The Best Travel Writing 2011

by James O'Reilly

  Suddenly, he looked at me mischievously out of the corner of his twinkling eyes and asked, “Would you like to spend the night? My daughter needs feminine company.”

  Maybe I wasn’t so boring after all….

  “What about my friends?” I asked in an embarrassing squeak. My vocal chords weren’t cooperating. I was scared and looking for the exit. The intensity of the connection wiped me clean of sensibility and instead of feeling a resounding thunderclap Yes!, I practically tripped over him as I ran away. I didn’t even say goodbye to Marie-Claire.

  As I speed-walked past my astonished friends, who were halfway up the trail, one-way conversations bounced around inside my skull. You would abandon your young son for a life with a bisexual, polyamorous man in cold, gray Belgium? My mind spun out dramas as fast as it could to distract me from my attraction to this gorgeous man who had just invited me to spend the night with him. I mean, his daughter.

  After I plowed over my friends to get in the car, they asked, “He invited you to spend the night? What are you doing here?”

  I muttered something about them worrying about me if I didn’t come back with them.

  In unison, they all chanted, “Stupid! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  On my last night in Ibiza, Sana choreographed yet another party. This one took place in an abandoned military fort. She turned each cold cement room into a vibrant temple celebrating various goddesses from Isis to Aphrodite.

  Looking up from the flames licking the sky around the perennial bonfire ring, I saw his eyes across the fire’s golden flicker. Panther eyes.

  The Chilean and I skirted each other through the evening’s mayhem of rituals and exhaustive dance-a-thons. I ended up collapsed in a sweaty pile next to him on one of Sana’s makeshift temple floors. He draped a pashmina shawl over me as I pretended to sleep. No kisses. No hugs. No sex. No goodbye.

  I arose at dawn and Oscar drove me to the airport for my long journey back to California.

  I can still see the jaggy edge trim of his thick pitch-black hair framing his face. I can still feel the tidal pull of ultimate attraction. I’m still in love with that artist. Or at least the concept and packaging.

  What if I had spent the night in that stone pink-tented wonderland he created? I muse about this every few years. What if I let the artist from my favorite remote island in the world woo me?

  At first, I always repeat the same old litany, “No, no! I had to go home to work and take care of my son.” But the blanket of reason that vigilantly guards the door to my heart falls off, and the truth speaks in a timid yet convincing voice, “I don’t want to be swept away by the murderous riptides of love. No heart landmines for me (even if they are just in my imagination)…”

  Lisa Alpine is the author of Exotic Life: Laughing Rivers, Dancing Drums and Tangled Hearts and co-author of the Self-Publishing Boot Camp Workbook. She is the founding publisher of Dancing Words Press and the Global Getaways columnist for Examiner.com. She is also an acclaimed teacher and leads workshops on travel writing and dance as a healing art form.

  Lisa is a member of the Wild Writing Women, California Writers Club and Bay Area Travel Writers. When not wrestling with words, exploring the ecstatic realms of dance, swimming with sea creatures, or waiting for a flight, Lisa is planting fruit trees in her garden in Mill Valley, California, or orchids in her jungle hideaway on the Big Island. Her gardens of vivid flowers and abundant fruit remind her that the future is always ripe with possibilities. You can find out more about her at www.lisaalpine.com

  CARLA KING

  Alone, Illegal, and Broke Down

  In the late ’90s, she rode northern China solo.

  IT IS MY FIRST DAY ALONE ON THE ROAD AND I AM LOST. The mountains of northern China beyond Beijing are vast and enormous. There are no road signs, only larger roads and smaller roads, paved roads and dirt roads. When I stop to ask directions the peasants simply stare because I am the first foreigner they have ever seen, and a woman. Putting myself in their place I can sympathize. I ride up on a big black Chinese sidecar motorcycle, the most expensive motorcycle in China. Then I remove my helmet. A blond braid tumbles down the shoulder of my black leather jacket and I mutter something incomprehensible and then look at them with slightly crazed green eyes.

