The Best Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  When a piece of travel writing is truly transporting, it works a small transformation in our lives, so that we are carrying around with us not just a new pair of eyes, but a fresh heart and an awakened conscience. And many of these essays take me back to some of the great works of travel-literature, old and new, that have permanently altered the way I think about the world. I cannot hear the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” today without calling up the hallucinatory intensity and horror of Dexter Filkins’s accounts of both in his recent work of combat reportage (and therefore travel literature), The Forever War; and when I try to think of how to make sense of war and the peace we need to cultivate within, I call upon the clarifying priorities and gift for essentials of the great poet laureate of journeying in one place, Thoreau. My favorite travel writers tend to be ones whose first and foremost interest is not in travel: they’re closet anthropologists, personal historians, readers of texts or even just observers of the treacherous human heart and the cycles of history (think of John le Carré or Derek Walcott). A travel writer, for me, is someone like Elizabeth Gilbert, who can at once find a wise man, a lover, and a new life in Bali, yet also take the time and trouble to excavate much of the island’s bloody history of violence and slavery.

  Occasionally, nowadays, you’ll hear people say that travel is dead, since we can access almost anywhere from the comfort of our living rooms and find Louis Vuitton stores in the shape of suitcases in Shanghai. Pshaw! As these pieces often memorably show, travel will last as long as we have difficult loves, unsolved memories, haunting questions, restless hearts and legs. Nicolas is still tracking the empty wastes at the center of Australia; his new wife Alison is still trying to find a way though the tangles of history; and I am still revisiting the interior of their land, and of their memories, and planning how I might somehow return there. The travel writer shines a light on something we never thought to look at—“gray, moss-covered churches, and gray, moss-covered cemeteries, and gray, moss-covered monuments,” in Mieke Eerkens’s beautiful essay—and then the light comes on in our eyes, too, and we can see its “hidden beauty.”

  Born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, raised in California and long settled in Japan, Pico Iyer has always been interested in the places where cultures collide and conspire. His first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, explored the West playing itself out in ten countries in Asia; his second, The Lady and the Monk, tied together the Western dreams of Japanese with the Japanese dreams of those from the West; and his third, Falling Off the Map, traveled to isolated places from Paraguay to North Korea and Iceland to Bhutan. In the years since, he has been looking at what travel is doing to a world and humanity on the move, in an age of immigration and exile, as described in such works as The Global Soul, Sun After Dark, and The Open Road: The global journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. His next book, on Graham Greene, will look at what fears and hopes we can legitimately carry out into the world.

  CAMERON McPHERSON SMITH

  The Way of the Mist

  He discovers how to vanish.

  I’VE BEEN KICKED OFF ICELAND’S VATNAJÖKULL ICE CAP three times—once by a windstorm that would uproot trees (if Iceland had any trees), once by a labyrinth of crevasses that remains deliciously impenetrable after thirteen days on the ice, another time by a snowstorm that all but buries me alive—but this time the dice I roll are magicked and somehow in a week of negotiations with the ice I’ve sneaked through the heavily-crevassed ice cap margin. My supply sled has not dragged me down and the volcano under the ice has not blasted me up. Every night when the snow is frozen solid I lean into the harness and take the first step forward with the rich glory of slugging back a glass of wine that I cannot afford. Here on the ice cap my wealth is limitless.

  Like a glass of wine, though, the glory doesn’t last. Traveling at night on the ice is exhausting and worrisome; it’s winter, and not even mountain guides come up here after October. But most of all there is a pervasive uncertainty. Maps of the ice cap interior—the best I’ve been able to find were charted in the 1930s—suggest that it’s flat and featureless, but even here in the interior previous expeditions have encountered giant crevasses crusted over with a thin snow bridges, vast pools of sliding slush melted by subglacial volcanic vents, strange conical ice formations, and subtle magnetic anomalies that seduce compass needles and send you off-course.

