The Best American Travel Writing 2016

by Bill Bryson

  What I could see, about four feet away, was a shelf of 16 gubals. The new design resembled Saturn. For several minutes I stood there and studied this wine rack of extraordinary music.

  It was raining, which seemed appropriate enough. They were right there, yet I felt as if I were still 4,000 miles away.

  If I had had an alphorn, the message I would have sent would have been shorter this time. And in the key of D.

  “Damn.”

  On my third day, I walked over to a music store called Musik Müller to talk to Tom Gunzburger, 42, the head of the drums and percussion section. Tom had had his own experience with Felix Rohner. In the beginning, Felix had let him sell the hang in the store.

  “And then suddenly [Felix] says, ‘Stop.’ He doesn’t want to have to do something with shops. He just wants to sell by himself. That was it.”

  Over time, Musik Müller began to sell the knockoffs that slipped into the marketplace. (PANArt was late and, ultimately, unsuccessful in trying to patent its design.) There was the German-made caisa that Musik Müller displayed in the front window. One day, Felix happened to be walking by. “He saw that, and he came in and was very angry,” Tom said. “And said, ‘Well, with this instrument you destroy your shop.’”

  “What the hell?” Tom said now, at the memory of that encounter. Sometime after, there was a repeat performance when the store started carrying another knockoff, produced in France, called the Spacedrum. “This is not a good copy,” Tom said Felix told him. “They all make shit.”

  There was, of course, a waiting list for the Spacedrum, too. For me, the Spacedrum was like encountering a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. A little stirring at first, sure, but to feel anything more is to give yourself permission to feel dishonest. And I hadn’t come all this way for a substitute.

  I fished out my map of Bern and went looking for a spot where someone said they’d seen a hang player recently. It happened to be in front of the Einstein House, where Albert Einstein lived from 1903 to 1905, when he was developing his special theory of relativity. Inside, you see the parlor room where the great thinker might have scribbled notes on the space­time continuum.

  When I came out, there was no hang player around, but a dulcimer player had set up. He was playing something familiar, but it took me a minute to place it: “Smoke on the Water,” by Deep Purple, with its simple, Neanderthalish guitar riff. On dulcimer, though, it sounded as if Deep Purple had been turned into a phalanx of fairies.

  I walked across the street to the Bern Conservatory, where Markus Plattner, 62, the assistant director and an accomplished guitarist, had agreed to meet me. Markus’s office was airy and orderly, with a keyboard and acoustic guitar at easy reach from his desk. Long windows opened to a pleasant breeze.

  Years ago, he told me, he and the director were invited to Felix’s house to see the hang. “We went there because we were generally interested in maybe having the hang at the school,” he said. “I remember, I felt a bit strange. We never got to talk to [Felix]. He didn’t actually talk. [Sabina] took care of the conversation.”

  The conservatory did get a hang, but after a while, Markus said, Felix demanded to have it back without explanation.

  At that point, the plinking sounds of round two of “Smoke on the Water” cascaded in. Markus stopped to listen and said, “What we’re hearing out there, the dulcimer, that’s very popular right now.” He said there was a new folk scene in Switzerland, with influences from jazz, pop, and rock. Injected with a modern sensibility. That got him onto the subject, as it had for Thomas at Norient, about the identity of the country. Conservatives, he believed, were saying, “We don’t need all that modern stuff. We have our folk music, our yodeling, our Schwyzerörgeli.” But, he pointed out, “for artistic musicians, that doesn’t cover it all, does it?”

  Before we said goodbye, I asked him if he’d play something on the guitar. He cradled it in his arms as if it were a toddler and began to pluck “The Nearness of You.” It was soulful and strained with a little melancholy, I thought. Or maybe that was just the mood I had fallen into. It was late afternoon, and I had only one full day left to find the hang.

  Journalist Jessica Dacey had interviewed Felix and Sabina for a story on the website SWI (Swissinfo.ch) two months earlier. She agreed to meet, and when we sat down that evening in a wine bar she said she was still surprised she had even gotten the interview.

  In her story, she referred to the hang as “a kind of Holy Grail for tens of thousands of people around the world.”

