The Best Travel Writing Read online

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR

  The Best Travel Writing Series

  “The Best Travel Writing: Here are intimate revelations, mind-changing pilgrimages, and body-challenging peregrinations. And there’s enough to keep one happily reading until the next edition.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The Best Travel Writing is a globetrotter’s dream. Some tales are inspiring, some disturbing or disheartening; many sobering. But at the heart of each one lies the most crucial element—a cracking good story told with style, wit, and grace.”

  —WorldTrekker

  “There is no danger of tourist brochure writing in this collection. The story subjects themselves are refreshingly odd …For any budding writer looking for good models or any experienced writer looking for ideas on where the form can go, The Best Travel Writing is an inspiration.”

  —Transitions Abroad

  “Travelers’ Tales, a publisher which has taken the travel piece back into the public mind as a serious category, has a volume out titled The Best Travel Writing 2005 which wipes out its best-of competitors completely.”

  —The Courier-Gazette

  “The Best Travelers’ Tales 2004 will grace my bedside for years to come. For this volume now formally joins the pantheon: one of a series of good books by good people, valid and valuable for far longer than its authors and editors ever imagined. It is, specifically, an ideal antidote to the gloom with which other writers, and the daily and nightly news, have tried hard to persuade us the world is truly invested. Those other writers are in my view quite wrong in their take on the planet: this book is a vivid and delightful testament to just why the world is in essence a wondrously pleasing place, how its people are an inseparable part of its countless pleasures, and how travel is not so much hard work as wondrous fun.”

  —Simon Winchester

  TRAVELERS’ TALES BOOKS

  Country and Regional Guides

  30 Days in Italy, 30 Days in the South Pacific, America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Grand Canyon, Hawai’i, Hong Kong, Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, San Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

  Women’s Travel

  100 Places Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, Best Women’s Travel Writing, Family Travel, Gutsy Mamas, Gutsy Women, Mother’s World, Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Wild with Child, Woman’s Asia, Woman’s Europe, Woman’s Passion for Travel, Woman’s Path, Woman’s World, Woman’s World Again, Women in the Wild

  Body & Soul

  Adventure of Food, Food, How to Eat Around the World, Love & Romance, Mile in Her Boots, Pilgrimage, Road Within, Spiritual Gifts of Travel, Stories to Live By, Ultimate Journey

  Special Interest

  365 Travel, Adventures in Wine, Danger!, Fearless Shopper, Gift of Birds, Gift of Rivers, Gift of Travel, How to Shit Around the World, Hyenas Laughed at Me, It’s a Dog’s World, Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, More Sand in My Bra, Mousejunkies!, Not So Funny When It Happened, Penny Pincher’s Passport to Luxury Travel, Sand in My Bra, Testosterone Planet, There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, Thong Also Rises, What Color is your Jockstrap?, Whose Panties Are These?, World is a Kitchen, Writing Away

  Travel Literature

  The Best Travel Writing, Coast to Coast, Fire Never Dies, Kin to the Wind, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, Last Trout in Venice, One Year Off, Rivers Ran East, Royal Road to Romance, A Sense of Place, Storm, Sword of Heaven, Take Me With You, Trader Horn, Way of the Wanderer, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

  Fiction

  Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls

  Copyright © 2012 Solas House, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Tim Cahill.

  Travelers’ Tales and Travelers’ Tales Guides are trademarks of Solas House, Inc.

  Credits and copyright notices for the individual articles in this collection are given starting on page 319.

  We have made every effort to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material and to secure permission from copyright holders. In the event of any question arising as to the ownership of any material, we will be pleased to make the necessary correction in future printings. Contact Solas House, Inc., 2320 Bowdoin Street, Palo Alto, California 94306. www.travelerstales.com

  Art direction: Kimberly Nelson

  Cover photograph: © 2012 Ralph Lee Hopkins, Kayakers observe Adélie Penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) on iceberg, Weddell Sea, Antarctica

  Page layout: Scribe Inc., using the fonts Granjon and Nicholas Cochin

  Interior design: Scribe Inc.

  Production Director: Natalie Baszile

  ISBN 13: 978-160952057-1

  ISSN 1548-0224

  Discretion rebelled against the folly of my plans, but as usual met a crushing defeat at the hands of curiosity.

  —RICHARD HALLIBURTON, The Royal Road to Romance

  Table of Contents

  Publisher’s Preface

  James O’Reilly

  Introduction

  Tim Cahill

  The Offer that Refused Me

  Marcia DeSanctis

  DUBAI

  Rabies

  John Calderazzo

  BHUTAN

  Vanishing Vienna

  Peter Wortsman

  AUSTRIA

  Mysterious Fast Mumble

  Bruce Berger

  MEXICO

  Spirals: Memoir of a Celtic Soul

  Erin Byrne

  IRELAND

  A Chip off the Old Bloc

  David Farley

  BELARUS

  Seal Seeking

  Anna Wexler

  GREENLAND

  Precious Metal: Me and My Nobel

  Tom Miller

  CUBA

  The Babushkas of Chernobyl

  Holly Morris

  Ukraine

  How I Got My Oh-la-la

  Colette O’Connor

  PARIS

  The Ghosts of Alamos

  Lavinia Spalding

  MEXICO

  Engagement Ceremony

  Carol Severino

  ECUADOR

  My Black Boots

  Juliet Eastland

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Zombies on Kilimanjaro

  Tim Ward

  TANZANIA

  Traveling to Mary

  Amy Weldon

  LONDON

  Hiking Grizzly Country—Or Not

  John Flinn

  CANADA

  Escape

  Gary Buslik

  USA

  Mahnmal

  Mardith J. Louisell

  AUSTRIA

  Desert Convoy

  Erika Connor

  MOROCCO/MAURITANIA

  The Land of T.M.I.

