The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008 - Introduction
The first time I traveled to a country not my own, the sixties were barely born. I was nineteen. I went to Bolivia as part of a student missionary program. The church said I was supposed to “bear witness.” Which I did: In my letters home, I regularly wrote about the poverty of the Bolivian Indian population, the corruption that ran through every act and aspect of government I encountered, and the hypocrisy of most missionaries I met. My mother, certain they’d like to see what a good writer her daughter was, sent all my letters to the nice folks at the church’s national mission headquarters. This was when I learned that what I called “bearing witness”—seeing what you see, hearing what you hear, and then telling others about it as truthfully as you can—will not make you popular. But it just might, one day, make you a journalist.
It did me. And it’s been a great life.
Call it serendipity, at least according to my favorite definition of the word, which comes from crime writer Lawrence Block. Serendipity: Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.
Take progress. Sometimes it’s just one serendipity after another. For instance, Silly Putty, Teflon, Superglue, Cellophane, Rayon, Aspartame, Penicillin, laughing gas, The Pill, x-rays, corn flakes, Wheaties, the microwave oven, Velcro, and Post-It notes have all played a role in my life, and in every case, their invention was due to you-know-what. The same is true of Viagra except for the part about it playing a role in my life. Except, possibly, indirectly.
Fine, but what, you ask, has serendipity got to do with the book in your hands?
Only everything.
Serendipity has been a singular part of the travel experience since God was a lassie, and yet it wasn’t until 1754 that Horace Walpole gave us the word—in a letter to a friend—in which he explained where the idea for the word came from. “It was when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip.” (The ancient Persian name for Sri Lanka was Serendip.) “As their highnesses traveled they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”
See, even the word had its beginnings in travel.
The concept, however, was by then already old.
It’s hard to know if the sagacity mentioned above was involved in Leif Ericsson’s case. But he was merely trying to escape a storm when, by accident, he became the first European to set foot on North America. And then Columbus “re-discovered” North America while searching for India. Nor should we forget Vincente Pinzon, who, while exploring the West Indies, stumbled upon Brazil. Hello South America! And then, of course, there was Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, when he accidentally ingested some Lysergic acid diethylamide, a drug he was studying, went on the world’s first acid trip.
Nothing much has changed. There may be no more continents (or new psychedelic drugs) to “discover,” but if you listen closely to the travel experiences of the women in this book, you will indeed hear the distant—and often not distant at all—melody of serendipity.
So how do you go about getting some serendipity in your travels?
In The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, novelist John Barth wrote that “you don’t reach Serendib (sic) by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings...serendipitously.”
I disagree.
Once in a while it’s why we go traveling in the first place (especially women, who so often seem to understand that the biggest part of being prepared is remembering to set a place at the table for the unexpected guest). Sometimes we go looking for one thing actually hoping that we might find another thing, even if we’ve no idea what that other thing might be.
We just know if it’s serendipitous, it’s good.
And if, on our journeys, we’re ready for it, it’s more likely to find us. But either way, journeys must be taken. As Block points out, you must be looking for something in order to find something else.
In celebration (or denial) of turning sixty, I loaded my backpack and flew to England, where I set out, alone and on foot, to follow the River Thames from its source in the Cotswolds to where it meets the sea some 200 miles down the path (and across the fields, past the villages, through London and most of English history). I meant to use the time to, as the Navajo say, “walk in beauty,” to be conscious of the life around me, and my connection to it. Oh, hell, truth is, I was hoping to use this journey to make peace with turning sixty.
But I did not find what I was looking for, and what’s more, in my rush to look for it, I finished what was meant to be a twenty-day walk in eighteen days, leaving me (two days before the big birthday) with no particular place to go.
Surprising even myself, I caught a plane to Italy, and on the dawn of the day that marked the beginning of my sixty-first year of life, found myself floating in the sea off the Amalfi Coast, where, over the space of an hour’s floating, I finally and somewhat astoundingly made peace with my mother, who died in 1983.
Serendipità, as they say in Italy.
I have read that serendipity is said to be one of the ten hardest-to-translate English words. How encouraging, therefore, that today the word has been at least imported into so many other of this world’s languages. In French, it’s sérendipicité. In Spanish, serendipia. The Dutch call it serendipiteit; the Germans, Serendipität. And so it goes.
As, one hopes, do you.
Finally, is there an opposite of serendipity? Well, Scottish novelist William Boyd once made up the word zemblanity, which he described as “making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design.” To me, that would be just another word for “staying home.”
I’m happy to say that while this book is filled with examples of serendipity, there is no zemblanity anywhere to be found.
Read on.
Happy surprises ahead.
Linda Ellerbee is an outspoken journalist, award-winning television producer, bestselling author, a breast cancer survivor, a mom, a grandmother, and one of the most sought-after speakers in America. With more than thirty years’ experience as a network news correspondent, anchor, writer, and producer, Ellerbee has won several Emmy, Peabody, and Columbia duPont awards. She has written three bestsellers—And So It Goes, a rollicking account of her years in network television, Move On, a more intimate look at her life, and Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table, a humorous account of her love of travel, talking to (and eating with) strangers. Today, Ellerbee heads her own television production company, Lucky Duck Productions, a supplier of prime time specials, documentaries, and limited-run series for television networks. Her news show for children, Nick News, airs on Nickelodeon, has won three Peabody Awards and five Emmys, and is the longest-running and most-watched children’s news program ever.