  So I travel in an alien world. Darkness and mist before me, ice and snow of a thousand varieties underfoot, like flour, or steel. Wind, hail, and sleet drive horizontally. There are no landmarks and I follow my compass day after day. It seems I can never be sure of anything. Once I see my face reflected in the metal lid of my cooking pot and the haggard hobo in that metal is a stranger.

  Often I travel through mist. The ice cap makes its own weather, the Icelanders have told me. I inhale the mist, I feel it cool my lungs, I exhale it in thick clouds. It looks like boiling milk in the cold beam of my headlamp.

  In the mist I slip in and out of exhaustion, dehydration, terror, and elation. There are also unique mental states ranging from laser-like focus to complete dissolution.

  The mist is distant; yet it is right against my goggles. The mist moves; but is itself immovable. Things swim at me from the static gray-white. I cannot see anything except my ski-tips and my chest-mounted compass, but I cannot tell if this mist is light or dark; it is simply blinding. As one explorer waggishly described it, it is like “living inside a ping-pong ball.”

  And in—or through—this mist I see four classes of things: things I want to see; things I definitely do not want to see; things simply inexplicable; and a very few real things.

  I see faint shapes that prick me up, shapes I desperately want to be landmarks I know and believe in, though I know them only from poring over my charts; they are landmarks that would confirm that I am actually moving forward.

  There, that must be the Háabunga Ice Dome! But, no; just a billow of snow ambling across the ice cap, like a tumbling sagebrush.

  There, now that grayish blob must be the end of this hill I’m climbing! No; just a shadow cast by the cold moonlight that has somehow penetrated the mist and shown up a low, fast-moving cloud; the slope does not level off.

  Finally! The Grímsvötn Ice Cauldron, maybe two miles ahead! No; a few steps farther the dark, expansive oval is just a small depression ten feet wide, and I stand there swaying and disoriented.

  Lights? No, my friend; just a tumbling grain of ice that has flashed for an instant in your headlamp beam.

  Crevasses, dead ahead! No. The broad smear of gray turns out to be sastrugi, a low ridge of snow sculpted by the wind….

  Rocks! What are rocks doing here in the middle of the ice cap? But they’re not rocks…illusions, again, this time I find no explanation for what appear to be a pile of dark boulders…. I arrive where they seemed to be and there is nothing but snow.

  The most trying illusion is that of an enormous pair of legs, knees in the clouds, striding across the ice cap ahead of me. I stop in my tracks, mouth open. The mirage lasts only a moment, but it is distinct.… I watch as the gargantuan legs take one, and then two giant steps, a mile at a stride, right across my path, then fade into the gloom! I am hallucinating!

  Or…was it real? Could this have been the Frost Giant Ymir, a primordial character of the Norse mythos, up from Hell to inspect the ice cap? Ymir, the Icelanders say—and have said, and sung, and murmured in their warm sod huts for a thousand years—was formed early in the universe. He originated in a mist, he assembled within it and of it. When Ymir was killed by Odin, his body dissembled, forming the Earth. As a human being, the Sagas tell me, my relation to Ymir is intimate: humans are the maggots that squirm through Ymir’s flesh. So it is a sort of recursion; my own squirming thoughts have brought Ymir back to the ice, in the vision of enormous striding legs.

  I find that the only way to repress such illusions is to force myself to fear nothing and to expect nothing; to simply exist. This reduces my universe to a
small bubble of perception, a small bubble of consciousness. It is not unpleasant.

  Behind, only vague memories; ahead, only the vaguest expectations. I need only think of here, now, this moment, the next step converted from the future to the present in an endless loop.

  Only a few times do I see real phenomena.

  It is cold and clear one night, an astronomer’s paradise. I tip my head back and look up into the stars feeling dizzy and light. I may as well be suspended in interstellar space. I feel far from the warmth of any star. In the black voids there is only distance, only emptiness. The punctuations of starlight are still. The void is not disheartening. It demonstrates the value of any spark of life. The enormity and improbability of consciousness appears like a terrifying mirage and I think I do not have the maturity for this before moving on.

