The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  I met Hamid out on the street. It seemed he had been waiting for me and in his eyes I saw a truce. He was holding a fennec, a little desert fox. He let me touch it, soft tawny fur, a glint in the dark brown eyes, of the wilds. It was dazed, half sleeping. He told me he had bought it from some children in the market and was going to set it free. My eyes watering. Yes.

  Five days in Nouadhibou and now I am leaving the world of tourists behind me. Ali brings me to the market where I find a place in a taxi-brousse with Mauritanians going to Nouakchott. I tell him I will never forget how he and his men saved me in the desert. He says good-bye with his hand on his heart. And I find I have placed my own hand on my heart in response.

  We follow the train tracks for hours on a bad sand track, our little convoy of two Nissan pick-ups, the backs built up for passengers and the roofs loaded high with baggage and sacks of coal, grain, a few goats and chickens. It is still Ramadan. Each time they stop to put water in the radiator, check the engine, or push their way out, or pray, no one eats or drinks. A few men smoke cigarettes, the apprentices or men who are lazy in their faith. The others wonder why I don’t eat. A smiling old man tells me, “Mais, Madame, il faut manger quelque chose. Vous faites le karem?” You must eat. Are you practicing the fast? And people laugh, teasing, gentle. They accept me.

  They are all “commerçants,” making their living by buying goods in one place and selling them in another. They travel to live and they travel without comfort, especially now in Ramadan, but they make it the best they can, sharing laughter and stories. They have stories about crossing the desert, trying to make it to Gibraltar, the only way to Spain and the new world. By transport truck, by camel, on foot, and all those that don’t make it. The guides betray them, or they run out of water, or lose their way, and they are left to die in the desert. Or they make it to the sea and the police find them and send them back. All the way back, to start again, to find the money and the means.

  Sixteen people in a Land Rover, three beside the driver and five in the middle seat, five of us in the back, with a baby and a small girl. She has slipped to the floor from a young man’s lap and lies there among our legs, hidden under robes and veils. Every now and then I can hear her plaintive voice and feel her pushing for space, her hand on my foot. The baby sleeps in his mother’s arms, his head hard as stone weighs heavily on my arm. It will leave a bruise. The three veiled women in front of us in the middle seats take care of the young apprentice boy beside them. His hard jaded voice, his stories about the nasranis, foreigners, makes the women break into giggling fits. One woman lets him rest his head on her shoulder. From time to time she sings, “La ilaha illa ‘llah …” There is no god but God.

  We ride through towering yellow dunes, so close you can see the pleats in the soft surface where the sands have blown down the sides. Then out again in the open we see a line of cars on the horizon. Everything that travels this flatness seems to rise up like theater props. It is a convoy of Europeans, five, six cars. We pass them and a white woman with turban in one of the cars waves at us. The people ask me if I know them. No, I say. We pass a herd of camels, their front legs hobbled with green twine. They just stand there against the light, waiting.

  We stop in a barren place as the sun is setting. Perfectly flat, pure sand to all horizons. The sky is larger than the land. The people wash with handfuls of sand and set out their mats and begin their prayers. They break the fast, and the happiness of eating, the relief spreads from group to group. We eat what we have. The Peul woman breast-feeds her baby and calls her small daughter who keeps running off across the sand, freed from the darkness of legs and feet, her cramped place on the truck floor. A young Malian from Kayes shares his dates with me. Everyone relaxes on the sands, feels the wind rippling across the skin. The full moon rises in the east. They pray again.

  Another three hours on the tracks and we arrive in a sleeping village. It seems abandoned, empty sheds without doors, cement buildings. I can hear the sea, not far. I stand and smoke in the light. The moon is high among the stars. A young man from the other truck of our convoy climbs down from the open back where he lies with other men across the luggage and sisal nets. He unwinds his turban to reveal his rich dark kinked hair, and lays the cloth across his neck. He tells me he has been here five months as a commerçant, buying goods for Korité, the feast at the end of Ramadan. He says they ship in the sheep by train. He is from Senegal and asks, “Have you ever been there?”

