The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  The road began to ascend, then turned abruptly horrible. At one point as we drove across a culvert, I looked down and saw that between the edge of the roadbed and the right-hand guardrail there were two feet of empty air.

  The journey from Chefchaouen to Fes had seemed, on my phone, a fairly straightforward business, even with a minor detour to see what remained of Volubilis, the former capital city of the Roman province of Mauretania. So what were we even doing on this ex-road? Who was this man whom we had entrusted with our lives, knowing nothing about his temperament, intelligence, psychological history, or driving record?

  “So, Zegota,” I said.

  “Zegota,” Rida agreed. “No couscous.”

  I sank a little deeper into my djellaba. I’d just bought it in Chef-chaouen’s medina, but it was already beloved. It was a winter djellaba, woven of camel and sheep wool, patterned with vertical stripes of cream and coffee brown, and with a pointed hood that gives the wearer a wizardly air. When I wore it—though this was not my intention—I made a spectacle of myself. Seeing an American dad walking with his American family in a fine Chefchaouen djellaba seemed to put a smile on people’s faces. It might be a puzzled or a mocking smile, but even these were tinged with delight. Everywhere my djellaba and I went in Morocco—and I went everywhere in my djellaba and, to this day in wintertime Berkeley, wear it every night to walk the dog—I was followed by cries of “Nice djellaba!” and “Hi, Berber Man!”

  After a bumpy hour, we neared the crest of a ridge. A string of villages ran along its top for 10 or 15 miles. The road was intermittently thronged with groups of children in school uniforms headed home for lunch. In the first town, the schoolchildren shouted and waved and peered into our car eagerly, as though prepared to be astonished by the identity of its occupants. Some little joker even pounded on my door. I jumped and looked at Rida. He was grinning.

  “It’s like they think we’re famous or something,” Rosie said.

  The next village was indistinguishable from the first, but here, for some reason, we barely drew a glance from the schoolchildren. It was as if all the relevant data on us had been gathered by the first group and transmitted to the second by no visible means. Word simply seemed to have spread: six Americans; Brad Pitt or Malia Obama not among them. Somehow, in the midst of our own lostness and ignorance, we found ourselves abruptly known.

  That kind of thing happened to us all the time in Morocco. If we stiffed a kid at the far end of the medina for “helping” us find the way to a square that we already knew how to get to, a kid over in our end of town would seem to have heard about it and try to collect. When Abe felt sick on a hike in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, a muleteer appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and set Abe onto his ready-saddled mule so we could carry on.

  Rida eased the minivan around a hairpin bend and slowed down as we came alongside a low cinder block structure with a corrugated metal roof, open on one long side. It was divided by more cinder blocks into four deep, wide bays. It looked like the loading dock for a warehouse that had never been finished and was now home to squatters. Dark smoke boiled up from the center of the building.

  To our surprise, Rida pulled into a sandy patch in front. Men in djellabas, tracksuits, and sweaters and jeans passed into and out of the shadows that filled the bays. On the concrete apron, a man with a poker was jabbing at half a bisected steel drum and unraveling long gray skeins of smoke into the blue sky. Behind him, a red curtain of carcasses—lamb and cow—dangled from steel hooks.

  “Meat,” said Rida. “Tell him what you want and the butcher will cook it for you.”

  We pointed vaguely at anything that did not still have a face or testicles attached, and fled. There was also a tagine on offer, chicken with peppers, and I ordered one of those, out of confusion and panic more than any desire to eat more tagine. On the far side of the butcher shop there was a dining area with a few picnic benches, and beyond that a vague space, empty but for some carcass-red rugs and three middle-aged men with beards and expressions of dignified boredom, sitting on bentwood chairs. I went over to see what kind of fare they had on offer and they stared at me the way you might stare at a wasp as it approached your Eskimo Pie.

  “That is a mosque,” Rida said, pulling me gently back to the dining area.

