The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

  When we finally reached my compound, a sleepy, shirtless man emerged from a security booth, looking confused and annoyed. It didn’t appear that anyone was expecting me—which I found hopeful. Maybe my driver was just asking for directions to the city. A city like Dubai, full of flash and plastic, glitz and glory. After a few minutes, however, my driver seemed to reach some sort of consensus with the guard—hopefully one that didn’t include me being sold to a sheik.

  I didn’t want to be left here, but I had little choice in the matter: the driver unloaded my bags on the sidewalk and told me to get out.

  I was the first teacher to arrive. With no contact information, no idea where I was supposed to be, and no clue what I should be doing, I decided to explore the villa while I tolerated the ambiguousness of my plight. It was sensational. Everything came unnecessarily super-sized, which made me feel unnecessarily small. It was like being under posh house arrest or privileged political exile, complete with a pool and a maid.

  When the sun finally sank into the sand, I decided to venture beyond the villa, maybe to find the market that the guard had pointed to in an extremely vague imprecise way. Off I went, fully clothed from head to toe, trudging through the vast Arabian Desert, the sand burning my toes. I needed a camel, and I couldn’t stop sweating. Sweating from places I didn’t know had pores. Perspiration was dripping from my elbows.

  Eventually, I spotted some British girls loitering outside their own compound, clad in swaths of fabric no larger than tea towels—risqué even by Vegas standards. Meanwhile, I was dressed straight out of the convent.

  “You can wear that?” I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out. Isn’t this a Muslim country? Shouldn’t we be modest? Respectful?

  “It’s fine. It’s very open here. We’re going clubbing,” one replied dismissively and then continued a lively conversation with her two trampy friends.

  I had my doubts, but it was really hot. I peeled off my schoolmarm cardigan, hiked up my skirt, and ploughed onward like a true Bedouin.

  I met Aaron two days later at orientation. I loathe orientations: a rush of vaguely necessary information that everyone else seems to absorb effortlessly, while I drink paper cups of instant coffee and struggle to make sense of the attendance sheet. Each country has a different system; some like to use checkmarks, others, dots. In Yokohama, meticulous records were required; in Madrid, nobody cared.

  Aaron understood my pain. He’d just arrived in the country that morning and was having enough difficulty just keeping his eyes open. We bonded over caffeine—coffee for me, tea for him. I didn’t think much of him romantically at first. He had a funny, formal way of speaking, as if he’d just stepped from the pages of a Jane Austin novel, and he seemed a little sweaty. But then, who was I to judge? My elbows sweat.

  Classes started the following day, and keeping attendance didn’t get any easier. Teenage Emirati girls don’t like to stay in class or even come to class. Most of the time I found them at Starbucks or roaming the halls in their designer shoes and custom tailored abayas—flowing black robes that made me feel like I was teaching at Hogwarts.

  Aaron became a confidant in my quest to win over my thoroughly apathetic students. Every day I had a plan, and every day Aaron listened to how it failed. In the end I let them paint intricate henna patterns on my hands and play Arabic music videos on YouTube. We shut off the lights, the headscarves came off, and we had our own dance party. This they liked. They even taught me the ponytail-whipping move. They didn’t learn much from the lesson plan, but they liked me—for that day anyway—and I couldn’t wait to tell Aaron.

  Compound life had its own set of rules, but a tenacious older teacher—the self-appointed purity police—kept a vigilant watch on us. He seemed to think if the genders started fraternizing it wouldn’t be long before the villas were overrun with panty-dropping whores and bathtubs of moonshine. He was probably just lonely, or envious that his panty-dropping days were behind him, but because of him, our budding romance remained innocent.

  Aaron and I sat outside his villa day after day in the suffocating heat, drinking piping hot pots of tea. It was like being in eighth grade again: he wasn’t allowed inside my villa, I wasn’t allowed in his, and any kind of public affection was gravely frowned upon. So we sat, and sipped, and barely touched.

  The fourth week into our four-week contract, we finally kissed, late at night with our feet dangling playfully in the pool. He’d spent the past several hours regaling me with tales of the economic collapse of the European Union and the myth of Achilles. For a closet nerd like myself, this qualified as foreplay.

