The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  “Namaste,” I say to them.

  “Namaste,” my father says; he still cannot get it right. But the boys think this is funny, and they glance at each other and giggle. The littler one sits down on the grass. They both look expectantly at my father. We finish lacing our shoes, and then my father removes one of his hearing aids and holds it out to the little boys.

  “See?” he says to them, although I’m sure they can’t understand. “It’s for my ears.” He taps his ear, empty of the aid, with his index finger. He turns a tiny knob on the hearing aid so it makes a tiny, high-pitched whine. The boys inch forward and peer at it. My father sticks it back into his ear.

  “Much better,” he tells them, nodding and grinning. They are entranced. The littlest boy’s mouth is slightly open.

  “Much better,” my father says again.

  For our last two days in India, I have convinced my father to splurge for a fancy hotel in Calcutta. I tell him that we’ll need a comfortable place in order to survive the city.

  “We need to see Calcutta, Dad,” I told him, “otherwise we won’t have really seen India.” Of course that wasn’t really true; I don’t add that even if we visit every large Indian city, we will never, ever really see India; in ten years you couldn’t see it all. In a lifetime you couldn’t, because India has far too many faces to ever be known. But my faulty argument worked; my father agreed on the fancy hotel.

  When we land in Calcutta, we are dusty and dirty, our packs stuffed with white scarves— gifts from the monks—and boxes and boxes of tea. At first we think we are in trouble when a tall man in a suit, a typed badge around his neck, approaches us at the baggage claim. He says my father’s name, a question, and for a moment we both stare at this neat-looking man who knows us.

  The man is telling my father that he has come from the hotel.

  “Your ride is waiting,” he informs us, then steps towards where I am standing, pressed up against the claim’s revolving belt.

  “Madam,” he says to me, “let me get those for you. Please indicate to me which ones are yours.” Indicate to me which ones, I say to myself, tucking that away. You don’t hear words used like that every day. But I do, I indicate which ones, and my father and I are led in amazement to a white limousine that is waiting outside, as shiny as that red monastery door up in Yuksom. The driver lifts his hat for us; he is wearing a white suit and white shoes and when we climb into the car he offers us water and cool, scented towels. We ride the thirty minutes from the airport to the hotel in air-conditioned silence, marveling at the unexpected luxury a hotel reservation in India can bring, marveling too at the India that still clamors outside, the carts and rickshaws and cows and cars all sweating, all roiling, all moving to the pace of this hot afternoon.

  “I wish your mother was here,” my father says, once we’ve checked in and gone to our room and shut the heavy door. He has said this outside of the sky-blue temple in Sikkim, on the windy ridge on the first day of our trek, and on the morning we saw Mount Everest. “She’d kill us, if she knew we were here,” my dad adds as we take in the plush pillows, the balcony with the marble floor, the luxurious bathroom with its deep, clean tub and its rose in a vase on the sink. We’ve peered inside the minibar at the bottles of expensive liquors, and in the closet, where wood hangers sit silently in a row, waiting to bear our unworthy garments.

  “She would have loved this whole trip, don’t you think?” he says, looking out at the pool. We cannot leave the door to the balcony open or else all the air conditioning will get sucked out, but my father stares down at the pool just the same, and for a moment I think that he leaves me. I think he goes to be with my mother, who is thousands of miles away across the ocean, waiting for us to come home.

  The waiter at breakfast suggests we visit the flower market while we are in Calcutta. Immaculately polite, he brings us a map and draws out the route we must take to reach the market, which sits right on the shores of the River Hooghly. He speaks in perfect English: “You will love it there, madam,” he assures me, refilling my coffee cup.

  So my father and I pack water and money, our camera and the map with the delineated route, and we set out after breakfast towards the river. We pass the Royal Palace, the Botanical Gardens and the Central Park. We walk up and down the streets, whose sidewalks alternate between being very wide and almost nonexistent. We push past shoe shiners, juice makers, makeup sellers, potters. Men who fix watches; men who fix cars; men who sell saris. There is no time to talk, for all of the looking. At one point we have to hold hands as we push through a sidewalk market, cramming past bangles stacked on wooden poles, so as not to lose each other. When we finally reach the Hooghly, a wide, muddy strip, we can barely see to the other side because the smoke in the air is so thick.