  At that moment the butcher went past, carrying a large steel basket full of ground meat on skewers, and for the first time I understood that he did not plan on feeding us an entire limb or organ, freshly hacked. You made your choice of meat and it was ground, on the spot, and mixed with the owner’s proprietary blend of spices, a formula he genially refused to divulge through an interpreter. The meat and its mysterious flavorings were rolled into flattened tubes along flat skewers like steel fence pickets, then caged in the basket so that they could be turned easily on the grill without falling apart.

  I have eaten good food in unprepossessing locales, but I doubt the disparity between the crude, shabby atmosphere of that nameless cement-block dispensary of protein and redemption and the quality of the lunch laid on by the butcher of Zegota will ever be matched. When it arrived, the kefta was easily the best we ate during our two weeks in Morocco—and we ate a lot of kefta. The tagine arrived sizzling in its Munchkin-hat clay oven, the long green peppers delivering a welcome and overdue burn. The ubiquitous mint tea was neither oversweetened nor bitter. The day was bright and cool, and after the meal we lingered a moment on that gritty concrete terrace, six Jews sitting in the sunshine between a mosque and a shambles, grooving on the mingled aftertastes of sugar and mint and barbecue and chiles, as happy, collectively, as we had been in Morocco or might ever be again in our lives.

  “I don’t get this place,” Abe said, mopping the meat juices from his plastic plate with a hunk of khoubz, or flatbread.

  I told him I knew what he meant. I thought about asking Rida if this unlikely meal was the reason he had taken such a long detour, if our growing discontent with the limited fare had somehow been guessed at and communicated—if, somehow, like the boy panhandler and the muleteer and the blasé schoolchildren, Rida had known that this was what we needed. But I decided to just let it pass.

  SARA CORBETT

  “How Can We Find More People Like You?”

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  Let me introduce you to Yoppy. Yoppy is young and friendly and lives in a small apartment in the Shinagawa neighborhood of Tokyo. His full name is Yuhsuke Yoshimoto, but at least with visitors who come to stay with him through his listing on Airbnb, he prefers to go by Yoppy. He wears heavy-framed black glasses, has a boyish haircut, and likes to talk to foreigners, even though his English is admittedly poor. In the one photo I’ve seen of him—his profile shot on Airbnb—he’s wearing a navy blazer, a collared shirt, and a thin silver necklace. He smiles at the camera in a pleasant but not overbearing way. It would be hard, I imagine, not to like Yoppy if you were to meet him at a dinner party or at a gathering of pharmacists or financial planners (according to his profile, Yoppy is both a pharmacist and a financial planner), but still that says little about how you would feel when putting your toothbrush on the sink next to his late at night in a city that’s far, far from home.

  Amid the million or so rental listings on Airbnb, amid the castles (at last count, there were 1,200 castles) and fantasy beach spreads, amid houseboats and ski gondolas and treehouses in the jungle, amid the scores of assiduously vacuumed urban apartments showcasing vividly printed bedspreads and devotion to Ikea minimalism, Yoppy’s place is eye-catching for being none of that. Its governing aesthetic is what I’d term “salaryman bachelor.” In one photo, there’s a dark brown couch, possibly velour, draped with a rumpled blanket. It sits in an area that is dimly lit and very narrow and has a corporate-looking whiteboard parked in one corner, maybe in the event that something needs diagramming. Another picture shows a different room, bare-walled and completely empty, where a guest can unfold a futon to sleep. The arrangement is simple: Yoppy has his own bedroom off
the hallway. He will share the bathroom and kitchen and, if you need it, his hair dryer. When he is not at work, he assures you, he will be eager to hang out. “I am nice to you very much,” is what he promises. All this for $42 a night.

  Before flying to Japan last fall, I did a crawl through Airbnb’s Tokyo listings. Maybe because I was looking only a week ahead, there wasn’t a whole lot open. But still, there were options. I examined people’s toilets, microwaves, and pillowcases. I assessed their cats and dogs, their workout equipment and shelves full of anime-character plushies. I felt voyeuristic and judgmental but, given that it was a business transaction, also entitled to my judgments. There is a guy named Masahiro who has an apartment he’ll share with you, but be aware he already shares it with 10 snakes. Many properties have strident house rules involving not speaking to the neighbors. There were a lot of specifics about how to take out the trash and some polite but emphatic exhortations to not, in general, behave like a cretin. You could add up the various “do nots” to get a sense of all the exasperating things people actually do. This from one male host, under the heading “Keep Clean”:

  Take off your shoes when you get into my house.

