The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [1]
Edited by
JAMES O’REILLY, LARRY HABEGGER,
AND SEAN O’REILLY
Travelers’ Tales
an imprint of Solas House, Inc.
Palo Alto
Copyright © 2011 Solas House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Introduction copyright © 2011 by Pico Iyer.
Travelers’ Tales and Travelers’ Tales Guides are trademarks of Solas House, Inc.
Credits and copyright notices for the individual articles in this collection are given starting on page 311.
We have made every effort to trace the ownership of all copyrighted material and to secure permission from copyright holders. In the event of any question arising as to the ownership of any material, we will be pleased to make the necessary correction in future printings. Contact Solas House, Inc., 853 Alma Street, Palo Alto, California 94301. www.travelerstales.com
Art direction: Kimberly Nelson
Page layout and photo editing: Cynthia Lamb using the fonts Granjon and NicolasCochin
Interior design: Melanie Haage
Production Director: Natalie Baszile and Christy Quinto
ISBN 10: 1-60952-008-4
ISBN 13: 978-1609520083
ISSN 1548-0224
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.
—JEREMIAH 6:16
Table of Contents
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE
James O’Reilly
INTRODUCTION
Pico Iyer
THE WAY OF THE MIST
Cameron McPherson Smith
ICELAND
FIRE AND WATER
Erika Connor
WEST AFRICA
ONE DAY, THREE DEAD MEN
Marcia DeSanctis
RUSSIA
HOW I PROMISED ANUSHA THE SMILE
Kevin McCaughey
PARIS
AIN’T READY FOR NO MAN
Katherine Jamieson
GUYANA
THE MEMORY BIRD
Carolyn Kraus
BELARUS
CAMEL COLLEGE
Matthew Crompton
INDIA
LANTERNS OF FEAR
Gary Buslik
AT HOME
ALL IN THE SAME HOUSE
Bill Fink
JAPAN
FEMME IN THE VOSGES
Meike Eerkens
FRANCE
BENEATH THE RIM
Michael Shapiro
GRAND CANYON/COLORADO RIVER
IT’S THE SAUCE
Mary Jo McConahay
GUATEMALA
JIMMY THE NATURAL
Martin Dillon
IRELAND
FLYOVER COUNTRY
Johnna Kaplan
USA
EDUCATING THE BODY
Katherine Jamieson
GUYANA
SUN VALLEY WITH DAD
Colette O’Connor
IDAHO
ALONE IN INDIA—BUT NOT FOR LONG
Kate Crawford
INDIA
WINGED VICTORY
Erin Byrne
PARIS
PROTECTED
Peter Wortsman
GERMANY
THE CHILEAN CLIFF CARVER
Lisa Alpine
SPAIN
ALONE, ILLEGAL, AND BROKE DOWN
Carla King
CHINA
WILDING HORSES
Mary Caperton Morton
NEW MEXICO
IN THE FIELDS OF MY LAI
Joel Carillet
VIETNAM
THE YEAR WE BOUGHT OUR HITCHHIKER
Deborah Taffa
USA
DEATH ROAD
Sabine Bergmann
BOLIVIA
SHIVA AND SADHUS AT PASHUPATI TEMPLE
Tim Ward
NEPAL
INTO THE UNDERWORLD
Amanda Summer Slavin
GREECE
ETERNITY
Cameron McPherson Smith
THE SEA/ECUADOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Publisher’s Preface
Urazinduka ntutanga rwuba
You may get up before dawn,
but destiny gets up before you.
—Kirundi proverb
When did you begin?
Was it when your parents had a roll in the hay? When your great grandparents huffed and puffed your grandparents into quickening? Was it back in the Neolithic, the Pleistocene? Your DNA, your constituent matter, is not only prehistoric, it is stardust—did your journey begin at the Big Bang, or before, when “before” had no meaning?
It is a cliché to say that life is a blossoming, but it is true. We are each a bloom of the ineffable, of something which has no age, and which no equation or words describe. We are all these: God’s breath, the point of an evolutionary spear, the curling edge of the Void, the mid-current of the River Now, perhaps even “robots from the future,” as at least one physicist has suggested. (Oy vey, I am hearing something from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”)
It is a cliché to say that life is a journey, but it is true. What shore did you wash up on when you were born? What well-worn coat of many colors will you be wearing at your end, or as Buddhists have it, your passage into the Bardo? What tools do you need to make this voyage? What wisdom must you acquire? Which companions will aid you? We all wonder