The Best American Travel Writing 2015 Read online

  When he deposited me back at my hotel, my guide demanded more money than we had agreed upon. As I sit writing this more than 20 years later, I can see him before me, his bloodshot left eye adding threat to an already insistent glare as the last rays of daylight cast a fiery glow over the yellow wall of my hotel just past his shoulder. The traffic buzzes behind me, forcing me to lean in to be sure I understand his command correctly. “I show you real Saigon”; his voice is harsh, his already outstretched hand shaking under the strain of his gathering tension.

  I can feel the myriad emotions that raced through me at the time—my naive shock at his outburst, my confusion, my sense of powerlessness under his sudden aggression. Surely he needed the money more than I did. Was I really that stingy? Yet there was shame in my acquiescence as I handed over the extra five dollars.

  Up in my room I became consumed with anger at being taken advantage of; the sensation of emasculation humiliated me. The indignity at having been overmatched and powerless threatened to consume me.

  Travel is often a petri dish for both our character defects and our finer qualities, and in this moment my baser attributes had me in their clutches.

  I did something I had never done before. I reached for a pen. I wrote it all down.

  I had been walking along the street when a boy, maybe not out of his teens, approached me on a scooter. I wrote how I tried to discourage him and then hopped on behind him. I remembered things he had said and I wrote them down as well. I described the places he took me and what it felt like while I was there. Then I wrote of how our day had ended—with his demand for more money. I wrote of my embarrassment and anger—both at him and at myself for giving precedence to my feelings of inadequacy over his genuine need. When I was done, I stuffed the pages in my bag.

  A few weeks later, in Luang Prabang, in northern Laos, I came upon a young American woman berating an elderly Laotian man about the inferior quality of the bicycle he had rented to her. When she left I crossed over to speak with the man and followed him into his home and ate lunch with him. I wrote that down, too.

  At Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe on Christmas Eve I danced in a basement club, part of a throbbing, sweating mass, then walked out to a florid sun rising over the cascading falls on Christmas morning. In Machu Picchu, on a starless black night, my flashlight died after I had sneaked into the ancient citadel. I crawled on my hands and knees searching out an exit, for fear of stepping off the edge of the mountain.

  I wrote it all down.

  In my writing I began to make deeper sense of what I experienced. I started to see connections between seemingly unrelated events and glimpse the import they contained. Insights that had eluded me before rose up in front of me. Things that I had simply forgotten were indelibly recorded.

  My writing wasn’t a journal. I had tried that and found my jottings indulgent and repetitive. Mostly they bored me. But almost unwittingly, what I was doing was writing stories. Things I wrote about captured a quality of where I was and what I experienced in a way my journaling couldn’t approach. Sure, others had been here before me, but no one had seen things exactly from my perspective. Suddenly what I saw mattered. I grew more and more connected to the world I inhabited, more invested. My travels had import.

  Upon my return home I would toss the notebooks I had by then begun to carry with me into my top dresser drawer. My travel writings were something I did for myself while on the road. I never thought of them as anything more.

  Until I did.

  I published first one story, and then more. Underneath every piece I wrote was the unspoken message that travel was important. Travel, I was convinced, was not something frivolous, to be indulged in merely by the idle or the wealthy or the unshowered backpacker. It was something worth fighting for. Travel changed my life; it could change yours. Travel mattered: that was my message.

  And if it mattered to me, then perhaps it mattered to others. That bond between writer and reader has been much chronicled, and so it follows that if travel mattered, and connecting with the reader was important, then certainly travel writing must have value. Maybe even urgent value.