  In the piece, Felix says: “20,000 letters and everyone is talking about the same thing. They tell us the story of when they first encountered this sound.”

  “They want to keep it a small production,” she said, as a guess as to why they wouldn’t talk with me. “They’re not interested in making money. For them it’s all about the artifice. In fact, they don’t even call it an instrument—they call it a sound sculpture.”

  Jessica, 43, knew plenty about music: her husband is a British recording artist who goes by the name Merz (in one of his videos, set in the woods, he plays with a drum ensemble that keeps the beat by hitting trees and rustling leaves—perhaps to invoke nontraditional forces. Or maybe the budget was just really low). She suggested that the musical experimentation in the country, and also the jazz influence and the very openness in Swiss culture, was a perfect combination for the unique qualities of the hang.

  “It’s one of those things that kind of transcends culture,” she said.

  The evening sky was turning pink and violet, and she needed to head off. The streets were quiet, and all the way back to my hotel it occurred to me that my being booked in the Ahmad Jamal room had been all wrong. I was in search of a percussion instrument; I should have asked for the Louie Bellson room. Bellson pioneered the use of two bass drums at once, and Duke Ellington called him “the world’s greatest musician.” The Louie Bellson room had drumsticks on the wall, a mounted snare drum!

  I felt more behind the beat than ever.

  A musician who lived in Liestal, a 50-minute train ride north, had expressed an openness to meeting, but the way my luck was going, I figured I’d reach the town and spend the next hours waiting in vain.

  On my last day in Switzerland, though, Andreas Gerber, 57, pulled up on his bicycle exactly when we said we’d meet. Andreas, who has the wiry build of someone who has been too busy his whole life to eat, took me up to the loft of a building that also housed a movie theater, and opened the door.

  The cavernous room was like Santa’s workshop if Santa Claus were a Nigerian percussion master. There were steel drums and a whole wall of African bells. There were shakers and gongs and pouches of decorative mallets posted on wooden beams, berimbaus and a balafon. There was a piano and string instruments, and more hand drums than I could count. And in front of all of that, Andreas had set out two hangs—not unlike the way a date might set the table for a romantic dinner—next to each other on stands, shimmering like blue diamonds.

  Here is what followed:

  We played the same hang together, and we played the hangs separately. Improvising melodies. He jumped on the piano as I played, and he picked up the guitar and grabbed shakers and the melodica and lorded over the rantang. Sometimes he sang as we played—in English, in German, in no language at all.

  For me, playing the hang was like a first kiss, in that it was both wonderful and maybe not exactly what I had imagined. Or maybe it was like driving an exquisite foreign sports car for the first time: I didn’t always know where to put my hands. I went too fast. I felt unworthy. (Wait, did I just describe my first kiss again?)

  Andreas would have a story for each of his five hangs (here was the one his wife sang most beautifully with; here was the one he loaned to a friend whose friend was dying and wanted to play it while he still could . . .), and he would have me play each one.

  He told me of his travels and studying music in Brazil, Korea, Africa, India, Bali, California.

  His father ha
d been a preacher, and he was raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment. Church music pervaded the house. But there was no denying Andreas “Satisfaction” when his two older brothers made him aware of the Rolling Stones. “That was a turning point,” he said. “It gave me electrifying feeling for my body.”

  It led him, eventually, into the study of TaKeTiNa, which emphasizes the healthy effects rhythm has on the mind, body, and soul. He has been teaching that and improvisation for decades. But even for a world traveler and musician, the discovery of the hang cast a spell.

  “It’s the most beautiful sound I ever heard,” he said.

  Over the years he kept going back to Felix for more. No two hangs are exactly the same, and Andreas kept falling in love with another and expanding the family like a musical polygamist. He wanted to use them in groups, with choirs, whatever musical context interested him. But, he says, Felix became disapproving of this approach, and eventually their relationship became more tense.

  “He started more and more saying the hang is not a drum, not a percussion instrument,” Andreas said. “‘The hang brings you back to yourself. The role of this instrument in the world is to bring people back to their self, their center.’ Which is a beautiful thing . . . I respect this vision, but here’s my ‘but’: I find it not OK to say that people who do something else with it mistreat it, are doing wrong.”

