The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  See the men dance. Arms draped on shoulders, kick-stepping in circles, they swing bottles of wine. Purpled thumbs cork the bottles. The wine leaps and jumps behind green glass. They throw back their heads, the dancing men. They laugh at the sky. They are happy. They lurch into streets. They reel among cars to the blare of horns. On the sidewalks their children walk, oddly attired—a carnival of pygmy soldiers, ninja, geisha, Roman centurions.

  “Everything we hate,” one man explains in broken English. He means sin. Laughing, he dances on.

  He is Haredi, a member of the conservative Jewish sect that rejects modern secular culture. Bene Beraq—a low-income, ultra-Orthodox satellite of Tel Aviv—broils on the Mediterranean plain of Israel. Its male residents dress like crows: heavy black suits, black Borsalino hats, the old grandfathers hugely whiskered and the boys in peot, the curled sidelocks of the pious. The women pale and staring under the sun. In plain skirts, drab shoes. In hair scarves. Their drunken revelry jars. A fiesta of Quakers. An imams’ jamboree. A bacchanal of Mennonites.

  These godly folk—have they gone mad?

  No. It is simply this: after walking the timeworn horizons out of Africa, I have entered a corrugated maze, a knotted crossroads of the world where landscape is read like sacrament, a labyrinth of echoing faiths called the Middle East. The strange zeal at Bene Beraq is a festival of joy, of survival: Purim. Purim commemorates the deliverance of the Jews from a genocide under the Persians almost 2,500 years ago. That slaughter, plotted by the courtier Haman, was foiled by two brave Jews, Esther and her stepfather, Mordecai. Every fourteenth day of Adar, Jews celebrate their continued existence. They exchange gifts. They make themselves “fragrant with wine.” They drink until they “cannot tell the difference between ‘Cursed be Haman!’ and ‘Blessed be Mordecai!’” It is a holiday one feels one can get behind.

  I join in. Unkempt, in threadbare clothes, with holed shoes and sun-cured hide, my costume is permanent: the traveler, the man from far away. At Bene Beraq the masked children laugh. They ask for coins.

  My walk is a dance.

  The anthropologist Melvin Konner writes how the num masters of the Kung San, the shamans of the Kalahari—members of perhaps the oldest human population on the planet—induce a spiritual trance through hours of dancing around campfires. Such arduous rituals deliver up to 60,000 rhythmic jolts—the number of footfalls in a long day’s trekking—to the base of their skulls. The result, Konner says, is a psychological state that we have been questing for since our species’ first dawn, “that ‘oceanic’ feeling of oneness with the world.”

  This may explain the neurology of rapture. But why the pursuit of it?

  I will exit the cauldron of the Levant at the Israeli port of Haifa. I buy passage on a cargo ship that will carry me around the abattoir of Syria to Cyprus. From there, it’s on to Turkey.

  One day’s walk south of Haifa gape the Mount Carmel caves. They hold Homo sapiens bones 100,000 years old. This famous archaeological site marks the farthest limit of human migration out of Africa in the middle Stone Age—the outer edge of our knowledge of the cosmos. I trudge to the caves in a squall. The government has seen fit to prop mannequins inside these rock shelters: plaster cave people dressed in skins. In gray stormy light, their painted eyes stare out at the Mediterranean—at Homer’s wine-dark sea, at a corridor into modernity. But in memory my walk’s true coda in the Middle East came earlier.

  I had camped months before, on the shore of the Dead Sea, with a family of Bedouin.

  The father, Ali Salam, was poor. He gathered aluminum cans alongside the highway. His teenage wife, Fatimah, a shy, smiling girl in a filthy gown, rocked her sick baby under a plastic tarp. She cooked tomatoes pilfered from nearby fields. We ate from a sooty cook pot. Across the asphalt, not 200 yards away in the night, blazed a pod of luxury resorts. I imagined, back then, another couple standing behind plate glass windows: Glasses of minibar wine in their hands, they might have stared out into the dark. Did they see our campfire? Could they hear the child’s persistent cough? Of course not. I tried to resent them. But they weren’t bad, the people in that well-lit room. Certainly no worse or better than anyone else traveling the lonesome desert road. Such was the walk’s only theology. The Bedouin. The people in the hotel. The road that divided and united them.