  We follow the waiter’s map along the river; we move from a park, where lovers sit beneath trees or on benches, their arms around each other as they stare at us, to a slum, which reeks of urine and rotting vegetables and old, dead cars. Skinny, shirtless men without shoes walk past us, barely glancing at us, huge bales balanced on their heads. On either side of us, we can see into homes, shelters erected out of scrap metal and tarp and cardboard; we see tiny children and cooking fires that burn right on the floor.

  This has to be right—that nice waiter wouldn’t lie—but I’m suddenly scared, though I don’t tell my father. This is not like the park, even with those uncomfortable stares from the lovers, and it is certainly not like our lush hotel, with its deep, blue pool and the tall, waving palms. It is not like the ridge that straddles India and Nepal; it is not like the planes, the airports, the taxis. It is like this: the roads that we drove past but didn’t go down, the alleys we hurried by as we walked down the main streets. The big, black eyes of the little girls who squatted on the stoops of their huts and stared at us as we hiked past, drove past, rode past without stopping. I wonder what could happen to us here, my father and me, with our backpack jammed full. I want to hold his hand the way I did in the bangle market, or the way I did when I was just a little girl.

  But when I glance at him, he does not seem scared; he is calm, his mouth relaxed and not set in that tense line, his hands in his pockets. And so I relax, and we walk, and we breathe. Eventually, of course, for that waiter knows his city, we begin to see piles of flowers for sale, big baskets of marigolds and roses, daisy petals, big stacks of leaves tied together, and pails of lilies. Irises, birds of paradise, and always those marigolds, yellow and orange like little suns. I want to take a picture.

  “Give that guy some rupees,” I tell my father, and while I gesture to my camera, point to the man’s huge pile of marigold heads, my father passes over a ten. Another guy sees the exchange; he says something to my father, shaking his finger at us and grinning. I know that he is teasing my father—I have flowers too! I guess that he’s telling us. Take pictures of those! After I snap the shot, both men slap my father on the back and waggle their heads and then watch us go, their hands on their hips, while we walk towards the bridge through the rest of the market.

  Next, I take a picture of my father; he has his camera around his neck, and he is wearing a shirt he got twenty years ago in a running race. Whiteface Mountain Annual Uphill, it reads. Sponsored by Coca Cola. The rain has just begun; drops fleck onto his glasses as the market churns behind him. This is my father, tall and thin and grinning, a marigold petal on his sleeve. He has bent before monasteries to drop money into donation boxes, and he has stood on a ridge and looked out at Mount Everest, surrounded by flapping prayer flags, his hand shading his eyes. He has tasted the street food of Calcutta; he has sniffed the sedge on a wind-swept trail; he has walked through this market, flowers around him, and he has closed his eyes to the scent of it, taking it in.

  Kate McCahill is a writer, reacher, and visual artist. She recently returned from a year of riding buses through Latin America, and now lives with her cat, Pants, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  PAT RYAN

  Where Things Happen
/>   The “third” in “third world” can be an existential multiplier, not a mark of poverty.

  One recent winter I spent five months wandering around East Africa. I flew into Nairobi, Kenya, and flew back from Cape Town, South Africa. In between I had many interesting adventures. I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya, went on safaris and visited semi-forgotten ancient ruins. For the first month or so, I traveled with a Polish guy named Marius I met during a layover in London. He’s a short, stocky punk rocker with a shaved head, lots of tattoos, and a fondness for camouflage. I’m tall and gangly with crazy long hippie hair, so you might appreciate the image of our traveling partnership. Indeed, the amount of laughter we seemed to cause everywhere was enough to make the entire journey worthwhile …but then this other stuff happened too.

  We arrive in the town of Tanga on the coast of Tanzania shortly after finishing our safari in the Ngorongoro Crater. Our original plan is to go directly to the island of Zanzibar for some rest and relaxation on the world famous beaches. But when we learn that it is possible to take a ferry to the smaller island of Pemba from where we can connect to another ferry for Zanzibar, we decide to take a small detour. Unfortunately, the ferry from Tanga only runs on Tuesdays and we arrive on a Saturday so we have to wait for a few days. No matter, we buy ourselves a nice bag of local weed, get a room with a balcony overlooking the ocean and proceed to amuse ourselves by socializing with the good citizens of Tanga.

