The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

  In France, as in many parts of the world, the best information arrives by word of mouth, or de bouche à oreille as they say, from mouth to ear. This is how I had learned of Roland Manouvrier, an artisanal ice cream maker—and the source of my navigational woes.

  I’d been in the Dordogne for nearly a month researching a culinary travel book. Having amassed a stockpile of classic recipes from local chefs and home cooks, I was in search of something—and someone—a little different. One of these people was Chef Nicolas De Visch, who had taken over his parents’ restaurant in the medieval village of Issigeac, and whose menu did not include a single serving of duck or foie gras—two mainstays of the regional cuisine. Nicolas had invited me to dinner and after several courses of his unconventional cooking, plunked a tub of ice cream down on the table, handed me an espresso spoon, and motioned for me to dig into the creamy white contents. Preparing my taste buds for vanilla or coconut, or some other sweet savor, I closed my lips around the mouthful. The cold burned my tongue, then melted down the back of my throat. Nicolas’s eyebrows arched in question.

  “Goat cheese?” I guessed.

  “Yes, from the village of Rocamadour,” he confirmed. “And you really must meet this guy before you go.”

  After crisscrossing the Dordogne countryside for nearly two hours, I had pulled off the road to make that call to Roland. My otherwise trusty GPS had been no match for rural French addresses without street names or numbers, only titles like “The Sheep Barn” and “The Old Mill.” Finally, thanks to a helpful barista, I zeroed in on Roland’s address, given simply as “The Industrial Zone” in the village of Saint-Geniès.

  When I arrived twenty minutes later, Roland met me at his office door wearing a white lab coat, a plastic hair net set askew atop his wavy brown hair, and a scowl. The archetypal mad scientist, I thought. For a second the story of “Hansel and Gretel” popped into my head. I wondered if anyone would hear me scream as Roland shoved me into a cauldron over a hot fire. Would I be his next flavor—Glacé à l’Américaine?

  “How much time do you need?” he barked, interrupting my reverie.

  “As much as you’ll give me,” I answered. He corrected my French.

  “Because you’re late, I’m late, and I must make deliveries.”

  “How about I help you? We can talk on the road,” I offered.

  “Pppfff …” Roland produced the classic French noise made by blowing air through one’s relaxed lips, often done to dismiss something just said.

  I followed him through his stainless-steel kitchen and helped him load frozen cases of ice cream into his delivery van. As I moved them into place, I noticed the flavors penned in black ink on the lid of each container: Tomato-Basil. Szechwan. Rose. Violet. Calvados. I asked Roland if I could include one of his unusual recipes in my book.

  “What do you think? I have a formula like at McDonald’s? I don’t write my recipes down. They are not exact, and depend on many influences.”

  “Pppfff …” he added.

  We coursed the serpentine Dordogne roads, past fields of lemon-yellow flowers and over oak-encrusted hills, delivering the frozen parcels every fifteen to twenty minutes. Each time Roland got back in the car, he shelled me with questions: Do you like Andy Warhol? Have you been to New York? Have you ever seen a real cowboy? How about a real Indian? What is the point of baseball? Each time I answered, he corrected my French.

  “Would you like to drink something?” Roland eventually asked.

  Finally, I thought. A question that isn’t about America and cultural icons. Hoping to demonstrate my language prowess and keep his corrections at bay, I came up with the perfect response, an idiomatic expression I’d recently learned.

  “Oui. Les grands esprits se rencontrent,” I replied. Yes. Great minds think alike. “J’aimerais une boisson froide.” I would love a cold drink.

  “Une boisson FRAICHE,” Roland said, emphasizing the correct adjective. “Pas froide.” He added in a verb suggestion while he was at it, and didn’t even mention the expression I’d whipped out to impress him.

  I didn’t mind being corrected. It was part of learning a new language. But after an hour of the question-response-correction routine—and what felt like nitpicking at what was, in fact, intelligible French—my patience had eroded.

  I finally took a swing back at him. “If you prefer, we could speak in English. Would that be easier for you?”

  “Why would I speak in English? I am in France and French is my language!” he bellowed. The sarcasm was lost on him.