  “W mílù le,” I say. “I’m lost.”

  But most villagers have never traveled farther than their network of about a dozen villages all of their lives. And there are no taxi drivers or buses or truckers to ask.

  Nearly out of gasoline, I am sure that Lijang, the town I had targeted for my first night on the road, will not appear anytime soon. The going is slow not only because of the dark but because of the potholes and badly banked curves and the asphalt that ends without warning.

  Where might I be? I might have looped back to where I began. I could be far, far away. I remember how the land looked in daylight: the jumble of pyramid-shaped mountains covered in soft green foliage jutting through the landscape, the crumbling hillsides, the plunging cliffs.

  Another tiny village passes; windows covered in thick, oiled paper glow with the flickering light of cooking fires. Exhausted, I consider stopping but would they be friendly? How could I tell them what I want? If I stop here it might cause an uproar. Do they have food to spare? A bed? Certainly not. My thoughts loop on the problem of where to sleep that night and on the problems that hadn’t yet come. In the background the unfamiliar engine rumbles. I am still working out its idiosyncrasies. I don’t yet know this machine well enough to take comfort in its working noises, its hard clunk down from third gear, its slight pull to the left.

  Shadow trees fly by and another village appears. I shift down, slowing in anticipation of the many potholes a village brings, and a small animal suddenly bursts into the road. A rush of adrenaline prepares me for hard braking, for swerving or impact.

  I hold my ground, trusting my instincts. I can’t tell if the side of the road dives off into a five-foot ditch or heads straight into a two-foot wall. The animal races alongside and, improbably, others join in. Finally I realize they are piglets. We travel together down the road for several long moments of dark indecision. I hold my breath while they grunt and squeal hysterically, invisibly.

  Several times it seems that they will move off the road and out of my way, and several times it seems that they will run under my tires. Finally, I gently let pressure off the throttle, decelerating very slowly. The engine noise deepens and, in response, one piglet lets out a sudden, long, high-pitched squeal. The others squeal in response and follow it off the road into darkness.

  Heart racing, I am alone again. Dirt road. Dark night. Miles later I notice that my fingers are still stiffly poised above the brake lever. The icy night air leaks up the sleeves of my jacket and between my collar and helmet. My joints ache from working the clutch and the gears of this heavy beast of a motorcycle, bumping along a barely paved road in the pitch black backwoods of China.

  That afternoon my friends back in Beijing, the four Chinese bikers who formed my send-off party, led me through Beijing in a complicated route into these mountains. They turned back at the Beijing-Heibi province border with regret in their eyes and I rode on. They were tied, without specific government permission to travel, to the province where they lived. Before I visited China I’d had no idea that people living in one province were forbidden to travel in other provinces without special permissions and special license plates. Their plates were the blue provincial plates, mine was the special black plate that allowed me to cross borders. We said goodbye and I traveled on, alone.

  I had spent the previous week in Beijing trying to get my papers in order. Permissions. Signatures. Chops. Both the American embassy and the Chinese government proved useless in helping with permits. I was required to obtain a Chinese driver’s license to ride outside Beijing province, but that required residency, a driving test, lots of paperwork. First of all, I had no residency. It seemed that, though the Chinese government was newly eager to we
lcome independent travelers, they didn’t know how to accommodate them.

  My expat friends, people I’d met through the embassy, explained that since the tourist policy was in a transition period, the lawmakers wouldn’t know what the rules were. It would probably be safe to go, even without papers, they said. “They won’t put you in jail for more than a day if you get caught,” one explained. “And you probably won’t get caught…at least not for a while.”

  It had been a hot, humid Saturday, a particularly auspicious day for weddings, it turned out. Brides in layers of white silk and chiffon perspired in the back seats of economy cars trailing red and white streamers, their drivers honking incessantly in celebration.

  My new friends rode Chang Jiang sidecar motorcycles that belonged to two Chinese members of the international CJ motorcycle club in Beijing. We crawled along Beijing’s third ring road until, right in front of us, a truck plowed into a taxi and slid out of the intersection. For a moment, all was still. Then, suddenly, traffic on all four sides lunged toward the center. Within seconds every car was touching the bumper or door of another car, resulting in a tightly woven fabric of glittering metal.

