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Table of Contents

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR The Best Travel Writing Series

Travelers Tales has thrived by seizing on our perpetual fascination for armchair traveling, including this annual roundup of delightful (and sometimes dreadful) wayfaring adventures from all corners of the globe.

The Washington Post

The Best Travel Writing 2007 is a globetrotters dream. Some tales are inspiring, some disturbing or disheartening; many sobering. But at the heart of each one lies the most crucial elementa cracking good story told with style, wit, and grace.

WorldTrekker

The Best Travel Writing 2006: Here are intimate revelations, mind-changing pilgrimages, and body-challenging peregrinations. And theres enough to keep one happily reading until the 2007 edition.

San Francisco Chronicle

There is no danger of tourist brochure writing in this collection. The story subjects themselves are refreshingly odd.... For any budding writer looking for good models or any experienced writer looking for ideas on where the form can go, The Best Travel Writing 2005 is an inspiration.

Transitions Abroad

Travelers Tales, a publisher which has taken the travel piece back into the public mind as a serious category, has a volume out titled The Best Travel Writing 2005 which wipes out its best-of competitors completely.

The Courier-Gazette

The Best Travelers Tales 2004 will grace my bedside for years to come. For this volume now formally joins the pantheon: one of a series of good books by good people, valid and valuable for far longer than its authors and editors ever imagined. It is, specifically, an ideal antidote to the gloom with which other writers, and the daily and nightly news, have tried hard to persuade us the world is truly invested. Those other writers are in my view quite wrong in their take on the planet: this book is a vivid and delightful testament to just why the world is in essence a wondrously pleasing place, how its people are an inseparable part of its countless pleasures, and how travel is not so much hard work as wondrous fun.

Simon Winchester

TRAVELERS TALES BOOKS

Country and Regional Guides

America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America,
China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico,
Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American
Southwest, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Middle East,
Paris, Prague, Provence, San Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

Womens Travel

100 Places Every Woman Should Go, The Best Womens
Travel Writing, A Womans Asia, A Womans Europe, Her Fork
in the Road, A Womans Path, A Womans Passion for Travel,
A Womans World, Women in the Wild, A Mothers World,
Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Gutsy Women,
Gutsy Mamas, A Womans World Again

Body & Soul

Stories to Live By, The Spiritual Gifts of Travel,
The Road Within, A Mile in Her Boots, Love & Romance, Food,
How to Eat Around the World, The Adventure of Food,
The Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage

Special Interest

Not So Funny When It Happened,The Gift of Rivers,
How to Shit Around the World, Testosterone Planet, Danger!,
The Fearless Shopper, The Penny Pinchers Passport to Luxury
Travel, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, The Gift of
Birds, Family Travel, A Dogs World, Theres No Toilet Paper
on the Road Less Traveled, The Gift of Travel, 365 Travel, The
Thong Also Rises, Adventures in Wine, The World is a Kitchen,
Sand in My Bra, Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why,
Whose Panties Are These?, More Sand in My Bra

Travel Literature

A Sense of Place, The Best Travel Writing, Kite Strings of
the Southern Cross, The Sword of Heaven, Storm, Take Me With
You, Last Trout in Venice, The Way of the Wanderer, One Year
Off, The Fire Never Dies, The Royal Road to Romance, Unbeaten
Tracks in Japan, The Rivers Ran East, Coast to Coast, Trader Horn

The Sailor

My old friend is a sailor
From the crew of many boats.
In his face shine the answers
Taught by visions and horizons
Lit with precious understanding.

Hes learned so many nameless lessons
From the risings
And the settings
Of the sunthis vagabond in me.

What you see in me is you, he says,
For we never see each other
Only ourself who is the other.

And the sense of one and other
Cannot stand before the vision
In the mirror
One could think to be another.

MORO BUDDY BOHN, KIN TO THE WIND

Publishers Preface

I read Steinbecks East of Eden recently, a marvelous book with more well-wrought themes and characters than a dozen Oscar winners, and it got me to thinking, naturally, of Paradise. Its what were all after, one way or the other, under many a flagsalvation, enlightenment, self-realization (Be All You Can Be, as the U.S. Army correctly exhorted), fulfillment, nirvana, heaven. From saint-in-training to suicide bomber, its what we do as humans, looking, looking. Some of us search in church and temple, some in the affections of others, possessions, power, drugs, asceticism, duty, service. Then there are those who seek paradise in travel, as do the writers in this book. From Joel Carillets opening story, Red Lights and a Rose, which takes place in Bangkok, the stories roll around the world until Rolf Potts brings it back to Thailand in the closing piece, Death of an Adventure Traveler. Of course all these stories reveal the essence of place, but equally they reveal the essence of the traveler and the heart of the stranger.

Travel is surely one of the best ways to explore the territory of the spirit. While I think we can all agree with sages through the ages that our spiritual home lies within, that realm is nonetheless fog-shrouded by the routines of daily life, which slowly numb us to the miracle of being. As Steinbeck writes early in his book, And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

We get stale if we stay home too long: travel creates motion, a fine breeze that reveals the contours of our insides, our errors of judgment and wishful thinking, and the possible path of our future selves. Even a stroll around the block can do the trick, for a while anyway.

Listen to Mary Patrice Erdmans walking the Way of St. James in Gods Who Smell Like Goats (the same passage rang the chimes of Sara Wheeler, as youll see in her Introduction):

I went to walk and to clear my head. I went because of the wretched monkey of yearning that never lets me know what exactly it is I am yearning for. Along the way, the innocent faith of an eight-year-old came back to me as I walked without a map or knowledge of the language across the foggy mountains, blue asparagus fields, and enigmatic silent villages of Spain.

Thus is she refreshed, reminded of who she is, living in the present like a child. Travel releases us to rediscover this in the very motion of the voyage, in the mirror of other cultures. The outward journey always turns us inward. Then we get home, we rejoice for a while, the fog rolls back in, and we forget the beauty of home, we forget the beauty of friends and families, and we need to be reminded by the face of a stranger.

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