TC Boyle - The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True stories from the worlds best writers

Published in 2016 by Lonely Planet Global Limited

CRN 554153

www.lonelyplanet.com

eISBN 9781786576132

Lonely Planet 2016

Managing Director, Publishing Piers Pickard

Associate Publisher Robin Barton

Commissioning Editor Don George

Editor Karyn Noble

Art Direction & Design Dan Di Paolo

Typesetting Palimpsest Book Production

Cover design Hayley Warnham

eBook Production Craig Kilburn

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Although the authors and Lonely Planet have taken all reasonable care in preparing this book, we make no warranty about the accuracy or completeness of its content and, to the maximum extent permitted, disclaim all liability from its use.

This book represents two milestones for me: its the 10th literary anthology Ive edited for Lonely Planet, and its publication marks my 40th year as a travel writer and editor. Contemplating these connected milestones as I complete this collection, Ive realized that they share a fundamental truth: every LP anthology is a new journey, and just as with all my worldly journeys, each of these word-journeys teaches me something new and precious about the planet too.

To begin this years literary journey, I reached out to a wide range of celebrated essayists, novelists, mystery writers, journalists, and travel writers, asking if they would like to write about a travel experience that had exerted a particularly profound and lasting influence on their lives. Despite daunting deadlines and demanding schedules, two dozen of these responded with impassioned tales. Humbled and heartened by their enthusiastic response, I posted a call for submissions online, inviting writers around the world to submit tales of travels that had in some way changed their lives. I received hundreds of stories, many of them exceptionally eloquent and compelling.

From these rich pieces I composed the collection you hold in your hands: 34 stories representing a world-spanning spectrum of themes, styles and settings.

Some of these stories present youthful adventures that bestowed indelible lessons. On her first trip to the US, Jan Morris discovers the quintessence of America in a moment of Wisconsin wonder. Inspired by a cologne commercial, teenager Elizabeth George sojourns in Swinging London on a school program and falls under the spell of a subject and setting that will become the focus of her lifes work. In his mid-twenties, Alexander McCall Smith tastes triumph and tragedy on an odyssey around a momentarily idyllic Ireland, and on her first trip overseas, Blane Bachelor courts disaster by turning an eight-hour airport layover into an innocent exploration of downtown Bangkok.

In some of these stories, travel sows the seeds of love, as it does for Ann Patchett when she misses a flight to Vienna, then puts her ticket to much better use one year later, and for Francine Prose in Oaxaca, where the theft of her familys passports and plane tickets delivers an unexpected, life-threading reward. TC Boyle settles uneasily into an isolated Irish farmhouse for three and a half months, and unexpectedly makes lifelong friends. And Shannon Leone Fowler experiences love and loss of the most profound kind, as she and her boyfriend explore the far reaches of China and each other.

Sometimes our travels confer unexpected connections. Suzanne Joinson is enchanted by the jasmine-scented mysteries and marvels of Damascus, Porochista Khakpour finds an unfamiliar sense of belonging on her first visit to Indonesia, Natalie Baszile follows her heart into the home of an unconventional Louisiana family, and James Michael Dorsey communes with his ancestors and plays a crucial, unwitting role on a hunting expedition with a Stone Age tribe in Tanzania.

Sometimes we are at a turning point in our lives when we travel, and our journey becomes both compass and balm: Mridu Khullar Relph conjures the resolve to overcome intimidation in Ghana, Carissa Kasper finds herself via sickness and salt flats in Bolivia, Maggie Downs unloads her grief with strangers-become-family in Egypt, and Bridget Crocker navigates uncharted waters literally and emotionally on a remote river in India.

And sometimes travel bestows endlessly rippling life-lessons, as it does for Jeff Greenwald tracking the divergent trails of love from Greece to Nepal to California; Pico Iyer trying to foresee the future in Kathmandu and Kyoto; and Tahir Shah following the teachings of a seed into the mountains of Morocco.

These are just some of the stories herein. All of the pieces in this extraordinary collection are equally moving and inspiring tales of life-changing adventures. I have felt honored and privileged to edit them, and I want to thank all the authors for their evocative, poignant and courageous contributions.

These days I spend much of my time teaching and speaking around the world, and one question Im invariably asked is: what is the point of travel writing? I usually answer that, for me, travel writing is an attempt to record and share my experiences away from home to evoke the cultures, landscapes, and people that Ive encountered, and to share the challenges and revelations these encounters have bestowed.

But now, as I contemplate this collection of tales, I realize that even more fundamentally, the point of travel writing is simply to make sense of the world the world outside and the world inside, and the sacred place where they intersect. Travel writing is an attempt to impose order and meaning on the chaos of experience, and in this, it taps deeply into the rich and ancient vein of human storytelling.

In this sense, the tales in this book hearken back to travel writings distant roots, but they also have great contemporary significance, for as the landscape of publishing has transformed over the past few years, some critics have predicted the death of travel writing, opining that vividly written and deeply reflected accounts would give way to superficial blog posts and insipid prose-selfies. As the stories collected here resonantly attest, great travel writing transporting travel storytelling is alive and well in 2016.

Another heartening gift I take from this collection is the illustration of how important travel is to our planet. Its important to each of us as individuals. And its important to us collectively too.

Forty years ago, on a balmy spring night in Athens, I sat in the moonlight reflecting on the first of my own life-changing travel experiences: I had spent the year after college living in Paris and Athens, and traveling to Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey, and Egypt; in a month I would leave for Kenya and Tanzania. I took out the tattered, wine-spattered journal that had accompanied me throughout these adventures and wrote, These travels have expanded and enriched my world view more than I can comprehend. The more I travel, the more I see, the bigger the world becomes. And the more cultures and peoples I encounter, the more I am awed and fascinated by the incredibly intricate and beautiful tapestry of humanity that covers this small globe.