James OReilly - The Best Travel Writing 2011: True Stories from Around the World

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

Here are intimate revelations, mind-changing pilgrimages, and body-challenging peregrinations. And theres enough to keep one happily reading until the next edition.

San Francisco Chronicle

The Best Travel Writing 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

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 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 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. 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 in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 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

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

Special Interest

Wild with Child, Mousejunkies!, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?, Encounters with the Middle East, Not So Funny When It Happened, Gift of Rivers, How to Shit Around the World, Testosterone Planet, Danger!, Fearless Shopper, Penny Pinchers Passport to Luxury Travel, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, Gift of Birds, Family Travel, A Dogs World, Theres No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, 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, Whose Panties Are These?, More Sand in My Bra

Travel Literature

Cruise Confidential, Marco Polo Didnt Go There, A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, 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

Edited by

JAMES OREILLY, LARRY HABEGGER,
AND SEAN OREILLY

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

James OReilly

Pico Iyer

Cameron McPherson Smith

ICELAND

Erika Connor

WEST AFRICA

Marcia DeSanctis

RUSSIA

Kevin McCaughey

PARIS

Katherine Jamieson

GUYANA

Carolyn Kraus

BELARUS

Matthew Crompton

INDIA

Gary Buslik

AT HOME

Bill Fink

JAPAN

Meike Eerkens

FRANCE

Michael Shapiro

GRAND CANYON/COLORADO RIVER

Mary Jo McConahay

GUATEMALA

Martin Dillon

IRELAND

Johnna Kaplan

USA

Katherine Jamieson

GUYANA

Colette OConnor

IDAHO

Kate Crawford

INDIA

Erin Byrne

PARIS

Peter Wortsman

GERMANY

Lisa Alpine

SPAIN

Carla King

CHINA

Mary Caperton Morton

NEW MEXICO

Joel Carillet

VIETNAM

Deborah Taffa

USA

Sabine Bergmann

BOLIVIA

Tim Ward

NEPAL

Amanda Summer Slavin

GREECE

Cameron McPherson Smith

THE SEA/ECUADOR

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 stardustdid your journey begin at the Big Bang, or before, when before had no meaning?

It is a clich 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: Gods 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 Eliots Middlemarch, All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.)