by Paul Theroux
But that afternoon at the castle was total fantasyland. When I returned home, would I be drinking very much Barolo? Um, no, not so much. Saying that Barolo is my “favorite” is very much a misrepresentation of my everyday drinking habits. How often do I drink it? Outside of professional tastings, when I’m buying wine to serve at home or when I order it in restaurants, I probably drink Barolo three or four times a year. Maybe five if I’m particularly flush. That’s because the price of a decent Barolo at a wine shop starts at around $60 a bottle and quickly climbs to well over $100. Double or triple that price on a restaurant wine list. Even though I love Barolo, it will always be a special-occasion wine.
I was thinking deeply about greatness in wines when I decided to make a quick side trip to visit my old exchange family in Pieve San Giacomo. On a whim, I’d asked Daniela, Paolo’s daughter, to do a little research to see where her father used to buy his fizzy red wine, and with some effort we located the winemaker. To my surprise, the winemaker was not based in Modena, but rather a couple of hours in the other direction, in the Colli Piacentini—the Piacenza hills—a region I’d never heard of.
After getting lost, and refereeing an argument between Daniela and Anna, who was almost carsick in the back seat, we were finally welcomed into the garage of the winemaker, 80-year-old Antonio, and his daughter, who was roughly my age. Anna became emotional—the last time she’d visited the winemaker was in the early 1990s with Paolo. “I remember you had a goat, and it used to like eating the grapes!” she said. The goat, of course, was long dead.
From stainless steel tanks, we tasted his crisp Riesling and a strange, straw-yellow wine made from the local Ortrugo grapes. Antonio told me that most of his customers come to buy his wine in demijohns because they prefer to bottle it themselves, as Paolo did.
“What about the frizzante red?” I asked. “Do you still make it?”
He smiled broadly and retrieved a bottle from a corner of the garage. He grabbed a wide white bowl and splashed the purple wine into it as the wine formed a pink foam. “My customers insist on white bowls for the red,” Antonio said, “to bring out the color and aromas.”
I closed my eyes and took a sniff, then took a sip. Sharp, fresh, tangy, earthy. Wow! The aromas and flavors were like a time machine. I was again 19, dressed in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and Birkenstocks, experiencing wine for the first time. Holding the huge wide bowl to my face nearly brought me to tears in the dark garage. “Ah, Lambrusco,” I said, with a satisfied smile.
Antonio laughed. “Lambrusco? No, no, no. This is Gutturnio!”
“Gutturnio?” I said. What the hell was Gutturnio? I must have said something wrong. Maybe I was having trouble understanding the dialect. “Is that the local name for Lambrusco?” I asked.
He laughed again. “No! It’s Gutturnio. It’s a blend of Barbera and Bonarda.”
Um . . . what? For 20 years, I’d been telling myself that my seminal wine experience had been Lambrusco. Now I find out that it was a wine called Gutturnio? And how had I never even heard of this wine? It’s not like it’s new. I later learned that the Romans drank it from a round jug called a gutturnium, from which the wine’s name is taken. Julius Caesar’s father-in-law was famous for producing this wine.
We sat at Antonio’s table and ate cheese and meat with the wine, and Anna and Antonio reminisced about the old days. Antonio said that he now sold about 4,000 bottles per year, about half what he had about 20 years ago. “Ah,” he said, “a lot of my customers, they’re dying.” Meanwhile, the younger generation just isn’t as interested in local wines like his anymore. “Nowadays, people want different tastes. There are a lot of other tastes that people seek.” Antonio shrugged. “There is an end for everything. Everything ends.”
Suddenly, this humble, fizzy, purple Gutturnio that I swirled around in a white bowl—which connected me to my own past, to ancient Rome, and yet at the same time was totally fresh knowledge—seemed more important than even the greatest Barolo. The strange experience I was having in a farmhouse in the Piacenza hills seemed to me to be the very essence of wine, the reason people spend their lives obsessed with it, an example of how wine becomes part of our lives.
As I thought about all this—about wine and Italy and youth and family and revisiting scenes of unadulterated happiness—it occurred to me that this wasn’t so different from how one falls in love with travel in the first place. They might even go hand in hand. And telling this kind of story isn’t so different from telling any other story that one might call travel writing.
Camus and others may have a point—that travel is about fear and suffering and travail. That has become an accepted truth of travel writing. But this truth is only partially correct. Travel is also very much about love and memory. I’m hoping that this anthology shows you that love—as well as fear and suffering and travail.
The stories included here were, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I’ve done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2013 were forwarded to guest editor Paul Theroux, who made our final selections.
This is the second time I’ve worked with Paul on this anthology (the first was way back in 2001), and it was just as much of an honor today to work with a travel writing hero of mine and a master of the genre. The world has changed a great deal since 2001, but I think you’ll find that the key characteristics of great travel writing never really change. I’d also like to thank Tim Mudie at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for his help in producing this year’s outstanding collection, our 15th. I hope you enjoy it.
I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2014. As I have for years, I am asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2014 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, date of publication, and publication name, and they must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. All submissions must be received by January 1, 2015, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.
