Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Find yourself in Thurso

You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love

You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love

The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert, starring Julia Roberts. The story involves Julia/Elizabeth taking a year out of her life — funded, though the film doesn’t make this clear, by a generous advance from her publisher — in order to discover food in Italy, God in India and love in Bali. It could just as well have been the other way round: she could have found God in Bali, food in India and love in Italy; the great thing about all these places is that they were a safe distance from home in New York, from the husband she had just divorced, and the actor she left when their affair flagged.

Anyway, for an extraordinary number of women everywhere, the film and book have been a clarion call to find themselves, preferably in the same locations. The travel industry has seen an upsurge in vacations to all three destinations. An ‘EPL-themed’ expedition to Bali by a company called Spiritual Tours (it provides all the elements of the film, barring sex with an empathetic but virile Brazilian) is sold out. Another travel company promises: ‘See the world for yourself on a transformational journey taken straight from Liz’s itinerary in the film Eat Pray Love with STA Travel. Embrace romance on the beaches of Bali, find inner peace next to the tranquil beauty of the Taj Mahal in India or indulge in the perfect pasta and wine in Rome with exclusive STA Eat Pray Love journeys.’

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