Freedom’s Edge
Most New Zealanders have setbacks during their OE; few comeback with horror stories to match their slide shows. Freedom’s Edge is Victoria Ginn’s gripping account of what happens when an adventure goes off the rails. It has taken over 20 years for Ginn to be able to face writing about what occurred: her book is more a prison saga than a travel memoir.
As a naive but gutsy 24-year old photographer, Ginn was fascinated by the romance and culture of the East, and in 1978 set off for Afghanistan. On route, she wrote in her diary, “Awandering wild and free, no solid walls imprison me”. The words would come back to haunt her.
Appalled by the brutality and danger she discovered there, Ginn was about to leave, only to get arrested at the airport. That’s when she learnt about the corruption that pollutes the romance. Imprisoned on a trumped up drugs charge, she gets weak from disease and despair as she tries to get the charges dropped, her passport and cameras returned before her return ticket expires.
Besides the scary Midnight Express saga of securing her freedom, this is the moving story of an ingenuous but feisty Westerner struggling to survive in a hostile, alien culture. It also provides a window into Afghanistan before the Russian invasion and fundamentalist Taleban coup closed it as a tourist destination. Her portfolio of photos smuggled out could be from an early travel classic such as The Road to Oxiana and the story itself would be a great film.
North and South Magazine, February 2001. New Zealand Books by Chris Bourke