Women Who Travel Podcast: Using 'The Odyssey' as an Island Hopping Guidebook

22.02.2024 - 15:07 / cntraveler.com

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In her upcoming book Enchanted Islands: Travels Through Myth and Magic, Love & Loss, author Laura Coffey charts a real-life journey she took inspired by one of the most epic travel stories ever told: The Odyssey. Lale catches up with Coffey to find out how the famous poem informed where she went, the unforgettable meals she ate, and the cast of characters she met along the way.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu. This is the third installment of our Slow Travel stories. I'm with writer, Laura Coffey, and on today's Women Who Travel, we're sailing to islands that resemble the fictional locations in the adventures of the Odyssey.

Laura Coffey: The book is about following parts of Odysseus' journey and finding these little mystical Mediterranean islands that various different scholars through time have said were the inspiration for the fantastical lands of the Odyssey. And there's lots of different theories about which islands around the Mediterranean could've corresponded to which lands in the Odyssey, and they're all based basically on kind of whimsy or things like a particular cave or the arrangement of the stars on a specific island.

LA: I grew up learning about the Greek myths. I feel like lots of children do. Um, I had a children's book about them that really captivated my imagination. Um, I think, you know, the Odyssey obviously is one of the most famous. A- actually, when I try to think of the story, I can't really remember it. What was the story, beyond it being an epic trip?

LC: It's basically this guy, Odysseus, who I think in modern terms we'd call a narcissistic polyamorous guy who's a bit of a dick.

LA: [laughs]

LC: And he has just finished fighting in the Trojan War and he was the guy who came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse that helped them win the war. So he's really clever, he's quite sneaky, he's very wily, but he's also, he's quite arrogant, he's pissed off the gods and they are preventing him from getting home to his island of Ithaca that's his home island. And he's basically doing island hopping, except he doesn't get to choose the routes and it's been going on for 10 years [00:02:00] when we meet him in the story.

LA: It was a challenge to trace Odysseus' journey. Where, for instance, is the island of the Lotus Eaters? Or Calypso's island and the island of Helios?

LC: There's all of these crazy bonkers theories surrounding the geography of the Odyssey. So scholars across time have been thinking about which islands across the Med could have been the land of the Sun God. Which island could have been Calypso's island where Odysseus was imprisoned for