Travel, for first-time author Salman Al Mattar, is not about collecting destinations, but rather nurturing curiosity.
The 39-year-old Bahraini serial entrepreneur and lifelong traveller has published his debut book The Daring Duckling - an archive of his maiden trip eastwards to discover the tantalising treasures of Thailand.
“I’d travelled extensively through Europe since I was a child and had been to the USA a dozen times, but this was my first real introduction to Asia outside of our own part of the world. And it genuinely surprised me,” the serial entrepreneur told GulfWeekly.
“I think I had become very familiar with travelling west. Europe had been almost a second home through the years, and I knew what to expect from it.
“Thailand felt completely different. It was more spontaneous, more raw, more authentic and, in many ways, much more effortlessly cool.
“What really stayed with me, other than the phenomenal food, were the people.
“There was a warmth and openness to them, but also a sense of individuality and passion that I found incredibly inspiring.
“People seemed to be doing things because they genuinely loved doing them, rather than because they were supposed to.”
Salman is quick to assert that The Daring Duckling is not a travel guide - you won’t find checklists of restaurants or hotels here.
Across 134 pages of photography, fragmented storytelling and experiments with graphics, it is an invitation to discover rather than study - ‘a book you can pick up, open anywhere and immediately find yourself somewhere else’, according to the author.
“It’s a collection of strange nights, loud cities, hidden bars, chance encounters, and the kind of moments that crack something open inside you,” he explained.
From Phuket dive bars and Chiang Mai jazz clubs to Bangkok hi-fi listening rooms and underground warehouses, Salman has documented his first trip to Thailand through obsession, music, design, food, chaos, and the people you only meet when you stay out too late.
Raw storytelling forms the core of the book and while travelogues often feature polished photography, Salman opted for iPhone photos to convey the beauty, strangeness, chaos, quiet and everything in between.
“I wanted to capture Thailand as I experienced it,” he explained.
“Some images are carefully composed; others are completely spontaneous. I actually like that they weren’t produced with professional photographic equipment.
“They feel more immediate and honest, almost like fragments of memory rather than photographs created specifically for a book.”
The book’s name The Daring Duckling - suggested by its graphic designer Ali Allababidi - is a nod to Ibn Battuta, a well-known and prolific pre-modern traveller, explorer and scholar from Morocco who travelled through much of Africa, Asia and the Iberian Peninsula between 1325 and 1354.
In Arabic, Battuta translates to ‘duckling’.
“A duckling is curious by nature,” Salman added.
“It is small, slightly naïve and venturing into a world it doesn’t fully understand.
“Add ‘daring’ to that, and you have something that felt quite close to my own approach to travel: not necessarily knowing exactly what you’re doing, but being brave enough to go anyway.”
Beyond the trip, writing the book itself was also about being brave enough to do something even if Salman didn’t necessarily know exactly what he was doing.
He was helped along the way by the book’s chief editor Zahra Khamissa and Ali who helped him mine his collection of photographs, notes and ideas and turn them into ‘something else’.
“Writing the book made me realise that I had been collecting stories for years without necessarily thinking of myself as a writer,” he explained.
“It also changed the way I travel.
“I’m much more conscious now of the small details and moments that normally disappear as soon as a trip ends - a photograph, a conversation, a strange afternoon, even a feeling you can’t quite explain.
“When you start documenting those things, you realise how much of travel is actually about the details you don’t expect to remember.”
The first edition of the book, limited to 100 copies, is available for purchase on www.areweawakestore.com.
