The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (3 page)

 

All master-works of travel, if you will but look

Are merely tails that drag at Ibn-Battutah's heel,

For he it was who hung the world, that turning wheel

Of diverse parts, upon the axis of a book.

 

Ibn Battutah wrote about everything, great hospitality as well as catastrophes, miseries, wars, famines, plagues, pestilences, and xenophobia. Centuries later, what has changed? With—to speak only of Africa—the Ebola virus ravaging Guinea, the fanatical Boko Haram jihadists massacring thousands in northern Nigeria, tribal rioting and terrorist bombs in Kenya, and sprawling squatter camps in South Africa and Angola, travel in some of Africa is as much a challenge as it ever was. And yet in those same countries, there are still safari-goers, bird watchers, colorful dancers, and tarted-up tribal splendor. And there are travel writers reporting this somewhat hackneyed African experience, in pieces published in the glossier travel magazines extolling the spa experience and the cupcake culture in other pages. Some of these magazines are represented here, with more robust pieces, but in general what they call travel is in most cases a superior and safe holiday.

All countries crave tourism, because tourism creates employment, and the tourist makes a brief visit and leaves money behind. By contrast, the traveler is typically a budget-minded backpacker who lingers and is self-sufficient. India beckons tourists to its luxury hotels, but India is a wonderful example of a country full of contradictions, even old-fashioned adventures, if a traveler happens to be willing to take a few risks. The “Incredible India” ad campaign by the Indian Ministry of Tourism was claimed to be a success, but the most incredible aspect of it was that there was no mention of how dangerous India can be—in the so-called Red Corridor of the country, where Maoist guerrillas regularly massacre villagers or set off bombs, and other sporadically reported separatist movements, notably in Assam, cause some roads to be declared off-limits to travelers. Not long ago, I was discouraged from traveling a mere 80 miles by road from Silchar to Shillong in Assam because of “incidents.” In a peaceable tea-growing area, I was warned of dacoits (bandits). It is the situation Kipling would have faced in the 1880s in the same place. In fact, there are 37 named terrorist/insurgent groups in Assam, with colorful names such as Adivasi Cobra Force, Black Widow, Liberation Tigers, and Rabha Viper Army. But, of course, bandits are out in force the world over. In many cases, the government in such places doesn't want you to know that.

I applied for an Indian visa two years ago, paid extra to have the visa approved quickly. When I did not receive my passport back on the given date or even two weeks later, I inquired about the reason for the delay. The Indian consular official explained that my application had to go to several other officials for approval, and this might take weeks more.

“What exactly is the problem?” I asked.

“On your application, under ‘Occupation,' you have ‘Writer.'”

“This is a problem?”

“Yes, one requiring higher authority.”

So big, boasting, highly educated, literate, incredible India is as worried by the approach of a bespectacled senior with a ballpoint pen in his hand as a dacoit with a slasher.

China is no different. Write “journalist” or “travel writer” on your visa application at your peril, and good luck if you get the stamp. With its dazzling cities and booming factories, China is still a country governed by a repressive puritanical regime that has infuriated and displaced many minorities, among them the Uighur separatists of Xinjiang, who in March 2014 slit the throats of 29 travelers (and wounded 130 others) at the main railway station in Kunming.

And those bookish travelers hoping to find the literary and biographical landscape of Chekhov in the Crimea will find themselves in a turbulent place today and a potential war zone, poised for conflict, just as it was more than 150 years ago.

But if the traveler manages to breeze past such unpleasantness on tiny feet, he or she is able to return home to report, “I was there. I saw it all.” The traveler's boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience—shocking though it may seem at the time—is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the trophies of travel, the life-altering journey.

Tourists have always taken vacations in tyrannies; Tunisia and Egypt are pretty good examples. The absurdist dictatorship gives such an illusion of stability, it is often a holiday destination. Myanmar is a classic example of a police state that is also a seemingly well-regulated country for sightseers, providing they don't look too closely. The Burmese guides are much too terrified to confide their fears to their clients. At a time when President Mugabe was starving and jailing his opponents in the 1990s, visitors to Zimbabwe were applying for licenses to shoot big game and having a swell time in the upscale game lodges. This is, to a degree, still the case.