  I devoured the road and wrote about it all. I hiked to the top of Kilimanjaro and dove with sharks off the Tuamotu Islands. I drank tea in Darjeeling, ate prosciutto in Parma; I slept in the Sahara and occasionally in my own bed. I even published that first story from Saigon nearly 20 years after I wrote it. Yet as we grow proficient at anything it can become more and more difficult to maintain access to that original seed of inspiration and connection to the inner delight that first inspired us. Craft and competence are the rewards of repetition, but a dulling of our senses can be the tradeoff. And as any dinner party guest can tell you, there is no greater bore than the world-weary traveler, the been-there-done-that blowhard spewing pronouncements on the military junta in Burma or Patagonia’s vanishing wilderness onto whoever is unfortunate enough to be seated beside him. It ought never to be forgotten that travel can be a revelation, offering the very real possibility of recaptured innocence to our jaded eyes. The paradox of travel’s effort is the renewal it affords.

  Which is why I owe all the writers in this volume a debt of gratitude. Underscoring every story here I can hear the silent calling out, Yes, this matters. Follow me!—serving to remind me again why I first left home.

  Nowhere in these pages did I feel as if I was being handed a bill of goods. I’ve grown weary of skimming glossies extolling the luxurious vacation and branding it as travel. (After a good session of travel I’ve often found myself in need of a nice vacation.) Tell me a story, don’t sell me a destination, I’ve thought more than once as I toss a travel magazine aside. You’ll find no selling here, just hard-won experience offered up.

  These tales are a testament to the importance of setting out, a call to the open road and its possibilities, lessons, heartbreaks, and occasional joys—a reaffirmation of the value of the investment required to leave the safety of shore. As yet unknown riches await the bold.

  In reading many of these stories I’m reminded that in so much of the best travel writing, it is the anonymous and solitary traveler capturing a moment in time and place, giving meaning to his or her travels, that inspires and elucidates. I’ll always take the subjective account from the lonely troubadour, with all the traps and fallibility it is prone to, over the detached second- or thirdhand summing up by the scholar who never left home.

  The tale that Benjamin Busch tells of his return to Iraq 10 years after his posting as a Marine is among the most dispassionate and affecting reportage I have encountered in the thousands and thousands of words I’ve digested about that conflict. It is also one of the most engrossing pieces of travel writing I’ve read in a very long while. I’m thrilled to include it here. And Stephen Connely Benz’s recounting of his Fulbright year placed me beside him in a Moldova I will most probably never see.

  Still another type of travel writing seems to reside almost entirely out of time. Patricia Marx floats in watery limbo during her transatlantic crossing aboard a freighter. David Farley’s elegiac meditation exists in a Varanasi that holds a very long view of time, while Paul Salopek’s epic walk across much of the planet endeavors to retrace time from man’s first steps. And then there’s Gary Shteyngart. His hilarious assessment of hotel sex occupies a time and place all its own.

  Despite the cynics’ cries to the contrary, the world is still there waiting to be discovered. The globe keeps spinning, sometimes at an alarming rate, reinventing itself almost daily. Timbuktu, once an end-of-the-rainbow ideal, recently plagued by strife, is represented in this volume by two stories. Patrick Symmes and Adriana Páramo give us very different reports of intrepid travel to that desert Oz. While Nick Paumgarten’s recounting of wild nights in Berlin tells of a different kind of mettle needed on the road.

  Of course there are the rabbit holes of travel. Lauren Groff’s discovery of mermaids in central Florida, Iris Smyles’s cruise down the Rhone River, and Rachael Maddux’s unlikely visi
t to Dayton, Tennesse, hint at lives many of us might never consider. Here also, Maud Newton offers a candid reexamination of a visit to the Holy Land in her brief treatise, and Lauren Quinn takes us to Cambodia to assess Pol Pot’s final resting place.

  Motion itself has long been a staple of the travel narrative, and it is represented here as well. Monte Reel transects South America and captures much of the continent’s internal contradictions, while Kevin Baker’s rail journey across America reminds us what a long strange trip in the wrong direction train travel in this country has become.

  And it strikes me as fitting that this volume concludes with a piece by the spiritual godfather of contemporary American travel writers. Forty years ago Paul Theroux, with an immersive style, barbed-wire observations, and sometimes merciless candor, rewrote what a travel narrative could be in The Great Railway Bazaar. His exploration here through the American South shows us that this lifelong road warrior has not lost a step.

