George - An innocent abroad: life-changing trips from 35 great writers

I lost my innocence in France. I went to live in Paris right after graduating from Princeton, following in the footsteps of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or so I fancied, and within two weeks I had fallen head over heels for a 22-year-old jeune fille from Grasse, who exuded a Provenal perfume of sunshine and sexualit.

A jeune amricain unwise to the ways of the world, I spent two months panting like a puppy after this fille fatale before I realized that for her I was more bauble than boyfriend. But by then it didnt matter. I had found a new object for my passion Paris itself and this lover consummated my ardor with Monet and Molire, the le Saint-Louis and Sacr-Cur, and midnights wandering under the plane trees by the Seine, sometimes hand in hand with a jeune amricaine, intoxicated by the moon and the swooning stars.

Then I lost my innocence in Greece. At the end of that Parisian summer, I rode the Orient Express through Switzerland, Italy, and Yugoslavia to Athens, where I would be teaching on a one-year fellowship at Athens College. Before classes started, I had a week free to sightsee, and on my second afternoon in the city, overheated and blinded by the stark sunlight, I took refuge in a shady bar just off Syntagma Square. No sooner had butt touched barstool than I was surrounded by three scantily clad sirens caressing my hair, arms, and thighs and ordering and re-ordering Champagne from an attentive barkeep. I was besotted with the prospect of the night to come, until it came time to pay the tab and the women disappeared, along with my entire reserve of emergency drachma.

But Greece repaid that lesson time and time again, with rosy-fingered dawns reading Plato on the Parthenon and bouzouki-brightened evenings sipping ouzo by the wine-dark sea, picnics with a mysterious muse named Gisela among the red poppies and white columns of Corinth, and soul-dancing connections and kindness on Crete.

Then I lost my innocence in Tanzania. It was the summer after my teaching year in Greece, and the parents of two of my students had invited me and a fellow teacher named John to visit them in Dar-es-Salaam. We were touring the Tanzanian bush when the clouds cleared and Mount Kilimanjaro suddenly gleamed on the horizon. The father impulsively asked if we wanted to climb it. John and I looked at each other. Of course we do! Why not? We were 23 and invincible. What could possibly go wrong? Well, to start with, all I had for footwear were tennis shoes we hadnt planned to climb the highest mountain on the continent but we survived, and all these years later, Id still climb it no other way.

That year changed my life. I learned the illusions and exhilarations of love, the enticements and terrors of adventure, and the importance of charting my own course. At the end of the year, I relinquished the students hand-me-down desire to become a tweedy professor and chose instead the perilous path of becoming a writer. I had no idea where that path would lead; I just knew that I wanted to walk it wild and wide-eyed, daring to dream.

Looking back on all this now, I realize that something profound and utterly life-changing happened that year: I embraced my innocence.

Ever since then, through 40 years and 90 countries, innocence has been my steadfast soulmate, my platform and persona, skin and shield, the rose-tinted mind/heart-set with which I encounter the world. As it is still. Over the past few days, I have started to prepare for an upcoming journey to Sweden, Estonia, Finland, Denmark, and Russia, all countries Ill be visiting for the first time. As I read about these places and imagine being in each one, innocence pulses as powerfully through me as it did on that first foray to France in 1975.

Yesterday I wrote in my journal: What will Stockholm be like? What will I discover in Copenhagen? Who will I meet in St. Petersburg? What wonders await?

An innocent abroad.

Compiling this collection has also been an adventure in innocence. I started by reaching for the stars the writers I most revere around the globe. To my astonishment, many of these award-winners and bestsellers, despite being deluged with their own deadlines and demands, responded to my invitation with grace and enthusiasm. I then sought out up-and-coming authors whose power and passion awe me and whose stories enthralled me. The result is this beautiful, bountiful book you hold in your hands, 35 celebrations of innocence at large.

As I have assembled these tales, poring over each with ever-deepening gratitude and delight, I have been astonished to see a jigsaw-puzzle portrait compose itself, piece by interlocking piece, right before my eyes.

In one part of this puzzle, innocence abroad is the portal to a rite of passage. Dave Eggers discovers this in the backroom of a Bangkok brothel-cum-nightclub, and Sloane Crosley on a cliff overlooking a shark-infested Australian bay. Pico Iyers passage unfolds as a succession of ill-fated initiations in South America, while Tim Cahills coalesces over a series of rootless adventures in North America. And for Jan Morris, the portal is an unsolicited post-war assignment in Venice that unexpectedly transfigures her world.

In another part of the puzzle, innocence is a conduit to misadventure, as it is for Richard Ford in Morocco, when he and his wife embark on an ill-advised journey by car into the heart of hashish country, and for Simon Winchester when he and a team of fellow geologists are ice-bound by fjord-freezing storms in Greenland. Alexander McCall Smiths innocence guides him toward an unsuspecting brush with murder in Swaziland, and Fiona Kidmans to an almost deadly disaster in Vietnam. For Jane Smiley and her husband, unanticipated mishaps play a more benign role, eventually offering admission to off-the-tourist-path pleasures in France.

Sometimes innocence takes the form of a teacher, as it does for 19-year-old Ann Patchett on an eye-opening exploration of Europe, Mary Karr in the eco-wilds of Central America, Kerre McIvor in the equally uncharted wilderness of Cuban conmen, Cheryl Strayed on an emotional odyssey in Andorra, and Stanley Stewart in the Italian capital, where he came of age on his first trip abroad, and where he has now returned for the birth of his first child. And for Torre DeRoche, coming home after a globe-girdling journey, innocence presents an old, familiar place in a new, unfamiliar light.