The Best Travel Writing 2007 - Introduction
We travel to try to understand, a country, a people, perhaps ourselves. We may fail to find what we’re searching for, but we’re many miles ahead of the stay-at-homes who’ve not embarked on that search, and way ahead of the stay-at-homes who believe they understand the world, even though they’ve not even ventured out the front door.
I’ve been regularly reminded of that important quest in my own recent wanderings, visits to a roll call of countries which, we’re repeatedly informed, deserve to be described as “bad.” I won’t claim I’ve come anywhere near understanding them, but I’ve certainly had plenty of opportunities to contemplate that essential truth that every story has two sides. We may resolutely believe one side of the tale, but it’s foolish to ignore the reality that other people may believe the flip side with equal conviction. It’s by traveling that we meet people and come face to face with how they see the world or, even better, start to see how the world looks from their viewpoint and begin to understand why they think the way they do. We’re much less likely to discover that alternative perspective by sitting at home and watching the news on TV.
So many of the tales in this collection are reminders of this other essential truth: that it’s at ground level, in the streets, where we have the best hope of making that connection. Perhaps we’ll only emerge dazed and confused, perhaps the person we come to understand best is simply somebody else from our own culture, like “The Girl Who Drank Petrol” in Tanya Shaffer’s intriguing tale of a spell in Ghana. Or perhaps it’s some long ago family relationship like Michel Moushabeck’s seemingly (until we dig further) aloof and unfriendly grandfather in “The Mukhtar and I,” a story that so positively brings home a completely different interpretation of a place, Jerusalem, where we so often only hear one story. Or its polar opposite.
Some of my favorites in this year’s collection remind us that how you travel is just as important as where you travel. For instance, there’s no better way of finding understanding in India than riding the rails, as Gregory Kennedy does on “The Howrah-Puri Express.” Along the way he hears of hopes and aspirations and how simply going somewhere—to the sea when you’re from the mountains—can define you. Watching the daughter of that man from the mountains, embarking on her first big trip, whisks Gregory back to contemplate his own initial travel inspiration.
Road trips can be equally enlightening, particularly if hitchhiking also comes into the equation. Following the waves in Costa Rica, J. Spencer Klein discovers that it’s really not such a “Bad Country,” although bad karma can certainly play its part. His tale is also a nice reminder of how much fine travel is inspired by some other pursuit, surfing being one of the best.
“The Adventure of La Refrita” starts as road trip, but soon changes gears to remind us that some of the best travel adventures are the unexpected ones. Nobody wants their road trip interrupted by a long breakdown, but would Steve King ever have discovered Chamberlain, South Dakota if the injector pump hadn’t gone kaput? It’s an illustration that some of the best travel doesn’t involve travel at all, it can be just as important to become part of the scenery, as Richard Sterling (and his hat) do in “Mr. Hat’s Neighborhood.”
We’ve all lost umbrellas. They’re probably the most losable of personal possessions and it’s remarkable how a shower of rain in a city almost anywhere in the world will bring out umbrella salesman just as assuredly as it will turn the grass green. My last two new umbrellas started their short life with me—for undoubtedly their turn to be lost will come—in Munich and Seoul. “The Purple Umbrella,” Karin Muller’s fine little tale of international misunderstanding, inverts that umbrella basic: her umbrella proves unlosable and in the process underlines some basic rules of life in Japan. Railway travelers in Japan may observe that bicycles are equally unlosable, they pile up outside terminals all over Japan, unloved, divorced, but still waiting in vain hope for their fickle riders to return on the evening commuter service and reclaim them. Until finally they’re rounded up and shipped off to North Korea.
Nicholas Seeley’s Red Sea voyage in “Bread” is another reminder of those connections that travel brings and how people are people, even in the most foreign of environments. Bread is the other side of the equation here: food, of course, is a big part of travel and there’s no better way of coming to grips with somewhere else, or someone else, than over a meal. Pickett Porterfield’s “The Mexican Taco Stand” is a perfect song of praise for that most Mexican of dishes while Maciej Ceglowski analyses another country’s culinary preoccupations with “Argentina on Two Steaks a Day.” “Never underestimate the importance of the first steak of the day,” is clearly a piece of advice essential to Argentinian understanding.
