Glowczewska - The conde nast traveler book of unforgettable journeys: great writers on great places

Rock Around the Clock, BY F RANCINE P ROSE
Plus: Finding Kafka

Haunted by Beau and Beauties, BY E DNA OB RIEN
Plus: Literary Bath

Heavens Gate, BY P ICO I YER
Plus: Seeing Ethiopia

Primal Dreams, BY R USSELL B ANKS
Plus: The Animals of the Everglades

A Country Made for Living, BY P ATRICIA S TORACE
Plus: Ultimate Provence

Sip It Slow, BY N IK C OHN
Plus: Savannah Secrets

The Secret Lives of Athens, BY P ATRICIA S TORACE
Plus: Athens Essentials

The Haunted Land, BY J AN M ORRIS
Plus: The Big Islands Sacred Sites

Lost Horizons, BY S UKETU M EHTA
Plus: A Map of the Mountains

The Loneliest Place on Earth, BY P ICO I YER
Plus: Icelands Hot Springs

Gods, Kings, Mystics, and Mullahs, BY J AMES T RUMAN
Plus: Reading Iran 209

The Glory That Was Not Rome, BY R OBERT H UGHES
Plus: Etruscan Essentials

Bella Capri, BY S HIRLEY H AZZARD
Plus: Island Highlights

Treasures of the Popes, BY J OHN J ULIUS N ORWICH
Plus: Walking the Vatican

Eight Ways of Looking at a Garden (or, the Art of Setting Stones), BY N ICOLE K RAUSS
Plus: A Garden Guide

Jinn City, BY E DMUND W HITE
Plus: Visiting Petra

Beauty and the Beast, BY S IMON W INCHESTER
Plus: Volcanoes Explained

The Red Danube, BY G REGOR VON R EZZORI
Plus: Of Castles and Counts

Portrait of the City as Genius, BY R OBERT H UGHES
Plus: Barcelonas New Masterpieces

Pilgrims Pride, BY W ILLIAM D ALRYMPLE
Plus: A Pilgrimage How-To

Where the Wild Things Are, BY P HILIP G OUREVITCH
Plus: A Safari Packing List

This is Heaven, a guide in Lalibela, Ethiopia, tells Pico Iyer, one of the contributors in The Cond Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys, as he shows him around a complex of churches carved entirely, unimaginably, belowground. Lest the traveler miss the point, he repeats it again: As soon as you step here, you have set foot in Heaven.

Its not another tourist scam. The man is being literal: The marvels built nine hundred years ago out of red rock in the heart of Ethiopia were meant to represent the geography of salvation, Paradise included. But heaventhe perfect place, the transporting experienceis also one of travels most potent metaphors, its Holy Grail, its ultimate allure. We all want to go there, or at least get close to it, if only for an unforgettable momentbe that while consuming a positively divine meal in Provence, or contemplating the transcendent beauty of a Japanese garden, or simply awaking at dawn in a flimsy safari tent in the African bush, wild things jabbering all around, to find oneself, miraculously, uneaten (triumphantly whole, as Philip Gourevitch puts it in his account of a journey through Tanzania).

Since its founding in 1987, Cond Nast Traveler has been dedicated to the proposition that while hell can be a trip gone bad, all a traveler needs to find his or her bit of heaven is the right travel informationinspired, accurate, unbiased. It is our mission to provide that knowledge, on our own scrupulous terms: Writers on assignment for the magazine accept no free or discounted travelnot from the airlines, not from hotels and resorts, not from tour operatorsa simple yet liberating prohibition that allows them to report freely and fully on what they see, feel, learn, and experience (the good and the bad). They are what every traveler wishes forconsummately knowledgeable guides with no ulterior motive, no hidden agenda or allegiance.

For The Cond Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys, we have selected twenty-one reports from the magazines last two decades by eighteen eminent contributorsart critics, novelists, poets, political reporters, and more. These are deeply felt, beautifully told tales of time spent in some of the worlds most desirable and fascinating places. (One might debate which of those two adjectives best describes the ominously unpredictable Mount Mayon volcano in the Philippines, object of Simon Winchesters obsession. See Beauty and the Beast.)

With more and more of us traveling, much of our daily discourse on travel is, of necessity, about its nettlesome mechanicsbooking strategies, reservation policies, fare negotiations, crowd avoidance, security procedures. Each month, the magazine supplies the best, the latest, and the most reliable advice possible on these matters and many more like them. But the stories in this volume speak to travels other dimensionits magnificence, its enduring power to transport us, delight us, educate us, and enlighten us.

There is no more mesmerizing guide to Italys Tyrrhenian coast than art critic Robert Hughes as he expounds on the mysterious footprints left there by the pre-Roman civilization of the Etruscans, and recalls his own early enchantment: It would become sacred ground for me. delicate gold ornaments buried in the earth, incomprehensible inscriptions, the echono moreof vanished flutes and sistrums caught by imaginations ear in the offshore Tyrrhenian wind whispering above the breastlike tombs of Cerveteri and through the blond grass of Tarquinias long sun-struck ridges. Who wouldnt want to follow him there? Or Edmund White to Jordans Petra, where every outcropping of stone looks carved and every carving looks natural, [and] every turn of the path inspires an urge to pray to some strictly local spirit. Or Francine Prose to Prague, with its profound, unstable beauty always at the point of crumbling, its penchant for amazing me as I turn a corner to discover a shockingly handsome square, or palace, or statue, or garden. Or Russell Banks to the Florida Everglades, where, he argues, it is possible to travel back in time to a heaven of another sortto view and imagine anew the planet earth without billions of human beings on it.