Further, publications that want to make certain that their contributions will be considered for the next edition should be sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Best American Travel Writing, 228 Kings Highway, 1st floor, Suite 2, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this year’s anthology to one of our contributors, Matthew Power, who died tragically in March of this year while on assignment in Uganda, reporting on an explorer walking the length of the Nile. Matt was 39, which made him a contemporary of mine, and he was a true adventurer and seeker of truth whom I admired tremendously. Those who are loyal readers of The Best American Travel Writing know Matt’s work well, as it has been included here several times over the past decade. He will be greatly missed.
JASON WILSON
Introduction
TRAVEL WRITING TODAY is pretty much what travel writing has always been, a maddeningly hard-to-pin-down form—one traveler boasting of luxury and great meals, another making asinine lists (“Ten Best Waterslides on Cruise Ships”), yet another breathlessly recounting an itinerary of hardships and mishaps, and a fourth (and the most valuable, in my view) holding you like the wedding-guest with a skinny hand and fixing you with a glittering eye and saying, “There was a ship . . .”
If you’re looking for a model, the greatest writer-traveler the world has known is the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, who set as his goal to travel the entire Islamic world, including China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, in the mid-14th century. This took him 29 years. He spent a year in the Maldives, that strange scattered archipelago of coral atolls, where he took a number
of wives, and then moved on, leaving them behind. Unlike those other long sojourners Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (who might not have existed), Ibn Battutah wrote his book himself. In the words of one of his early Arab admirers:
All master-works of travel, if you will but look
Are merely tails that drag at Ibn-Battutah’s heel,
For he it was who hung the world, that turning wheel
Of diverse parts, upon the axis of a book.
Ibn Battutah wrote about everything, great hospitality as well as catastrophes, miseries, wars, famines, plagues, pestilences, and xenophobia. Centuries later, what has changed? With—to speak only of Africa—the Ebola virus ravaging Guinea, the fanatical Boko Haram jihadists massacring thousands in northern Nigeria, tribal rioting and terrorist bombs in Kenya, and sprawling squatter camps in South Africa and Angola, travel in some of Africa is as much a challenge as it ever was. And yet in those same countries, there are still safari-goers, bird watchers, colorful dancers, and tarted-up tribal splendor. And there are travel writers reporting this somewhat hackneyed African experience, in pieces published in the glossier travel magazines extolling the spa experience and the cupcake culture in other pages. Some of these magazines are represented here, with more robust pieces, but in general what they call travel is in most cases a superior and safe holiday.
All countries crave tourism, because tourism creates employment, and the tourist makes a brief visit and leaves money behind. By contrast, the traveler is typically a budget-minded backpacker who lingers and is self-sufficient. India beckons tourists to its luxury hotels, but India is a wonderful example of a country full of contradictions, even old-fashioned adventures, if a traveler happens to be willing to take a few risks. The “Incredible India” ad campaign by the Indian Ministry of Tourism was claimed to be a success, but the most incredible aspect of it was that there was no mention of how dangerous India can be—in the so-called Red Corridor of the country, where Maoist guerrillas regularly massacre villagers or set off bombs, and other sporadically reported separatist movements, notably in Assam, cause some roads to be declared off-limits to travelers. Not long ago, I was discouraged from traveling a mere 80 miles by road from Silchar to Shillong in Assam because of “incidents.” In a peaceable tea-growing area, I was warned of dacoits (bandits). It is the situation Kipling would have faced in the 1880s in the same place. In fact, there are 37 named terrorist/insurgent groups in Assam, with colorful names such as Adivasi Cobra Force, Black Widow, Liberation Tigers, and Rabha Viper Army. But, of course, bandits are out in force the world over. In many cases, the government in such places doesn’t want you to know that.
I applied for an Indian visa two years ago, paid extra to have the visa approved quickly. When I did not receive my passport back on the given date or even two weeks later, I inquired about the reason for the delay. The Indian consular official explained that my application had to go to several other officials for approval, and this might take weeks more.
“What exactly is the problem?” I asked.
“On your application, under ‘Occupation,’ you have ‘Writer.’”
“This is a problem?”
“Yes, one requiring higher authority.”
So big, boasting, highly educated, literate, incredible India is as worried by the approach of a bespectacled senior with a ballpoint pen in his hand as a dacoit with a slasher.
China is no different. Write “journalist” or “travel writer” on your visa application at your peril, and good luck if you get the stamp. With its dazzling cities and booming factories, China is still a country governed by a repressive puritanical regime that has infuriated and displaced many minorities, among them the Uighur separatists of Xinjiang, who in March 2014 slit the throats of 29 travelers (and wounded 130 others) at the main railway station in Kunming.
And those bookish travelers hoping to find the literary and biographical landscape of Chekhov in the Crimea will find themselves in a turbulent place today and a potential war zone, poised for conflict, just as it was more than 150 years ago.
But if the traveler manages to breeze past such unpleasantness on tiny feet, he or she is able to return home to report, “I was there. I saw it all.” The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience—shocking though it may seem at the time—is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the trophies of travel, the life-altering journey.
