The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  “Josh, how is your head?” he asked.

  “Oh, I still have a headache. But compared to what I felt like at lunch, I feel like now I’m dancing in a field of buttercups.”

  “You should take pills,” Fred said.

  “Can I read the label for side effects?” I asked.

  Fred handed the bottle to me.

  “‘May cause drowsiness. Don’t operate heavy machinery.’ Hmm …Josh, you think you can operate your walking poles?”

  “Hakuna matata,” said Josh.

  He mimed going spastic with invisible walking poles, stabbing and smashing into everything in the tent. Definitely, he was feeling better.

  Fred turned to me. “So, give him half a pill after dinner, another half in the morning. Make sure he takes it with lots of water.”

  I nodded to Fred. I had my hand on the top to pop open the bottle and break a pill in two. Wait a minute, I checked myself. One of the reasons I had wanted to take the trip with Josh was to bond in a new way with him, man to man. But here I was, compulsively slipping into daddy-mode. I looked across the table at Josh. Our eyes met. I handed the bottle across the table to him. Yeah, he’s old enough to take his own medicine.

  Day 4: No doubt about it, I stank. Bacteria do not thrive at high altitudes. Theoretically, one can go a long time this high without a bath. But waking up the fourth day on Kilimanjaro with all the odors of the mountain zip-locked inside my sleeping bag with me, I knew it was time to take action. When Josh went out to visit the potty-tent, I rummaged through my duffle bag and found the special item I had been saving for just this moment. While shopping for trip supplies a month earlier, I had been thrilled to find a camping accessory that was new to me: man-sized wet wipes. Wet wipes are a parent’s best friend. These little moist tissues with a slight antiseptic sting make changing diapers easy and sanitary, and can also clean a dirty face or sticky hands. But these beauties I found at REI were made for head-to-toe adult body rubdowns. Each napkin unfolded to the dimensions of a laptop keyboard. Using both sides, I found I could wash about one quarter of my carcass before the wipe turned gray and grimy. Four wipes and ten minutes later I felt clean and fresh as the proverbial daisy.

  Josh, while appreciating my change of skin color, declined to use them on himself, no matter how enthusiastically I promoted the daisy-fresh feeling. Though he did not smell as bad as I did, he looked frightful. His hair seemed to be made of solid clumps that stuck up from his scalp at odd angles like palm fronds, like some Claymation-cartoon version of himself. And he was covered with feathers. His down sleeping bag was leaking. Since he was sleeping in his fleece jacket and long johns, white tufts of down had gotten stuck in the fibers.

  The walk today would be a short one, Fred explained after breakfast, just five kilometers. But there would be a lot of steep climbing up and down at high altitude, so we would go slowly, covering about a kilometer each hour. To start, we would scale the cliff on the far side of the valley, known as the Barranco Wall, a climb of 200 meters (600 feet), straight up.

  A little glacial stream flowed alongside the base of the cliff. The morning sun glistened off a thin layer of ice that covered the stream’s banks. Mist rose from the ice like a translucent veil in front of the wall. As we drew near we saw that the ice had given the stepping stones in the stream a glossy sheen, making it difficult to cross without slipping and plunging ankle deep in the frigid water—not a great way to start a day’s trek. Fred hopped nimbly across and then steadied each of us so that we only splashed our waterproof boots without soaking them.

  Where the wall begins, the trail turns into a steep switchback etched upon the rock face. We picked our way slowly over jagged chunks of lava. In some places the footpath disappeared and we had to climb straight up, one careful handhold at time. Our conversation dropped to nothing as we struggled to keep our breath and focus on each grip. After hauling ourselves up a particularly challenging stretch, we rested on a broad ledge. We gulped water, gulped air. I was sweating profusely. Looking straight down, we saw the icy stream, just a thin, white line at the base of the wall far below us. Across the valley we watched the last of the tents coming down, the patches of colors folding up and disappearing amidst the trunks of the crazy, tufted Kilimanjaro trees. Our porters started coming up behind us, precariously balancing their heavy loads on their heads while they used both hands to pull themselves up. It was insane to watch this take place without the use of a single climbing rope. Josh and I could barely manage to haul our own asses up the cliff, let alone loaded down with groceries and gear bags. Fred bent over and grabbed each of our porter’s loads and hauled them onto the ledge as one by one they joined us for a brief rest.