  It didn’t take much convincing for Aaron to join my colleagues and me on a two-week road trip once school ended. From the creamy, caramel-colored sand dunes of the Emirates to the rocky, sun-cracked land of Oman, we gorged on feasts of hummus and lamb kebabs and ended our evenings with shot-glass sized cups of thick cardamom-spiced coffee and apple mint shisha.

  One especially balmy evening in a Muscat souk, a shopkeeper lured me in with black sticks of kohl, guaranteed to transform me into a harem harlot. Ahmed, the shopkeeper, called me his sister. It was clearly a keen sales ploy, but one I appreciated nonetheless. He seemed to keep his shop tiny and cramped so that whatever he thrust into your hands you couldn’t put down again. I had already bought the kohl, three jars of frankincense, a few tubes of henna, and a green pashmina shawl when he pulled out a small magical looking bottle from a velvet satchel.

  “The Sultan,” he said, referring to the bottle, “is an aroma intoxicating to men.”

  The perfume, Ahmed explained, sneaks up on a man until he’s unwittingly engulfed in the woman’s seductive scent. He nodded toward “his brother” Aaron, then winked at me. That night while I was sleeping, Aaron returned to the souk and bought me a bottle.

  But realistically, where was this going? I was from California but lived in Korea. He lived in Spain but came from London. Geographically speaking, we were a mess. I’d seen it work for other couples—they walked around flaunting their bilingual relationships and work visas for multiple countries. Their babies came out clutching passports in their tiny dual-citizenship hands. For me, international relationships were more like a carton of milk: they came with an expiration date, which you ignored at your own peril.

  The no-smoking bet began the night of the green sea turtles. In July, hundreds of these half-shelled creatures crawl ashore to lay their eggs deep in the sand. You venture out at night and wait beneath the stars. Our guide informed us that these mama “turrrtles” don’t have babies until their mid-thirties. After they lay their eggs, they return to the ocean and embark on a two-year odyssey around the world. Then they return to their birthplace, to this exact same beach in Oman. Meanwhile, the male turtles never go anywhere. I felt an instant affinity with these dynamic reptilian ladies.

  The guide said we mustn’t help the babies; it was their own destiny to find their way to the sea, or not. We stood in awe for quite a while watching one little fellow waddle in circles—obviously not destined for seafaring life. After repeatedly stating the importance of not interfering with the natural passage of life, the guide eventually grew bored of watching and chucked him in the water, where I’m sure he was promptly eaten by a fish.

  I can’t remember how it started. Maybe it was because we’d just spent a moonlit evening holding hands and breathing fresh salty sea air, or perhaps being thirty-something myself, I was feeling maternal and didn’t want secondhand smoke harming the babies. But by the time we left that beach, Aaron wasn’t going to smoke for the next twenty-four hours.

  It was a quarter to twelve and we’d moved into the Indian section of the nightclub, where things were a bit more rowdy. More of a PG-13 crowd here. The men were boisterous, and the dancing ladies on stage were actually dancing. They wore bright jewel-toned saris and spun around to a two-man Indian band, whipping their long dark tresses teasingly—a move proving universally provocative.

  The place was thick with ci
garette smoke, and Aaron was salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I encouraged him to break the bet, but he was adamant that he wouldn’t give in and had another beer instead. Was he afraid of sandals? Did he have freakish hobbit feet? Or was he just determined to win?

  I became fascinated with one of the dancers, the one we’d dubbed “The Fairy.” She wore a gorgeous white sari and flitted about like a flirtatious butterfly. She had the attention of every man in the club, and me. Her eyes, her smile, her hair, her body: this woman got what she wanted. Aaron didn’t see the appeal. He was mistrustful of fairies; he found them fickle. He preferred “Midnight.” She sat to the side of the stage in a deep blue sari looking bored.

  “She doesn’t need the attention,” he explained. “She doesn’t fill you with a bunch of meaningless promises.”