  GARY SHTEYNGART

  Behind Closed Doors at Hotels

  FROM Travel + Leisure

  WHEN I TRAVEL alone, when my only companion and source of affection is the hypoallergenic wedge of pillow with some silly hotel monogram on it, when the jet lag and the unfamiliar sun make me feel like a dust speck blown across the earth (an alien dust speck that will never know the love of another human being again), when all these planets align, one thing will happen: someone in the room next to me will be having very loud sex. Not just loud sex, but the most emotive, bizarre, animalistic, post-structuralist, post-human sex ever. The men will moan as if the hotel staff is extracting state secrets out of them, the women will reach a crescendo of foreign syllables that always sounds to my ears like “You’re so alone, you’re so alone, you’re so ahhhhhh-lone!”

  And I am alone. At three in the morning, in a distant land, unsure of who I am, my iPhone set to the wrong time zone, my passport forgotten at reception, my wallet out of Albanian leks, my bed floating through nothingness like a spacecraft that’s slipped out of Earth’s orbit and beyond Houston’s range, as above me, below me, beside me, two people join up in outrageous, pornographic ecstasy, some of them clearly trying to create a third person by the early morning’s light.

  Different hotel chains seem to elicit different kinds of sex. W Hotels, contrary to the boutique leanings of many of its properties, seem to get going early, say 10 p.m., and some of the sex sounds vaguely romantic, with occasional kind laughter and even a precoital Italian “Ti amo!” The international range of the Marriott brand is unmistakable and admirable: if you want to hear sex in Tagalog in Manila, this is probably your best bet. Hands down, the lustiest hotel chain in the world in my experience is Hyatt. I don’t know if every encounter is registered in its loyalty rewards program, but Hyatt may be one reason why the world’s population is topping 7 billion. When I had to place Misha Vainberg, the amorous hero of my second novel, Absurdistan, inside a Western brand-name hotel, I really didn’t have to think twice.

  Of course, where you are makes a difference. At a too-cool-for-school hotel on the outskirts of Bangkok, the Japanese couple next door went at it so vocally, I was absolutely sure the woman had just recited the entire Tale of Genji. Even the deeply cynical Thai water bug staring at me pensively from the ceiling seemed to stop in its tracks, utterly shocked. The next morning Mr. and Mrs. Osaka were at the pool next to me nibbling on spicy scrambled eggs. Inevitably during “the morning after” the young man will be staring ahead in his most cool and sullen pose, or heartlessly flipping through his cell phone, while the young woman hums with purpose and fulfillment. This discrepancy is yet another reason to worry for our species.

  (Important note: if you have recently broken up with someone and are feeling particularly blue, do not stay in a hotel in Naples, Italy, or anywhere south of Naples.)

  Often I feel the people next to me are having sex with the express purpose of showing off. At a luxurious hotel in my native St. Petersburg, Russia, I was placed in a duplex suite, the kind where the second-floor mansard bedroom is just centimeters away from another person’s lovemaking. By their outrageous okhs and ooohs I had immediately pegged the next-door couple as rich Muscovites come to the relatively impoverished Venice of the North to show off their advanced earning power and perfectly calibrated reproductive skills. The next morning at the hearty breakfast table, they were cinematically feeding each other sturgeon and kielbasa, cooing and mooing, laughing and loving, reminding me that the only thing sadder than a lonely traveler with sex all around him is a lonely traveler staring at a plate of cold kasha.

  Sometimes the sex itself is sad. At an airport hotel
in Des Moines, Iowa, the young farmers of America next door were so desperately trying to fall into a rhythm, to find a language that could accommodate that other, uncertain side of them, I almost called room service to send them up an oyster. Their meaningless call-and-response led me to open my window so that I could better hear the drone of an early-morning flight taking off for a better-sexed destination. Minneapolis, say.

  Needless to say that when I travel with my partner, there is complete silence in the rooms next to us. When I’m asleep in her arms, the universe has no reason to taunt me. Enjoy the silence, it says to me. Someone loves you. Now love her back.

