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

by Matt Gross

At the same time, I could sense my travel writer’s instincts—honed over countless professional trips for the New York Times and other publications—kicking in. At JFK, I knew, as soon as I’d passed through security I’d go online, scanning CouchSurfing.org and A Small World, a theoretically exclusive social network, for contacts. I’d hit Facebook and Twitter and let my friends and followers know where I was headed; maybe they’d have advice. Hadn’t my old coworker Marie-France lived in Tunis as a child? She’d get a direct e-mail. And hadn’t Jean herself once visited Tunis and flirted with a local guy from whom she’d later received postcards? Did she still have the postcards? Could I track down the man who’d once tried to woo her? Now, that would be a story!

  And that was just my strategy for filling in the things I didn’t already know. What I did already know was that Tunisia was a relatively small, comparatively secular Muslim Arab country, its beach towns popular with European vacationers, its government stable thanks to the police-state tactics (e.g., jailing bloggers) of its longtime president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. People there would speak French better than me, not to mention Arabic. I could search the markets for harissa, a spice-enriched chili paste, I could see how Tunisian merguez, a lamb sausage, stacked up against its Moroccan and Algerian counterparts, which I’d eaten elsewhere, and I’d absolutely have to try brik, a deep-fried packet of phyllo dough stuffed with shredded tuna, spices, and egg. Oh, and orange juice—lots and lots of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  By this point, the A train was maybe halfway to the airport, and I’d already mentally mapped out the next several days. I hadn’t wanted to, honestly. I’d hoped to maintain that blissful feeling of not-knowing for as long as possible, but as long as possible wasn’t very long at all. And now I had this guidebook, too, which would no doubt reveal to me even more secrets of Tunisia, the family taverns of bygone days, the tenth-generation artisans still weaving cottons and carving wood in sea-cliff caves. Why even bother going now?

  Except that as I read deeper into the book, I realized something else: Fodor’s was useless. Parts of it discussed Tunisian history, both recent and ancient, which I knew somewhat, while the rest dealt with “culture,” from Carthaginian art (“very little remains”) to contemporary carpet makers. Compared with guidebooks of today, which include copious listings of where to eat and sleep and what to do to keep yourself occupied, Fodor’s Tunisia was sketchy. In the listings of “moderate” hotels, four hotels appeared, none of them with any identifying details or description other than address. Restaurants tended toward the touristic (“many tempting specialties . . . oriental dancers tempting too”). One section, however, was fanatically detailed—a two-page walk-through of every funerary stela and Roman sarcophagus worth seeing in the Bardo Museum, Tunisia’s national repository of relics from antiquity. But somehow all that highly specific information felt tedious and unnecessary; who needs a guidebook in a museum?

  This was, in a way, disappointing. I’d hoped I could use the book to track down some of the older businesses in Tunisia, or to uncover forgotten attractions, but in the span of 261 pages, Fodor’s Tunisia didn’t really get into such things. Instead, it was a gloss, a manual not for intrepid wanderers (as I imagined myself to be) but for those voyagers of the 1970s who’d float through the Maghreb in the care of a travel agent’s time-honed itinerary.

  Which meant there would remain at least some holes in my pre-arrival knowledge—and thank goodness. Because for a long time now, such holes had become harder and harder to find, or to create. As the New York Times’ “Frugal Traveler” columnist from 2006 to 2010, I’d had to become an expert at researching every aspect of my trips. I’d mastered Google, and could, with a few clicks, dig up brand-new boutique hotels in Puerto Rico and little-known bed-and-breakfasts in far-flung corners of New Mexico. Through Facebook and CouchSurfing and A Small World, I reached out to strangers from Bucharest to Chennai, ensuring myself friendly local guides to strange, new cultures. I scoured food blogs and Chowhound.com and eGullet.org so I’d know what to put in my mouth in Seoul and Budapest. I set up bank accounts and credit cards to maximize frequent-flier miles and minimize fees. I figured out how to store high-resolution Google maps on my iPhone so that I could reference them abroad without incurring roaming charges.

  For one Frugal Traveler column, I wrote about my system for getting the best possible deals on airfares. It was, I thought, a highly rational system, consisting of a dozen steps—or maybe twenty—that spanned the gamut of airline Web sites and third-party online travel agents and fare forecasters and seat recommenders (which is better, SeatGuru.com or SeatExpert.com?), and I didn’t even get around to discussing the whole business of international-flight consolidators.