  Later, a fountain of amber light washes across the sky like spilled liquid, stopping me in my tracks. Aurora! I say out loud as a gout of flaming red bursts above me, then fades almost immediately. Then an amber swath wavers like an enormous tapestry fluttering slowly at an impossible distance. It, too, fades, replaced by dim green columns illuminated from within, their infinitely-distant tops tilting towards one another. I try to commit the fantastic images to memory. Eventually the cold nudges me; move along.

  Another real phenomenon I see, only occasionally, is the expanse I am traveling across. For brief moments the mist parts and I am granted a view of the starlit snowscape leaping away in all directions. It is ruffled, like a windblown lake, but stopped in motion, and here and there diamond-like snow crystals seem to shine beams at my eyes. But cloud and mist always return, speeding in to blur and then obliterate. The mist is wet and it glazes my clothes with a cracking armor of ice.

  I keep marching, heading uphill for the Grímsvötn Ice Cauldron. Around 3 A.M., just before Christmas, eight hours of uphill slogging bring me to the level ground of the ice cap plateau. I drop to my knees, sobbing with exhaustion.

  I look east. The low clouds have retreated here, revealing an icy plain that falls away before me towards the three-mile wide volcanic crater.

  The Ice Cauldron!

  Tolkein himself could not have conjured such a diabolical scene!

  Dense white vapor billows up from the center of the crater, and contacting the supercooled air it freezes into unbelievable glitter that roils and writhes—

  Up!

  Up!

  A mile-high column of glass dust, winking in moonlight!

  The vision breaks my heart. Everything I know or have done or have ever thought is shattered.

  You try to create beautiful things in life, I think, but when you encounter a natural masterpiece you dissolve, and that is right.

  Cameron M. Smith is an explorer and writer based in Portland, Oregon, where he is a member of the writing group The Guttery. He has written about his expeditions for many books and magazines. An active scuba diver and paraglider pilot, he is slowly retiring from ice cap expeditions in order to explore the lower stratosphere in a specially-constructed balloon and capsule. You can follow his expedition and writing projects at www.cameronsmith.com.

  ERIKA CONNOR

  Fire and Water

  She is a wanderer. There is no cure.

  IT WAS A FULL MOON IN HOMBORI ON THE EDGE OF THE Sahara. I was drawing in the sand as Issa and I argued our love. Across the open came the laughing, playful sounds of adolescents. Above us, in the incredible rock faces I could see the markings, traces of ancient portals that had been sealed forever. I had come back to make things right, but nothing had changed. Our words were the same after six years of separation. I knew him by his words.

  We had been traveling all day, speeding along the broken road, wind in the windows. The way he drove incensed me, forcing the breaks at the last minute, dancing around the potholes and coming down on the sand verge, sometimes at a tilt, half on, half off, again and again, choosing the way in his mind, never speaking, as if we weren’t there. My mother and his gentle younger brother, who looked up to him, were gazing out the windows in the back, equally silent. This was our last excursion. My mother had never agreed to rent this 4-wheel drive, but he had talked me into it. After our trip to Dogon country she had wanted to go up the Niger by boat. Instead we were going to Hombori. They had not gotten along. He was lazy, she said, bossy, didn’t have any drive.

  I was up in the cliffs, the strange orange and black walls lit like fire in the sun, where climbing goats were just dots of white. The walls gave way to passages and other worlds unseen from the road. Crevices were filled with green. I saw how there was life in the recesses, looking for shadows and water.

  I returned to the road, as if my eyes could help him to drive, my foot on an imaginary brake. He was always too fast, too reckless and it made me angry, made him angry, that I had never really trusted him.

  “Tu as peur?” he cried. “Tu pense que tu vas tomber?” You’re afraid? You think you will fall?