  My face flushed and my jaw tightened. Short fused and aching from the smile I’d been faking for the last hour, I was ready to abandon this day and this ill-mannered ice cream man. I blew up.

  “You know what?” I hollered, “It’s people like YOU who give the French a bad reputation in my country. And in case YOU haven’t noticed, I am in YOUR country speaking YOUR language because YOU can’t speak mine.”

  I braced myself for retaliation. Roland stared straight ahead, his hands clenching the steering wheel. After a tense ten-second interlude, he asked me about the reputation the French have in America. I quietly listened to the advice of the voices in my head. One said, “Be diplomatic, you’re a professional.” The other said, “Be honest, he’s an asshole.” I cleared my throat.

  “Though generalizing,” I began, “we find you rude, arrogant, and hateful toward Americans.” A good synthesis of both voices, I thought.

  Roland’s belly-bouncing chuckle filled the air, but he said nothing more, not even to correct me.

  We crossed a bridge and puttered down the main two-lane street of Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, our final stop for the day. The sun was low in the summer sky and cast an ochre glow on the stone buildings. Garlands of yellow and orange paper flowers strung between the steeply pitched rooftops swayed overhead, remnants of a recent festival. We parked and found a table in the sun at the town’s only café. Roland ordered me to wait while he delivered ice cream to his brother down the street. I watched him shake hands and kiss-kiss the cheeks of a few people along the way before disappearing into a doorway. When I saw him again, he was back on the street, handing out ice cream cones from the back of his van to lucky passersby. He waved me over.

  I asked him if he lived in Saint-Leon-sur-Vézère.

  “No. This is where I was born,” he said.

  Roland pulled out another familiar white container, scooped the bright orange ice cream into two cones, and handed me one. The mandarin orange flavor couldn’t have tasted better if I’d plucked it from a tree.

  We wandered through the cobblestone streets of the riverside village, and as I savored my frozen treat, Roland unlatched his memories. He pointed out the window he’d broken while trying to master a yo-yo; the home of a girl he once had a crush on; the church where he got married. We stopped in front of the brown wooden door of a village house, and Roland told me the lady who once lived there had found a rusted American G.I. helmet in her garden.

  “She gave the helmet to my father, and we kept it displayed on top of an armoire in our dining room for many years,” Roland said.

  “Why?” I asked. “What interest did your father have in it?”

  “We didn’t know anything about the soldier. Did he come from Oklahoma? Wyoming? Did he have a family?” Roland said. Then he raised his finger in the air. “The only thing we knew for certain was that this anonymous American came here to liberate France. For that we are grateful.”

  Tears pricked my eyes, and I silently blinked them away. It wasn’t just the unexpected provenance of Roland’s story, or the softening of his voice. His words had conjured an image in my head of a framed black-and-white photograph hanging in my dining room back home: my nineteen-year-old grandfather—my own hero—in his G.I. helmet.

  We sat, wordless, atop a low rock wall for several minutes, feet dangling over the Vézère River.

  “Thank you for sharing that story,” I eventually said.

  “Thank you for com
e today,” Roland replied, in English.

  I didn’t correct him.

  Kimberley Lovato is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Afar, Delta Sky Magazine, Executive Travel, and in other print and online media. Roland’s recipe for tomato-basil sorbet appeared in her mailbox a month after their meeting and can be found on page 123 of her culinary travel book, Walnut Wine &Truffle Groves, which won two awards in the category of Culinary Travel: the 2010 Cordon d’Or International Culinary Academy Award, and the 2010 Gourmand International World Cookbook Award. Her website is www.kimberleylovato.com.

  ANN HOOD

  The Runaway

  Can grief be outrun?

  When the SUV I took from the train station to my hotel in Lhasa last January got blocked by two men haggling over a yak’s head, I had one thought: I could not be farther away from my little red house in Providence, Rhode Island. I’d had that thought before—on a starlit night on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca; on a crowded street in Phnom Penh as a man clutching an AK-47 strolled past me; on a boat in the Mekong River bumping against other boats loaded with jackfruit, mangosteen, and durian. The realization that I am somewhere removed from life as I know it, somewhere no one can reach me, where I can’t read menus or street signs and where the very air I breathe smells different, brings me a strange comfort.

