life: the extravagance of water.
At the office in Guatemala, C.A. in search of Il MIrador, the tallest Mayan pyramid in the world.
“Be it ever so humble” here is home at K2 base camp on the Baltoro Glacier for 3 months at 18,000 feet.
Just another beautiful day at K2 base camp.
At my editor’s office upon returning from Pakistan as the 50th Anniversary of the first ascent of K2 in 1954 by the Italians.
Before a speech on “The Ancient Cities of the Middle East.”
Psst! I can’t sing!
Trying to stay one step from the Headhunters of Borneo
AWARDS:
In 2001, the Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists presented to Guy Sibilla its “Finalist” Award for his Photographic Essay entitled “Sleeping With The Moai” published by the Honolulu Magazine.
In 2008, the Hawaii Chapter of Recording Artists (HARA) awarded “Best DVD” for his work on the “Raiatea Live!” video recording of Ms. Raiatea Helm’s 25th birthday concert at the historic Hawaii Theatre Center.
Guy A. Sibilla is a writer living in Honolulu, Hawaii.
In spite of his reckless disregard for his own personal safety, he has managed to travel extensively for over thirty years throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Basin. His stories and images have appeared in Honolulu Magazine, DestinAsian Magazine(Indonesia, Singapore, and Hong Kong), Hawaiian Airlines In-Flight Magazine, Pacific Magazine, HiLuxury Magazine, Arabian Horse Times Magazine, the Honolulu Advertiserin the Travel, Editorial, and Island Life sections, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and others.
As a contributing editor for Honolulu Magazine, he received a Finalist award from the Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for his story and images in Sleeping with the Moai(2001).
His life continues to be a work in progress, as is his book One Hundred Love Sonnets.
Sibilla, Guy A.: BOARDING PASSES TO FARAWAY PLACES
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sibilla, Guy A. BOARDING PASSES TO FARAWAY PLACES Archway Publishing (Indie Nonfiction) $33.95 8, 16 ISBN: 978-1-4808-4691-3
A debut collection of exotic travel essays from the deserts of Jordan to the totems of Rapa Nui.
An Army brat from birth, adventure writer Sibilla was born traveling: "Travel filled each day with wonder. I thought that everyone had grown up speaking another language." He dallies with law school when young only to drop out in favor of life as a wandering writer, one always on the move and with an interest in less-traveled places: remote hotels in Uttar Pradesh, crumbling monasteries in Mandalay, the traumatized island of East Timor, among many others. He learned lessons in Buddhist humor from the Tibetan monk Tenzin Kalsang B. (The monastery where Kalsang trained already had a monk named Tenzin Kalsang. "So Dalai Lama say, 'You Tenzin Kalsang A, and I Tenzin Kalsang B.' ") Alongside a man named Horse of God, he trekked through Jordan in search of "art, music, literature, food, tobacco, alcohol, and the occasional tryst." He slept alongside enormous moai statues on Easter Island, their overturned backs, "huge stone ramps angling heavenward into nothingness." A traveler willing to embrace contingency, Sibilla explains, "I usually headed off with only a vague notion of where I wanted to go, and how I was going to get there once I figured out where there was." He trusted his intuition when selecting where to stay, who to befriend, and what to eat. He generally chose well, though it does leave readers without a road map for what's ahead. As a result, there is no real throughline for this collection (indeed, we are unsure if his travels are recounted to us in the order in which they occurred). But Sibilla is an able evoker of detail and the various mists of mise-en-scenes. He shares the sensations of the places he visits via elegant metaphors; e.g., near the banks of the Ganges "there were so many scars on the face of an old Rajasthani sandstone ghat that it had the feel of Monet's Rouen Cathedral." As stand-alone pieces, these certainly reward reading.
An earnest if unmoored collection of international rambles from an accomplished travel writer.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sibilla, Guy A.: BOARDING PASSES TO FARAWAY PLACES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247908/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=efe9123d. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247908
Boarding Passes to Faraway Places
Kristine Morris
Clarion Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 ForeWord
https://www.forewordmagazine.net/clarion/reviews.aspx
Full Text:
Guy A. Sibilla; BOARDING PASSES TO FARAWAY PLACES; Archway Publishing (Nonfiction: Travel) 16.99 ISBN: 9781480846920
Byline: Kristine Morris
Conversational in tone and thoroughly engaging, this travel narrative expresses joy at seeing just how many good, kind people there are in the world.
