James OReilly - The Soul of a Great Traveler: 10 Years of Solas Award-Winning Travel Stories

C RITICAL A CCLAIM FOR T HE B EST T RAVEL W RITING S ERIES

Travelers Tales has thrived by seizing on our perpetual fascination for armchair traveling (there is a whole line of site-specific anthologies) including this annual roundup of delightful (and sometimes dreadful) wayfaring adventures from all corners of the globe.

The Washington Post

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

The Best Travel Writing: True Stories from Around the World: 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

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 2005 which wipes out its best-of competitors completely.

The Courier-Gazette

The Best Travelers Tales 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

A S ELECTION OF T RAVELERS T ALES B OOKS

Country and Regional Guides

30 Days in Italy, 30 Days in the South Pacific, 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, Tuscany

Womens Travel

100 Places Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Greece Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Spain Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in the USA Every Woman Should Go, 50 Places in Rome, Florence, & Venice Every Woman Should Go, Best Womens Travel Writing, Gutsy Women, Womans Asia, Womans Europe, Womans Path, Womans World, Womans World Again, Women in the Wild

Body & Soul

Food, How to Eat Around the World, A Mile in Her Boots, Pilgrimage, Road Within,

Special Interest

Danger!, Gift of Birds, Gift of Rivers, Gift of Travel, How to Shit Around the World, Hyenas Laughed at Me, Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana, More Sand in My Bra, Mousejunkies!, Not So Funny When It Happened, Sand in My Bra, Testosterone Planet, Theres No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, Thong Also Rises, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?, Wake Up and Smell the Shit, The World Is a Kitchen, Writing Away

Travel Literature

The Best Travel Writing, Coast to Coast, Deer Hunting in Paris, Fire Never Dies, Ghost Dance in Berlin, Guidebook Experiment, Kin to the Wind, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, Last Trout in Venice, Marco Polo Didnt Go There, Rivers Ran East, Royal Road to Romance, A Sense of Place, Shopping for Buddhas, Soul of Place, Storm, Sword of Heaven, Take Me With You, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Way of Wanderlust, Wings

Fiction

Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls

Billy Gogan, American

Copyright 2017 Travelers Tales. All rights reserved.

Introduction copyright 2017 by Brad Newsham.

Travelers Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc., Palo Alto, California. travelerstales.com | solashouse.com

Credits and copyright notices for the individual articles in this collection are given starting on .

Art Direction: Kimberly Nelson

Cover Photograph: Galyna Andrushko, Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA

Production Director: Susan Brady

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: OReilly, James, 1953- editor. | Habegger, Larry, editor. | OReilly, Sean, 1952- editor.

Title: The soul of a great traveler : 10 years of Solas award-winning travel stories / edited by James OReilly, Larry Habegger, and Sean OReilly.

Description: First edition. | Palo Alto, California : Travelers Tales, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 2017027117 (print) | LCCN 2017038662 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609521240 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609521233 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781609521240 (eISBN)

Subjects: LCSH: Travelers writings.

Classification: LCC G465 (ebook) | LCC G465 .S664 2017 (print) | DDC 910.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027117

ISBN: 978-1-60952-123-3

E-ISBN: 978-1-60952-124-0

First Edition

Brad Newsham

Matthew Crompton

INDIA

Laura Resau

ECUADOR

Peter Wortsman

GERMANY

Katherine Jamieson

GUYANA

David Torrey Peters

CAMEROON

Amy Butcher

NEBRASKA

Lance Mason

BOTSWANA

Tawni Vee Waters

MEXICO

Carolyn Kraus

BELARUS

Bill Giebler

INDIA

Marcia DeSanctis

MOSCOW

Mario Kaiser

IRAN

Erin Byrne

IRELAND

Amy Gigi Alexander

PARIS

Bruce Berger

BAJA CALIFORNIA

Cameron McPherson Smith

ALASKA

Lisa Alpine

THE AMAZON

Nancy L. Penrose

SPAIN

Joel Carillet

BANGKOK

Kevin McCaughey

MOLDOVA

Kathleen Spivack

AMSTERDAM

James Michael Dorsey

CAMBODIA

Tom Joseph

BOLIVIA

Michael Shapiro

GRAND CANYON

Tom Miller

US/MEXICO BORDER

Keith Skinner

MONTEREY PENINSULA

Jennifer Baljko

BARCELONA

Pamela Cordell Avis

FRANCE

Gina Briefs-Elgin

ACROSS THE USA

Glenda Reed

THE PACIFIC OCEAN

W e launched the Solas Awards in 2006 because extraordinary stories about travel and the human spirit have been the cornerstones of Travelers Tales books since 1993. Simply put, we wanted to honor writers whose work inspires others to explore. Each year we grant awards in 21 categories, and the stories in this book represent the Grand Prize Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners in the Solas Awards first ten years. These stories are funny, illuminating, adventurous, uplifting, scary, inspiring, and poignant. They reflect the unique alchemy that occurs when the travelerperhaps best called pilgrimenters unfamiliar territory and begins to see and understand the world in a new way.