By contrast, the free market–inspired, somewhat democratic, unregulated country can make for a bumpy trip, and a preponderance of rapacious locals. The old Soviet Union, with nannying guides, controlled and protected its tourists; the new Russia torments visitors with every scam available to rampant capitalism. But unless you are in delicate health and desire a serious rest, none of this is a reason to stay home

“You'd be a fool to take that ferry,” people, both Scottish and English, said to me in the spring of 1982 when I set off at Stranraer in Scotland for Larne in Northern Ireland. I was making my clockwise trip around the British coast for the trip I later recounted in my book
The Kingdom by the Sea
. At the time and for more than 10 years, a particularly vicious sort of sectarian terror was general all over Ulster. It seemed from the outside to be Catholic versus Protestant, centuries old in its origins, harking back to King Billy (William of Orange) and the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the decisive event still celebrated by marchers in silly hats every year on July 12. Ulster violence in the 1970s was pacified and then stirred by British troops, and the terror given material support by misguided enthusiasts in the United States.

How do I know this? I was there, keeping my head down, eating fish and chips, drinking beer, and making notes, while observing the effects of this confederacy of murderous dunces, the splinter groups, grudge bearers, and criminal hell-raisers of the purest ignorance.

The narcissism of minor differences was never more starkly illustrated than after that rainy night when I boarded the ferry from Scotland and made the short voyage into the 17th century, setting off to look at the rest of Northern Ireland. What I found—what I have usually found after hearing all those warnings—was that it was much more complicated and factional than it had been described to me. And there were unexpected pleasures. For one thing, the Irish of all sorts were grateful to have a listener. This is a trait of the aggrieved, and to be in the presence of talkers is a gift to a writer.

It was all a revelation that has become a rich and enlightening memory. Nor was it the only time I have been warned away from a place. “Don't—whatever you do—go to the Congo,” I was told when I was a teacher in Uganda in the mid- and late 1960s. But the Congo was immense, and the parts I visited, Kivu in the east and Katanga in the south, were full of life, in the way of beleaguered places. In the mid-1970s, I was setting off from my hotel in Berlin for the train to East Berlin when the writer Jerzy Kosinski begged me not to go beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I might be arrested, tortured, held in solitary confinement. “What did they do to you?” he asked when he saw me reappear that evening. I told him I had had a bad meal, taken a walk, seen a museum, and generally gotten an unedited glimpse of the grim and threadbare life of East Germany.

Not all warnings are frivolous or self-serving. I have mentioned being cautioned about dacoits in Assam: it was good advice. Passing through Singapore in 1973, I was warned not to go to Khmer Rouge–controlled Cambodia, and that was advice I heeded. There is a difference between traveling in a country where there is a rule of law and visiting one in a state of anarchy. Pol Pot had made Cambodia uninhabitable. I traveled to Vietnam instead, aware of the risks. This was just after the majority of American troops had withdrawn and about 18 months before the fall of Saigon. My clearest memory is of the shattered Citadel and the muddy streets and the stinking foreshore of the Pearl River in Hue, up the coast, the terminus of the railway line. Now and then tracer fire, terror-struck people, a collapsed economy, rundown hotels, and low spirits.

Thirty-three years later, I returned to Vietnam on my
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
journey, which was a revisiting of my
Great Railway Bazaar
. I went back to the royal city of Hue and saw that there can be life, even happiness, after war, and, almost unimaginably, there can be forgiveness. Had I not seen the hellhole of Hue in wartime, I would never have understood its achievement in a time of peace.

Just a few years ago, Sri Lanka emerged from a civil war, but even as the Tamil north was embattled and fighting a rear-guard action, there were tourists sunning themselves on the southern coast and touring the Buddhist stupas in Kandy. Now the war is over, and Sri Lanka can claim to be peaceful, except for the crowing of its government over the vanquishing of the Tamils. Tourists have returned in even greater numbers for the serenity and the small population, and travel writers have begun to explore Jaffna and the north of the island, which was for so long a war zone.

