The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  Throughout, I refer back frequently to the postcollegiate year I spent in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Though that trip took place long ago, in 1996 and 1997, it was my first major solo adventure abroad and brought me face to face with the epiphanies and anxieties I would encounter again and again for decades to come. Whenever I am lonely, or ill, or guilt-ridden, I think back to the model that year provided me. It doesn’t always give me answers, but it does remind me that I survived once before and can do so again.

  That year abroad provides a backbone for the book as its various themed chapters leap around, from country to country, from my childhood to my most recent experiences. This is, I’ve discovered, one of the inevitable consequences of a lifetime of travel—that one’s constant dislocation in space produces a parallel dislocation in time. An ill breeze in Brooklyn recalls to me with instantaneous effect the streets of Saigon, and a bar of music overheard in a Taipei bar puts me in a Volvo crossing the Texas desert. I trade messages with Facebook friends I haven’t seen in person in years and make plans to see others far from their homes—in eastern Java, in Mongolia. Wherever I happen to be at this moment, I can close my eyes and imagine myself a million other places.

  If your life has not been filled with constant travel, these sorts of jumps may be disconcerting—a kind of narrative jetlag, I suppose. For me, at this point in my traveling life, it’s become normal, and I know I’m not entirely alone. When my travel-writer friends and I gather over drinks, our conversation is always filled with lines like “That reminds me of when I was in Osaka . . . ” or “Oh, just like in Bogotà!” Yes, it’s insufferable to outsiders, I’ll be the first to admit, but for us the world has opened up, and to act like we don’t notice the deep connections between disparate points on the globe would be to pretend we’ve learned nothing at all.

  Another, more important phenomenon I’ve learned in assembling these nearly thirty years of travel anecdotes is that they tell the tale of a very independent traveler—one who almost never outsourced the planning and execution of his adventures to travel agents, tour companies, concierges, or friends and family. In many ways, I was an independent traveler by default. At first I didn’t have the money to depend on outsider help, and by the time I had the money, it was my duty to readers to deal with everything myself, so that they might learn from my example.

  Still, those practical factors were always secondary. From an early age, I’ve simply wanted to do things myself. Whether I was spending hours on Lego projects in my room or taking independent study courses in high school and college, I’ve always been more comfortable figuring the world out on my own, and enjoying the private rush of triumph that comes from knowing I alone was responsible for my success. Or something like that: I never set out to be independent, and until recently wasn’t self-aware enough to identify that as one of my character traits.

  Of course, no one is born independent, nor is independence an absolute value, immutable once it’s achieved. This book is a chronicle of my ongoing progress toward independence, each minor step forward a tentative one, each victory shaky, liable to be overturned at the next foreign challenge. By the end of my story, you should be able to see how far I’ve come—and how that’s also not, maybe, really very far at all. When you go around the world, you wind up back where you started.

  Now that I recognize my own independent streak, I can see, too, how it’s aided me as a traveler. Because when you travel, things will go wrong: baggage will disappear, your guts will betray you, and you will find yourself alone in a poor, strange land where you don’t speak the language. The illusion of control that you set out with, fueled by a fevered studying of guidebooks, planning of itineraries, and e-mailing of friends of friends (of friends), will evaporate, leaving you with no one to rely on but you. Money and experience can insulate you from calamity, but never perfectly; when it comes down to it, you are responsible for your own happiness. Are you ready for that kind of responsibility? I wasn’t always—but I am now, I think.

  Which is why I cannot present this book as some kind of elaborate instruction manual for becoming a good traveler yourself. No, this is simply how and why I did what I did, related in what I hope is an entertaining and dramatic format. For me to claim you should make similar choices would be worse than presumptuous—after all, you are not me—it would be dangerous. If anything, I want you, too, to become an independent traveler, to think and act for yourself wherever you might be, without the aid of guidebooks and the kinds of newspaper and magazine articles I write for a living. I want you to experience and understand the miserable things that can happen when you travel, to learn how to deal with them, and, like Sisyphus, to transcend them, to find joy in the crushing inevitability not so much of failure but of near-failure. I want you to leave home and return with stories to tell, not of disasters dealt with the way Matt Gross would have but of how you improvised your own solutions. The Turk Who Loved Apples should be the last guidebook you’ll ever need. And if things actually work out that way, then, well, as Kemal Görgün, our eponymous apple farmer, would say: WOW.

  Chapter 1

  Schrödinger’s Boarding Pass

  Perpetually Unprepared—and Totally Comfortable with That—I Set Off for Vietnam, Tunisia, and Beyond

  One night in early August, about a week after my twenty-second birthday, I drove head-on into a pickup truck on Maryland’s eastern shore. I’d been coming down from Washington, D.C., to Chincoteague, Virginia, to meet my parents for a brief beach vacation; my girlfriend, Tammy, was in the passenger seat. It had been raining hard, with heavy traffic, but then, near the town of Salisbury, the showers stopped and the road cleared. I relaxed—too soon. The unfamiliar highway curved, I hit the brakes, and my lilac Plymouth Acclaim skidded across the lane and directly into the oncoming pickup. Bang.

