Dunsandle woman Marguerite MacCurtin was bitten by the travel bug when she was a child. After graduating from UCG, she worked in the fashion industry before following her dreams to journey to all parts of the globe. She has now documented some of her adventures in her debut book, Invisible Threads. And, as she tells BERNIE NÍ FHLATHARTA, even the most spectacular places are nothing without their people.

Marguerite MacCurtin was just four when she decided to visit the man on the moon. Her wise mother helped her pack provisions and even kitted her out with paper wings.

As she recalls in her first book, Invisible Threads, which has just been published, Marguerite didn’t get lift-off –  but that didn’t put her off the idea of exploring the world as soon as she got a chance.

Many of us think we’re travellers but in reality we’re tourists who travel in affordable style and like our creature comforts. Marguerite’s idea of travel is a lot more adventurous. She is curious to meet people, no matter where they live, so she can learn about their culture, their traditions and their way of life.

And while more lily-livered travellers would shudder at the thought of getting out of our comfort zones, Marguerite is quite happy to ‘go with the flow’. She has put her head down in far-from-salubrious surroundings that have included an abattoir, a smelly sheep-barn and a cold, makeshift tent on the Tundra, to name but a few.

A native of Dunsandle, outside Loughrea, Marguerite has documented some of her adventures in this new book, published by Beehive, an imprint of Veritas. Invisible Threads had its Galway launch last week in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop.

As she keeps a daily diary of her travels, Marguerite has lots more where those essays came from and which might find their way into a second book.

The first trip abroad, or pilgrimage as she calls it, was to Tibet as part of an escorted group which was the first opportunity for Westerners to travel overland from Kathmandu in Nepal to Lhasa in Tibet. Among a group of strangers on a rickety bus, she was awed by the Himalayan landscape and even more impressed by the sight of Tibetans making pilgrimages to the seventh-century Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, considered to be one of the holiest places in that country.

“I realised that places, however spectacular, are nothing without people,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “It is random encounters with the local people in countries across the globe that have informed my view of their worlds. It is their stories, their beliefs, their religious practices, their rituals and their empathic connection with the traveller in their midst that became the gossamer filaments that were finally woven into the tapestry of Invisible Treads.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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