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By Root 875 0

two years and wrote his final exams so illegibly he had to be summoned back to read them aloud to an examiner for two weeks). I hadn’t seen him in a quarter of a century, but I’d begun to get to know him again through the haunted, solemn, questing books he’d started to write about the Red Continent’s interior, full of Central European exiles and memories of war. On my way to meet him in Alice Springs, as I got onto the plane from Sydney, he e-mailed me, casually, that we might be meeting his “wife” Alison, too (Nicolas, a legendary classicist who had been covering wars for The Australian for many years, living for months on end in hotel rooms in Iraq, with nothing but his copies of Proust and Kafka, was the least marriable soul I knew).

As we scuffled about the scruffy town—a smiling young soul from Bombay checked me into my hotel, Singaporeans ran the Tea Shrine and even the fanciest place in town served mostly beef vindaloo and Nonya specialties in its restaurant—we saw huge signs for “Alison Anderson”: Nicolas’s partner turned out to be a significant politician, and the rare Aboriginal who went back and forth between her people and the state government (speaking six indigenous tongues). As we drove across the red-dirt emptiness to visit some “old ladies” who paint (Aboriginal artists who sit on the ground outside a shed and dab patterns on canvasses that fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in the West), I took note of the sign at the airport prohibiting tomatoes from entering the territory, Nicolas took inner notes on a strangeness that had become his second home, as familiar to him as recent patterns in his dreams. And Alison quietly told us about the “Dreamtime” stories associated with each tree or patch of desert, and how this “dingo dreaming,” amidst the cordwoods and the iron-woods, marked the place where the dingo ate the caterpillar and got separated.

The parallel paths, the disparate stories each of us began to develop as we drove along the same empty road came roaring back to me when I took the stories you’re about to read out onto my thirty-inch-wide terrace in suburban Japan and, in the radiant sunshine of an early November day, lost myself in them for hour after transported hour. I wouldn’t say these are necessarily the “best” travel essays of the year, because the phrase makes as little sense to me as talking of a “best” color, a “best” love, or even a “best” child. But many, many of them did what only the most memorable trips—and the most deeply felt essays—do, which is to deposit me back in my life someone different from the person who set out.

When I sat with Gary Buslik, musing on the wistfulness of old slides and long-ago lives; when I began, excitedly, to find the secret treasures of an unprepossessing part of the Lorraine (with Mieke Eerkens); as I learned about what happened in Minsk, thanks to Carolyn Kraus’s hard-to-forget excavations; as I found myself in a realm of meditation and allegory, learning how to see again, in the Iceland of Cameron McPherson Smith, I felt I was touching a part of the world, and of experience, that I hadn’t known was there and could no longer think of cruise-ship honeymoons, look at Belarus, even reflect back on the Iceland I knew and loved in quite the same way as I had before.

One thing that exhilarates me about this book is that so many of its writers are women (you would not have found that thirty years ago, when I began writing), and many of these women are in places that I would be afraid to go to even as a shifty male—alone in New Delhi’s train station after midnight, on the edge of the Sahara with a mother and a sometime lover, in Guyana after the exodus of most white folks, or looking for mass graves in Minsk. There is a sense of personal investment, of openness and soulfulness, a heartfelt introspection in many of the pieces here that would have shamed (and surely could have taught) the “travel writers” I grew up on in my youth, mostly tight-lipped British men remarking wryly on the natives.

So many of these pieces, too, show how our world is moving