  All these writers have rejuvenated my sometimes flagging travel spirits and inspired me to look again to the horizon. Each has reinvigorated me in a different way. Each has reignited my passion to hit the road, to set out—for it is of course in the leaving that we afford ourselves the opportunity to be found. As the stories here reveal, the world is still eager to receive the solitary sojourner with a hungry spirit who is willing to keep a keen eye out and an attentive ear to the ground in an effort to capture the telling moment, then send it back across the wire—and, perhaps, through the years.

  ANDREW MCCARTHY

  LISA ABEND

  The Sound of Silence

  FROM AFAR

  I WAS ABOUT 20 minutes into the four-hour train ride from Glasgow to Fort William when I realized I couldn’t stand the two men seated in front of me. This realization was based on nothing other than what I could overhear—which was every bloody word—of their conversation. They were traveling to a friend’s house, but before they arrived they would need to stop at the supermarket for cheese and wine, of course; though white, not red, since the carpets were beige and the host had a policy. One of the men also had a sister of whose parenting skills he disapproved, a nephew who would likely end up in juvenile court, a new backpack whose every compartment required minute explication, and a penchant for a Danish television series whose plot twists he could recall in terrifying detail. Did I mention that the train ride was four hours long?

  I know. The problem wasn’t Mr. Chatty and his mate. It was me. In the weeks before I went to Scotland, I had found myself increasingly irritated by the constant crush of other people, crowding me in line at the market, checking their phones at movie theaters, coming at me nonstop in tides of e-mails, tweets, and status updates. This happens to me periodically: the deadline pressures and everyday annoyances that normally pass unnoticed accumulate until even benign human interactions begin to feel like too much, and the only thing that helps is radical solitude. I didn’t have the time for a trip to Greenland or Mongolia or some other distant, empty place, so when I read a British newspaper story about Inverie, the only town on the Knoydart peninsula, one of the most untouched parts of the Scottish Highlands, I thought it might be just the cure for my misanthropy.

  The problem? Getting there. Inverie is accessible only by boat or on foot. In my state of mind, the two-day hike seemed the better choice. I planned to start at the nearest access point—a road that dead-ends at a settlement near a lake called Loch Hourn, about 50 miles from Fort William—follow the trail along the lake’s edge to Barisdale Bay, spend the night there, then head over a pass and down to Inverie. It would be a 16-mile trek through steep and rocky terrain, and at hike’s end, I would be in a town with a population of roughly 100 people, no cell-phone coverage, and a pub billed as the most remote in mainland Britain.

  At last, the train arrived in Fort William. I picked up some granola bars and a map and checked into a hotel for the night. The next morning, a taxi driver named Jamie picked me up, and we set out for the 90-minute drive to Loch Hourn. I had not a minute to contemplate the hills and sheep as we passed, as Jamie and I were too busy chatting. I learned about Scottish independence (“It’s the football hoodlums that are for it”) and a tiny biting insect, smaller than a mosquito but given to traveling in swarms, that was an annual plague in these parts. “Midgies,” Jamie said. “Worse than the independentists.”

  Unlike the self-absorbed man on the train, Jamie was a charming conversationalist, so I didn’t terribly mind the barrage of sound. Still, after he left me at the trailhead, a quiet fell with the abruptness of a tsunami. It wasn’t silence. Birds chirped and water ran in small, stony falls down to the loch. But there was no human sound except for the crunch of my feet on the trail. The weather was gorgeous: bright sunshine, a warm-but-not-hot temperature. The view was even better: wildflower-covered hills jutting down to shiny blue water. And when I went to check my phone for the weather forecast, I had no connection. For the first time in months, I felt relaxed and at peace.

