The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  The room is packed. Scores of Koreans try on rental ski suits, rental gloves, and rental helmets and jockey for new rental skis and Italian-made ski boots. I have no idea how they can afford any of this, but their excitement is unmistakable. They’re laughing, speaking loudly, and brimming with the same anticipation I feel every season. Why shouldn’t they have a little fiscally senseless joy?

  Outside, 20 or so ski instructors in fluorescent orange and yellow uniforms line up for calisthenics. I get the feeling they’re military men now assigned to Masik. Behind them, a giant digital monitor blasts tinny folk tunes to images of swaying flowers, crashing waves, and the occasional missile launch.

  “Hoan-young-ham-ni-da!” squawks an electronic voice, “Welcome!” in formal Korean, as Dan and I scan our passes and slip through the first lift gate. The reality of the place soon hits again.

  On opening day, Kim Jong-un rode this lift without his skis. All of the lifts are slow and rickety. The footrests hit the ground in spots and you can feel the whole cable shudder. The towers are really far apart, like the recipe called for 12 but only 8 arrived. As we ascend I look down: two workers are tightening some tower bolts with a really big wrench.

  It takes 43 minutes and 3 rides to reach the summit of 4,468-foot Taehwa Peak, but we get there in one piece. Two lift attendants in fuzzy white hats bow and spring into action. There is no exit slope to whisk you away—just a flat landing—so Lift Attendant 1 seizes the chair from behind while Lift Attendant 2 helps me shuffle out of the way without getting bulldozed. Lift Attendant 3, the one with a finger on the emergency shutoff switch, doesn’t exist.

  “Well, let’s go ski North Korea,” Dan says, and we push off down the slope.

  After five days of constant anxiety, we are back in a familiar world of snow and gravity. The storm builds and so does a sense of camaraderie. A skier from Pyongyang poses for a picture with me. Another shakes my hand. Our guides can’t ski and have let us roam—alone.

  Masik’s two groomers made only one pass up the middle of Slopes 1 through 9, all of which fall back to the base, leaving 30-foot-wide sideburns of untracked snow on each side of the pistes. Kim Jong-il could allegedly control the weather with his mind, but I doubt conditions were ever this good for his son. We have virgin powder all day long.

  Dan and I race down Slopes 7, 8, and 9. They feel like intermediate runs but the signs don’t say. The birch trees to either side are as tight as toothpicks in a shot glass, so we stick to the runs. I imagine Kim Jong-un doing lonely giant-slalom turns with the angulation of Ted Ligety. We bounce past a midmountain pavilion where he probably did some tricks just as his GoPro failed. We settle for views of the brown valleys below, then leapfrog each other, high-fiving our powder eights.

  Most of the North Koreans here have never been on skis before. They stick to the bunny hill below but attack it with gusto. Some crash into an orange safety fence. Others can only go right. One lady steams toward a table-filled patio, then diverts to port with the turning radius of a cargo ship.

  “I told you you would see lots of local people here,” says a guide taking lessons. “This is very new for us.”

  So new, in fact, that a lot of people don’t even bother with skis. Instead they cuddle up and ride the lifts around and around, up and down, thrilled just to be there. Each time our paths cross they wave and smile as if to confirm that this is no dream. These are not the brainwashed marcher-bots we tend to envision, but lovers, maybe my wife and me, content to snuggle on a dawdling loop where “only beautiful, please” plays on repeat.

  That evening I go to a karaoke bar in Hotel 1 with a few of the Westerners. The place is empty, just two Korean guys shucking a dried mackerel for a snack. The two barmaids wear maroon skirts and vests. One of them hands me a full bottle of soju, a rice spirit. The other flicks on some disco lights and together they sing sassy duets for hours to a crowd of five. They seem a bit over­enthusiastic. Maybe this is the greatest job ever. Maybe they’re being watched.

  Our last day dawns cold and clear, but the deal with myself collapses. I feel guilty for enjoying a place where the construction costs would have fed the hungry for years and there’s still this air of suspicion that lingers everywhere we go. The instructors ignore me when I ask to warm up with them. Dan and I do runs on Slopes 4 and 5, where the crystals hiss and ricochet off my knees, but the long rides up are becoming unpleasant. There’s a camera in the trees.