Editor’s Preface
by Lucy McCauley
My pilgrimage included my daughter, Hannah, then eighteen months old. Because of her and the fact that I’d thrown out my back shortly before the trip, I decided to do only parts of the 500-mile pilgrimage, some of it by bus, rather than walking. I had planned everything carefully, set my itinerary, and packed a large bag with everything I imagined I could use on such a journey—probably more than I needed: a large supply of diapers; Cheerios and raisins for Hannah; bottles and a Ziplock bag of powdered milk; clothes and raingear for both of us; a travel guide and a selection of Hannah’s books and toys.
The best part of the trip was when I left all of those things behind.
I hadn’t planned it that way. It was the last leg of the pilgrimage, and I had decided on a daytrip with Hannah to Finisterre, what was once believed to be “the end of the earth.” Lying on the northwestern-most point of Europe, Finisterre was the ancient finish-line of the pilgrimage trail, a few hours’ bus-ride from the modern-day trail’s end of Santiago de Compostela. At the time, I was struggling in my personal life, seeking some answers. The idea of traveling to the ends of the earth resonated with me somehow. I left my large bag at the hotel in Santiago and packed a small backpack containing only the barest essentials for the day, not even a toothbrush.
But in the space of a few minutes my plans changed when Hannah threw up on the bus, all over herself and partly on me, altering in that one uncontrollable act the rest of the journey. One minute she was happily singing “The Wheels on the Bus” and the next she was looking up at me pathetically, spewing great rivers of curdled milk and raisins all over the only clothes I’d brought for her.
A few minutes later we pulled into Finisterre, and on the dirt road outside the bus I stripped Hannah down and covered her in her little lavender windbreaker that I’d stuffed into my pack at the last minute. I wiped some errant splatterings from my shirt and looked at Hannah. She was still a bit green and looked so tiny and vulnerable in the jacket, her baby-bird’s legs naked beneath.
I decided to find us a room. I wasn’t sure how we’d manage without clothes and extra diapers, but I had plenty of powdered milk. I spotted a sign for a pensión just up the street, and that’s when I felt it: the ripple of excitement. This little daytrip had suddenly turned into an adventure.
At the small, family-run pensión, the matron handed me a large bar of lye soap and pointed me to the backyard sink and clothesline. I scrubbed Hannah’s shirt and pants while she played at my feet with the bucket of clothespins, wearing a shirt belonging to one of the matron’s older grandchildren.
And we were fine. Without all of our stuff, we were better than fine. The local market of course had diapers for Hannah and a toothbrush for me. What else did we really need? A pilgrim I met along the trail, a young British woman, told me that she had begun the 500-mile journey carrying a pack full of clothes and books and hiking accoutrements. But as she walked she discarded things one by one, and then in great heaps and bundles, leaving them with locals she met in towns along the way. The more things she discarded, she said, the happier she felt—the simpler, and somehow more meaningful, the walk became for her, unburdened by the physical and psychological weight of all of those objects.
As I hung Hannah’s clothes in the bright afternoon sun, I couldn’t agree more. Trying to make do with what we had or could scavenge, I felt lighter, happier than I’d felt during the whole journey up to that point. And then there was that element of the unexpected. Travel sends us out of the familiar, hurtling us surely and certainly into utter uncertainty, to a place where we can’t help but yield to pure experience—to the new, the unexpected, to the change in itinerary or venue. To adventure.
Many of the selections in this year’s Best Women’s Travel Writing embody that phenomenon of serendipity. To name a few: Christine Sarkis finds her serendipitous moment at a fondue restaurant in France (“Dipping Fork, Flying Girl, Heart Attack”); Anne Lamott experiences it up-close-and-personal after a hard landing on a mountaintop (“Ski Patrol”); Mary Day Long encounters it on an overnight train from Turkey to Bulgaria (“Keep Breathing”); and in Mexico, Laura Resau learns of serendipity’s transformative power when her date doesn’t show up—again (“My Ex-Novio’s Mother”).
As for Hannah and me, in the end we stayed three days in Finisterre. Each morning we walked into the town’s tiny panadería to buy fresh bollos of bread, which we ate with small packets of jam I found in my backpack, smuggled from the breakfast bar of our last hotel. In the afternoons Hannah toddled on the rocky beach, or next to the white walls that ran along the tourmaline bay. I’d hold onto her as she sat on the wall, the two of us looking out over the water. It was there that she said “ocean” for the first time, clearly entranced with it.
Each evening as we ate omelettes and calamares with spongy chunks of bread at a restaurant overlooking the water, I would decide to stay another day. Why not? I was happy to be away from the crowds in Santiago. Finisterre by contrast was so tranquil, with its views of ocean and mountains. The people were gentler there too, more open and friendly, compared to those in some towns along the pilgrim trail, the inhabitants jaded by the constant parade of foreigners. I felt utterly at peace there with my daughter, moving in and out of our days.
All too soon the pull of commitments back home and an unchangeable airline reservation forced us to board the bus back to Santiago. When I went to reclaim my things at the hotel there, I can’t say I was happy to have them back again. Rather, I felt grateful for Hannah’s indecorous moment on the bus. It had allowed us an oasis of time, there at “the end of the earth”—and it had transformed the journey.
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