  IRIS SMYLES

  Ship of Wonks

  FROM The Atlantic

  THE LAUNDROMAT is a great place to meet men, dating experts say. Also, sports bars. But what do you do when you have your own washer and dryer? When you quit drinking six years ago? What do you do when you want to meet someone who, like you, is not at that Super Bowl party but home alone watching the Science Channel, contemplating the certain collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda and the romantic ramifications of quantum entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”?

  As I sat in my parents’ kitchen last fall, thumbing through my dad’s back issues of Scientific American, my mother warned me again about my hurtling headlong into a lonely void. “You don’t have forever,” she said. I was reading about the possibility that time doesn’t exist but is simply “emergent.” Still, I didn’t argue. I nodded and opened another issue, to an ad for Insight Cruises featuring a trip with a strong physics theme.

  “You’re too picky,” my mother went on, noting my age—“nearly forty!” “Thirty-five,” I corrected her as I perused the cruise itinerary. Following a tour of CERN, on the Franco-Swiss border, home of the Large Hadron Collider, participants board the AmaDagio for a trip down the Rhone River, enjoying 23 onboard lectures about the latest developments in physics and cosmology punctuated by tours of five French port cities en route to Arles. What kind of people take these trips? I wondered. Could this be my laundromat?

  The day before my flight, I was still packing. Casual attire was advised, but I wasn’t about to meet my soulmate in a T-shirt. And visiting the largest particle accelerator in the world, where the elusive Higgs boson (the “God particle”) was finally discovered, surely warrants a little dressing up. I settled on practical Hepburn-esque menswear for daytime and gowns for the evening—perfect for a transatlantic steamer setting sail in 1925.

  An overnight flight later, I was standing amid a crowd of T-shirted septuagenarian couples, waiting to board a bus that would take us to CERN. I was about to give up all romantic hope when a fantastically young man in his late fifties, an English astrophysicist, asked whether he could sit next me. “Of course!” I said. And then I noticed his wedding ring, fat and gold, shaped like the Large Hadron Collider we were about to see.

  Three hundred thirty feet underground, a 17-mile ring straddles the Franco-Swiss border. Whizzing through the accelerator at speeds approaching that of light, particles smash into each other, reproducing collisions that occurred in our newborn universe nearly 14 billion years ago. I was still thinking about this the next day as I stared out from the deck of the AmaDagio. Swathed in secondhand mink, I watched the French countryside drift by, the trees an autumn medley of orange and red, and then bare.

  Belowdecks, I lunched with an American couple who reminded me of my parents. “The boeuf bourguignon is delicious,” I said, smiling. “The meat is tender, but none of that matters if you don’t have a person to share it with,” the wife replied, after learning that I was traveling alone. I was grateful when her husband, a gynecologic pathologist, changed the subject. He asked whether I’d gotten the HPV vaccine. “My doctor says I’m too old.” He nodded gingerly before estimating my age, probable number of sexual partners, and the statistical likelihood that I already had the cancer-causing virus. His wife took his hand and beamed. “My husband’s work has been honored all over the world.”

  For dinner I selected a dramatic houndstooth gown paired with my favorite polar-bear earrings. The only one in formal attire, I blushed and quickly took a seat beside a roguishly handsome retired art history professor from Bath. An Insight Cruise veteran (this was his fifth), he had spiky white hair, dark eyebrows, and a back problem that made him look sulky and rebellious.

  We bonded right away—I have a similar pain in my hip from too many hours at my desk—and I began fantasizing about becoming the wife of Bath and accompanying him on his sixth cruise. Over dessert, he took out his iPhone to show me photos of his collection of clocks and barometers. He was going on about time and pressure when it hit me: I was not being courted but visited by the Ghost of Science Cruise Future. With a start, I realized that all of his clocks were grandfathers.

  Like sand through one of the professor’s hourglasses, the days of our cruise slipped by. Some mornings brought lectures on the subatomic world—“Electrons come in pairs.” Several afternoons, talks on space—“We live in a time of cosmic collision, but eventually the galaxies will settle down.” We toured the Roman ruins of Vienne—“The Temple of Augustus and Livia. What a pair!” And on one of our last evenings, we walked through the medieval ghost town of Viviers. Two by two we disembarked, like Noah’s animals, onto dry land. The professor gallantly offered his arm.