The pieces this year ably illustrate the defiance of the traveler who, against the odds, sets off to find something new to write about. I can imagine some chair-bound geek advising against going to London or Venice or Las Vegas; but here is a refutation—strong, well-written accounts of London, Venice, and Las Vegas. Another warning finger might be wagged in the face of someone on his or her way to the remote parts of Brazil or the back alleys of Somalia, but here is an account of a confrontation in the Brazilian rain forest and an amazing experience in Somalia.

Around the time I was reading, with pleasure, Matthew Power's piece, marveling at yet another of his exploits, I learned of his premature death at age 39, apparently of heat stroke, in Uganda, on an assignment following a man who was walking the length of the Nile. I am delighted to include his story and regret that it is his last. He started young—he was a mere youth traveling in and writing about Afghanistan and the Philippines. This recent piece is in the nature of guerrilla travel, a portrait of disapproved and frequently arrested “space invaders”—the so-called urbex movement—who have a passion for infiltrating off-limits sites, gaining access to locked sewers and forbidden cathedrals. Matthew Power both observed and participated; his writing is vivid and memorable. He will be greatly missed.

In such a collection as this, the truly horrible experience can be found next to the mildly annoying incident: the kidnapping in Somalia of Amanda Lindhout (a joint credit with Sara Corbett), with—in sharp contrast and in another mood—Harrison Scott Key's reflections on riding by Greyhound bus, with his helpful observation, “Bus People are nothing like Airplane People.” And in yet another paradoxical pairing, Alex Shoumatoff writes about one of my favorite subjects, the first contact between highly cultured, self-sufficient indigenous people in the Brazilian rain forest and desperate, rapacious savages—loggers in this case—from the outside world. Elsewhere, Michael Paterniti immerses himself in Guzmán, Spain, and Julia Cooke makes good friends in Havana. Some travelers are compelled by daring, others by dilettantism.

To see a familiar place in a new way is the mission of Sean Wilsey among the gondoliers of Venice, Peter LaSalle peregrinating Paris, Peter Selgin in New York, Colson Whitehead in Las Vegas, Stephen Rinella in the Alaska wilderness, Gary Shteyngart in a more-salubrious-than-usually-depicted Bombay, Andrew McCarthy negotiating Calcutta, and Bob Shacochis on a fishing trip in remote Argentina. Thomas Swick, in his shrewd essay on the nature of travel, suggests what motivates these travelers.

The earth is often perceived as a foolproof Google map, not very large, easily accessible, and knowable by any nerd drumming his fingers on a computer. In some respects, this is true. Distance is no longer a problem. You can nip over to Hong Kong or spend a weekend in Dubai or Rio. But as some countries open up, others shut down. Some countries have yet to earn their place on the traveler's map, such as Turkmenistan and Sudan, but I've been to both, and although I was the only sightseer at the time, I found hospitality, marvels, and a sense of discovery.

Distance was once the problem for the traveler to overcome. How to get to the Indies, or cross the Taklamakan Desert, or navigate the Sepik River? When Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1887, it was as though he was heading for another planet. In my lifetime, Albania and Cuba were once forbidden and inaccessible countries, but these days you'll find them full of tourists sunning themselves on the beaches and windsurfers offshore.

The problem of distance has been solved. There are good trains through the Taklamakan Desert and tour boats up the Sepik. You can get yourself to the Highlands of New Guinea or the foothills of the Himalayas, or to Timbuktu, without much trouble. But access is still a problem in those, and in many other, places: in the fractured countries of Africa, in quarrelsome Pakistan, in the disputed parts of India, and in the nations that have emerged from the old Soviet Union—Dagestan, Chechnya, and now Ukraine. And there are the inner cities of the United States, many of which pose challenges to the curious visitor with probing questions. In writing this, I am betraying my love of reading about adventures and ordeals—the traveler's baptism of fire. These places that defy many travelers are opportunities for those who are willing to take a risk, for the reward of making a discovery and then writing about it brilliantly.