But it was Bonnie Smetts’s perfect small tale “Only Fish” that brought the biggest smile to my face. Racing from restaurant to restaurant trying to find that perfect “vibe” is just as consuming a preoccupation to a guidebook writer as to a traveling chef. Yes, I thought, I’ve been there. I’d also already traveled, although only on paper, with Rory Stewart. His foot-propelled wanderings in “Dervishes” take place in Pakistan, but only a few months ago I followed his wonderful book The Places In Between across Afghanistan. My Toyota Hilux may have been beat up, but it was clearly a far more comfortable means of travel than the boots that carried Stewart on a truly amazing journey. He, however, appears to have had the deeper experience. At the end of the day it’s walking that really gets you there.
A lengthy jaunt along Asia’s “Hippy Trail” in 1972 led Tony Wheeler to create Lonely Planet Publications, a story he tells in Unlikely Destinations (Periplus, 2007). The account of his recent wanderings around nine pariah states (including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and North Korea) also appeared in 2007 as Bad Lands (Lonely Planet). Tony’s footloose ways can probably be traced back to his childhood: born in England, he grew up in Pakistan, the Bahamas, and then the USA where he went to high school near Detroit and Baltimore. Today he lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Publisher’s Preface
by James O’Reilly
Some years ago I was on a travel panel and was asked who were, in my estimation, the most amazing travelers. “Refugees,” I answered, and an uneasy murmur passed through the crowd; I think I’d been expected to canonize Wilfred Thesiger or Isabella Bird, or sing the praises of backpackers and do-gooders roaming the globe.
But no! I said refugees and I mean it still. Millions of souls cross borders without food, documents, clothing, health, or hope, and are preyed upon by weather, wild animals, and human jackals—their own kind who hack at them, rob them, rape them, kill them. These are the travelers we should admire and study and care the most about, for our cardboard wall of law and borders is flimsy, and expensive weaponry is mostly an illusion, and while that wall keeps the demons from snapping at us in our well-washed and well-fed splendor, if it collapses we will all too quickly join our brothers and sisters who suffer unimaginably every day. We, the lucky ones who can cross borders with impunity, need to do so as often as we can to see how the rest of the world lives, to wake up and spread the honest news of our fellows to people at home who don’t get out much, or who think that Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates have it handled out there beyond the bubble.
Recent research concluded that if you have assets of—get this—$2,200—you are in the richest half of humanity. So chances are if you are reading this, whether you are well off or struggling to make ends meet, you are, in the eyes of most of your fellow humans, unimaginably rich. And not just in fact, but in opportunity, in education, and most of all, freedom.
The traveler today continues to enjoy an unparalleled opportunity to bear witness, do good deeds, and have fun and fantastic life experiences at bargain basement prices. And while it is not new to say that the traveler is a nation’s best ambassador, it is worth repeating, for the lives and ethics and views of individuals are often, as Tony Wheeler points out in the Introduction which follows, dramatically different from those of governments the world over. The U.S. Army recently had a recruiting slogan I like very much and think we should all apply to ourselves: “An Army of One.” That’s you, bringing warmth and hope and a fresh perspective to others wherever you go, even when you’re just on holiday.
So I say look kindly on all those bereft of home for any reason, political, economic, or religious, and encourage your leaders and fellow citizens wherever you live and travel to craft shrewd and honest immigration policies so that those who wish to live in freedom and prosperity be allowed to at least try out for the privilege. Do not let them languish in the gray lands where they are prey to the wicked and the greedy and to the hideous inertia and cruelty of state bureaucracy.
I just got back from my first trip to Antarctica, an intoxicating and terrifying continent, but one that so far doesn’t suffer from the confusion of fences and borders we have up north. Sure, many countries have made territorial claims, with more in the wings, but so far the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, and the awesome power of the continent’s climate and remoteness have kept us, the would-be carpetbaggers, at bay.
Consider the penguin, that goofy bird that has forgotten how to fly (except underwater). The penguin, while it has a few natural predators, can go where the krill are without being machine-gunned by Janjaweed or brainwashed child-soldiers, blown up by fanatics strapped to explosives, or restrained at every turn by the kudzu of government regulation. The penguin can go home again, back to the same nest, unlike the world’s homeless, from the Lost Boys of Sudan to the Dalai Lama, who has been in exile from his Tibetan homeland since that very same year the Antarctic Treaty was signed.
So enjoy your next trip with deep appreciation that you can do it at all! And I will accept your forgiveness in advance if I seem overly cranky. I must still be thawing out.
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