In Boarding Passes to Faraway Places, seasoned adventurer and travel writer Guy A. Sibilla, who calls himself "a hapless rambler with little regard for a world with borders," recounts the sense of wonderment and exuberance that wandering the planet without a plan can bring.
By his teens, Sibilla, the son of an Italian American US Army serviceman and a Japanese mother, had spent half his life abroad. Not surprisingly, he became a travel writer. He has trekked throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Basin, keeping lively accounts of his travels in journals that are as much scrapbook as notepad.
Boarding Passes to Faraway Places celebrates the act of movement itself as it shares Sibilla's love for discovering people, places, and cultures that mere tourists will never know -- journeys taken on foot, on horseback, in canoes, and on buses, traversing deserts, jungles, mountains, glaciers and crevasses, tightly-packed towns, and remote outposts carrying the bare necessities in his backpack. "Wherever I ended up, even for a day, I was home," he writes.
The book covers the years 2000 through 2007 and Sibilla's travels to India, Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma), the cities and deserts of Syria and Jordan, Togo with its voodoo culture, the jungles of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the war zone of Timor-Leste. Captivating and colorful, its descriptions bring these places and their people to life. India was "the most exotic, disgusting, enchanting, appalling, poetic, filthy, bewildering, beguiling place on earth," and his romanticized visions of Indian monastic life were shattered by the reality of a friend's Dharamsala monastery accommodations: "a Motel 6 from hell." Yet India, a luminous land of contrasts, taught him "to grab poetry from the air" around him.
Other contrasts are as vivid: the total devastation of East Timor contrasted with the brilliant beauty of the three-hundred-foot-high dome of Burma's Shwedagon Pagoda, covered in gold, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires; Buddhist monks in timeless robes, their shaved heads hunched over computer screens in Dharamsala; Damascus, the site of bitter conflicts between politics and religion and at the same time home to some of mankind's highest aspirations; and, after so much movement, the refreshing time spent breaking bread and swapping songs with Bedouins in the desert, sleeping on the red sand beneath the Milky Way with shooting stars falling into his hair.
Conversational in tone and thoroughly engaging, the narrative expresses both the dangers encountered and the joy of seeing just how many good, kind people there are in the world. There is also plenty of wry humor; it's both scary and funny to see the words, "Oh! God Save Me!" painted on the front bumper of a bus navigating hairpin turns in mountainous terrain. The text presents some errors in grammar, syntax, spelling, and subject-verb agreement, and there is an odd shift to US involvement in a coup d'A[c]tat in Chile in the midst of a section on Tahiti.
If Guy A. Sibilla's Boarding Passes to Faraway Places has one overriding message besides excitement, adventure, and learning the truth that "there are few gifts more precious than living a day exceptionally well," it's surely this: "Don't let fear keep you from taking chances, sometimes even with your life. Joy and wonder live there."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Morris, Kristine. "Boarding Passes to Faraway Places." Clarion Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526345237/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4b85a2c5. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526345237
Boarding Passes to Faraway Places
Guy A. Sibilla
Archway Publishing (Aug 16, 2017)
Softcover $16.99 (230pp)
978-1-4808-4692-0
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
Conversational in tone and thoroughly engaging, this travel narrative expresses joy at seeing just how many good, kind people there are in the world.
In Boarding Passes to Faraway Places, seasoned adventurer and travel writer Guy A. Sibilla, who calls himself “a hapless rambler with little regard for a world with borders,” recounts the sense of wonderment and exuberance that wandering the planet without a plan can bring.
By his teens, Sibilla, the son of an Italian American US Army serviceman and a Japanese mother, had spent half his life abroad. Not surprisingly, he became a travel writer. He has trekked throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Basin, keeping lively accounts of his travels in journals that are as much scrapbook as notepad.