  I started to see what he meant. The Fairy might be fun for a romp or a heady summer romance, but maybe I was beginning to crave something real. I reached into my pocket and felt for the scrap of paper. It was midnight. I looked across the bar at Aaron. He shot me a cheeky grin before bumming a cigarette off a local, like some nicotine-fueled Cinderella. He immediately relaxed into a billowing cloud of cathartic smoke. As he happily puffed away, I turned my attention back to the stage and the folded note now in my hand. I took a deep breath and quietly opened it.

  Buy me dinner …

  Was that all? He’d stuck doggedly to his non-smoking guns so I could buy him a two-dollar shawarma? I felt deflated.

  … in Korea.

  I stared at the words for a minute, a slow smile forming on my lips. Then again, maybe this one had an extended shelf life.

  Sarah Katin has been a television host in Korea, professor in Japan, treehouse dweller in Laos, house painter in New Orleans, sangria swiller in Spain, dragon hunter in Indonesia, and fishmonger in Australia. A two-time contributor to the The Best Women’s Travel Writing series, she recently retired (pending her success as an unemployed screenwriter) from her teaching position in South Korea. These days you can find her hard at work on her second screenplay at her L.A. office (the cushy chair by the window at Starbucks) or in Costa Rica bathing baby sloths.

  HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS

  Our Own Apocalypse Now

  “We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.”—Anatole Broyard

  The Dalai Lama’s face looked distorted on the JumboTron. His eyes peered from behind a pair of twelve-foot-tall glasses into a crowd of 60,000 people in a football stadium. I sat among the masses, my thighs pinned to a blue plastic seat, waiting for him to speak, straining to see the real thing: a tiny orange figure like a blown leaf on the gridded green field below.

  I was working as a reporter in Seattle, covering a five-day conference about compassion. The Dalai Lama was the keynote speaker. At the opening ceremony the day before, local scientists had shown a video about an experiment on toddlers, in which a researcher pretended to smash his own finger with a hammer and then cried out in pain. A two-year-old test subject rushed over and, his eyes rimmed with tears, offered the researcher his teddy bear. At the football stadium, the Dalai Lama was talking about how experiments like this prove that compassion is innate. That it’s something we feel before we learn its name, and that as we get older, we must be careful not to let it seep out. The crowd stood and applauded wildly.

  I snuck out of the stadium before the presentation was over to catch people on their way out and ask what they thought of the conference, but I was too early. The parking lot was almost empty, except for a handful of security guys and a man passing out pamphlets entitled, “Are you going to Hell?” Toward the exit, two Vietnam vets sat on a patch of grass beside a black portable sound system. They were taking turns reading aloud from a binder, thick as a city phonebook, the names of troops who’d died so far in Iraq and Afghanistan: Cpl. Luke S. Runyan, twenty-one, Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. Lance Cpl. Curtis A. Christensen Jr., twenty-nine, Collingswood, New Jersey. The dull cadence of a macabre graduation.

  A few feet away, another vet stood in the shade, swaying to the rhythm of the names. He wore a bandana, dog tags, a white undershirt, and wraparound sunglasses too small for his head. He introduced himself as David and, since it was 2008, we started talking about the election, Obama, and the success of the surge in Iraq. After a while, both of us leaning against a cool cement wall, we started talking about his war. Ron Kovic’s war. ‘Nam. That thick stretch of jungle between his generation and mine.

  “Over there, everything’s clearer in a way, you know?” he said. “You’re killing or you’ll be killed. It’s you or me. It’s live or die. It’s simplicity. I’m not saying everything that happens in a war is O.K., I’m just saying it is what it is.”

  I asked him if there are things people do in a war, during times of simplicity, that don’t seem so simple once they’re back home. I didn’t have the guts to say “you.” Didn’t have the guts to ask, “Are there things you did that don’t seem so simple now? Are there things you did that haunt you?” But he understood. He looked me straight in the eyes and then laughed a frayed, humorless laugh.

  “Listen, in a war, you do what you have to do to live. You kill people,” he said, shrugging. “Do you kill women? Sure. Do you kill children? If a kid is shooting at you with an AK, do you think you’re going to care if his balls haven’t dropped? You light him up or he lights you up.”

  David licked his lips and barked that frayed laugh again. “That sound fucked up to you, girl?”