  “Yes, once I rode by horse across the Fouta.”

  “Yes?” he smiles. “Then you must know my village, Horendoldé. Our family is the one with all the goats and cattle.”

  “Yes, I know it.” We laugh.

  “Ah, Fouta,” he murmurs. “Tell me all the villages you passed through, every one.”

  Tchile, Tarije, Njoum, Waro Jamel, Kahel, Wande, Medina Ntiabe, Fonde Gende, Tikite, Medina, Asnde Ballo, Orefonde, Thilogne, Kobila, Nabadji, Matam, Odebere, Horendolde …

  We are waiting for the sea. Our route will continue along the beach but the tides are in, the sea is turbulent.

  “Trop agité,” he says. We can hear the rush from up here.

  The wind gusts.

  He says, “Viens, on va entrer dans la baraque.”

  We stand at the dark doorway of an old shed, just pieces of corrugated metal sheets, all the travelers’ sandals lying on the sand. We go in slowly, stepping over and between sleeping bodies wrapped in veils and blankets. We lie down on the sand in a small space between two people. The cold wind comes in through the doorway, ruffles our clothes. People talk quietly across the room. There is an old man beside me whispering his prayers in the dark, clicking his beads in his fingers. I feel enveloped in secrecy, these places in life where time does not move. The breath of these sleeping people. The young man lying pressed against me, warm, comforting. I can feel his breath on my face. We fall asleep at the same moment, I know, dreaming about the Fouta. Monayel, Bakel, Golymi, Atofsriga, I-Gokere, Djanni, Mussola, Dialla …

  I found Lou and Dirk again, and the Australians, Mark and Daniel, on a beach campground in St. Louis, Senegal. It was Christmas. We shared bottles of wine, peanuts, bread and cheese, melon, and Mauritanian biscuits, talk of travel and guardian angels. The crescent moon was setting and we all went to lie on the beach.

  I had changed, but who had I become? Sometimes I felt like I was just living on the surface of my skin. And sometimes I felt like I was transparent, just a pencil outline drawn across the sea and the sand. The stars, the scuttling crabs. I played with the crabs, mimicking their movements with my hands and fingers, the game of run or stand. I always pulled away first. There was phosphorous in the surf and one lamp of a fisherman and Mark’s soft voice out of the darkness, “Do you ever get any answers out of all this?” We were the only ones left on the beach. I did not know. I could not move. But later, after he left I realized I had no link to anyone. I only passed through. Place to place, country to country, the men, the drinking and dancing and never returning, the unresolved, the dangers, the land and the light. The mines were there. I was a wreck, an empty husk. The only thing that gave me courage was to go on relentlessly in search of a new vehicle, a horse and a path, one that taught me to retrace my tracks, uncover the darkness, and bring me back.

  Years later I sit again before the Atlantic, on the clean white sands above the tide-line, wrapped and shivering in the winds, while the men change the front tire of the bush taxi under the full moon. The young man from Atar lies hidden under the Peul woman’s flannel blanket. We see lights on the horizon, glowing through the distance and the sea mist. The other truck of our small convoy has returned to find us. It pulls up in front of our car and leaves the headlights on so that they can see what they’re doing.

  We continue along the beach with the moon on the ocean on our right. The traveling surf sometimes reaches our wheels and the spray brushes our faces. We go around white fishing boats, through dark swirling waters and it is then I see the two jackals come
running up the beach behind us. Dark shadows, swift, haunting. I think of the European man who lost his way and lay dying in the sands with the jackals. He is somewhere now, saved, alive, living his life in some city, but he will always come back with his mind to the desert, to that moment, how he lay with his eyes open, awake, staring at God. He will never forget the gift. There is always only the moment. You must never let it slip away.

  The driver leans out his window to see the way. The old man beside him has his red prayer beads clicking in his fingers and the smaller man beside him is singing the prayers for us, hour after hour, in a clear loud voice holding us and as we listen it carries us through the night, in and out of sleep, over the endless waves of sand.