  That night I stayed up late with the captain, the married astrophysicist, the gynecologic pathologist and his wife, and a couple from China. Together in the ship’s lounge, we talked excitedly about ideas the way we had when we were in college, when we were young, when we had forever. We talked about the Big Bang, about what came before the beginning, about what came before that, and before that . . . “You don’t want to end up alone,” I remembered my mother saying. But there, alone among the over-70 set, it dawned on me: I’ve seen the end, and it’s not so bad. I adjusted my vintage turban and leaned into the conversation. So what if electrons come in pairs? The Higgs boson, that special thing that took almost 40 years to find, goes it alone.

  CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON

  Baked Alaska

  FROM Outside

  JIMMY’S STORE IN Port Heiden, population 102, stocks all the staples of Alaskan bush life, at bush prices: $14 cans of Folgers, $7.50 packs of sunflower spits, something called the Jerky Master. And on the wall, hanging from a nail: very large steel leg traps, without price or explanation.

  “You’re goin’ up there today?” Jimmy asks from behind the counter, in what passes for a formal greeting. Jimmy’s gaze trails across the ample gray acreage of his sweatshirt and settles on the window, where right now a slasher-film fog is sticking to what little scenery presents itself. Tundra. Truck. Still more tundra, unspooling to a horizon so unbroken by man or mountain range that the sky would start at your shoelaces if only you could see them. Welcome to July on the Alaska Peninsula.

  Twenty minutes ago, our bush plane nosed down into the soup and left us on a gravel airstrip, where we hitched a ride to Jimmy’s along with the mail sacks in the back of a gutted eighties Econoline van. QUAYANA (Thank you), the door read. NO PETS.

  Jimmy Christensen is half Aleut, and like many of the native Aleut here, he’s broad, quiet, and kind and in possession of his people’s sly, dry sense of humor. The way everybody is always asking Jimmy for advice or to borrow his dozer until next Friday, he seems to run his hometown. He’s sort of the gentle Tony Soprano of Port Heiden. There’s not much new here for a man like Jimmy, and our sudden appearance and determination seem to amuse him. He sells us a gallon of white gas and offers to drive us to the road’s end.

  Grabbing his keys, Jimmy says we’re the first backpackers he’s seen in weeks. This doesn’t surprise us. Nobody comes to the Alaska Peninsula by accident. Even fewer come here for fun. The peninsula marks the start of the Aleutian island chain, the 1,400-mile tail that wags west toward Kamchatka. It’s a slim, Vermont-sized piece of nearly trackless green with a population of fewer than 3,000 residents,
almost all of whom live in just a few villages that sit uneasily on the map, as if nature might evict them at any time. Naknek. South Naknek. Port Heiden. It’s a tortured landscape, pummeled by unrelenting storms and warted with semiactive volcanoes. In a state grinning with superlatives, this is one of the wildest, rowdiest, most remote places around. It remains a question mark to even the most sporting Alaskans.

  Which is exactly why we’re bouncing in the back of Jimmy’s king cab. I’m obsessed with blank spots on the map, the places nobody goes. I’ve learned to follow my cell phone like a reverse Geiger counter: the poorer the coverage, the more enticing the destination. For 10 years, I’ve tried without luck to visit the most promising one of all, the one that now lurks out there in the murk: Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve, the least visited of the entire 401-unit national park system.

  Already it has taken my companions—guide Dan Oberlatz and photographer Gabe Rogel—and me three flights from Seattle to reach Port Heiden, which sits about 450 miles southwest of Anchorage. Our plan is to backpack 22 miles into the monument’s centerpiece, an ancient and massive crater, and then float 38 miles to the Pacific using ultralight, stowable rafts crammed deep in our packs. From there we hope to hoof and paddle nearly 80 miles down the coast to the native community of Chignik Lagoon, where the closest airstrip awaits.

  Inconvenience is the least of the obstacles that Aniakchak throws up for the would-be visitor. The central peninsula is home to one of the largest concentrations of the biggest brown bears on earth. Then there are the man-eating vegetables, alder jungles that swallow bushwhackers, and cow parsnip with poison leaves that blister the skin. Add routinely nasty meteorology—“This is where a lot of the weather is made for the rest of the country,” a guide once told me—and the challenge we face is pretty stark.