  Perhaps predictably, this column got a lot of responses: 217 people wrote in, many of them thanking me for the advice and some offering their own tips. Others, however, were more critical. One compared my method to “herding cats”; another said it made her head spin. Someone called “Buddy” from Houston, Texas, wrote, “So, you spent how many hours and saved how much for all that effort? Exactly how much is your time worth to you?”

  As it happens, this was a question I’d already begun to ask myself, in a slightly different form: What was the point of all this preparation?

  It’s not that I was utterly dissatisfied with how I was traveling. I never felt like I’d over-researched a trip, to the point where I was merely executing a set of pre-planned maneuvers through Paris or Bratislava. There were always moments of randomness, spontaneity, and serendipity. There was the bistro owner on the French Riviera who offered me a free meal if I’d send him video footage of his restaurant. There was the afternoon I walked into a Slovakian village, my feet blistered, my legs collapsing, and met a family who invited me in for fresh-baked pastries, homemade wine, and a place to spend the night, out of the rain and safe from the Gypsies. Once, in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, I was walking down a rocky beach when I somehow caught the attention of a quartet of hip locals in their early twenties; within minutes, we’d all stripped off our clothes and were skinny-dipping in the freezing surf. Although they later told me this was the “nudie beach,” I could find no reference to it on the Internet. You try it—Google “nudie beach” and see what you come up with.

  These episodes made me wonder if I needed the research part at all—they happened so naturally and beautifully they overshadowed the quotidian parts of the trip: checking into hotels, taking buses or trains from one spot to another, dutifully seeing sites considered historically or culturally important. More frustrating, when I’d sit down to write my articles, I’d find that including the quotidian stuff—which publications generally require, since they’re in the business of telling readers how to travel—left little room for the serendipitous moments that made the trips special to me.

  But if you’re going to be a professional travel writer, you can’t exactly stop researching your destinations or give up advising readers on how to travel. The business doesn’t work that way. You don’t call up an editor, tell them you want to go to Morocco or Ireland for a couple of weeks, and have them cut you a big check. And you don’t generally head off on your own dime to one of these places, hoping you’ll be able to turn your adventures into a salable story afterward. That’s how you go broke.

  No, if you want to go to, say, Tokyo, first you come up with an angle: some subset of activities or specific thematic bent. For example, ramen. Hugely popular in America, both the inexpensive, dried, college-food form and the fresh, high-end New York restaurant style, ramen is, in Japan, a full-blown cultural phenomenon. There are ramen magazines, ramen TV shows, ramen bloggers, a ramen museum, and five thousand ramen shops in Tokyo alone. So: seeing and understanding Tokyo by trying to make sense of its ramen shops and ramen aficionados—Tokyo through a noodly lens—that’s the angle.

  Then you figure out what the story will cost to report—or really, how you can do it as cheaply as possible, since magazine and newspaper budgets are
always tight—and when you can do it, and the editor has to see if it conflicts with any other stories in the pipeline, and then, finally, the editor says yes, and you sign a contract that specifies how much you can spend and how little you’ll be paid—and then off you go to Tokyo!

  More or less, that’s how I got myself there in December 2009, and—after scouring Web postings and corralling Tokyo’s ramen bloggers—I spent a week eating four bowls of ramen a day: pork bone ramen, miso ramen, cheese ramen. That was a pretty damn delicious trip. And I couldn’t have done it, either the on-the-ground reporting or the actual writing of the story, without intense preparation.

  But the hell with intense preparation! Maybe I was just getting old, but I seemed to remember a time, long before I became a travel writer, when I not only didn’t prepare but couldn’t prepare, when I didn’t have the tools to plan ahead because those tools hadn’t been invented yet. And yet those adventures seemed more real to me, more all-encompassing, more life-changing, more objectively important. I looked back on them nostalgically, knowing they’d made me the traveler I am today even though they seemed to have happened to an entirely different person. In short, I found myself facing questions that all travelers face, but now on a deeper, more existential level: How did I get from where I started to here? And how do I get back there again?

  My first memory of travel is a simple one: I am four years old, or maybe five or six, sitting in the backseat of the family station wagon, looking out the window. It is raining, and fairly hard, too. Hard enough that the raindrops defy gravity, streaking up and rolling across the window just slowly enough that I can follow their progress—trace their wobbly trails—until they dead-end in the slat of vertical rubber. Then I drag my gaze back to find a new droplet.