  When Tuesday arrives, we ditch the marijuana before catching the ferry because there is supposed to be a customs inspection on Zanzibar. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get more after arrival. The boat trip across the ocean takes about five hours. Docking the boat on the island, however, takes another three hours because there is no jetty or dock and it’s low tide. We end up having to slog through ankle deep mud in order to reach the shore. Customs inspection is minimal. A single officer in a plain wooden shack has to process all hundred or so people who disembark from the ferry. He looks at my passport and waives me through without searching me at all. Nevertheless, I’m still glad I got rid of the contraband before the process. Formalities complete, we follow the crowd up a steep path and into the town of Wete on the north side of the island.

  Wete is a Muslim place …a very Muslim place. All the women wear a dark black covering over their whole bodies except the tiny slits for their eyes and all the men wear long pants and long sleeve shirts even though the temperature is around 100 degrees. The Koran teaches that both men and women should be modest in dress and these people take their religion very seriously. Wandering around in shorts and a t-shirt while looking for a place to stay, I feel like I am half naked. Nevertheless, the people don’t seem offended by my attire. To the contrary, they seem amused by my strangeness and they all greet me with smiles and nods. Ultimately, we find a nice but inexpensive place to stay where we are welcomed by a very friendly older man. He’s not the kind of guy to ask about marijuana though so instead we ask about swimming. He gives us directions to a nearby spot and that’s where we go after dropping our backpacks in the room.

  But the swimming hole is a shithole that no sane person would immerse himself in. No doubt the local kids are taking the plunge but I am not the least bit tempted even though the temperature hovers around a hundred. It’s just a tiny opening between the mangroves with lots of floating plastic bags and bottles.

  That’s the thing about Pemba which separates it from Zanzibar. Zanzibar has perfect blue waters, endless white sand beaches and an almost infinite number of tourist hotels to choose from. Pemba is covered with overgrown mangroves so it has almost no beaches and therefore no tourists. It’s a totally different universe. Pemba is also 99 percent Muslim and alcohol is not a part of their culture so finding beer here is nearly impossible. So we are on an island but there are no beaches, no grass, no booze and the women are covered from head to toe. What in the hell can we possibly do for fun here?

  In the evening, the hotel owner informs us that there is indeed a beach on Pemba. It’s called Vumawimbi beach but it’s very hard to get to. There’s no public transport; it’s 25 kilometers away and the road is very very rough. We can rent bicycles if we want but the journey will be extremely difficult. I, however, disagree with the assessment of difficulty. Fifty kilometers round trip on a bicycle should be easy. That’s only 30 miles. I do that almost every day back home. So we agree to rent the bikes and plan the excursion for the following morning.

  Fifty kilometers in one day is no problem on my nice 20 speed expensive American made bike on well-paved roads in comfortable temperatures in upstate New York. Fifty kilometers round trip on a one speed, very old, half broken, very small, Chinese bicycle with a basket on the front on the worst roads on the planet in hundred degree temperatures is a whole different transportation reality. Visualize the absurdity: A peaceful African village on an island in the middle of nowhere calmly going about its day-to-day activities when all of a sudden, two crazy muzungus (Swahili for white guy) come pedaling through on shitty old bicycles that are way, way too small for them. In the first hour or so, we pass through four such villages and the following conversation takes place no less than 100 times.

  Local man: “Jambo!” (hello in Swahili).

  Pat and Marius: “Jambo!”

  Local man: “Mambo vipee?” (how are you?)

  Pat and Marius: “Poa.” (good or fine).

  Local man: “Karibu sana.” (very welcome).

  Pat and Marius: “Asante.” (thank you).