  We kept playing.

  Andreas understood that when this story came out, Felix might end their relationship. This would be particularly difficult, he explained, since Felix and Sabina were the only people he knew who could tune a hang.

  But, he said, “I’m a free man.”

  We both knew when we had played our last notes together.

  By the time I stepped outside again, I was amazed to realize that, as much as I had loved playing the hang, I no longer harbored the fantasy of owning one. I had something better now: the memories of meeting all these good people over these four days and hearing their stories—and their wonderful playing. And memories wouldn’t need tuning.

  Maybe Felix was right: maybe I had had the virus. Now I seemed to be cured.

  At the station, as the train rounded the bend to take me back to Bern, I reached out to shake Andreas’s hand, but he pulled me into an embrace. We broke into laughter—over the fact that I’d come so far for this encounter, that we were two people who took such immense pleasure in the beating of a drum.

  The endless roads you could travel to find harmony.

  PATRICK SYMMES

  Peak Havana

  FROM Outside

  In February I was rolling in an old, squeaking taxi through Havana, headed back to my rented digs atop a house in the tiny Chinatown. I got the room in a way many travelers to Cuba will recognize: a friend passed me a phone number, which was never answered. Eventually, days after arriving in Havana and after pursuing the owner halfway across the city in person, I booked the room, which had been available all along. That was how Cuba worked, or didn’t work. After 23 years reporting all over the island, I’d grown accustomed to the frustrating mixture of disciplined dictatorship and tropical chaos, the steady state of an island where nothing seemed to change, ever.

  But travel is best in the cracks, in the unexpected encounters between appointments, in the crucial subtleties revealed when—according to our expectations and schedules—nothing is happening. So it was that night. My taxi passed by a restaurant, and I looked with exhausted envy at the warm interior, the soft lights, the well-dressed people eating from nice plates. Vibrant, disorganized music spilled out the doors, and a woman was dancing, spinning alone.

  We kept moving, and I vowed to come back another day. But then a sudden doubt hit me. The place looked fun now, but would it be tomorrow? At the end of the block, I jumped out of the taxi and walked back.

  The restaurant, Siá Kará Café, was unusual for Cuba, even weird: lots of cushions and low seating, eclectic décor, and a large and attentive staff serving food that arrived promptly. What’s with that? Even more unusual were the guests. I was used to Europeans and Canadians idling in the bars, but here were actual Cubans, including a pair of uniformed flight attendants for an airline I’d never heard of and a loud family celebrating something over beers and beef skewers. There was a good piano player and then a great one, playing song after song, many of them improvised or unheralded, a fusion of jazz and classical, an almost heedless performance cheered on by the increasingly drunken customers.

  Was this really Havana, the grim citadel I’d been obsessing over for two decades? Was this the real Havana at last? A place as good as the legend?

  Outside, cooling off, I noted the rest of the block. Dead. Dead and dark in the truly Cuban way. Both sides of the street were a long run of shuttered entrances and windows.

  So what? I’d bought countless meals for Cubans in tourist places that they could never afford—or even enter—on their own. But this was the first time in 23 years I’d sat, eaten, danced on an equal footing with Cubans themselves, and it was for one simple reason: they could pay for it.

  A nice restaurant, a good song, a cold drink. So what? So long to the old Cuba, that’s what.

  Americans always say we want to see Cuba before. We don’t really say before what.

  Before it changes into something else? Before Burger King gets there, before Nike and Spotify and global Taylorism turn Cuba into just another place? This is Cuba’s dilemma. Isolation and authenticity are its greatest lures, proof that the rebel island isn’t just anywhere. But they come at a terrible price. For Cubans, the quaint sleepiness that pops up in our viewfinders is a rusted poverty. And for foreigners, nothing is ever authentic enough.

  Even stomach bugs don’t plague the modern traveler as much as the nagging suspicion that this isn’t really it. The it was always some time ago, in some other place. We fear we are missing Cuba the way it was, or was supposed to be. We don’t want to be those people, the ones who arrived too late.