Tourists have always taken vacations in tyrannies; Tunisia and Egypt are pretty good examples. The absurdist dictatorship gives such an illusion of stability, it is often a holiday destination. Myanmar is a classic example of a police state that is also a seemingly well-regulated country for sightseers, providing they don’t look too closely. The Burmese guides are much too terrified to confide their fears to their clients. At a time when President Mugabe was starving and jailing his opponents in the 1990s, visitors to Zimbabwe were applying for licenses to shoot big game and having a swell time in the upscale game lodges. This is, to a degree, still the case.
By contrast, the free market–inspired, somewhat democratic, unregulated country can make for a bumpy trip, and a preponderance of rapacious locals. The old Soviet Union, with nannying guides, controlled and protected its tourists; the new Russia torments visitors with every scam available to rampant capitalism. But unless you are in delicate health and desire a serious rest, none of this is a reason to stay home
“You’d be a fool to take that ferry,” people, both Scottish and English, said to me in the spring of 1982 when I set off at Stranraer in Scotland for Larne in Northern Ireland. I was making my clockwise trip around the British coast for the trip I later recounted in my book The Kingdom by the Sea. At the time and for more than 10 years, a particularly vicious sort of sectarian terror was general all over Ulster. It seemed from the outside to be Catholic versus Protestant, centuries old in its origins, harking back to King Billy (William of Orange) and the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the decisive event still celebrated by marchers in silly hats every year on July 12. Ulster violence in the 1970s was pacified and then stirred by British troops, and the terror given material support by misguided enthusiasts in the United States.
How do I know this? I was there, keeping my head down, eating fish and chips, drinking beer, and making notes, while observing the effects of this confederacy of murderous dunces, the splinter groups, grudge bearers, and criminal hell-raisers of the purest ignorance.
The narcissism of minor differences was never more starkly illustrated than after that rainy night when I boarded the ferry from Scotland and made the short voyage into the 17th century, setting off to look at the rest of Northern Ireland. What I found—what I have usually found after hearing all those warnings—was that it was much more complicated and factional than it had been described to me. And there were unexpected pleasures. For one thing, the Irish of all sorts were grateful to have a listener. This is a trait of the aggrieved, and to be in the presence of talkers is a gift to a writer.
It was all a revelation that has become a rich and enlightening memory. Nor was it the only time I have been warned away from a place. “Don’t—whatever you do—go to the Congo,” I was told when I was a teacher in Uganda in the mid- and late 1960s. But the Congo was immense, and the parts I visited, Kivu in the east and Katanga in the south, were full of life, in the way of beleaguered places. In the mid-1970s, I was setting off from my hotel in Berlin for the train to East Berlin when the writer Jerzy Kosinski begged me not to go beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I might be arrested, tortured, held in solitary confinement. “What did they do to you?” he asked when he saw me reappear that evening. I told him I had had a bad meal, taken a walk, seen a museum, and generally gotten an unedited glimpse of the grim and threadbare life of East Germany.
Not all warnings are frivolous or self-serving. I have mentioned being cautioned about dacoits in Assam: it was good advice. Passing through Singapore in 1973, I was warned not to go to K
hmer Rouge–controlled Cambodia, and that was advice I heeded. There is a difference between traveling in a country where there is a rule of law and visiting one in a state of anarchy. Pol Pot had made Cambodia uninhabitable. I traveled to Vietnam instead, aware of the risks. This was just after the majority of American troops had withdrawn and about 18 months before the fall of Saigon. My clearest memory is of the shattered Citadel and the muddy streets and the stinking foreshore of the Pearl River in Hue, up the coast, the terminus of the railway line. Now and then tracer fire, terror-struck people, a collapsed economy, rundown hotels, and low spirits.
Thirty-three years later, I returned to Vietnam on my Ghost Train to the Eastern Star journey, which was a revisiting of my Great Railway Bazaar. I went back to the royal city of Hue and saw that there can be life, even happiness, after war, and, almost unimaginably, there can be forgiveness. Had I not seen the hellhole of Hue in wartime, I would never have understood its achievement in a time of peace.
Just a few years ago, Sri Lanka emerged from a civil war, but even as the Tamil north was embattled and fighting a rear-guard action, there were tourists sunning themselves on the southern coast and touring the Buddhist stupas in Kandy. Now the war is over, and Sri Lanka can claim to be peaceful, except for the crowing of its government over the vanquishing of the Tamils. Tourists have returned in even greater numbers for the serenity and the small population, and travel writers have begun to explore Jaffna and the north of the island, which was for so long a war zone.
The pieces this year ably illustrate the defiance of the traveler who, against the odds, sets off to find something new to write about. I can imagine some chair-bound geek advising against going to London or Venice or Las Vegas; but here is a refutation—strong, well-written accounts of London, Venice, and Las Vegas. Another warning finger might be wagged in the face of someone on his or her way to the remote parts of Brazil or the back alleys of Somalia, but here is an account of a confrontation in the Brazilian rain forest and an amazing experience in Somalia.
