The Best Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR

  The Best Travel Writing Series

  “Travelers’ Tales has thrived by seizing on our perpetual fascination for armchair traveling, including this annual roundup of delightful (and sometimes dreadful) wayfaring adventures from all corners of the globe.”

  —The Washington Post

  “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 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…. 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

  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 in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places Every Woman Should Go, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, A Woman’s Asia, A Woman’s Europe, Her Fork in the Road, A Woman’s Path, A Woman’s Passion for Travel, A Woman’s World, Women in the Wild, A Mother’s World, Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Gutsy Women, Gutsy Mamas, A Woman’s World Again

  Body & Soul

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

  Special Interest

  Wild with Child, Mousejunkies!, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?, Encounters with the Middle East, Not So Funny When It Happened, Gift of Rivers, How to Shit Around the World, Testosterone Planet, Danger!, Fearless Shopper, Penny Pincher’s Passport to Luxury Travel, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, Gift of Birds, Family Travel, A Dog’s World, There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, Gift of Travel, 365 Travel, The Thong Also Rises, Adventures in Wine, The World Is a Kitchen, Sand in My Bra, Hyenas Laughed at Me, Whose Panties Are These?, More Sand in My Bra

  Travel Literature

  Cruise Confidential, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, A Sense of Place, The Best Travel Writing, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, The Sword of Heaven, Storm, Take Me With You, Last Trout in Venice, The Way of the Wanderer, One Year Off, The Fire Never Dies, The Royal Road to Romance, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, The Rivers Ran East, Coast to Coast, Trader Horn

  TRAVELERS’ TALES

  THE

  BEST

  TRAVEL

  WRITING

  2011

  TRUE STORIES

  FROM AROUND THE WORLD

  TRAVELERS’ TALES

  THE BEST

  TRAVEL WRITING

  2011

  TRUE STORIES

  FROM AROUND THE WORLD

  Edited by

  JAMES O’REILLY, LARRY HABEGGER,

  AND SEAN O’REILLY

  Travelers’ Tales

  an imprint of Solas House, Inc.

  Palo Alto

  Copyright © 2011 Solas House, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Introduction copyright © 2011 by Pico Iyer.

  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 311.

  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., 853 Alma Street, Palo Alto, California 94301. www.travelerstales.com

  Art direction: Kimberly Nelson

  Page layout and photo editing: Cynthia Lamb using the fonts Granjon and NicolasCochin

  Interior design: Melanie Haage

  Production Director: Natalie Baszile and Christy Quinto

  ISBN 10: 1-60952-008-4

  ISBN 13: 978-1609520083

  ISSN 1548-0224

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.