  But that’s nearly impossible. Today’s jet-setter expects, as travel writer and historian Tony Perrottet told me, “to be the only traveler in a remote Amazon village, the first to find a quote-unquote untouched outpost in New Guinea. This is at the heart of the frustration travelers will no doubt feel in Cuba.”

  In other words, we want to see the island before we ourselves can get there to ruin it.

  Bad news: everybody but us is already there. Cuba’s 60,000 hotel rooms are booked solid by more than two million tourists each year, mostly Canadians and Europeans who spend their visits at wristband beach resorts that have precisely zero correlation to unspoiled anything. The United States severed diplomatic ties and cut off trade with Cuba back in 1961, and for decades the Treasury Department has blocked Americans from using credit cards in the country. Those who visited Cuba legally had to book educational or cultural tours that were nominally sponsored by universities or nonprofits and supervised by polite functionaries of the Cuban state tourism authority. That meant being shuttled from the Museum of the Revolution to a canned cabaret at the Tropicana, with a stop in the colonial hill town of Trinidad and one afternoon of free time to encounter a Cuba off the books. It wasn’t all so bad: in the remote town of Baracoa, I once met a busload of drunk Americans who were here legally “studying Cuban rhythm.”

  But tens of thousands of U.S. citizens snuck into Havana illegally every year, passing through Cancún or Nassau. (In some years, I tallied four of those visits.) During his first term, Obama zeroed out the funding to pursue such scofflaws, and since December a cascade of travel reforms has seen JetBlue’s first flight to Havana—a nonstop from JFK for authorized travelers—and a new plan for ferry service from Key West. Florida-based Carnival Cruise Line, the largest operator on the planet, has won approval from U.S. authorities to begin biweekly landings in Cuba next May, using the Adonia, a 710-passenger ship themed around “social impact” voyages. At press time, in early August, Congress was debating lifting the trade embargo entirely. When that happe
ns, up to a million Americans are expected to join the existing crowds.

  The abrupt onset of reforms inside Cuba means that for the first time, individual, self-organized travel is becoming less onerous and expensive. A new generation of Americans will soon be able to explore Cuba at their own pace, doing things that should be perfectly routine but aren’t, like renting cars, climbing crags, or setting their own itineraries—all difficult or banned under Fidel Castro. Obama’s diplomatic opening gets much of the credit, but Raúl Castro has been making changes ever since he took the reins from his ailing brother nearly a decade ago. Only now, after years of glacial Cuban bureaucracy, have his simple economic reforms—legal self-employment, cheaper Internet access, increased rights to travel abroad, the licensing of hundreds of thousands of private businesses—begun to take effect.

  As recently as 2013 I noticed little change in the day-to-day life of Cubans, but this February I was stunned to come back after two years and find the island transformed. I saw this even in small towns like Cárdenas and Sancti Spíritus, but it is most obvious in Havana, where everything seemed to have a new coat of paint, including the old cars. For decades those old Chevys and Buicks were among the few private cars in Cuba, but they are increasingly shoved aside by fleets of Korean Kias and Chinese Geelys that are easier to import for the small new business class. Some 360,000 such enterprises, from repair shops to media companies, have been licensed since 2011, and out of 11 million Cubans, a million were released from mandatory and practically unpaid state employment to earn their own living. The result has been a surge in economic growth and optimism unseen in half a century.

  The tourism business was the obvious winner, and Havana in particular is booming, the hotels full and the ancient alleys thronged with foreigners. Airbnb launched last April with 1,000 members—and doubled that number in 40 days. TripAdvisor now reviews 522 restaurants in Havana alone. (About one of my favorites, the hipster bar 304 O’Reilly: “Everything was very good, which is an especially rare thing in Cuba.”) The home cafés called paladares, little places with just 12 chairs, have been superseded by large private restaurants with scores of employees and ingredients sourced from the first wave of private farms in the countryside. You already have to elbow your way through a crowd to get a mojito where Errol Flynn used to drink. But the changes go much deeper: the population is better fed, better dressed, and (crucially) sure that, with Havana and Washington both changing, their future has finally arrived.