  By the time we leave I still have no idea who in North Korea can really ski here. Our guides say anyone, but I’m skeptical. Lift tickets cost roughly $40 a day. A good job pays $10 a month. You need police permission just to leave your town, and who has any free time anyway? Fridays are manual-labor days. Saturdays are time to study ideological texts. Sundays could work—those are personal-betterment days—but unless you’re in good standing with the regime you’re probably too busy surviving.

  Things are slowly changing, though. You see more cell phones, more cars, more people with watches. Some Koreans may ski for free with their work units. Ski clubs could build the ranks. We in the West can’t imagine that people in a place ruled by such darkness and death could ever find joy. But sometimes they do.

  It is dark again by the time we pull into Pyongyang for one last night at the Yanggakdo. The city is quiet; we roll down Youth Street, but it is empty. There’s a battered streetcar parked on the rails ahead, motionless and dark in the middle of a wide, carless road. When the minibus’s lights brush across its windows I see dozens of people pressed against the foggy glass. They don’t look sick. They don’t look scared. They’re just waiting for the lights to come on.

  MAUD NEWTON

  A Doubter in the Holy Land

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  A FRIEND AND I were beginning that strange dance of making plans to make plans when I mentioned that I’d be traveling to Jerusalem soon. “We should get together right away,” he joked, “before you come down with Messiah syndrome.” It was the kind of precision-targeted crack only an old friend can manage. I can’t remember whether I laughed or winced first.

  When I was young, my mother had a feverish conversion and started a church in our living room. I’d always been a tiny bit anxious that I might one day follow suit, hear the calling myself, start roaming the streets, preaching salvation. A committed but fearful agnostic, I’d never intended to tempt fate by visiting the Holy Land. But I was going to the Jerusalem Book Fair, and my husband, Max, who grew up in the comparatively staid Eastern Orthodox tradition, was joining me.

  When we arrived, at dusk, the sky was a pale, glowing blue— eerily biblical, which, I had to keep reminding myself, made sense. As we sped into the city, past rocky white hills and almond trees bursting with blooms, we were overwhelmed by incongruous feelings of intense foreignness and intimate familiarity. This was a landscape we knew, from Sunday-school lessons and iconography and bad Old Testament movies, and a place we did not know at all.

  Even the mundane became extraordinary. The almonds were soft and sweet, delicate as fruit. When I caught an olive as it fell from a tree and crushed it between my fingers, it stained my skin a brilliant red I couldn’t scrub away.

  At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, priests of different sects tried to pray more loudly than one another. The chambers reverberated with their chanting. As pilgrims knelt to kiss Christ’s tomb, we climbed a staircase to the area said to be Calvary, site of the Crucifixion. It was not particularly hill-like, that dark and crowded little platform, and when the woman next to me cried, I felt as if I were intruding on a wake for someone I didn’t know.

  Back on the street, the doors to a nearby mosque were tightly guarded, preventing even a peek to us congregating infidels. We walked on to the Western Wall, where I stopped, spellbound, despite that same feeling of separateness from someone else’s passion. Max pointed out that the men had about three times more room than the women to pray. We decided against writing prayers to tuck into the cracks and left the Old C
ity on foot. Above us roiling tufts of gray clouds swept across the pallid sky, out over the wall of separation.

  Inside the gates of the Temple Mount, not far from the gleaming golden Dome of the Rock, stood a group of column capitals, some chiseled in intricate florals, some in delicate curlicues, others in a sturdy basket weave, all jumbled together, like rubble, at the mercy of the weather. Throughout the city, walls rested on other, older walls, often of disputed provenance. Among these ruins of failed occupiers and kings, I kept thinking of the stories of my childhood: Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Esther supplicating herself before the Persian king, Daniel interpreting the dreams of Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar, the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate declaring Jesus the king of the Jews and then washing his hands of the matter. At times the past seemed so immediate, I could hardly breathe.

  On our last day, we visited the Garden of Gethsemane. The gnarled olive trees, ghostly in their cragginess, are said to date to Jesus’s time. It was in this place, according to the Gospels, that he passed his last night praying, willing to die because he believed that in doing so he could redeem the sins of the world. As we looked out from that tiny plot of land, contemplating the divisions of modern Jerusalem, the afterlife (by which I mean the legacy) of this man seemed both enormous and tenuous.