  The Hand of Fatima appeared before evening, the great bluish-rose pillars rising from the white desert floor like five fingers. As we came closer the deep orange cliffs towered above us. I saw in the closest pillars the figure of a veiled woman standing with her left arm pointing to the sky. A portal. It was a holy place, ethereal, and yet I knew that travelers from my world had passed through and left their spikes and rope pinned to the fiery walls.

  In Hombori I drew in the sand and it was like a divination, all the lines and waves were the years, all the love and anger, fights over money and distance, beliefs and circumstance. It was like a flower, a star, a storm, a whirlwind. And then I erased it.

  “J’ai peur de toi,” he said. I’m afraid of you.

  For twenty-five years I was pulled to Africa as if by a living rope, something made of plant fiber, tree bark, animal hair. I can see all the initiations now, all that I had gone through. It comes into my dreams. A certain light on a bare tree in the Quebec hills will conjure the dust light of the Sahel. The smell of burning kindling or sizzling meat, a crushed plant, diesel, mulching leaves, a candle. It taught me about magic, how to see the signs. For fifteen years I was in this relationship with Issa. Are you afraid? Do you think you will fall? Our story traveled back well over a decade, over cattle trails and highways, along the rivers. It lived in clay huts, among mice and stars, divinations, ritual offerings to water, in tenderness and laughter, under scorching heat on Le Pont des Martyrs in Bamako, and mango rains. It lived in the images of a white horse, a miscarriage, malaria, a car crash, in the phone line from a farmhouse in the snow, the failed immigration papers and business ventures, all the wire transfers, plane tickets, emails and silence. I learned to carry it all inside, sealed off, until I found the magic words: which way do I go? It was inevitable that I would cross the line in myself and come to the crossroads. My father has a saying:

  “Be strong, be brave, wait for the sign.”

  The first sign was that I had to go back and that my mother wanted to come with me. A traveler in her own right, she has been all over the world. She had left the dark and cold of Northern Europe when she was twenty and lived for a year in Lagos, Nigeria, working for the embassy. And later she moved away to Canada. But Africa was her first love. The remnants lived in her house, hide drums, Ibo sculptures, bronze reliefs and camel blankets. It had always been in her heart to return. Maybe that was why I did, again and again. I had been born into her yearning.

  We traveled first in Burkina Faso. There was a village called Ourouboro, a name that reminded me of the symbol of eternal unity, the snake that swallows its tail. It was the home of the blacksmith, the clang of metal, the breath of fire. A mass of white chicken feathers hung from the thick woven ceiling and the stone altar underneath was stained with blood. In Boromo we waited three hours in the forest to see the elephants. There was a great buttressed tree that my mother said looked like an elephant’s foot. A stone was placed between the roots, and a carved wooden bench. She put her hands on the trunk of the tree and asked for th
e elephants, and they came, dark forms out of the bush, wading into the green river, trunks curling and waving, blowing water over their backs, the sound of water.

  My mother lit a candle on Christmas Eve in Bobo, on the terrace of Hotel Cocotiers above the busy roundabout, and listened. I was going to transform my relationship with Issa. I wasn’t going to give up. I would stay in Mali with him until the spring and make it work. A marriage procession arrived at that very moment at the City Hall across the road, a Toyota pickup filled with frenzied drummers, and bridesmaids in pink satin on the sidewalk, women in long gowns, men in pressed suits.

  We floated across purple lilies in a black pirogue on Tengrela Lake and climbed up into the black Dome Mountains, a million years old, rippled by the sea.

  The tiny village of Bani was known for its seven mosques that rose out of the red rock escarpment, empty, ghost-like monuments. They had come by the vision of an old village mystic. We walked up there in the evening. My mother hit her foot on a rock and the blood flowed onto the earth. But she said it was nothing so we continued up to the great tabletop of wind, a view of the Sahel on all sides, the sun like a full harvest moon in the rose-gray sky against a dark red mosque.