by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
The Best Travel Writing Series
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“The Best Travel Writing 2007 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
“The Best Travel Writing 2006: True Stories from Around the World: Here are intimate revelations, mind-changing pilgrimages, and body-challenging peregrinations. And there’s enough to keep one happily reading until the 2007 edition.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“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 2005 is an inspiration.”
—Transitions Abroad
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—Simon Winchester
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Fiction
Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls
Copyright © 2015 Travelers’ Tales. All rights reserved.
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Don George.
Travelers’ Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc. 2320 Bowdoin, Palo Alto, California 94306. www.travelerstales.com
Credits and copyright notices for the individual articles in this collection are given starting here.
Art Direction: Kimberly Nelson Coombs
Cover Photograph: Head of Sandstone Buddha at Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya, Thailand. © Stanislav Fosenbauer.
Interior Design and Page Layout: Scribe, Inc.
Production Director: Susan Brady
ISBN: 978-1-60952-087-8
ISSN: 1548-0224
E-ISBN: 978-1-60952-088-5
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities . . .
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Table of Contents
Publisher’s Preface
James O’Reilly
Introduction
Don George
Friends Who Don’t Bite
Jill K. Robinson
NAMIBIA
The Vanishing Art of Losing Your Way
Sarah Colleen Coury
USA
The Marco Chronicles: To Rome, Without Love
Elizabeth Geoghegan
ITALY
What Is that Thing?
Michael Coolen
THE GAMBIA
Inside the Tower
Keith Skinner
CALIFORNIA
Notes into Lines
Hannah Sheldon-Dean
CZECH REPUBLIC
Into the Hills
Matthew Crompton
INDIA
Show Me, Shouyu
Kelly Luce
JAPAN
Fish Trader Ray
Lisa Alpine
COLOMBIA
My First Trip to the Homeland
Tania Amochaev
RUSSIA
The Tea in Me
Bill Giebler
INDIA
Code 500
Stephanie Elizondo Griest
TEXAS
Diego Forever
Kelly Chastain
SPAIN
Woman Rain
Katherine Jamieson
GUYANA
The Crap Between the Love and Us
Dayna Brayshaw
AT SEA
Neil and I
Gary Buslik
EUROPE
From the Ashes
James Michael Dorsey
CAMBODIA
Ohio House Tour
V. Hansmann
OHIO
I Have a Problem with the Blood of a Woman
Stephanie Glaser
PARIS
Surfing the Millennia
Jeff Greenwald
UTAH
Feliz Cumpleaños
Lavinia Spalding
CUBA
Biko
Ken Matusow
SOUTH AFRICA
Storykeepers
Erin Byrne
PARIS
In Search of Dylan Thomas
Michael Shapiro
WALES
Found
/> Ben Aultman-Moore
SLOVAKIA
Southern Sandstone
Jessica Normandeau
KENTUCKY
The Bloom of Cancer
Amy Gigi Alexander
USA
The Lapham Longshot
Peter Valing
NEW YORK CITY
Into the Cold
Marcia DeSanctis
SWEDEN
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Publisher’s Preface
By following the magnetic metaphor of “elsewhere” as a guiding principle, I managed somehow to elude the fangs and gullies of ego.
—Peter Wortsman
You might think that after twenty years of publishing close to 150 travel books and reading thousands of travel essays, blog posts, books, and manuscripts, I’d be good and tired of it. But I am not—when my interest flags, it only takes one grand story to rejuvenate me. That story can be about any place, any topic, it can be mysterious, silly, gross, simple, or complex. The only required ingredient is humanity exposed in a well-turned sentence.
I need news of the stranger like an engine needs fuel, and not the news of the news media, or social media, but news brought first-hand by my own travels or second-hand through the stories of others. If there is cosmic unity to be found, it is in the staggering multiplicity of lives lived elsewhere on other shores and the other side of town, as recorded and sung by a good writer.