  A.E. Baer

  SOUTH KOREA

  Six Syllables

  Angie Chuang

  AFGHANISTAN

  Catalina

  Matthew Gavin Frank

  MEXICO

  Caribbean Two-Step

  Connor Gorry

  HAITI

  Notes on My Father

  Kate McCahill

  INDIA

  Where Things Happen

  Pat Ryan

  TANZANIA

  Negrita

  Richard Sterling

  VIETNAM

  What the Trees Try to Tell Us We Are

  Jessica Wilson

  USA

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editors

  Publisher’s Preface

  “Indeed there exists somethin
g like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.”

  —Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus

  Ryszard Kapuściński was one of the most remarkable travelers of the twentieth century, a Polish journalist whose work straddled not only the globe, but the east-west chasm of the Cold War. While there are those who question the veracity of some stories told in his books, he’s the kind of traveler I admire most, one with endless curiosity about place, the people and events swirling about him, even in the most hellish situations (he covered many a war and revolution). He doesn’t dwell overly on his emotions, just enough to make you know he’s not indifferent to suffering, fear, illness, and loneliness. He finds beauty in humanity and nature everywhere, but seems perpetually aware of the shadow a human being—or a mob—can cast at a moment’s notice. But (and this, shall we say, is what sets apart the enlightened traveler from the dilettante) he is a hugely informed wanderer, one who reads and questions constantly, one for whom Herodotus, and history, was a lifelong inspiration and passion. Travels with Herodotus is a beautiful last literary voyage—Kapuściński died in 2007—from someone in the same twentieth century league as H.V. Morton, Chiang Yee, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wilfred Thesiger, Norman Lewis, Nicolas Bouvier—and the very much still alive Jan Morris, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, and William Dalrymple, to name but a few who never fail to inspire me with their fusion of place, history, and personal experience.

  One thing these writer-explorers have in common is that they are big readers: wanderer-scholars with outsize curiosity and the hearts of poets, much like the writers in the book you have in hand. The culture of the wanderer is alive and well, and no doubt you yourself cherish being part of it, inveterate traveler or timid pilgrim, or you wouldn’t be reading this. That stranger coming to town, that vector of change and magic, that catalyst of romance and curiosity, might well have been you on a past journey, might well be you on the next.

  Why not seek to be the best guest or visitor you can be when you roam, the prepared stranger that Kapuściński endeavored to be? Why not encourage others, young and old, to do the same? Thus when you indulge your travel “disease,” your contribution will be all the richer for those who encounter you, and you in turn will be rewarded, for while it has become cliché, it is still true that “chance favors only the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur).

  Choreographer Martha Graham said something that applies to you, the traveler-pilgrim, as much as it does to the dancer and artist:

  There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open …

  You bring something special to the places and people you visit, even if your passage is like morning fog on a lake—so be prepared. Read until your eyes droop, every night. Set aside electronic tethers. Listen to the foreign sounds, study the maps, read strange prayers. Take what you learn with you, but be prepared to abandon it as sawdust when the sun rises over your day far away, and a new world is born.

  James O’Reilly

  Palo Alto, California

  Introduction

  It Lives

  Tim Cahill

  We live in age in which we are blessed with a plethora of information about destinations of interest; an era of travelers eager to share knowledge and photos and experience. When I started writing about travel, especially to remote and—at the time—little known areas, research took place in a library. Information was often difficult to obtain. My trips were planned in the broadest of outlines. I’d heard rumors, for instance, that the salt mines of the Sahara desert were still operating. Could that be true? The words “salt mine” were the proverbial description of a joyless and exhausting job. Just so.

  Travel writers tend to have a network of friends knowledgeable about various areas. Back in the day, you made a few phone calls. Information came from trusted sources. And you took precautions: geez, what if a publishing concern paid you to go find the salt mines and you discovered that they no longer existed. And hadn’t for centuries.

  Now it is my contention that failure is as good a story as success. Sadly, many editors do not share this perception. So it was always necessary, on these dodgy sorts of stories, to find something else in the area—something known to exist—that might make a good narrative. Well, research suggested that to get to the salt mines, it would be necessary to travel up through Dogon Country. The Dogon are an ethnic group, largely animist, known for their masked dances, which, even years ago, were very often done for tourists.