  I’d been warned that visiting the Holy Land intensifies your deepest religious beliefs. That was unexpectedly true for even this ardent doubter. Seeing the remains of all the regimes and the people who had tried to infuse their faiths and customs and architecture into the place and then receded across the millennia, I couldn’t understand how anyone could feel sure of any belief, any way of being, in a place that is so constantly shifting. Like Jerusalem, I remained my own stubbornly uncertain self.

  ADRIANA PÁRAMO

  My Timbuktu

  FROM The Georgia Review

  I WAS IN elementary school when my dad—a frustrated world traveler—showed me a picture of the Djenné mosque in Mali, the largest mud-brick building in the world. I remember looking at the photograph, running my fingers along the mosque’s mud outlines, and asking my father when we could go visit this “church.” He smiled, shook his head, and told me it was very unlikely we would ever see it. “You have to make it first to Timbuktu,” he said, “and that, my girl, is the end of the world.” My father also told me that a long time ago lots of wise, tenderhearted men had lived in this uttermost-end-of-the-earth place, and that’s why it was known as the City of 333 Saints. I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture. Seeing my fascination with the place, my father added that the people of Timbuktu were blue. Blue.

  I grew up thinking of Timbuktu as a mythical place, another legendary Atlantis, until a few years ago when I heard on the radio about Mali’s Festival in the Desert, a Woodstock-style concert deemed the most remote music festival in the world. Having inherited from my father an unquenchable thirst for travel, I immediately started to make inquiries. As soon as I found out that the concert, which had showcased African and non-African musicians since 2001, was only 45 miles west of Timbuktu, I made up my mind.

  In 2006, my husband and I traveled to the Malian Sahara to attend the sixth edition of the Festival in the Desert near Essakane, the poorest village in a country considered one of the poorest in western Africa. We went for the same reason some mountaineers say they climb Mount Everest, and because three years earlier the Malian singer Ali Farka Touré had shared the stage with Robert Plant and Tinariwen—a band of desert nomads who in 1991 had traded in their rifles for electric guitars. We wanted to experience that medley of distant cultures firsthand. We threw into the mix a bit of musical adventurism/sangfroid/derring-do—all of which we wanted to put to the test—sprinkled our plans with a personal lifelong dream to see Timbuktu, added historical accounts of the Caravan of White Gold—so called because salt from the remote Taoudenni mines, 400 miles north of Timbuktu, was once literally worth its weight in gold—and we were ready to go.

  We knew very little about Mali, and the fact that every time we mentioned our impending trip to friends they mistook our destination for Bali didn’t help. All we knew was that the area where we were about to camp out for a few days was a godforsaken land known for harboring “desert bandoleers” in the past and terrorists in the present, and for being home to the Tuareg, the nomadic people whose indigo-dyed skin had fueled my imagination with fantastic images for decades. Little did we know as we prepared for our trip that our faces and hands would also be dyed blue from the cheche—the several yards of muslin cloth the Tuareg wear around their heads and faces. We were, in fact, about to become temporary members of the clan of the Blue People of the Desert.

  We left Florida for Mali—a long and logistically challenging trip through France and Algeria—and more than 24 hours later we were met at Mopti airport by Mahmoud, our tour operator, a handsome Tuareg man with a killer smile and a pink turban. He introduced us to the rest of the travelers under his care, a group that was part of a small convoy of 500 tourists from all over the world attending the festival. Then came the real trip. First from Mopti to Timbuktu—a trek that required an unexpected overnight on the banks of the Niger River after we missed our ferry to traverse it—and later, a jeep ride from Timbuktu to the festival site in the desert near Essakane—a trip fraught with flat tires, malfunctioning brakes, and sandstorms.

  The site of the concert appeared on the horizon behind a cloud of haze, like a mirage. The drivers parked the caravan of 4x4s atop the highest dune around, from where we could take in the amazing feat of ingenuity before our eyes. The concert was in the middle of nowhere. There were no sources of electricity or running water nearby, either before or after the concert. The generators, the portable toilets, and the personal allocation of bottled water and goat mutton were short-lived luxuries meant to last only for the duration of the festival. I found it hard not to be awestruck and humbled by the whole endeavor: a group of rugged Tuareg with few resources and a limited budget had planned and were about to run a multicultural festival without sponsors, vendors, or the sale of alcohol.