  As we reached the top of Barranco Wall, Kilimanjaro’s southern glacier slammed us in the face. The sun glinted from the brilliant mass, a hard white light that hurt the eyes. The mountain filled the sky, too big, too close to comprehend. I felt disoriented, as if hit with a weird kind of vertigo. Not dizziness from looking down, but from looking straight up at that wall of glaring ice. Standing on the mountain’s neck, I knew with my rational mind that the glacier was still at least two kilometers away, more than a mile. But it seemed poised just above our heads, so close I felt I could reach out and touch one of its long white toes.

  I recalled reading that the first mountaineers on Kilimanjaro were turned back by massive ice sheets so thick they covered Kibo’s cone down to 4,000 meters, which was about our present elevation. The men who first summited, Hans Meyers and Ludwig Purtswcheller, spent days cutting ice steps in a 100-foot ice wall of that blocked the way to the top. Though these glaciers still looked crushingly majestic, I realized I was in the last generation that would ever see them.

  The previous night I had pulled out the papers that Mike had given me. He was a geography teacher we met our first day on the mountain. He had passed on to me an article on the most recent research of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers, published in the science journal Nature in September 2009. It was written by a team of scientists from the University of Ohio and University of Massachusetts who have spent more than a decade on Kilimanjaro measuring the exact dimensions of the ice fields.

  They had discovered that the rate of shrinkage of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers more than doubled in the past half century: from one percent per year between 1912 and 1953 to 2.5 percent per year between 1989 and2007. The researchers also learned something new from drilling core samples all the way to the bottom of the ice. These cores, some of them 50 meters long, revealed huge amounts of information about the climate of East Africa. Like the tree rings on a giant Redwood, one could count the layers of ice laid down year after year, like pages of an 11,700-year-long calendar. This was the history of the continent frozen in ice. For example, a 300-year-long drought was marked by a 30 cm layer of dust in the cores. Tiny air bubbles trapped at various depths in the ice could be analyzed to reveal the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at specific moments in time. Given how little data there was about Africa’s climate in ancient times, the cores from Kilimanjaro’s glaciers were something akin to unearthing the climatological Dead Sea Scrolls. But this unique record is being rapidly destroyed as the glaciers shrink, literally erasing 11,700 years of information. In just a few decades, this record will be gone. Because of this threat, the scientists decided to drill and remove additional ice cores to be stored in freezers for future generations of researchers to analyze with more sophisticated methods.

  The most alarming thing that they discovered was that the top sixty years of ice is missing from the record. In the past few decades, instead of adding new layers, the surface of the glaciers has started to melt from the top down. At high altitudes such as Kilimanjaro’s summit, the temperature stays below freezing, so glaciers typically don’t melt to water. Instead, the intense rays of the sun turn surface ice directly into vapor. The ice gradually evaporates in a process called sublimation. But these most recent cores showed that the top 65 centimeters of the glaciers had turned to wat
er and then refrozen. Elongated bubbles and tiny channels in the ice provided certain evidence of melting in modern times—a phenomenon not found anywhere else in the glaciers’ 11,700-year history.

  Furtwängler Glacier, on the plateau inside the cone of Kibo, was actually discovered to be waterlogged and shrinking at a rate of five percent a year. The scientists measured its decrease at fifty percent over the past decade alone. It recently split in half, increasing the area exposed to the sun and further hastening its inevitable demise over the next several years.

  “Hence, the climatological conditions currently driving the loss of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields are clearly unique within an 11,700-year perspective,” the researchers concluded in the Nature article.

  I explained to Josh what I had read about the glaciers in the article.

  “You are looking at an endangered species,” I said.

  He looked up silently, taking in my somber words.

  “It’s sad,” he said.

  “How do you and I even begin to absorb what this means, Josh?” I said. “I think of the thousands of people who walk up to these glaciers as we are doing, they take a picture, a snapshot. This single moment, it’s enough to capture the grandeur. But we don’t see the time lapse photography, how over decades the glaciers are disintegrating. If we had the perspective of a glacier, perhaps we would see the climate changing at a pace the planet has never experienced before. This is definitely something we humans cannot afford to respond to with hakuna matata.”

  We both looked up at the glaciers in silence.

  “I am looking forward to the snowball fights, though,” Josh said.