  —JEREMIAH 6:16

  Table of Contents

  PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

  James O’Reilly

  INTRODUCTION

  Pico Iyer

  THE WAY OF THE MIST

  Cameron McPherson Smith

  ICELAND

  FIRE AND WATER

  Erika Connor

  WEST AFRICA

  ONE DAY, THREE DEAD MEN

  Marcia DeSanctis

  RUSSIA

  HOW I PROMISED ANUSHA THE SMILE

  Kevin McCaughey

  PARIS

  AIN’T READY FOR NO MAN

  Katherine Jamieson

  GUYANA

  THE MEMORY BIRD

  Carolyn Kraus

  BELARUS

  CAMEL COLLEGE

  Matthew Crompton

  INDIA

  LANTERNS OF FEAR

  Gary Buslik

  AT HOME

  ALL IN THE SAME HOUSE

  Bill Fink

  JAPAN

  FEMME IN THE VOSGES

  Meike Eerkens

  FRANCE

  BENEATH THE RIM

  Michael Shapiro

  GRAND CANYON/COLORADO RIVER

  IT’S THE SAUCE

  Mary Jo McConahay

  GUATEMALA

  JIMMY THE NATURAL

  Martin Dillon

  IRELAND

  FLYOVER COUNTRY

  Johnna Kaplan

  USA

  EDUCATING THE BODY

  Katherine Jamieson

  GUYANA

  SUN VALLEY WITH DAD

  Colette O’Connor

  IDAHO

  ALONE IN INDIA—BUT NOT FOR LONG

  Kate Crawford

  INDIA

  WINGED VICTORY

  Erin Byrne

  PARIS

  PROTECTED

  Peter Wortsman

  GERMANY

  THE CHILEAN CLIFF CARVER
<
br />   Lisa Alpine

  SPAIN

  ALONE, ILLEGAL, AND BROKE DOWN

  Carla King

  CHINA

  WILDING HORSES

  Mary Caperton Morton

  NEW MEXICO

  IN THE FIELDS OF MY LAI

  Joel Carillet

  VIETNAM

  THE YEAR WE BOUGHT OUR HITCHHIKER

  Deborah Taffa

  USA

  DEATH ROAD

  Sabine Bergmann

  BOLIVIA

  SHIVA AND SADHUS AT PASHUPATI TEMPLE

  Tim Ward

  NEPAL

  INTO THE UNDERWORLD

  Amanda Summer Slavin

  GREECE

  ETERNITY

  Cameron McPherson Smith

  THE SEA/ECUADOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Publisher’s Preface

  Urazinduka ntutanga rwuba

  You may get up before dawn,

  but destiny gets up before you.

  —Kirundi proverb

  When did you begin?

  Was it when your parents had a roll in the hay? When your great grandparents huffed and puffed your grandparents into quickening? Was it back in the Neolithic, the Pleistocene? Your DNA, your constituent matter, is not only prehistoric, it is stardust—did your journey begin at the Big Bang, or before, when “before” had no meaning?

  It is a cliché to say that life is a blossoming, but it is true. We are each a bloom of the ineffable, of something which has no age, and which no equation or words describe. We are all these: God’s breath, the point of an evolutionary spear, the curling edge of the Void, the mid-current of the River Now, perhaps even “robots from the future,” as at least one physicist has suggested. (Oy vey, I am hearing something from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”)

  It is a cliché to say that life is a journey, but it is true. What shore did you wash up on when you were born? What well-worn coat of many colors will you be wearing at your end, or as Buddhists have it, your passage into the Bardo? What tools do you need to make this voyage? What wisdom must you acquire? Which companions will aid you? We all wonder where and when our journey will end, but of course it will not end, just as it has no beginning. Travel is the best metaphor for life, and can help you be ever more present at all stages of an eternal becoming.

  The book that follows, eighth in a series of annual compilations from Travelers’ Tales, is an orchestra of travelers plucking at the strange harmonics of the world, and each one of them showing that we are part of one humanity.

  It is a cliché to say that we are all kin, but it is true. Even if we hail from different clans, travel makes you certain that kinship is true not only in sentiment but in fact. The writers and explorers herein, and thousands of others not in this volume, partake of a kind of travel that Paul Theroux wrote about recently, “of the old laborious kind, [which] has never seemed…of greater importance, more essential, more enlightening.” This is especially so in a time of great upheaval, natural and political, which makes it clear once again that we never were in charge. If we seem to merely persist without volition or direction (and it’s not for want of trying), and politicians and our fellows disappoint us again and again, we are still free to fall in love with one another, we can still choose to explore the luminous world, become more conscious of blossoming around and within, ply the Golden Current in our raft of cells and cosmic material.

  As I sit here this spring day, I’m listening to music by Moro, whose memoir Kin to the Wind recounts an improbable and deeply inspiring 1960s journey around the world as a young troubadour, traveling with no money or guile but with an open mind, heart, and his guitar. A little earlier than Moro, Swiss traveler Nicolas Bouvier wrote in Turkey in an account of his 1950s travels, The Way of the World (L’Usage du Monde): “I dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again…the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family or work, or what others say and think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love.”

  When did you begin?

  JAMES O’REILLY

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

  Introduction

  Seeing the World Anew

  PICO IYER

  Ten people walk into a crowded room, and every one of them comes out with a different story; the Rashomon effect plays out in all our lives pretty much every day. Someone sees the Donna Karan sunglasses and the Paul Smith stripes, and reads the strange figures in the room accordingly; someone else starts to talk to as many people as possible, and learns who they are from whether they like Massive Attack or Sigur Rós. Someone else starts to talk about “golden” and “blue” and “light-filled” auras. The travel writer is the one who can do all these things at once—listen more closely, see more deeply and bring some personal question into the room—so that we feel that we’re seeing a shadow story, a secret narrative visible to few, and everything is at stake.

  There are a hundred ways of describing good travel writing, but really they all come down to much the same thing: does the piece make you see the world anew, while offering you a place or a feeling you instantly recognize? Does it—as a Jan Morris essay does—take in all the surfaces so attentively that you catch not only the way a place looks, but the way it thinks, and mutters, and hides from itself? Does it—as Peter Matthiessen’s writing might—take on the qualities of an allegory, the story of a soul looking for the gold it’s lost? Does it—I’m thinking now of V.S. Naipaul—have such an ache of unsettledness that you can feel that the writer himself is on the line? The great travel writer makes you see yourself anew, too, by introducing you to things you perhaps never allowed yourself to observe.