  Admittedly, the conversations are extremely short because my knowledge of Swahili is limited and I am speeding by on a bicycle (well, O.K., not exactly speeding). But just imagine having literally hundreds of people welcome you to their island. Real welcomes too; not just words, but smiles and gestures with honest enthusiasm. In addition to the remarkably friendly adults, there are the kids. They all shout “Muzungu! Muzungu!” or “Hello, hello,” or “Good morning.” Oh what a bizarre sight Marius and I must be. But they have no fear whatsoever. Nothing but openness and welcome. I can’t help but think of my own country. What would happen if two black Muslim guys came riding through a suburban neighborhood on bicycles. How would they be received?

  About an hour or so into the ride, tragedy strikes. Marius gets a flat tire. Now what? We have no spare and no pump. We are stuck. We have to walk the bicycles. But we manage to make it to the next tiny village. I am not exaggerating in the least when I say that the entire village comes out to help Marius fix his flat. They all gather around us to shake our hands and welcome us …“No problem the bicycle. We can fix.” About ten of them actually work to take the tire off and patch the leak while the rest just gather around and smile and pat our backs and shake our hands. “Look. How cool? There’s muzungus in our village.” Eventually, they fix our tire and we continue on our way. After several more hours of very hard riding we come to a forest. The trail goes through the forest and past several more villages. The farther and farther we go, the more primitive the villages become. By the time we get close to the beach, the villages are nothing but houses made of reeds and lots of half-naked children running around. But still, it is the same. “Look at those crazy muzungus. What are they doing here? Welcome strangers. Welcome strangers.”

  When we finally get to the beach, it’s downright amazing. It’s several kilometers long with gorgeous white sand backed by palm trees and forest with absolutely nobody on it. The water is shallow so we have to walk a ways out on a sandbar to swim. I can hardly believe that a beach of this size is absolutely empty …Yeah, that’s right, life is very very good. Why haven’t the Western developers taken over this place and spoiled it with big fancy hotels yet? I don’t’ know. But I hope they never do.

  The journey back from the beach is more of the same except that I am absolutely worn out and somewhat overwhelmed with heat exhaustion. The crazy Muzungu thing takes on a whole new dimension as I start to hallucinate. Who needs marijuana? Just push the body to absurd extremes in torturous heat; wow,
what a buzz… . Muzungu! Muzungu! Welcome! Welcome! Smiling happy faces jumping up and down. Is this really the planet Earth? I didn’t think people could have so much fun. And these people have nothing by our standards, absolutely nothing …no electricity, no television, no indoor plumbing, no computers, no iPods, no iPads. They do have food; plenty of it I think: fish and fruit and rice. But they have nothing else. Yet they seem so damn happy? How is it possible?

  Somehow, we make it back to the guesthouse and I don’t die from the effort. I have a good meal and then lie on my back in the room under the ceiling fan. A day like today makes me think. I’m not one who idolizes the primitive, subsistence lifestyle. I don’t exactly believe that we should abandon all Western luxuries and live simple lives. And I do realize that people in these villages have hard lives and they suffer and they die and it’s not paradise. But still, there’s something about it; something pure, something beautiful; something that I’m having a difficult time expressing. I guess it’s this: In the Western world, we are taught by the media and the government and the religious institutions that we are supposed to pity and feel sorry for the suffering in the Third World. Theoretically, the rest of the world needs the First World to help them progress and develop. But the reality I experienced explicitly contradicts this notion. Honestly, I see more happy smiling kids in one day on Pemba than I have seen in the U.S. in the last forty years. If the purpose of our constitution and government is truly to help citizens pursue happiness, then maybe, just maybe, we have as much to learn from the Third World as they have to learn from us.

  The next morning, we leave Wete and travel by very crowded mini-bus (dalla dalla) to the town of Chake Chake in the middle of the island. Once again, it’s a Muslim place so there is no beer or weed anywhere to be found. What the heck can we do? The guidebook recommends some stone ruins on the end of Mkumba peninsula as a good destination. It’s only 40 kilometers round trip but the road is really bad and there is no public transport. Should we rent bicycles again? If only we could get some decent ones. Surprise, surprise; we meet a guy who says he can get us mountain bikes, real mountain bikes. All right then, that’ll be easy; only 40 kilometers round trip is no problem on a mountain bike.