  Tim Ward is the author of six books, including Zombies on Kilimanjaro: A Father/Son Journey above the Clouds, from which this excerpt has been adapted. Disclaimer: please note that there are no actual zombies on Kilimanjaro. It just looks that way when you see hundreds of exhausted, brain-dead trekkers on the crater rim at dawn. Zombies also serve as a metaphor for the book’s main theme of how we can become enslaved by the stories we tell ourselves. Tim has also written about Thailand (What the Buddha Never Taught), India (Arousing the Goddess), Greece (Savage Breast), and is the author of a collection of stories about Asia (The Great Dragon’s Fleas). He lives in Maryland with his wife, Teresa. You can visit his websites, timwardbooks.com and zombiesonkilimanjaro.com.

  AMY WELDON

  Traveling to Mary

  Wandering through London, a young scholar finds inspiration for life and love in warrior women of the past.

  At the foot of Westminster Bridge in London rides a bronze woman bent on war. Drawn in a chariot behind two rearing horses, she sweeps her arms vengefully high, clutching a spear and beckoning some Fury from the air. She is Boudicca, Celtic warrior queen. In 60 AD, after Roman soldiers flogged her, then raped her two preteen daughters in front of her eyes, she did her damndest to kill them all. “Let us, therefore, go against them trusting boldly to good fortune,” she shouted to her troops. “Let us show them that they are hares and foxes trying to rule over dogs and wolves.” Boudicca nearly beat the Romans, but when her defeat became inevitable, she poisoned herself rather than accept it. Now she guards the entrance to a bridge, a place of crossing, of something new on the other side. In this city, pressed by a dying first love and the soft clamor of ancestral voices at my back, any bridge might be the bridge I’m looking for.

  When I stare up at Boudicca, I’m a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in nineteenth-century British literature on my first trip to England, alone. It’s a landscape I’m already primed to read: a native of rural Alabama, I breathe the charged air of the not-quite-dead past as naturally as oxygen. At age seventeen, Dicey Langston—my great-great-great-great grandmother—swam across the frozen Tiger River near Travelers Rest, South Carolina to warn local rebels, including her brother, that a local band of British loyalists called the “Bloody Scouts” were about to attack their little settlement. She saved them all. When the same “Scouts” came to harass her father about his son’s whereabouts, she sprang—Pocahontas-like—in front of him and dared them to shoot. Later, she married Thomas Springfield, the leader of her brother’s rebel group, and had twenty-two children before her death at age seventy-one in 1837.

  Dicey is, of course, short for Laodicea, the name of a Christian community cited in Revelations, chapter three, as being “lukewarm,” destined to “spue” out of an angel’s mouth. Yet a teenage girl who could ford a frozen river to warn a whole settlement of disaster, flirt with the rebel leader (and marry him), and save her father is far from lukewarm—she’s a role model. As a child I never waded into a creek on our family’s farm without thinking of her; bookish and late-blooming, I loved the thought of her blood bracing up my own. As I got older, I feared lukewarmness more than anything. I smoked and drank and told riotous stories in bars. I wrote all night and went to rock shows and seized any chance for what I thought was love. I held on too tight to the first boy who said he loved me, because I feared there might never be another one. I looked so bold, so strong. Inside, I was so afraid.

  Now, at twenty-six, I’m walking alone in one of the oldest cities of the Western world. It’s the year 2000, the millennium celebrated by the brand-new London Eye revolving just beyond Boudicca’s outstretched hand. This is a city built on the sites of women’s battles. Ravens stride the Tower yard where I gaze on the execution block that cradled Anne Boleyn’s neck. From a Thames-chugging tourist boat I study the dank stone of Traitors Gate, where young then-princess Elizabeth I craned up at the dripping archway as she passed underneath. In Westminster Abbey I shuffle in a line toward her marble deathbed effigy, its sharp profile softened like a cow-licked salt block by all those centuries of touch. I study the surprisingly small and ordinary Coronation Throne with its three hundred years of carved graffiti, a script date marked by some then-tourist: 1763. They filed past then just as I do now: even a cat can look at a king.