  Do not pull your luggage along the floor to prevent damage on the floor.

  Sit on a toilet even when you take a pee (to gentlemen).

  Relative to other major cities in the world, Tokyo, with its population of 13.4 million, has been slower to embrace Airbnb, with fewer hosts signing on to open their doors to strangers. There are currently about 2,500 listings in the city, less than half of what can be found in Madrid, less than one-fifteenth of what can be found in Paris, and about the same as what’s available in Edinburgh, a city of half a million people. For the company, which is aggressively endeavoring to become a global superbrand and markets itself on the idea that the world is an inherently exuberant and welcoming place, this is a concern. In five years, Tokyo will host the Summer Olympics, and with that will come a wash of what the Japanese government predicts will be eight million or so eager visitors on a trip-of-a-lifetime binge, all needing places to stay. It could be an incredible boon for a growth-minded, profit-minded company like Airbnb. But so far, there are not enough Yoppys.

  This is why, one morning in September, I found myself following a pair of American Airbnb employees and a Japanese translator down a leafy pedestrian street in Jiyūgaoka, an upscale residential neighborhood on the southwestern side of Tokyo. The Americans, Anne Kenny and Kathy Lee, were researchers in their mid-30s focused on user experience. They had been dispatched from headquarters in San Francisco to do a four-day anthropological deep dive, interviewing Japanese hosts, most of them designated “superhosts”—people who have excellent reviews from guests and are quick to respond to booking requests—to try to understand whether and how the San Francisco share-everything ethos works in a country like Japan.

  The air was muggy and smelled faintly of cedar. Japanese commuters glided past on bikes. A flock of girls dressed in school uniforms and frilly knee socks passed us going the other way. Nobody stared, because that would be rude, but they definitely looked. We were not just foreign, but we were also accidentally louder than everyone else, if only because everyone else seemed utterly silent.

  Our translator, a woman named Fujiko Suda, noticed people noticing. “It’s because no tourists would really come here,” she said. And true enough, inside the hushed morning routine of the neighborhood, it felt as if we had jumped a fence.

  A couple of months before my trip to Japan, Airbnb overhauled its website and began an extensive effort to rebrand itself, moving away from the notion that it was merely a room-rental platform, or an “online marketplace for accommodation,” as its employees often described it, but rather something warmer and fuzzier and decidedly more expansive. Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO and one of its three founders, announced the rebranding via a lengthy video message aimed at the site’s users—“our community”—in which he unveiled the company’s new credo: “We believe in a world where all seven billion of us can belong anywhere.” He described Airbnb not as a business but rather as a movement, noting how people once lived in villages and understood what it was to feel a sense of belonging, but that over time—thanks to the Industrial Revolution—everything became depersonalized and dispersed and the good stuff eroded. “At a time when we’ve been told to look at each other with suspicion and fear,” he said, “you’re telling the world it’s OK to trust again.”

  Airbnb, which makes its money by charging service fees of 9 to 15 percent on every booking, is reportedly valued at $13 billion, more than Wyndham Worldwide or Hyatt. Since its founding six years ago, the company has booked stays for 30 million people, 20 million of them last year. It now has about 1,500 employees in 20 cities worldwide. Most of the charts plotting its various growth metrics—amount of capital, number of listings—show a steep upward curve, not unlike an arm shot triumphantly at the sky. But still, there are limits, and Airbnb seems to have glimpsed them, realizing that it will continue to grow only in concert with a parallel mindset, one involving the general reliability of strangers.