  Ever since 2002, when my daughter Grace died suddenly at the age of five from a virulent form of strep, I have had the desire to flee. At first, I wanted to sell our house and move—to Oregon, to Italy, to the moon. It didn’t matter where. What mattered was that I leave the familiar rooms and streets where Grace’s footsteps now echoed louder than they had when she was alive. Our kitchen floor still had glitter on it from the art project she never finished. In the corner of one room I found her ballet tights rolled into a ball, still smelling of the mild stink of her feet. In her bedroom, wrappers from forbidden candy she had sneaked nestled in drawers. When I stepped out the front door, when I walked down the street, I could still see her dashing ahead of me in her metallic purple sneakers, her big brother, Sam, at her side. “Stop at the corner!” I could hear myself shout. I had worried about a speeding car careening down one of the alleys that line our neighborhood when I should have been dreading a microscopic, deadly bacterium. How foolish the panic in my voice seemed now.

  After Grace died, I wanted to run away, to go somewhere mysterious and distant. Surely, I thought, there were places in the world where I would not be haunted. I had been a nomad of sorts for most of my adult life. Looking back, perhaps I have always been running away. From a small-town childhood. From broken hearts—my own and those I broke. From loneliness and a restlessness that has bubbled in me for as long as I can remember.

  My father used to tell me stories about his years in Peking (Beijing) in the late 1940s. People dropped dead from starvation right at his feet, he said. There were dark rooms where men gambled. Women still had bound feet and limped down the street behind their husbands. He told me how he’d skied in Greece and scuba dived off the coast of Haiti. He ate dog in Morocco and got bit by a mongoose in Cuba. Perhaps it is no surprise then that at the age of sixteen, I took the $500 I’d earned in two years of modeling for the local department store, Jordan Marsh, and flew to Bermuda, where I snorkeled and drank rum swizzles and lay on a beach of pink sand. With the next year’s savings, I flew to Nassau in the Bahamas to eat conch chowder and dance to steel drums. And so it went through college: a voodoo ceremony in Brazil, a double rainbow on Maui, Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

  When I graduated, the only job I wanted was as a flight attendant with an international airline. I studied route maps the way my friends studied Kaplan books for the LSATs and GREs. I memorized codes for airports—LHR, CDG, MIL—intending to visit every one. In eight years at the airline, I flew more than a million miles. When not in the air, I sailed down the Nile and climbed the Acropolis; I bought knockoff handbags in Rome and watches in Zurich; I wore out dozens of shoes on cobblestone streets. Even after my job ended, I planned getaways. When Sam was born, and then Grace, I kept going, breaking umbrella strollers on the bumpy sidewalks of Warsaw. Three years after Grace died, my husband, Lorne, and I adopted a little girl, Annabelle, and within three weeks she was on my lap in a boat on Lake Titicaca.

  The advice commonly given to grieving people is to stay put. Don’t move, don’t quit your job or leave your spouse. Yet my instinct was to go, to run away as far and as fast as I could. “You can go away,” I was told, “but when you get home, nothing will be better.” Didn’t they understand that in those months after Grace died, I thought nothing would ever be better? Simple tasks became impossible, but when friends invited us to visit them in France that summer, I said yes. It took me an entire afternoon to book three tickets to Paris over the telephone. Reading the numbers off my American Express card proved daunting. They jumped and reversed until I cried. “My daughter is dead!” I sobbed to the frustrated ticket agent. “I still need a valid credit card,” she said.

  Finally I had tickets, a travel plan, an escape. Lorne and Sam and I cried our way through Provence, following van Gogh’s footsteps in Arles and shopping the market in Aix-en-Provence. At our friends’ house, I gratefully slept the deep, numbing sleep of jet lag and woke to cold wine, crashing waves, and jaw-dropping views. In the fog of grief, I visited Marseille and ate bouillabaisse. Well-wishers were right: when I got home, nothing had changed. But while I was away, I was distracted and off-kilter in a different way. I struggled with unfamiliar, twisting streets and menus I couldn’t decipher, while at home I struggled with the familiar and I still could decipher nothing. Better, I thought on my first grief-struck night back home, to navigate the foreign and exotic than to fail to navigate what I used to manage so easily.