  An instant later the street was silent. Tammy and I looked at each other; neither of us was hurt. Nor was the driver of the pickup, just then clambering out of his vehicle. Soon, a police car arrived on the scene. The officer told us we were the third accident at that spot that night. Then he brought us to the station, where I called my mother at the bed-and-breakfast in Chincoteague to come get us.

  While we waited, I took a photo of Tammy, looking miserable and exhausted in the yellow lamplight. And then a serene calm settled over me. Understandable, I think, for someone who’d just survived a potentially disastrous wreck, but my happiness was more a sense of relief—relief that the car was totaled.

  Because from the moment I’d acquired the vehicle, it had been the source of constant troubles. The Acclaim had come into my possession only because my maternal grandmother, who’d owned it previously, had died three months earlier. She’d lived in Wilmington, Delaware, and I, finishing up college in nearby Baltimore, was carless, so without much ado, the Plymouth became mine.

  But not for long. Less than a week after I’d driven it back to Baltimore, it vanished off the street one night. A theft, I figured, particularly since Grandma Rosalie had outfitted the car with a newfangled cellular phone. A few days later the police found the car wrapped around a lamppost—sans cell, of course—and promptly notified my late grandmother by mail. Only when I called to check in did they direct me to an impound lot.

  In addition to being strangely technologically prescient, Grandma Rosalie had also arranged zero-deductible insurance for the car, so it cost nothing to put the car in the shop, where after another couple of weeks it emerged almost as good as new. (Which, for a lilac Acclaim, was not really so good.) The car chugged along in relative health for another two months, until one day in Washington—where I was spending five weeks learning how to teach English as a foreign language—I discovered it wouldn’t go more than about thirty-five miles per hour. The transmission was shot. Worse, by then insurance wouldn’t cover it.

  One week and roughly $600 later, I picked up the Plymouth from yet another garage, threw my bags and books in the trunk, and headed for Baltimore to fetch Tammy and enjoy a nice vacation w
ith my folks.

  Bang.

  This series of calamities would signify nothing—the all-too-short life and death of a generic American sedan—were it not for my post-Chincoteague plans. That is, less than a week after the crash, I was supposed to be moving to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

  The year was 1996. I’d just graduated from college with a degree in creative writing, an expensive certification of my unsuitability for work. Unsure of what to do next, I’d fixated on Vietnam, which had recently reestablished diplomatic ties with its old enemy the United States. It would be my future, my destiny, my salvation. I would go there and . . . do something. I wasn’t sure what. I had some vague ideas about mastering the Vietnamese language and joining the Communist Party (less an ideological goal than a route to power and influence). Also, I was going to write big, important, best-selling novels in English at the same time.

  But mostly, I really liked Vietnamese food, and figured that if I was going to live abroad, it should be somewhere I really liked the food.

  In other words, in the months leading up to a life-changing move, the Fates seemed to be delivering me a series of dire, travel-related warnings, the kinds of omens that, in a bad movie, would foreshadow the protagonist’s travel-related demise. Had I been able to take a step back from my life and observe the events with a more analytical (and possibly more paranoid) attitude, I might have delayed, canceled, or at least worried more about what awaited me in the former Saigon.

  Instead, I was oblivious, as I had been for much of my life, to the reality that things could go awry, and in ways that could do me physical or psychological damage. Like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There, I moved through the world unaware of looming danger and potential disaster.

  In preparing for the move to Vietnam, for example, I had done the minimum of research. There was that teacher-training course in Washington, which I’d taken more because I didn’t have the first clue about teaching English than because I thought having a certificate might help me find a job. Even so, that was general preparation—it had nothing to do with Ho Chi Minh City as a specific and unique destination.

  In those days, the Internet was of little use to travelers. This was before TripAdvisor, before Travelocity and Expedia, before blogs, before—if you can conceive of such a thing—Google. I hadn’t posted about my plans in any online forums. I had never seen a map of Ho Chi Minh City. I didn’t know where I was going to live, or whether Le Thi Thanh, an acquaintance of a friend of my father, would show up to greet me at the airport, or whether the teaching job that Ms. Thanh had written me about (by actual international airmail) would materialize.

  Instead, I’d been supplementing my preexisting knowledge of Vietnam—which came entirely from movies and TV—with books. Not serious histories of the war by writers like Stanley Karnow or Philip Caputo, which might have given me some perspective on the matter, but contemporary Vietnamese novels in translation: Novel Without a Name, by Duong Thu Huong, and The Sorrow of War, by Bao Ninh. Both were interesting, but their focus on the war era left me cold. That is, I knew the war, or at least the pop-culture version of the war, and I understood how deeply it had consumed my parents’ generation. But what all the war stories left out was Vietnam itself. What was this country? What kinds of lives did Vietnamese people live? How did they think and act? And now, more than twenty years after the war had ended, what had the place become?