  The high dune provided an excellent vantage point from which Mahmoud proceeded to allot the tents already pitched down below. Walking in the Sahara desert is a treacherous affair. Its powdery sand and the constantly shape-changing peach-colored dunes give the place a dreamlike air . . . until you try to walk on it. Taking a step is hard work. You sink no matter how fast or how slowly you walk. And you sink fast. The soft sand swallows your feet, your ankles, your calves. It’s like quicksand without the danger of drowning. My husband and I had to lean on each other as we laboriously made our way from our 4x4 to the tent. Exhausted from the journey, the sun, and the sand, we collapsed on our thin twin mattresses, the only items inside the tent.

  We woke up to the voice of a little boy shouting in French, “The Tuareg are coming!” A full moon was already out and an orange dusk enveloped the desert when my husband and I took another short but arduous walk from our primitive tent site to the amphitheater, a flat valley of soft sand surrounded by sloping dunes.

  The amphitheater filled up as Malians interspersed with Western faces. At first we couldn’t see anything other than the cheering crowd of tourists and locals scattered across the open desert and a few Tuareg working the lights and sound system powered by electrical generators. Then I felt their presence before I could see them. The sand trembled under my feet and the dunes reverberated and changed form as the Tuareg approached. It was like the millions of wildebeest I had seen migrate across the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Like the sound of a cavalry charge. Like thunder. Then, in the distance, a cloud of dust billowed in a manmade dust devil. The Tuareg are coming. They arrived on the backs of camels running at full speed, the beasts’ four feet coming off the ground simultaneously, making them look as though they were flying, pushing their way toward the arena in front of the stage. The Tuareg are coming. They had their faces and heads wrapped in dark indigo cheche; they rode barefoot, their legs wrapped around the col
orful wooden pommels of their saddles. They raced each other—wielding their swords in the air, waving their daggers, shouting their Tamasheq war calls. They were terrifying and regal and handsome. Some of them dismounted their camels and sat on the sand; a few others stayed atop their animals and gathered to one side of the stage in an improvised camel-parking spot. We sat on the Saharan sand, among the Tuareg and under a savage sky bursting with stars. We tapped and cheered and clapped along with the music delivered by each of the artists. Their bluesy music filtered up into the night. I was high at the concert. High on Mali, on desert, on music.

  Khaira Arby, Timbuktu’s reigning queen of Malian soul, sang. It was easy to feel small where everything seemed bigger: the vastness of the desert, the infinity of that starry firmament, the stone-cold-sober crowd of Tuareg revelers, all under the spell of Khaira’s supernatural, high-pitched voice. Maybe it was the fact that there were no seats and the audience was sitting on the bare sand; maybe it was the constant physical contact with the Tuareg around me, but by the time the concert was in full swing, I was filled with a borrowed, if not clichéd, sense of belonging like no other. We hummed to the same tunes, we exchanged pleasantries in French, we applauded enthusiastically the performers we liked best and we shouted encore, encore in unison. By midnight, a few of the revelers started to doze off. Sitting on the sand, they leaned on each other as the night wore on; a few propped their heads on a neighbor’s shoulders, some were collapsed on one another’s laps. After the closing act, the valley around the stage was dotted with Tuareg men sleeping in the fetal position, with nothing above them but yards of cheche shining under the full moon.

  Six years later, in 2012, another loud rumble would be heard in northern Mali, not from a group of enthusiastic Tuareg marking the beginning of the Festival in the Desert, but from the Islamic Mujahideen, an al-Qaeda offshoot determined to impose a strict sharia law. My heart sank as CNN aired footage of these Islamists, armed with pickaxes and hoes, demolishing the cultural heritage of the fabled city so dear to my heart. I had to remind myself that these machine gun–wielding fighters were zealots, unlike the gentle Malians I had met in 2006 who were artists using music as their way to extricate themselves from their region’s history of rebellion, hunger, isolation, and underdevelopment. The jihadists marched into small villages first, and later into bigger towns like Timbuktu. From my own living room I followed the destruction of Mali on TV: images of robed and turbaned men destroying half of Timbuktu’s legendary Sufi mausoleums and shrines, along with sections of the town’s grand mosques, Sidi Yahya, Djingareyber, and Sankore. I heard news broadcasters and friends alike use the words Islamist, al-Qaeda, and Tuareg interchangeably, committing a gross semantic error that tormented me beyond words.