  The walk that afternoon was easy. There were a few climbs, but mostly the trail hugged the lakeshore. Before I knew it, I had reached the juncture where the lake spills into Barisdale Bay. It was low tide, and across the shimmering flats, a few people dug for cockles. I picked my way through a flock of sheep until I came to a small house where a bare-chested, sunburned man was mowing the grass. He cut the engine, but he wouldn’t speak to me until he had run in to put on a shirt. Barisdale, it seemed, was an estate, and it was his job to manage it.

  Craig explained that I could stay in the bothy, the first of several adorable Scottish words I would learn. A bothy is a rural shelter, open to walkers, that affords the simplest of accommodations on a first-come, first-served basis. This one looked like it slept about 12, which was 11 possible roommates too many. I paid extra for a private cottage on the property. A very loud rooster with a poor sense of time crowed with equal fervor at five o’clock in the afternoon and at six in the morning, but otherwise my accommodations were quiet. Toward dusk, I found myself drawn, out of habit, to my phone. I went outside in search of a signal, but to no avail. Instead of checking e-mail, I settled into the cottage and read some of the guidebooks near the fireplace.

  The books agreed there was a spectacular Munro (adorable Scottishism No. 2: Munro = mountain), the tallest on the Knoydart peninsula, several kilometers off the trail to Inverie. I had no intention of climbing it. I used to do a fair bit of hiking, but that was more than a decade ago, and it left me with enough respect for serious mountains that I wasn’t going to waltz up one on a lark. Besides, it would add extra miles to a walk that would already take me the better part of a day.

  The next morning I slipped out of the estate without seeing another soul. In minutes, I came to a path that headed to the right and cut vertiginously uphill. I said a prayer of thanks that I didn’t have to tackle that ascent right out of the gate. Instead, I went left, where the trail climbed more gently. I thought of Lord Byron and those other Romantics who sought solitude in the woods. Time alone in nature felt restorative for them. And that was before the Internet. Solitude in the outdoors was surely all the more healing for those of us who had not only the physical and moral pollution of industrialized society to escape, but also the incessant chatter of everyone we have ever known running constantly across our screens and phones. It was a relief to turn off all those voices and focus on the path in front of me.

  Soon the trail crossed a stream and became so vertical that it wasn’t long before I was playing little mental games with myself to keep moving: Walk to that boulder, then you can rest, I told myself. Walk 100 steps, then you can rest. The good thing about hiking alone, I decided, is that there is no one there to see you humiliate yourself.

  After what seemed like hours but was probably only 45 minutes, the ascent plateaued. Behind me, Barisdale Bay sparkled through the folds of the mountains. Ahead, it was just as the guidebooks had described: I had come through the pass, sharp peaks soared around me, and down below I could se
e a lake, its cobalt waters rimmed with ribbons of sand.

  I set off happily toward the distant lake. But the bone-jarring descent quickly tempered the relief I had felt when I’d reached the pass. Down I went, my toes slamming into my boots with each step. At times the trail disappeared altogether in bog, but the lake gradually got closer. From my reading the night before, I knew that once I reached it, the trail would turn into flat jeep track, and I’d be 4 kilometers from Inverie.

  When I reached the lake at noon, I felt triumphant, even a bit smug, despite the ache in my feet. With plenty of time to make it to Inverie before dark, I took off my boots, ate a sandwich, and took a nap.

  I awoke with a start.

  Something—I couldn’t say what—made me think I needed to look at the map. The trail had been so clearly marked that it hadn’t occurred to me to take it out earlier. Now I spread the map and traced my path. There was the climb up from Barisdale, there was the pass, there was the descent to the—I stopped. The map had me coming up to the lake on its right shore. I had arrived on the left.

  I tried turning the paper, to see if I had somehow gotten the orientation wrong. I walked back up the trail I had come in on, to make sure that it was indeed a trail. And here is the part that, even now, I can’t explain. Absurd as it sounds, instead of admitting I had made a mistake and turning around, I convinced myself that the map was mistaken.