  We escaped by riding into a shallow ditch and onto a railroad track that our sidecar bikes easily managed, for they were designed for use by messengers through the rough terrain where World War II was fought. They are essentially carbon copies of the 1938 BMW motorcycles, built hastily with inferior materials, yet still robust.

  I was sweating in the deep heat of polluted urban Beijing, though I’d stripped to my tank top. Our leader, Jiangshan, had to be steaming in his Harley Davidson jacket, but he kept it zipped up. His girlfriend, Yang Xiao, sat slightly away from the leather back of the sidecar chair, one hand gripping the edge of the car and the other held up to her aviator glasses. Every so often she’d turn around to smile and give me a thumbs up. Her glossy black hair tangled in the fringe of the brown suede sleeves of her American-Indian-styled motorcycle jacket. People driving, riding bicycles, waiting to cross the road, stared. Beautiful, wide-eyed Yang Xiao. She always had a slightly haunted look, except when she was riding, and then her black eyes sparkled, and her movements were almost careless. Jiangshan, an unusually tall, dignified man of around fifty, also brightened when he rode. His movements became larger, his voice louder. On the motorcycle, they seemed almost American.

  Lee and Liu followed on another Chang Jiang through the ruthlessly dense Beijing traffic until we rose above the city into the relief of a beautifully paved single-lane mountain byway. The air cooled as we passed farming villages, a lifestyle in harmony with nature. I glimpsed grain drying in courtyards behind village walls made from mud and straw. The traditional curlicue roofs seemed carefully maintained in the old style, with protective demons painted on doorways. Here, I forgot about the problems of urban life, enjoyed the scenery and dodged donkey carts full of twigs, maneuvered around diesel tractors pulling into the road from the fields, a dusty wind in my face.

  Country roads, sunshine, and the camaraderie of fellow riders should have made for a perfect Saturday, but the realization that in a few hours I would be riding alone for as long as six months through this strange country sent bolts of fear shooting through my heart and stomach. The Heibi Province border appeared.

  Our moment of separation was inevitable. My borrowed bike, with its expensive black license plates, was authorized for operation in any province, though its rider wasn’t. These black plates, an indication of importance, of guanxi—their term for power, freedom, prestige—would keep me from being harassed by the police—or so I hoped.

  Jiangshan gave me some extra wheel spokes and told me I would be lucky. Yang Xiao game me a hug, and Lee and Liu shook my hand.

  I rode alone with a knot in my stomach trying to enjoy the first few hours of my solo journey but I was completely cowed by the wildness of Northern Heibi province. I still had the vague impression from childhood that all of China was densely populated. But this lonely country backwater was riddled with potholed roads among jagged mountains covered in soft brushy bushes and trees. The air was fresh and cool in the late afternoon, and the green mountains gave the atmosphere a healthy glow. I never imagined that China had such wide-open spaces, and then the road forked into three with no signs to mark the way. I switched the engine off and, for the first time since I arrived in the country, experienced absolute silence.

  After a while, I pulled the map from the sidecar to consider it seriously now for the first time and to search, unsuccessfully, for my three-pronged crossroads, when a peasant wearing ragged cotton pants and a peaked cap appeared. He pushed a jumble of tree branches in a wooden handcart, his arms and shoulders straining against the slight decline of the road.

  “N ho,” I said to him, expecting him to return my hello. He stopped and I shoved up the visor of my helmet, to be better understood. “N ho,” I repeated carefully, intoning as properly as I could in my basic Mandarin. “W mílù le,” I said, slowly. “I’m lost.”

  He stared, as if he understood, so I continued, asking the way to Liajang. “Z nme qù Liajang?”

  The man was tiny, and looked eighty but was probably only sixty, badly bent from work and probably mineral deficiencies. His face was tan and flat, lightly wrinkled, and his eyes, though bright, were sunken deeply. I saw that he was a little startled when he stepped nearer to me to peer up into my helmet.