  Erika Connor is a writer, artists, and art teacher from rural Quebec, Canada. She has lived and traveled in West Africa and once traveled on a white horse through Senegal to Mali. She spent time on a nature reserve in Mongolia, observing wild Przewalksi horses, and also traveled by horse in Central Mongolia, and along the Khovsgol Lake near Siberia. She has worked with street dogs in India, and wild birds in Canada.

  A.E. BAER

  The Land of T.M.I.

  To say Korea defies expectations is an understatement.

  I’m chopping this out under a violet awning on a bark patio outside of a joint called Iris. I’ve got a charcoal filter cigarette, some Korean brand called “This,” all because the waiter said I looked like I smoked classic Marlboro—even though I don’t smoke—and he swore “This” was the Korean Marlboro and that I couldn’t walk away without rolling that paper torch between my fingers and drawing in that sweet and sour ocher air. So I took the free light and now it’s about burned down to the final neck and I’m kind of fishing smoke in and out to the flamenco guitar rolling through my headphones while my fingers shove my thoughts through plastic keys and circuitry. And I’m trying to collect and graft all the angles of that field trip onto paper but it’s all so stir-fry crazy I find myself tripping over words and words and words.

  So I’ll begin with something basic, something like pool water warm as rose tea, something you can ease yourself into before you step on the tacks glued to the bottom.

  “Heyo, heyo, heyo.”

  It’s a full bag vacuum cleaner voice, a hairball caught in the vent voice, a fan stuffed with too much voltage about to die kind of voice, tugging on my belt loop on the bottom stair of my apartment complex. I’ve got head phones in, something acoustic, I tear them out, wheel around, and find an old lady with a bag of flowers vanilla-colored shirt, a clay hewn smile, hacked teeth, grape pants, and this Tim Burton-type creep in her step with cheeks hanging like fishing nets as if she spent her entire life either laughing at corny, worn-out street jokes or drowning in Jocasta pillows thick enough to swallow all those tears from yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

  I bow a tad only because I know it’s polite and I have no idea what to say so I kind of string the corners of my mouth and tug them up and moon smile because she’s random and old and it’s awkward and I have no idea what’s about to happen.

  “You see Bill?”

  She putters in typical Korean English, always too tonal; every letter has its own suction cup but every word slides into the next. I have to bag what she’s saying and pound it into something flat, American, and understandable. I have to sift through the lingo muck, hook and pluck the consonants and vowels; I feel like a verbal Hephaestus or a special guest on “Grammar Rock.”

  “Bill?”

  “Yeyo, yeyo, Bill, Bill.”

  I catch something in her eyes, a flare, filaments in a damp room, burning like a tarred tassel. It’s that same look I’ve seen in suburban children scoping the neighborhood for their lost beagle. They come crawling up your front walk with hope as their porter until they find out you have no idea where their dog is and it’s like you’ve just blown out the candle in their heart.

  “No, sorry, I don’t know any Bill.”

  The candle’s out. Her pupils are all shadow, ink wells, a cover on a casket. She’s worlds away. I don’t mind when she disappears into the esophagus of the stairwell without a smile or a goodbye; it’s awkward, it’s random, I’m awkward, I’m random. But in a few weeks I’d find out her story. She fell in love with an American GI over fifty years ago, but one cold November day in 1951 he was rotated to the front and on that one warm April day when he was supposed to return, he didn’t. Since then, she’s been waiting.

  “Sad, sad.” The landlord would putter and turn a finger like a windmill after telling me the story in machine gun English. “She no love, she no love.”

  She no love …or she knew it too well.

  I leave to work and lose myself in the dazzling wallpaper of the world. It’s one of those days where the sun hangs like a Valencia orange and the sky is a kind of poncho blue you find hanging on clothes lines in rundown Madrid neighborhoods. There’s enough of a breeze to catch the leaves, take their hands, and roll into a wedding dance while the daylight skips off every parked car and shop window and guttered plastic bottle on the street and it reminds me of a spotlight on a nativity scene warming up the shallow snow.