  The journey proceeded apace, and it turned out that the salt mines did, in fact, exist, just as they had since 1000 A.D. Great slabs of salt, mined from the desert floor, were hung off the sides of camels like saddle bags, the clear mineral glittering in the bright desert sun as the long line of camels made its way over the ridges of sand dunes and back to Timbuktu on the Niger River. It was a story.

  But I’d already covered my bases and seen a bit of the Dogon. The culture was both impressive and fascinating. One of my traveling companions also impressed me with his eye for the sacred. The Italian gentleman was a longtime desert rat who had searched for the mines before (and failed). He also knew the Dogon and collected some of their masks. It wasn’t a business. (“I am very good at buying and very poor at selling.”) No, he felt some connection to the people and their beliefs, so when masks were laid out for us to examine and perhaps purchase, he invariably chose the one that was “not for sale.” I learned that some of the masks were, in fact, consecrated and used in actual ceremonies. And no, it wasn’t a negotiation technique: certain masks were not for sale at any price.

  How, I wondered, could my friend pick out the sacred masks every time?

  “You can’t see it?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  He explained. “It is as if you are looking at a picture of a man. In one picture he is alive. In another, he is dead. You can see that. For me, it is the same with the masks.”

  In time I believe I could begin to see which masks were alive. When I saw that Life—and knew I’d seen it—something inside me soared.

  But I already had an overlong story about the salt mines that included menacing warlords, a would-be kidnapping, and a bad sand storm. It was enough. I never wrote about the Dogon. But I do have a mask hanging in my office. It was, I was told when I bought it, to have been retired from the dance. It looked alive to me. Still does. I don’t always feel its dry desert breath, especially in the mornings when I stumble to my desk with a cup of coffee sloshing in my hand. But sometimes, in odd moments when the work is going well, I feel that sacred mask watching me. I have that feeling now, as I write.

  And that is what we have here, in The Best Travel Writing, Volume 9. These true stories from around the world are alive, and you may feel their breath in your heart. To the degree they breathe, they are sacred, as all our stories are sacred. Yes, even the ones that make us laugh aloud.

  As I’ve said, information is an invaluable commodity, but to a writer it is only the inanimate raw material that is used to create a living breathing thing. We call that “thing” a story. Stories are the construct we use to organize our thoughts about the world; they are the lenses we use to make sense of the chaos of information that bombards us daily.

  Story is the essence of literate travel writing. Bewildering situations arise as a matter of course, and it is story that lends comprehension to the case. Baffled, perhaps bewitched, the writer stumbles onto one key that unlocks the mystery. That key is called the “story.”

  Story is generous about the forms it embraces. Young writers in most advanced fiction courses will be told that “character is story.” So it may be in travel writin
g. David Farley’s impressions of Minsk are a jolting introduction to the character of the city: it’s an often inebriated place of ambiguous political opinion and no little sophistication. Peter Wortsman’s character study of Vienna is very nearly one of psychoanalysis. Vienna! How appropriate.

  In many pieces here, the story is about how decisions were made—or had to be made—in the face of changing circumstance. John Flinn is presented with a life or death decision. John Calderazzo handles the same sort of dilemma in a remarkable story that combines elements of Buddhist thought and history with his own concepts of conservation and mortality. Marcia DeSanctis considers a moral over the course of twenty years.

  Colette O’Connor’s delicious piece about the sort of underwear favored by French women involves a new personal choice. Tom Miller’s short memoir amuses while Erin Byrne’s dreamlike meditation on the Celtic poet’s soul gives us both a physical and meta-physical way to think about travel.

  It’s all here, and various stories will appeal to various sensibilities. What is alive and sacred to one reader may not be the story another can hear breathing. But all these writers here have been to the proverbial salt mines. They’ve dug up raw knowledge and watched it glitter in the unblinking sun. And they’ve discovered, in a collision of events, that precious arrangement we call story. Like the most sacred of the Dogon masks, a well-told story is animate; a sacred thing that, at its best, can send the soul soaring.

  There’s a lot of that here. Enjoy.

  Tim Cahill has been laboring in the salt mines of travel writing for more than forty years. He is the author of nine books and the winner of many awards, including The National Magazine Award and several Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. The co-author of three IMAX screen plays (two of which were nominated for Academy Awards), Cahill lives in Montana and still travels for a living.

  MARCIA DeSANCTIS

  The Offer that Refused Me

  Business is business.

  Once, a man I will call Sam wanted to buy me. Actually, he wanted to purchase my occasional services, on retainer. He proposed securing an apartment for our assignations, which would take place whenever he desired, however rarely or frequently he came to Paris, which is where I was living at the time. In French, they referred to such a place by the word garçonnière, which in English meant, roughly, “fuck pad.” I could decorate it however I chose, and enlist the services of some Parisian decorator, with whom I could wade through oceans of silk swatches. I tried to imagine an existence that would be parallel and invisible to the one I was leading. In that life, my artist boyfriend and I lived in a dank apartment which was rendered more so by dog-brown wallpaper that the landlord, Monsieur Ballou, would not allow me to steam off. I combed the weekend flea markets for bargains, gathering—candlestick by candlestick, mirror by mirror—the narrative for my future with the man I loved and would marry in six months.