As the regular news darkens the day with panoramas of blood, greed, and cruelty, news from the traveler lifts me into awareness and delight, even in a cautionary tale about somewhere I would never wish to be. It summons me from stupor, calls me to leave the mirror of home for the mirror in the eyes of others.
It is easy to forget how much I need to be a pilgrim, a physical pilgrim, just as it is easy for any experienced traveler to wail about how places change, how San Francisco or Kathmandu or London are not what they used to be, never will be again. And it is true, true. I sometimes long with something approaching anguish for eras gone by, and that is what nostalgia means in its root—pain. But then I have to remind myself that what infuses eras gone by with magical halos, and places in the past with mystical qualities, is the landscape of humanity, ever changing, and never changing. The landscape of travel is the vast interiority of the human soul.
Serve your restless pilgrim! Serve him or her tea and a scratchy blanket before the fire. Leave town without too much baggage. Don’t wait too long. Take a pen and a pad.
The stories that follow in The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10 are but a tiny sampling of the great writing going on everywhere, every day. I hope you will find in them an offer you can’t refuse, as I did.
—James O’Reilly
Palo Alto, California
Introduction
Immersed in the Mud of Life
Don George
I’ve finally decided to unpack my hiking shoes.
About a month ago I returned from a week-long immersion in rural northern Cambodia. My mission had been to stay with a family in a stilt house in a village of unpaved paths, and to explore the ruins that waited in the surrounding jungle gloom. Because of time and travel constraints, I was visiting during the rainy season, but that didn’t deter my explorations. Over the course of that week, I and my hiking shoes leapt over (and sometimes into) sudden streams, sloshed through ankle-deep puddles, glopped through ten-foot-long stretches of sole-sucking mud, crashed through clutching vines, stepped over furry millipedes, and stumbled on mossy picture-puzzle-pieces of massive rock carvings scattered on the jungle floor.
By the end of this adventure, my shoes looked like they’d been dipped in milk chocolate, and as I sat in my fan-cooled cottage in Siem Reap on the last night of my adventure, packing for the twenty-hour journey home, I briefly considered leaving my shoes behind. They had served me well, I reasoned, but they would not be serving me anymore.
Then I realized that doing so would be like leaving a quintessential part of my adventure—a part of me—behind. So I wrapped each shoe in three plastic bags and stuffed them into the corners of my carry-on case. When I got home and unpacked, I placed the shoes, still securely shrouded in plastic, in my bedroom closet, thinking that I would figure out what to do with them later, at a time that would make itself known.
For the past two hours I’ve been sitting in my study, entranced by the stories in this anthology, and now, pieces have clicked into place inside me, and I’ve realized that the time has come to unveil the chocolate-covered shoes.
I retrieve them from the closet and then, back in my study, heft one plastic-wrapped package and gingerly extricate the bags inside. Particles of mud—mini-mementoes of Cambodian dirt and rainwater—fall onto my hardwood floor. I reach into the innermost bag and grab a heel, grainy and grimy, and as dirt sprays around me, pull the left shoe out. Soon the right shoe is resurrected as well.
I set the shoes like trophies on their plastic bags. They are spattered, splattered, scarred, and copiously caked in mud, and as I gaze at them, the jungle comes back to me—or rather, I go back to the jungle. I feel the heavy humidity, the sweat pouring like an open spigot down my face and back, hear the mosquitoes whining in my ear, slap at them ineffectually, take my camera in sweaty hands to photograph an intricate carving of a voluptuous Khmer dancer on a two-foot by three-foot by two-foot stone block, partly hidden among lush ferns.
I’m again parting branches and vines, laboriously liberating myself from persistent stickers, wiping the sweat from my eyes, stopping for a precious swig of water—the mosquitoes whining, dancing on my neck and hands—stepping over tumbled pieces of rock, slipping and sliding, grabbing at branches to stop my fall, clambering over a half-intact wall to see a bas relief story unfold before me, warriors and musicians and fish alive in stone. I slip again, and narrowly avoid planting my palm atop a millipede. The hairy, feety nightmares are everywhere and I recall what my guide said when I asked if they could harm me: “Oh yes, if you touch one, you will die.”