  Yes, it’s a good day to Bar-B-Q any American would say, it’s that kind of day where you just want to lie under the trees watching all the yellow and orange and flour white drip through the branches and spines and green hands and fall like soft-pressed juice into the grass where your naked toes are buried as deep as they can go.

  And I’m walking to work all through this and I see the old men in their baggy trousers and leather skin picking at old scabs on park benches and the old women with their billed caps and natty ebony hair fixing up the city gardens. I see the shopkeepers tugging up their blinds to welcome in the premature ghosts and eyes of hopeful customers and the street vendors dumping skate fish into clean tanks and peeling all the brown bag splotches off bean sprouts and yams. I see all the children with their smiles and their laughter slapping tiny soles against brick and cement and the city is as alive as it will ever be with all its faces and souls beating and breathing and huddling like mad skin down these concrete hallways under something real—the sun—and it’s a beautiful day. It’s a perfect day. And it makes me think of her …

  I get to school and we’re told to pack all the kids on these oriental San Fran buses with maize-colored curtains and that VW hippie van feel. I’m sitting there in a fold-out aisle seat oblivious to what’s about to happen with my fingers in my ears because it’s far too early to have two dozen children hollering and shouting and screaming and cheering three feet away from me.

  Thirty minutes later I’m standing in the hallway of our field trip destination, Woobang Park, more confused than anyone in the entire place and wondering why there’s a detailed mural of fertilization on the wall. I came here relieved, thinking—all right, this will be like a junior Smithsonian tour. A guide walks around pointing out random facts on this and that, the most traumatic thing being a Cambodian tourist washing his feet in the urinal …

  Oh, no.

  There I am standing in front of a wall with two dozen sperm burning the Roma countryside like Hannibal’s army, a mob of foxes picking golden eggs in a borough, with the Dexter of the bunch homing in on the goliath egg.

  It’s unbelievable and it’s whatever to the tour guide who collects all sixty-plus students and guides them into room one without ever bothering to comment on the Michelangelo meets the internal activity of Mommy and Daddy wall décor.

  Lesson Twelve: There are two types of culture shock: culture shock and culture lightning strike.

  Room One.

  Titled: “The Uterus.”

  Strawberry red, decked out with a surround sound heartbeat, live internal footage, and a legion of pillows shaped like sperm, hearts, and stars all over the floor. And what do I do? What can I do? Only stand against the wall with folded arms acting like there’s nothing bent in this borderline contemporary health Salem absurdity while our tour guide stands there for ten minutes talking in yin an
d yang about the nine months of green house waylay it takes a human being to develop into something useful enough to pop out into this clean, crayoned world.

  And then the tour guide wants us to pretend like we’re in the womb, tuck in our knees and play fetus, but I can’t get over the fact that half the six-year-olds in the room are lying on pillows shaped like sperm because the cultivated Westerner in me is lost in translation. And then up comes Mick with a typical shatter the glass question and those wide, innocent eyes that sell you out like Sirens sweetly singing.

  “Teacher, teacher, have you baby?”

  Really. Have I baby? I don’t even look old enough to pay my own taxes or play poker.

  Then the tour guide with her sunflower vest and cap with a stitched baby above the bill leads us all toward the exit into the next room. But just when I think it can’t get any worse than the uterus room my expectations implode …

  Lesson Thirteen: Never expect a line of what is and what is not appropriate to exist anywhere, ever.

  Never.

  The exit is a birth canal. A beet-colored, ribbed and riveted, fleshy miner’s tunnel, stretched like a rubber band with sticker cutouts of giant doctor arms on the floor ready to catch you when you slide out, reflecting the purity, backward calamity, and beauty of blood, puke, and labor pain. Over the chute, just as you exit into room two, is an eight by eight quilt of Asian Adam and Asian Eve scissoring with a manila heart for censorship and two sweet Stella Maris Sunday smiles.

  No joke.

  This is a cartoon version of The Magic School Bus meets Hugh Hefner.

  Room Two.

  Titled: “We were born like this …”