| Julia Dimon's Travels |
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Travel writer and TV host Julia Dimon will take you on adventures from the Congo to the Yukon  In a way, Julia Dimon knew what she was getting into when she walked into Dawson City’s Sourdough Saloon. She had come to the old Yukon mining outpost, population 1,327—in a prop plane that landed on the town’s gravel runway—to learn ice fishing for an episode of Canada’s Outdoor Life Network show, Word Travels. She wasn’t deterred by the prospect of staring for hours into a hole in the ice in minus-15- degree temperatures, attempting to land the first fish of her life. A Toronto native, she knew frostbite-in-a-minute cold. And the raucous hands of Texas Hold ’Em at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s casino, the fact that the town’s main hotel used to be a brothel, and street signs that read, COWBOY PARKING ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE CASTRATED? Those things might have put some people on edge, but for Dimon it was just another day in the life of a travel writer—until she found a shriveled human toe in her cocktail.  Dimon, 28, has been opening herself up to this kind of cultural shock since she was a kid, when she would tag along on trips with her travel-writer mother. By age 21, she had already been to more than 20 countries and had been penning movie reviews for the Toronto Star since age 12. All it took was one great story—an article in the Star about running out of money on the Italian island of Elba and having to panhandle for cash to get home—to bring the pieces together.Soon after, she began writing a column in the free international daily paper Metro News, and she gathered all her savings to spend a year traveling the world alone. “I backpacked through Africa for five months, traveled all through Europe and India, Korea, and China,” she says. “I kind of went everywhere.” By the end of the year, she’d visited 27 countries on five continents. And during the trip, she met a fellow Canadian travel writer named Robin Esrock at a small hotel in Turkey. They traded tales of deadline pressures and life on the road. Two years later, Esrock sought her out with the idea for Word Travels. That show, now in its third season, has taken her to an additional 24 countries. Despite the frenetic pace—she averages about 12 international flights per month—Dimon is far from a been-there-done-that traveler. With a mix of plucky charm and curiosity, she digs beneath the gloss to uncover interesting cultures, customs, and places. “I am a travel writer, but I happen to have an interest in meatier issues,” she says. This has taken her to female (“cholitas”) wrestling matches in Bolivia, a self-mutilation ceremony in Sri Lanka, an elephant-rehabilitation center in Thailand, and Rwanda’s genocide memorials. Her gusto for authentic experiences and adventure has gotten her into some dicey situations over the years. She has ventured into the civil-war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo, and she once spent the night in a former Latvian prison for the show. “I try to push it as hard as I can,” Dimon says of her news-junkie impulses. “But my editors and the TV show rein me in a little. They say, ‘OK, Julia, it’s not 60 Minutes here.’ ” On Word Travels, which also airs internationally on the National Geographic Adventure channel, the cameras follow Dimon and Esrock as they dive into stories around the globe. When Dimon wanted to write about Muay Thai boxing, the national sport of Thailand, for example, instead of just watching from the sidelines, she hopped into the ring and learned the Muay Thai repertoire: punching, kicking, elbowing, and kneeing. “Julia’s fearless,” says Word Travels director Mary Frymire, “but at the same time she’s highly intelligent and has very honed instincts.”  Dimon does allow herself to relax on the road occasionally—like when she had a honeymoon-worthy suite at her disposal in the Maldives, and the time the show chartered a $45,000-a-week yacht in British Columbia’s Gulf Islands just after members of Pearl Jam had spent a week on it. Her favorite place for kicking back is Zanzibar. “Mixing African culture with Arabic influences in a beach setting with great seafood is perfect,” she says. But more often, she’s combining her backpacker sensibility with an anything-goes appetite for adventure.That attitude extends to her actual appetite. She has tried snake blood and bile in Vietnam and eaten goat brain in Morocco, silkworm kebabs in China, and duck fetus in the Philippines. “I’ve got an iron gut,” she says. “I can eat almost anything, but the duck fetus was the worst.” She finally drew the line in Vietnam when she was offered a still-beating cobra heart. And then there was that toe. After throwing off her mittens at the edge of the fishing hole and wrestling a lake trout out of the frigid waters, Dimon and her crew headed over to the Sourdough Saloon to celebrate. It turned out there was an initiation fee: a shot of Yukon Jack with a human toe bobbing in it. It used to belong to a local who made the mistake of power-mowing his lawn in sandals. To join the club, patrons must drink the shot and let the toe touch their lips. The sole reward is bragging rights. Dimon stared at the toe and its gnarled yellow nail. “I had a mental block thinking that this was a severed body part in a drink,” she recalls. “But my philosophy is that if there’s something you can do, you might as well do it. And, as if she was merely ripping off an adhesive strip, she threw back the drink and kissed the toe. “It was disgusting, but it’s a rite of passage to prove that you’re hardcore,” she says. As if we needed any further proof. Want to see more of Julia Dimon? Watch the video. Comments (0)
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