Various - The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Volume II: Great Writers on Great Places

PENGUIN BOOKS

T HE C OND N AST T RAVELER

Book of Unforgettable Journeys:Volume II

T HE C OND N AST T RAVELER

Book of Unforgettable Journeys:Volume II

G REAT W RITERS ON G REAT P LACES

E DITED AND WITH AN I NTRODUCTION
BY K LARA G LOWCZEWSKA

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Penguin Books 2012

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Copyright Cond Nast Publications, 2012

All rights reserved

The essays in this book first appeared in issues of Cond Nast Traveler.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE FIRST VOLUME AS FOLLOWS:

The Cond Nast traveler book of unforgettable journeys : great writers on great places / edited and with an introduction by Klara Glowczewska.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60364-2

1. TravelLiterary collections. I. Glowczewska, Klara.

PN6071.T7C66 2007

808.8032dc22 2007026230

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ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

It is easy enough to make fun of birders, writes E. L. Doctorow, one of the contributors to this second volume of The Cond Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys. He is on a tour of India with a group of American enthusiasts of the earths winged life and is struck by the wisdom in their curious passion. Birders ask only to see something. Not to shoot it, not to touch it, feed it, cage it, mess with it in any way. To see something and give it a name. Thats all. Birding celebrates nonpossession. At this time in the history of a planet dammed, deforested, and drilled to its deepest dingles, isnt this a blessed thing? It is the practice of reverence. It is knowledge for its own sake. Here are these birders traveling halfway around the world to amaze themselves.

The best travelersand the best writers on travelbelong to that same wandering tribe and share that same fundamental passion (if not necessarily its object). They are obsessive, wildly alert observers of what nature and man have wrought. Amazement is their Holy Grail, and they come upon it, as do all the contributors to this collection, in the most varied ways and places. In Berlins impressively licentious nightlife (which, as Guy Martin concludes, has something fundamentally imbalanced and headlong about it, something Slavic and not quite fully Western); in the hallucinatory quality of the Arctic summers endless sun (where, as Wade Davis reports, one can witness an annual convocation of wildlife of such stunning magnitude and beauty that [it] shatter[s] all notions of a world of human scale); or in the gastronomic oddities on display in a market in Cuenca, Ecuador (including something that appears to be the result, Calvin Trillin delightedly observes, of crossing a large strawberry with an exceedingly small porcupine).

These and countless other aperus in the pages that follow are travel writings pots of gold, the reason some of the very best observers of our worldbe they novelists, poets, playwrights, art critics, political reporters, screenwriters, essayists, or naturalistsjourney forth and report back on what they see. The telling seems for them a goal in and of itself, and their generous compulsion to make note of the earths myriad seductions akin to that of those birders thrilled with recording the fleeting glimpse, a blurt of color, a call, the bend of a branch. Witness Amy Wilentzs rapture in Senegal: The women are beautiful to look at, the men are elegant and sometimes jazzy, and there are corners where a painted wall, even though its made of cement block, will stir you with its raging deep-maroon color, and a single palm tree and a single sheep in a village compound, up against the flat ocher of a quick-falling sandstorm sunset, will make you sigh with poetic ecstasy.

Most of us are not likely to buy a ticket anytime soon to the Swat Valley, in the wilds of Pakistans North-West Frontier Province, but how eye-opening to read William Dalrymples account of his travels through the magnificent and forbidding region that stopped Alexander the Great in his tracks during his conquest of the world. And no wonder it did. Machismo is to the Frontier, Dalrymple writes, what prayer is to the Vatican. It is a way of life, a raison dtre, an obsession, a hobby, a philosophy. The ultimate status symbol? You can drive to work in a captured Russian T-72 tank. We are definitely not in Kansas anymore.

But how tempting to table-hop in Patrick Symmess footsteps as he eats his way through Italys Emilia-Romagnathe fecund plain that produced the food that did conquer the world, or at least the table (think prosciutto di Parma, Parmesan, porcini, and half of all pastas known to man). On his menu? A meal that ended with a stunningly simple dish: gnocco fritto, or pillows of fried dough topped with a few intense drops of sixty-year-old balsamic vinegarso thick that it had to be coaxed from the bottle.

We live in a cabinet of endless curiosities and possibilities for enchantment, and since Cond Nast Travelers founding in 1987, the magazine has made it its mission to provide the key: travel intelligence and information that is both authoritative and inspiring. Authoritative because it is based on our unique motto, Truth in Travel, which stipulates that neither the magazines writers nor its editors accept free or discounted travelnot from airlines, not from hotels and resorts, not from tour operators. It is a simple proposition but also a profoundly consequential and liberating one, since it allows us to report freely and fullywith no ulterior motive, hidden agenda, or allegianceon what we see and experience. And inspiring because it is so often presented through the lively, evocative lens of some of the worlds finest observersour contributors.