The Best Travel Writing 2008 - Introduction
This sprightly new collection gives the lie to those wearily familiar mantras that all the journeys have been done, that globalization has robbed travel of meaning, that travel writing is dead. It shows that the open road still beckons, for better or worse, just as it always did.
I love The Best Travel Writing 2008 most for its thematic range. It is metaphysically global. The subject shifts from the voyage between broken-ness and redemption in Joel Carillet’s piece on Bangkok, to that hard-won path between resentment and acceptance in Matthew Link’s story about home-schooling adrift on the Pacific. Cloudy issues of faith lie at the heart of Margo Berdeshevsky’s take on the Philippines, while Jennifer Baljko describes the vertiginous reality of castellers in Catalonia. When I started out as a writer, it seemed to me that travel offered the perfect vehicle. In this anthology I marvel again at the elasticity of the genre.
Unlike their predecessors a generation or two past, these contributors have had to confront the distinction between travel and tourism (because, of course, there was no mass tourism until relatively recently: the nature of travel has changed.) This new lot are writers who travel, rather than travelers who write. There is a difference. Broadly speaking, they instinctively concentrate either on the personal or on the particular, and integrate modern realities into whatever it is they want to say. “Even on a cruise,” Kevin McCaughey writes in “Heroes of the Caribbean,” “it’s possible to experience real travel.” What will a changing climate do to the places so lovingly conjured in the book? We do not really know. But I hope they will still be there for the yet-to-be-born generations of travel writers.
Like all proper writing, these stories leave images that linger. The “fresh-faced nun” poking her head out of the door in the Santa Clara convent, Carrion de los Condes, in Mary Patrice Erdmans’s Spanish tale (I like the way Erdmans talks of “the wretched monkey of yearning.” I know that simian devil); sunset on a dusty highway in “the withered heart of Why” in Dustin Leavitt’s heartbreaking parable of Mexican despair and hope. All the world is here, and all its rich complexity. Like many before them, some contributors ruminate on notions of “home,” and the paradox implicit in the concept. One longs to leave home for the desert, another longs to get back to her desert home. And, like life, these narratives are not all coconuts and honeyed sands, as Richard Goodman discovers in Tortola. “All life is a journey,” Homer tells us in the Odyssey, perhaps the oldest travel story in the world. (Though at my age, I prefer the Iliad’s “All life is battle.”)
In these pages one learns again that travel writing is about more than travel. Exotic or banal, eventful or becalmed—whatever the trip, the writers here make it their own. To quote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, author of The Worst Journey in the World, possibly the greatest travel book ever written, what counts, on the page and in the moment, is “the response of the spirit.” The journeys writers make are slip roads to the private colonies of the imagination. Yes, writers have now been everywhere. But the eye that looks inward always sees a new landscape. Happy Travels.
Sara Wheeler’s books include the bestselling Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, and Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile. She has also written biographies of the travelers Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of Captain Scott’s men, and Denys Finch Hatton, the white hunter, and Karen Blixen’s lover, played by Robert Redford in Out of Africa. All her books are published in the United States by Modern Library. She lives in London, England, and is currently writing a book about the Arctic.
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