  “Liajang?” I repeated, rattling my map and punching the name of the town with my finger. Its name was clearly written in Pinyin, the Roman characters that appeared under the Chinese pictograms, but I really couldn’t tell how to pronounce it correctly and it’s possible the man couldn’t read. The paper rustled, ignored in the gentle breeze as the man continued to stare at my face with the bald curiosity of a child.

  I’d been stared at in Beijing but this was absurd. The man acted as if I was a statue in a wax museum. He studied my jacket, then bent down to study my jeans and my boots, and rose again to take a look at my helmet and gloves before walking all around the motorcycle.

  At least it gave me time to stare back. So this would be the peasant so reviled and absolutely dismissed, usually with a disgusted sneer, by the Chinese middle class. In his peaked cap with his wrinkled old face he was a museum piece himself, a caricature of the Chinese peasant in his blue Mao clothes, with his stringy gray hair, pushing his battered wheelbarrow. I asked one more time the way to Liajang, but he continued to stare, slack jawed and glassy-eyed.

  Starting off again I chose the middle of the three equally unlikely looking roads. The middle way seemed appropriate as a spiritual path, at least. Not that I was practicing moderation just then, but it wasn’t a heads or tails situation.

  The middle way twisted around and down and up and around again and I no longer had any idea of the direction it would lead. It didn’t really matter, I told myself. I wasn’t on any particular deadline and I needed only to head roughly west, toward Tibet and the setting sun. With that thought I settled into a not unpleasant resignation. The scenery was wild and serene and the tension knotting in my stomach dissipated. I had chosen Liajang because it was a fairly large town with a few hotel choices, according to my Lonely Planet guide, but surely another town would appear. Or so I thought.

  The joy of exploration waned with the fading daylight, the absence of a road sign, a gas station, or a town. I continued to choose my way randomly at forks in the road and, like the first road, they followed the contours of the mountains to take me on a tour of all the directions of the compass. By the time darkness fell I had passed only the tiniest of villages. The peasants performed their end-of-day tasks. They were poor, desperately poor. Their windows were covered in oiled paper. Their water was fetched from who knows where in buckets hung from sticks carried on their shoulders, and their grain was sorted and ground by hand and their small gardens protected from the animals by fences of bricks made of mud and it seemed impossible that anything would change for them tonight, or tomorrow, or in the years after.r />
  Ten kilometers of empty road passes between the village where the piglets had run beside me and here, where the road narrows and deteriorates into dirt and gravel. The dark shapes of trees hover above on either side. Long ago Kublai Khan had traveled through China and was dismayed at the unbroken monotony of the roadways. He ordered trees planted on every roadside to give solace to travelers.

  The trees do not give me solace as my headlight shines on one after another after another white painted tree trunk giving me the impression that it is they which move past me, and that I am sitting still like an actor on a movie set, the wind machine blowing in my face.

  What does give me solace is the sudden appearance of two gas pumps under a brightly-lit shelter. Beyond it stands a building strung with white lights that I hope is a hotel. I pull up to the pumps and after a moment a woman peeks out of the doorway of the attached shack. She hushes the two small children peeking out behind her to walk toward me. Her outfit is garishly illuminated under the fluorescent lights. She sports a shapeless lime green dress sprinkled with large white polka dots and opaque knee-highs that have left a sharp dent halfway up her short fat calves, and bright pink rubber pool sandals.

  She decodes my rough Mandarin as she pumps gas into the tank. Yes, she nods, smiling. The lit building is indeed a hotel—her luguan. I can stay there, and it will cost twenty yuan.

  Equipped with a full tank of gas and this happy information I follow the road she traced with her finger. I would otherwise have never found the entrance, a steep dirt and gravel driveway that passes over a shaky wooden bridge built over what seems to be a very deep ravine. The sound of water running far below me quickens my heart. It will be interesting to see in the morning what death-defying feat I am performing by crossing over these rickety beams.