  That was how I found myself in Lhasa, stuck behind the head of a yak. As years passed and the grief continued, I traveled to more remote locations. The farther or higher or more isolated, the better I felt. The unknown brought a strange safety. The vaccinations, the visas, the curve of alphabets I could not read reminded me that the world holds mystery and danger side by side with joy and wonder. These were the same contradictions I’d grappled with every day since Grace died.

  On a snowy night eight years after her death, Lorne, Annabelle and I boarded a train in Beijing at midnight, headed for Tibet. The journey would take forty-eight hours, which seemed to horrify people when I told them. But to me, the long trip sounded divine. With my French press coffeepot and a pound of Peet’s French Roast, my knitting and a bag of old New Yorkers, as well as crayons and paper for Annabelle and a dog-eared copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I set up our little train compartment as if it were our home. In many ways it was. My comfort came not just from the places I was going but also from the journey to them. Even after so many years, opening curtains and finding a herd of yaks, or sitting at a table in a crowded dining car eating spicy noodles, brings wonder back into my still-broken heart. As the train slowed on its approach into Lhasa, I whispered to my husband, “I wish we didn’t have to get off. I could just go and go on this train.”

  Moments later, we stepped into the thin air of Lhasa, its sky bluer than anything has a right to be. Everywhere we looked, ragged faded prayer flags blew in the breeze. The smell of yak butter permeated our hair and clothes, mixing with the scent of burning juniper. On the road to our hotel, we passed scores of pilgrims moving in synchronized motions, dropping from knees to stomach along the crowded roads.

  I took a deep breath. For oxygen, yes. But also to renew myself. Days of travel, by air and train and now car, had brought me here. I was tired and achy and overwhelmed by sights and sounds. And in this way, I moved along a different journey, the one that began eight Aprils before in an intensive care unit, when I stood by my dead daughter’s side and wanted to run. In that moment, I imagined running out of that hospital, away from its smell of death and the sounds of machines stopping and the
stillness of my little girl. I wanted to run through the streets of my hometown of Providence, screaming and screaming into the night. But of course I couldn’t. I stood in that room and signed papers and answered questions and held my hand out to the nurse who gave me Grace’s brightly colored clothes in a Ziploc bag. Later, at home in the bed where I had slept for ten years, I heard the familiar sounds of neighbors going to work, college students on their skateboards, The New York Times dropping on my front stoop. Once so soothing, they all felt like an assault. Run, my brain ordered. Run.

  Finally, the yak head is tossed into a truck, and the small street opens up. The SUV squeezes between mountains of pale-yellow yak butter and Chinese soldiers carrying rifles. Inside our hotel, yak-butter tea waits for us; orange and pink silk cushions line the floor. Venturing out again, I join a crowd of people in colorful ethnic clothes and monks in yellow robes, jostling through a dark temple. They mumble prayers. They reach out to touch the toe of a statue. They light offerings of incense and butter. I have no prayers, no religion, no ritual except this act of throwing myself into the unknown.

  That first night, we climb narrow stone steps to the roof of the hotel. A crooked handwritten sign says WELCOME TO THE ROOFTOP OF THE WORLD. I am gasping by the time I reach the top. The altitude makes my heart pound against my ribs and my head ache. It’s hard to breathe here. Leaning against the sign, I return to that hospital, that ICU. That night when Grace died, I couldn’t catch my breath. The foreign world of death overwhelmed me, sucked the air from me. I remember my hands flailing like a drowning person’s. I remember drowning in grief.

  People think grief ends as time passes, when really it just changes shape. You should, they believe, be over it. Although it is true that sometimes days pass without me thinking about Grace, or losing her, it is also true that I can hear a song or glimpse a little blond-haired girl, and my knees will still buckle. When I am housebound for too long, when I must stay put, grief intrudes more often. Over time I have learned to see it coming, to recognize its early signs: the inability to concentrate, the jangling nerves and short temper, too many hours staring at daytime TV. I’ve learned that planning my next escape can ease the pain. I turn off The Barefoot Contessa and pick up a travel guide, mapping out the best flights to Entebbe or Vientiane, the routes I can follow to disappear into a different world. Perhaps I will always be looking for these routes out of grief, for these places that can shake me up, that can remind me that this big world is beautiful after all.