A new boyfriend, a one-way plane ticket, no plan, big dreams and a new life in the Amazon jungle. To find out what happens next you must read this book now.
Love, adventure, triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, this book will forever change how you see the natural world.
When Donna Mulvenna is invited to go to France with her new man, she didn’t expect to find herself in South America, sleeping under the stars, and living an extraordinary and isolated life in the steaming, humid jungles of French Guiana. But that was exactly what happened.
Placing her life of comfort in Australia into the far distant reaches of her mind, she expected the adventure to last for a few weeks. That increased to a few months and then drifted into years, until she felt completely at home in the sweltering heat and anaconda-infested rivers of this amazing country.
In Wild Roots Donna documents her deep love and respect for the Amazon forest, while making some attempt to depict the awe, beauty and isolation of this always chaotic, often bizarre and constantly frustrating country, so that you can appreciate, in some small way, how it captured her imagination.
Written with humour, a respect for nature and a conscious knowledge that we must somehow rebuild our relationship with it, Donna Mulvenna shares with you her incredible transformation and road to awareness of the world around her, in one of the most inhospitable parts of the planet.
This book includes a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of wildlife and nature gained while the author took excursions deep into the Amazon forest. It is also a profound reflection on the healing power of nature.
Inside book cover
Donna supposed life was as good as it was going to get. She had a decent job, a nice home and a life where she was plugged into everything from a wall-sized flat-screen TV to handheld mobile Wi-Fi platforms, talked to Facebook friends and answered emails 24/7. However, despite all those things, an underlying feeling of emptiness shadowed her. It didn’t seem to matter what she did to attract love, happiness, peace, or passion into her life, everything somehow, kind of, got tainted by the murkiness of an inner chaos.
So when she met a man, who was about to leave Australia’s shores, she jumped on board. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to visit France and enjoy passion, pastries, and Paris? It wasn’t until he bought the tickets she asked, “Where in France is French Guiana?”
After that things got a little crazy. She found herself hacking through the impenetrable jungle, sleeping beneath the stars, swimming in chocolate colored seas, sprint canoeing along anaconda infested rivers, and watching space rockets blast into the sky. She was threatened by wild animals, had more than a few hair-raising moments in pirogues, met with a bureaucratic and bungling nightmare, and succumbed to a tropical disease – all within a place that seemed to offer more and more hostility by the minute.
But then something even more bizarre happened. Life just slipped into a sort of slow motion. Her hands, her head, and her heart, her thoughts, her breath, and her speech – all these became one and s-l-o-w-e-d d-o-w-n when she looked out over the forest.
I guess you could say that at that moment, she came alive in the Amazon.
This isn’t the stuff of fairy tales or of stories with rainbows and unicorns – that was her former love life. This is a personal journey from a place she initially viewed as the armpit of the universe, a reflection of her lack of purpose in life, to the humbling and magnificent Amazon forest where she discovered a natural state of joy.
It turned out to be a love story that shows what can happen when you open your eyes to look beyond the surface, and what is possible when you make room in your life,