  Can we “belong anywhere?” Should we try? I was thinking about this as we made our way through Jiyūgaoka that September day, headed toward the home of an Airbnb host named Haruko Miki, feeling distinctly as if we didn’t belong. We passed a flower shop and a placid little park and then waited at a crossing next to a quiet mother and her quiet toddler for a train to quietly whoosh past. Kenny, who is blond and blue-eyed and has a gentle matter-of-fact nature, piloted us by following 30 pages of turn-by-turn, photo-based instructions she’d received. Thirty pages seemed like a lot, but this was Kenny’s second trip to Tokyo on behalf of the company, and she had already figured out that Japanese hosts tend to be heavy-handed with the directions—in part because they’re trying to be helpful to people navigating the confusing streets, and in part because thoroughness and precision seem to matter for their own sake.

  Earlier, over breakfast, Lee mentioned the work of a Dutch social psychologist named Geert Hofstede, who developed a matrix of cultural dimensions by which one country could be viewed against another. The original research took place in the 1960s and ’70s, when Hofstede was employed by IBM International and carried out a survey of its employees in 70 countries. Using the IBM data, and later incorporating the research of other social scientists, he came up with six measures to help define and analyze the values, attitudes, and behavioral impulses of any group—from something as small as the population of a single office or factory to something as large as a nation. These include individualism versus collectivism, indulgence versus restraint, power distance (a group’s acceptance or rejection of hierarchy) and, perhaps most important for Airbnb, uncertainty avoidance.

  According to the Hofstede Center, an institute specializing in intercultural business practices, uncertainty avoidance has to do with “the way a society deals with the fact that the future can never be known: Should we try to control the future or just let it happen?” The 30 pages of navigational instructions seemed a vote in favor of control. The center’s portrait describes Japan as a pragmatic culture that emphasizes collectivism and hierarchy and as “one of the most uncertainty-avoiding countries on earth.” (Apparently Greece and Uruguay also don’t enjoy uncertainty.)

  Lee is tall and willowy and was dressed that day in a sleeveless knit jersey dress. She has a master’s degree in behavioral psychology and another in human-computer interaction and is part of Airbnb’s Insights team, which looks at user data to glean useful information about hosts and guests. Like a majority of people who work at Airbnb, she has been at the company only a couple of years. She and Kenny met when they worked together on user-experience at Microsoft; each moved to Airbnb as its growth went steroidal in 2013. While Kenny focuses on international growth, Lee specializes in doing internal studies on things like why hosts decline bookings (30 to 40 percent of booking requests on the site are rejected) and what people mean exactly when they deem a p
lace “clean.” Back at Airbnb’s offices in San Francisco, Lee told me, a behavioral economist on her team has looked at user data in conjunction with cultural dimensions. “Airbnb doesn’t do as well in collectivist countries,” she said, citing Japan as an example. “But in a place like Australia”—which, like the United States, rates high on individualism and indulgence and low on pragmatism—“it’s huge.”

  Chesky has characterized Airbnb’s popularity as spreading “house by house, block by block, city by city,” kind of like a faith-in-the-world infection, governed by good will and good behavior, transmitted from one happy traveler to the next, one continent to another. Which brought us back to the challenge at hand. It was hard not to wonder how a company that’s disruptive at its core would be received ultimately in Japan, where harmonious unity—a concept known as wa—is something of a national virtue. How does a storm arrive in a place that’s phobic about storms?

  A day earlier, before meeting the Airbnb team, I had coffee with a Japanese acquaintance—an English-speaking businesswoman named Chiaki Hayashi, who often travels internationally for work. I arranged to meet her as I was on my way to check in to the place I had booked through Airbnb. It was a cute-looking apartment I would have all to myself, called “Ultimate Tokyo-Sized Experience!!” At $62 per night, it was pricier than Yoppy’s spare room but still about a third of what a decent hotel would cost. Hayashi ran her finger over the map I’d printed out, pinpointing its location near the Shibuya train station, in the busiest part of the city. Ultimate Tokyo-Sized Experience!!, it turned out, sat atop something known as Love Hotel Hill, which was where, she explained, a slew of small establishments rented rooms overnight or by the hour and a lot of people in Tokyo went to have sex.