Boarding Passes to Faraway Places celebrates the act of movement itself as it shares Sibilla’s love for discovering people, places, and cultures that mere tourists will never know—journeys taken on foot, on horseback, in canoes, and on buses, traversing deserts, jungles, mountains, glaciers and crevasses, tightly-packed towns, and remote outposts carrying the bare necessities in his backpack. “Wherever I ended up, even for a day, I was home,” he writes.
The book covers the years 2000 through 2007 and Sibilla’s travels to India, Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma), the cities and deserts of Syria and Jordan, Togo with its voodoo culture, the jungles of Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the war zone of Timor-Leste. Captivating and colorful, its descriptions bring these places and their people to life. India was “the most exotic, disgusting, enchanting, appalling, poetic, filthy, bewildering, beguiling place on earth,” and his romanticized visions of Indian monastic life were shattered by the reality of a friend’s Dharamsala monastery accommodations: “a Motel 6 from hell.” Yet India, a luminous land of contrasts, taught him “to grab poetry from the air” around him.
Other contrasts are as vivid: the total devastation of East Timor contrasted with the brilliant beauty of the three-hundred-foot-high dome of Burma’s Shwedagon Pagoda, covered in gold, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires; Buddhist monks in timeless robes, their shaved heads hunched over computer screens in Dharamsala; Damascus, the site of bitter conflicts between politics and religion and at the same time home to some of mankind’s highest aspirations; and, after so much movement, the refreshing time spent breaking bread and swapping songs with Bedouins in the desert, sleeping on the red sand beneath the Milky Way with shooting stars falling into his hair.
Conversational in tone and thoroughly engaging, the narrative expresses both the dangers encountered and the joy of seeing just how many good, kind people there are in the world. There is also plenty of wry humor; it’s both scary and funny to see the words, “Oh! God Save Me!” painted on the front bumper of a bus navigating hairpin turns in mountainous terrain. The text presents some errors in grammar, syntax, spelling, and subject-verb agreement, and there is an odd shift to US involvement in a coup d’état in Chile in the midst of a section on Tahiti.
If Guy A. Sibilla’s Boarding Passes to Faraway Places has one overriding message besides excitement, adventure, and learning the truth that “there are few gifts more precious than living a day exceptionally well,” it’s surely this: “Don’t let fear keep you from taking chances, sometimes even with your life. Joy and wonder live there.”
Reviewed by Kristine Morris
February 1, 2018
Boarding Passes to Faraway Places
Guy A. Sibilla
Publisher: Archway Publishing Pages: 208 Price: (paperback) $16.99 ISBN: 9781480846920
Reviewed: February, 2018
Author Website: Visit »
Guy Sibilla has been writing about his travel adventures for over 30 years. Here, he recounts eight of his journeys to out-of-the-way locales such as Myanmar, Pakistan’s Karakoram mountain range, and the jungles of Belize.
Sibilla comes by his travel habit naturally; his father was in the U.S. Army, and the family moved frequently. “Travel wasn’t a break from life; it was our life,” he writes. His stories aren’t typical travel pieces: He doesn’t rattle off the finest hotels, the best places to eat or landmarks to gawk at. While those things seep into the narrative, his focus goes deeper and is more reflective.
Consider the final chapter, about a trip to East Timor in the months after a two-decade war with Indonesia. The hostilities were over, on paper at least, but the devastation and horror remained. Spending time with U.N. Peacekeepers, Sibilla was so numbed by what he saw that he had to take a break from his notetaking, only to be reinvigorated by an encounter with four young boys who were playing at a deserted waterfront pier, squealing with laughter and simply enjoying life. He titled a photo of the four: “This is what hope looks like.”
Sibilla’s storytelling skills are evident on every page. His writing is clear, atmospheric and entertaining, showing humor and depth. A wonderful example is his account of being in a desert in the Middle East with two Bedouins when one of them insists he take a turn on the lute. The best he can do, he says, is a version of the Hawaiian song Waikiki, a rendition “even more appalling than I can fully express.” Nonetheless, his companions “clapped joyously and hooted with glee.” It’s a beautifully told story of bonding between strangers.
Boarding Passes to Faraway Places is excellent not only as adventure/travel writing, but as a look at people from different cultures who aren’t so different after all. Readers don’t have to be travelers to appreciate this book.
Also available in hardcover.