  Where are we Grosses going? In my memory, it’s always to my paternal grandparents’ house, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, about a two-hour trip from our home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Two hours is a long time for a little kid, made longer by the abstractedness of the journey. What are Amherst and Bridgeport? How are they connected geographically? The fact is, I don’t know, and I don’t know enough to even ask the questions. There are steps I remember are necessary to take. We will cross the Connecticut River via the Coolidge Bridge. At some point, we will drive down something called the Merritt Parkway. Finally, we will turn onto Dixon Street, whose Waspy name always seems so proper and stately that it’s almost a joke that people called Gross live there.

  And that’s it: the road, the rain, the minor details that drizzled into my consciousness, the sense that we would begin one place and end at another, and that if I were relatively patient, I would be rewarded with hugs and gifts from my grandmother. Beyond that, I knew—and expected—nothing. This was how journeys went. You started out at one place, and ended in another, and spent most of the time in between in a state of semi-boredom that constantly threatened to veer into fidgety, unrealistic anticipation of imminent delight.

  That was how my perception of travel began, and for a very long time it remained unchanged. When my father, a historian specializing in Revolutionary War–era Concord, Massachusetts, first took me abroad—to Denmark and England at the age of almost-eight—I had no map or guidebook to prepare me, just a sense that, somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, a paradise of Lego bricks and unseen Dr. Who episodes awaited me. And perhaps that was all I needed, for nothing of importance that took place on that adventure could have been predicted in a book.

  And it was an important trip, maybe the most important of my life. The Matt Gross who arrived in Copenhagen one afternoon in the summer of 1982 was a strange, nearly feral creature: messy curly hair neither tamed nor touched by brush or comb; tough dungarees with grass stains at the knee; blue eyes huge and unblinking, like an alien. And, always at his side, a crocheted yellow polyester blanket, softened by years of love, that provided a sense of security, particularly when paired with a thumb in the mouth. Picture Linus from Peanuts, crossed with Pig-Pen.

  The first thing this Matt did, upon arriving in his hotel room, was look out the window and spot the glowing red neon sign of a bookstore. Books! This was a treat. He hadn’t really known where to start exploring, or what to do in the days before he and his father would make the trip to Legoland, in Billund (wherever that was), but now here was a bookstore. He could read, and pretty well, too: Encyclopedia Brown, Dr. Who novelizations, Tolkien. No surprise for the child of an editor and a history professor, really. So when he saw the bookstore, he leapt with excitement to show his father.

  Only, there was a problem. A tricky problem that Dad didn’t know precisely how to explain, or rather, he knew how but wasn’t sure Matt would understand. And so he just said it.

  “Matt, that’s an adult bookstore.”

  Did Matt understand? He did, somehow. It had something to do with sex, whatever that was, with a world that he’d sensed existed but that had been, until now, beyond him. Well, it was still beyond him, but here, on his first day in Denmark, it was closer. He could see it, he could be told where it was, and though he was denied entry, this one step, this knowledge was enough. He’d inched closer. He laughed, I imagine, and his father laughed with him. It was funny, that he could understand even though he didn’t really understand. And besides, he’d brought other books to read anyway.

  From there, the revelations and significant moments began to flow, seemingly at a rate of one per day. At Tivoli Gardens, the grand amusement park at the center of Copenhagen, Matt attempted to eat a fast-food burger from a kiosk—but rejected it as disgusting, inedible. His father, unbelieving, cajoled the tearful boy to finish until, at last, he himself bit into the foul gray thing. Into the trash it went; they dined on french fries instead. For the first time he could remember, Matt had been right about something in the grown-up realm: taste. And soon he was learning more. At Legoland, he had his initial plate of the heretofore exotic spaghetti bolognese, and liked it, enough that the dish became his mainstay, the food by which he could judge a restaurant, and on which he could rely in the absence of compelling alternatives. He was moving forward.