  Having just read the work of the great English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, I’m also looking for traces of her London—dark and rickety, racked by gin and crime and the decades-long clash with upstart colonists and French regicides one slim Channel’s-breadth away. Wollstonecraft was born in 1759, the same year as Dicey Langston. She approved of both these revolutions against what her future son-in-law Percy Shelley would call “an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king.” But in 1795, age thirty-six, weeping after a rakish American speculator named Gilbert Imlay deserted her, she was walking up and down on Putney Bridge to let the rain soak her skirts before she flung herself into the Thames. Dicey swam a swollen river to save lives; Wollstonecraft jumped in to kill herself. Peering down into the suck and gurgle of the brown water, I wonder: was this where they fished her out, or here?

  In 1795, Dicey Langston, also age thirty-six, was happy at home in South Carolina with her own rakish American, nursing the fifth of her soon-to-be twenty-two children. But Mary Wollstonecraft would bear only two children, both girls. The first, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide at an inn in Wales, her body buried anonymously by the parish. The second, Mary Godwin, ran away to the continent with a sexy married nobleman named Percy Shelley, grieved the deaths of three of her four children, and began, in the summer of 1816, a novel called Frankenstein. Mary’s birth caused an infection that killed Wollstonecraft at age thirty-eight, when Mary was ten days old. For her whole life, the younger Mary yearned toward the memory of her famous mother, tracing the invisible maps of grief: a creature bumbling and stumbling, looking for love, looking for a parent, blind to the rules and laws everyone else seems to know by instinct. This is non-lukewarm life: you always seem to want too much or try too hard or reach too high. You’re always crossing some line everyone else seems to see, always getting it wrong. Especially in love—which seems to me, as I study the lives of women, so frighteningly determinative for something so chancey. Wollstonecraft—like her daughters—would never be lukewarm.

  Technically, I’m in love on that first
trip to England, in a long-distance relationship with a sweet boy, Allan, from Mississippi. He is the first man to whom I ever said I love you, and the first one to say it to me. But three years after our first dizzying summer together, we’re carrying on lives a thousand miles apart, and without admitting it, we’re losing the will to stitch them together. I look back toward Allan in my mind as I walk in London, but I can’t imagine him closer anymore. That effort used to feel like love. Now it just makes me sad.

  More real than Allan in my mind are the people who have walked here before me, especially the dead. A scholarly-historical tourist walks through a double world, half-known and half-imagined, maps of what used to be or might have been laid over the clattering, honking reality of the present. She sees the place as palimpsest, imagining the traces of other footsteps, other words, only half scraped away beneath the inscriptions of the present. All these ghosts are in such vigorous coexistence. But this cloud of stories, imaginings, and dreams is clarified by fact: a woman traveler’s body is vulnerable as a man’s is not. Yet my body, I tell myself, is an exception. Roman historian Cassius Dio described Boudicca as “very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce” with “a great mass of the tawniest hair” that “fell to her hips.” I’m Boudicca-sized: six feet tall, with a similar mass of curly hair, with wide shoulders and long arms and legs. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, I pride myself on my physical strength: “In the name of truth and common sense,” she wrote irritably, “why should not one woman acknowledge that she can take more exercise than another? or, in other words, that she has a sound constitution; and why, to damp innocent vivacity, is she darkly to be told that men will draw conclusions which she little thinks of?”

  Yet I’m confused, then, at twenty-six, about the gap between my physical health and an emotional self-sufficiency I can’t quite reach: I can’t seem to get strong in both ways at once. Years later, after I’ve become a college professor and avid cyclist, a different boyfriend will listen to me plan a study-abroad tour of Shelley-and-Keats-related sites in London, Switzerland, and Rome. “You’re as big as most men,” he remarks. “Bigger than most people, in fact. I don’t imagine you’d be afraid anywhere. That anyone would want to bother you.” That man will leave me abruptly on a cold November night, breaking my heart as no man ever had. At that time I’ll be thirty-six years old, Wollstonecraft’s age on the night when despite her books and intellectual achievements she decided to die from disappointed love, from depression that knew no outlet, from the yearnings and urgings of the sensual body she believed no man would ever want to touch, again. I’ve tried so many times to fashion my strong, unruly frame into something more delicate. I’ve tried to anticipate a man’s desires and call them forth out of him, before he even knew them himself. I’ve kept doing everything Mary Wollstonecraft did to try to keep Gilbert Imlay in love with her, and more. And like her, I’ve failed. Boudicca fought to keep her country, not a man. Was her battle more important? Then, I would have said I wasn’t sure.