  He looked into my face, like he was waiting for me to say something. To agree with him, or judge him, or exonerate him, or start crying—something. But I just stood there, watching him. Feeling stupid or naïve or angry or, worse, as if I both hated him and understood him completely.

  “It’s fucked up, but it’s magical, too,” he said finally, quietly. “Remember that, girlie: fucked-up magical. That’s war.”

  I said goodbye and walked back into the stadium, back into the dark, echoing hallways where I could hear the inflection of earnest speeches still going on inside. I hadn’t told David I’d gone to Vietnam a few months earlier. I just couldn’t do it. Hey! I took a little holiday to that nightmare place where not long enough ago, you no doubt watched your friends die. Where maybe you killed children.

  To make it worse, when I’d gone to Vietnam, I’d gone with one of those discount student tour groups that give you photocopies of your itinerary with animated, smiling globes on each page. All twelve of us on the tour had fashionable sunglasses and iPods and the same Lonely Planet guidebook, and we all knew the same things every twenty-something American knows about Vietnam: Rambo, peace signs, “Platoon.” The drunk vet on the corner by the pharmacy. “Me love you long time.” Our collective memory of the place had been rolled over and over in Hollywood’s great, gummy maw so many times, its once-sharp edges had been spit out soft as beach glass. We were hipsters on vacation.

  That’s not to say that most of us weren’t old enough to know someone—an uncle, a friend, a sixth grade teacher—who’d been in the war. The girl sitting next to me on the bus, Jenny, said her dad had been a G.I. there in the late ’60s. He hadn’t wanted her to visit. Jenny thought it was silly, but I understood. The last time he’d been, it was to kill or be killed.

  A few days into the trip, a bunch of us rented motorcycles and drove into the hills near Hue to see the cement-topped bunkers where American soldiers used to sleep. We put our palms against the dirt worn smooth by their bodies, worn smoother by the hands of hordes of visitors like us. Then we took a break to drink Diet Cokes in the shade. “Intermission for wartime nostalgia,” I’d written in my notebook. “Vacationing in someone else’s hell. Or, worse: wallowing in a stale grief, when kids my age were dying every day—today—in my own generation’s wars.” Nearby, a little old lady in a conical hat hawked buttons and t-shirts decorated in camouflage and the North Vietnamese star.

  That afternoon, I left the group and wandered into a gallery showing photographs of b
ooby traps dug by Viet Cong: deep holes full of sharpened bamboo sticks, covered over with brush. A gallery employee explained that when the Americans ran over the top of them they’d fall in and get skewered. I looked at him. He shifted his weight and smiled the way people smile at a casket. Most of the Vietnamese who sided with the Americans were made social pariahs and forced into poverty after 1975, so this wealthy-looking fifty-something guy in this air-conditioned gallery had probably fought my country. Had he been there? Had he tried to skewer Jenny’s dad? Had he killed Americans? Had we killed his family? Who do I apologize to? Did it matter anymore?

  A few days later, a friend on the tour and I went walking, and within a few minutes a dozen children had gathered around us, begging for money, hanging on our hands and pulling at our pants, until eventually I yelled, “Enough! Enough!” Most of them scattered, and we could see that behind where they’d been, a grown man, deformed by what was probably Agent Orange, was resting on his forearms in the street, his spine turned backwards like a scorpion tail, his baby-sized feet dangling above the nape of his neck. I closed my eyes. Enough, I thought. Enough.

  In the football stadium in Seattle, I’d made my way back to my seat. A new face was on the JumboTron, and swarms of children were parading across the field. I let my mind wander, trying to remember my last night in Saigon when five of us from the tour group found a war-themed nightclub called Apocalypse Now, which our Lonely Planets recommended without irony. Sandbags and barbed wire lined the bar and windows, and the elbow-height cocktail tables were painted to look like chemical weapons barrels. A sign reading “Charlie don’t serve” hung over the dance floor, where 300 kids slid against each other in the near-dark, the smell of sweat and alcohol and perfume so thick and the music so loud that we couldn’t hear or feel anything but the bass thumping in our stomachs, in our thighs, on the napes of our necks.