  Although at times, it did not feel like moving forward. After a few days in Denmark, Matt and his father departed, by train and ferry, for England. It was an unbelievable journey—the train actually drove onto the ferry, Matt was stunned to learn—and despite the rocky seas and attendant nausea, he managed to play Centipede in the ferry lounge well enough to win a free game, another breakthrough. Once in England, however, Matt made a horrifying discovery: his blanket had vanished. Had he left it in Copenhagen? At Legoland? On the train? The only thing certain was that it was gone. But Matt did not cry, as he had over the Tivoli Gardens burger. Tears were of no use anymore, and besides, he was almost eight.

  In the years since, I’ve often wondered about the disappearance of my blanket. It seems almost too perfect, in the context of this overly symbolic growing-up tale, that the most visible symbol of my babyhood—that frayed, ultrasoft blanket whose Cheerio-sized ringlets I can, thirty years later, still imagine against my bearded cheek—would go missing. My father, I’ve long suspected, must have removed it from our luggage, but whenever I’ve cornered him, he’s pleaded innocent. I guess I have to believe him.

  The point is that you can never really know what’s going to happen when you travel. Or at least I never did, not when I set out on my heavy blue BMX bicycle to roam the hills of Amherst; not when, partly at my behest, my dad took a new teaching job at William & Mary and moved us all to Williamsburg, Virginia, in whose high school I was the only Jew, and a Yankee, and a skateboarder back when skateboarding was anything but cool; not when I chose to study math at Johns Hopkins, having visited the campus for a day and been so impressed by the focus with which students walked from quad to quad that I forgot that laziness and improvisation, not intensity and labor, were my natural modes of being. I was, for so much of my early life, either uninformed or ill-informed.

  And I didn’t care. The risk was what motivated m
e, though for a long time I couldn’t have articulated that. The possibility of failure—of getting lost, hurt, ostracized—made the eventual successes that much sweeter, although again, this was an unconscious process. I’d hate for anyone to think I was some preternatural daredevil courting death, or humiliation, willy-nilly. No, I was the opposite—so unaware of what awaited me on the other side that it was only once I’d discovered what dangers lurked that I realized how lucky I’d been to survive them. That discovery, however, often came too late—or sometimes never.

  Which is how I arrived in Vietnam: twenty-two, clueless, and lucky. From the air, Vietnam seemed instantly different from anywhere I’d been before. It wasn’t the rice paddies or farming villages—images I recognized from movies and TV—but the trees. As the Air France jet coasted in toward a landing at Tan Son Nhat Airport, the trees looked tight and nubby, gnarled like broccoli florets, a shorter, denser carpet of foliage than I’d ever seen elsewhere. I don’t know why this struck me so strongly. I’d never particularly cared about trees before. But the maples and birches and pines of North America had insinuated themselves so deeply into my consciousness that every other kind of tree cover would instantly signify not just difference or newness but indelible foreignness.

  This hadn’t been in my Slovenian guidebook: the very trees will look different. Nor had anything else, from the Pepsi logos enveloping the shuttle buses that greeted the plane on the tarmac to the MTV playing on video screens throughout the terminal. These, at least, were easier to integrate into my consciousness—because of course this communist country making its first steps toward Western-style capitalism would immediately latch onto pop culture and fast food. I could stand back and safely reflect on the irony. I knew that pose.

  Not so with the trees, or with the reality of Vietnam once I left the airport. Le Thi Thanh, a petite literature professor at Ho Chi Minh City Open University, a kind of community college, met me at the gate with Phuoc, one of her students, and we hustled into a taxi for the thirty-minute drive into the city. What I felt, in addition to the rainy-season heat and humidity, was the nearly overwhelming closeness. The streets were narrow, jammed with motorbikes and bicycles that darted and wove around the cars and pedestrians and each other, a writhing sea of transportation bound by rows of numberless concrete shop houses, all four meters wide, with businesses on their ground floors (“Product Consumption Store” was the English name of one) and living quarters above. Tangled skeins of electrical wiring hung between poles. A smell I eventually concluded was overripe fruit and exhaust filtered through the taxi’s windows. The Vietnamese words printed on signs and billboards may have used a modified Latin alphabet, but I couldn’t read a thing, and could barely muster a chuckle at phrases that should have had me cackling (e.g., “Mỹ Dung”). The city was loud—every motorbike honked constantly—and dirty, and while I was appalled by what I saw, I could also feel an unfamiliar energy pulsing through the streets, an activity so furious and ambitious it both invigorated and frightened me, so much so that Ms. Thanh, Phuoc, and I barely spoke on the drive.