  Not long ago, I was driving through the Outback with my old college friend Nicolas: the most brilliant student of our generation, thirty years before, but so individual and restless that we were sure he would end up somewhere dark (he left the university, physically, after only two years and wrote his final exams so illegibly he had to be summoned back to read them aloud to an examiner for two weeks). I hadn’t seen him in a quarter of a century, but I’d begun to get to know him again through the haunted, solemn, questing books he’d started to write about the Red Continent’s interior, full of Central European exiles and memories of war. On my way to meet him in Alice Springs, as I got onto the plane from Sydney, he e-mailed me, casually, that we might be meeting his “wife” Alison, too (Nicolas, a legendary classicist who had been covering wars for The Australian for many years, living for months on end in hotel rooms in Iraq, with nothing but his copies of Proust and Kafka, was the least marriable soul I knew).

  As we scuffled about the scruffy town—a smiling young soul from Bombay checked me into my hotel, Singaporeans ran the Tea Shrine and even the fanciest place in town served mostly beef vindaloo and Nonya specialties in its restaurant—we saw huge signs for “Alison Anderson”: Nicolas’s partner turned out to be a significant politician, and the rare Aboriginal who went back and forth between her people and the state government (speaking six indigenous tongues). As we drove across the red-dirt emptiness to visit some “old ladies” who paint (Aboriginal artists who sit on the ground outside a shed and dab patterns on canvasses that fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in the West), I took note of the sign at the airport prohibiting tomatoes from entering the territory, Nicolas took inner notes on a strangeness that had become his second home, as familiar to him as recent patterns in his dreams. And Alison quietly told us about the “Dreamtime” stories associated with each tree or patch of desert, and how this “dingo dreaming,” amidst the cordwoods and the iron-woods, marked the place where the dingo ate the caterpillar and got separated.

  The parallel paths, the disparate stories each of us began to develop as we drove along the same empty road came roaring back to me when I took the storie
s you’re about to read out onto my thirty-inch-wide terrace in suburban Japan and, in the radiant sunshine of an early November day, lost myself in them for hour after transported hour. I wouldn’t say these are necessarily the “best” travel essays of the year, because the phrase makes as little sense to me as talking of a “best” color, a “best” love, or even a “best” child. But many, many of them did what only the most memorable trips—and the most deeply felt essays—do, which is to deposit me back in my life someone different from the person who set out.

  When I sat with Gary Buslik, musing on the wistfulness of old slides and long-ago lives; when I began, excitedly, to find the secret treasures of an unprepossessing part of the Lorraine (with Mieke Eerkens); as I learned about what happened in Minsk, thanks to Carolyn Kraus’s hard-to-forget excavations; as I found myself in a realm of meditation and allegory, learning how to see again, in the Iceland of Cameron McPherson Smith, I felt I was touching a part of the world, and of experience, that I hadn’t known was there and could no longer think of cruise-ship honeymoons, look at Belarus, even reflect back on the Iceland I knew and loved in quite the same way as I had before.

  One thing that exhilarates me about this book is that so many of its writers are women (you would not have found that thirty years ago, when I began writing), and many of these women are in places that I would be afraid to go to even as a shifty male—alone in New Delhi’s train station after midnight, on the edge of the Sahara with a mother and a sometime lover, in Guyana after the exodus of most white folks, or looking for mass graves in Minsk. There is a sense of personal investment, of openness and soulfulness, a heartfelt introspection in many of the pieces here that would have shamed (and surely could have taught) the “travel writers” I grew up on in my youth, mostly tight-lipped British men remarking wryly on the natives.

  So many of these pieces, too, show how our world is moving as much as we are, growing multiple and diverse, newly complex, as the entire planet, so it seems, is on the road or spinning on its axis. An American and his Polish girlfriend are looking for the Mona Lisa; a Canadian and her African lover are watching her mother receive news, in a cyber-café among the mosques of Africa, of a death in the family. Women are traveling to ski resorts with their eighty-three-year-old fathers, and young men are going all the way to Hiroshima or My Lai to say sorry, after a fashion, for what their country has done. In a meticulously crafted piece like Michael Shapiro’s account of rafting down the Colorado River, even that most famous of poster images, the Grand Canyon, is made human and mysterious and new.