Through a screen of green I discern a wall, a doorway, a crumbling tower, a stony face—lips, nose, eyes—at the top of the tilting stone. I fumble with my camera as rain starts to fall, first a pitter-patter on the forest canopy and then an insistent downpour that penetrates the branches and leaves, and soaks me from the red bandana on my head to the invisible rubber soles of my shoes.
My shoes.
Suddenly I’m back in my study in a San Francisco suburb. The sun is shining, hummingbirds are flitting in the dappled branches beyond my window. The whine of a distant lawn mower dances, stingless, in the air.
And then the pieces snap together: hiking shoes—travel stories. Both take us places we never expected to go.
The book you hold in your hands offers a spectacular collection of hiking shoes. Among them, Jill Robinson transports us to an illuminating rest stop standoff with a black mamba snake in Namibia, and Lisa Alpine takes us deep into the everyday wonders of an Amazon backwater. Tania Amochaev leads us on a rigorous journey to a remote Russian village in search of roots and relatives; through Jeff Greenwald, we discover the vividly ventricled heart of a natural landmark in Arizona. Lavinia Spalding guides us on a bittersweet birthday celebration through Cuba, Erin Byrne and Marcia DeSanctis excavate the layers of poignant pasts in Paris, Michael Shapiro searches for the soul of Dylan Thomas in Wales, and Amy Gigi Alexander maps the life-saving marvels that travel can sometimes confer.
Like my shoes, all the stories herein are battered, spattered, scarred. They’re immersed in the mud of life. And like my shoes, they’ve absorbed once inconceivable and now immeasurably enriching journeys.
So, I invite you to step into these stories, to embark on the magical, muddy adventures they hold. I can guarantee that you’ll go places you’ve never imagined—and unwrap lessons you’ll never forget.
Don George is the author of Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing and the forthcoming The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Trave
l Writing of Don George. Don has been a pioneering travel writer and editor for 40 years. He was the travel editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, founder and editor of Salon’s “Wanderlust” travel site, and global travel editor for Lonely Planet. He is currently an editor at large and columnist for National Geographic Traveler and the editor of BBC Travel’s “Words and Wanderlust” section. Don is the cofounder and chairman of the renowned Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference. He has visited 90 countries and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of magazines, newspapers, and websites worldwide. He has also edited ten award-winning literary travel anthologies. He speaks and teaches regularly at conferences and on campuses around the world, and he is frequently interviewed on TV, radio, and online as a travel expert.
JILL K. ROBINSON
Friends Who Don’t Bite
If we help each other, there’s more time for wonder.
The olive color of the black mamba can’t be ignored. It’s the last thing I want to see in Namibia.
And it’s under my car.
I perch on a picnic table at a tiny rest stop thirty miles north of Otjiwarongo, with my eye on the snake, knowing better than to throw something to scare it off. Tall grass punctuated with sprawling trees lines each side of the highway, and what lies beyond is protected by cyclone fencing. After ten minutes of waiting for the snake to move, a truck turns off the road.
“Are you having trouble with your vehicle?” asks the man.
“In a way,” I respond. “I’ve got a mamba under my car.”
The man introduces himself as Solomon, a Namibian wildlife guide, and asks if I have binoculars so he can check my claim. My binoculars are in the car. I hand him my camera. He looks through the lens, grunts, and gives it back.
“Indeed, that’s what he is,” says Solomon. “We’re here for a while. Do you have lunch?”
I reply that I have a great lunch, but it’s sitting in my car next to the binoculars. Solomon strides back to his truck, reaches inside, and pulls out a bag and cooler. In less than a minute, he’s set the picnic table and laid out his meal to share with me.