  I decided to find out not by reading journalistic accounts (such books hadn’t yet been written) or guidebooks (I don’t remember ever even looking for one) but by delving into even earlier Vietnamese literature. One book I read on the plane from Washington to Paris to Ho Chi Minh City was a piece of literary reportage from 1920s French Indochina, by a Vietnamese journalist who’d worked undercover driving a cyclo, the tricycle pedicabs that plied the streets of Saigon. It was, I believe, entitled I Am a Cyclo Driver. It did not tell me much about present-day Vietnam, but it did give me a foundation for discussing labor issues and racism under the French colonial government.

  I did, however, have one true guidebook in my possession—though not, unfortunately, one by Lonely Planet, which I would later learn dominated the Southeast Asia guidebook world. No, mine—which I believe my mother bought me as a birthday gift—was a lesser guidebook, with lots of general historical and cultural information but no details about, say, acquiring a long-term tourist or business visa, opening a bank account, finding work, learning the language—all those survival-related things that, as the jet neared its destination, I suddenly realized I was going to have to do. I flipped back and forth through the guidebook with mounting anxiety, until at last I looked at the publisher’s information page.

  The book, I noticed, had been published in Slovenia. That did not seem to be a good sign. Thanks, Mom.

  Fourteen years later, nothing had changed—and everything had changed. After dozens of trips abroad, to sixty countries on five continents, having produced hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories, I was once again setting off on an adventure, utterly ill-informed—possibly even less informed than I’d been when I flew off to Vietnam. Because this time, as I waited for the A train to Kennedy Airport in the bowels of a Brooklyn subway station, I did not even know my precise destination. All I knew, on this Saturday in June of 2010, was that an Air France plane ticket had been purchased for me, and that I needed to get to JFK on this particular day and at roughly this time.

  Knowing nothing more was the whole point. This journey to wherever was sponsored by Afar, a then-new travel magazine, based in California, that had assigned me a “Spin the Globe” story, in which the editors select a destination at random (supposedly by spinning a globe in their offices) and, without revealing it, buy the writer a plane ticket. Of course, certain details had to be worked out in advance—when I’d be available, whether I’d need a visa or vaccinations, what the weather would be like—but the fact remained: I would be going off into the wild blue yonder, with no idea whatsoever of what awaited me. I was as excited as I’d ever been.

  Still, if I wanted a clue, I had one right at my feet. On the damp platform sat the black leather weekend bag I’d bought in the late 1990s, and inside, atop four days’ worth of warm-weather clothes, was a small package wrapped in brown paper. My wife, Jean Liu—whom the Afar editors had provided vital data like my departure time and destination—had put it there. “It’s a hint about where you’re going,” she’d said.

  I wanted that hint, and badly, but just as badly I wanted to wait. The longer the mystery remained, the more I cherished it. Because who now truly gets sent off into the void? I was on the cusp of adventure—an adventure whose appeal lay almost entirely in my lack of knowledge of what the adventure would be. Right this second I was in a filthy Brooklyn subway station, but in a few hours I might be in Paris, or Dakar, or Dushanbe. Who in this borough, in this city, in this country, could say the same with equal (un)certainty?

  Not knowing was key. Surely, there were thousands of people about to do crazy things in crazy places all over the globe. But how many had planned nothing at all? Who among the brave was willing to give up total control, to set forth blindly into unknown lands?

  You had to be particularly brave to do this, I thought. So many hundreds of thousands of Americans stay home, refuse to travel, precisely because of a lack of knowledge—because they don’t have time to fully plan trips, because they don’t know their options, because they are afraid to confront the near-certainty that when they leave the confines of their homes, something will happen, something that could shake their fundamental understanding of the world and their place in it. Me, I wanted to be shaken, to be the ultimate blank slate on which the world would leave its marks.

  And yet I also desperately wanted to know where I was going. At some point soon, of course, I would find out—like when I checked in at the Air France counter of Terminal 1. And at that point, I feared, my dreams would collapse. Just knowing I was flying Air France was dangerous; that meant, most likely, I was bo
und for the Caribbean, Canada, North Africa, or France itself. And perhaps it would turn out I already knew someone in the destination, or that it would be a country or city I’d read about extensively—maybe even written about without ever having visited. After traveling for decades and working in journalism for years, there were many such places. Even if it was somewhere brand new and unfamiliar, simply knowing the location might be a disappointment. Moldova, seriously? On that plane bound for somewhere, I’d be just another passenger who knew where he was supposed to disembark, and what he might do when he got there.

  At last, the A train arrived, and I boarded. My journey was beginning. I’d been patient long enough. I might as well open the package and reveal my hint. I untied the twine and shuffled off the brown paper.

  Inside was a hardcover copy of Fodor’s Tunisia—from 1973, the year before I was born. Jean and I had found it at a used-book store maybe a decade earlier, and without ever reading it I’d fantasized about someday using it to explore the country. Someday was apparently today.

  As I started to flip through the book, I felt ambivalence build up inside me. First, there was a warmth, the delight of finally getting to visit a land I’d held in my imagination ever since, at the age of around three, I saw Star Wars, whose desert planet opening scenes had been filmed near the Tunisian town of Tataouine. And I appreciated the serendipity of simply having this guidebook in my possession, as if I’d secretly planned this very trip a decade in advance. Plus, there was the sweetness of Jean’s having packed it in my bags. I married well, I thought.