The Wonder Trail

by Steve Hely

  Almost as interesting as Bruce Chatwin’s book is his life story, told in a 1999 biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Chatwin had a “gift for instant intimacy,” Shakespeare says. People were always inviting him to stay at their summer house and introducing him to their most interesting friends. Chatwin was an art dealer for a while, studied archaeology for a time, and spent three years trying to write a book that would prove that humans by nature were nomads. When “warped in conditions of settlement,” we go crazy with “violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new.” We’d walked out of Africa and we never should’ve stopped walking was Chatwin’s idea.

  He lived up to it. He was apt to head to Niger and Cameroon for three months, or a few weeks in the Sudan anytime he felt restless. He’d send his wife letters suggesting “we meet somewhere in Western rather than Central Asia on or around Aug 25.”

  Elizabeth Chatwin met Bruce when they both worked at Sotheby’s auction house. On one of their first meetings, Elizabeth remembered Bruce eating a tin of caviar without offering her any, and then asking her to buy him an Hermès diary, then inviting her to a dinner, an invitation he canceled at the last minute because there were already too many women coming. Bruce sometimes told people they’d met on an archaeological dig in Persia. A few years later they were married, even though Elizabeth knew Bruce was bisexual.

  Chatwin made a lot of things up, and he hid a lot of things, too. He was a “polymorphous pervert,” said one (female) lover. He had strings of male lovers, too. He left his sexual adventurers out of In Patagonia, though he apparently slept with at least one of the boys he describes. Invention, the blending of fact and fiction, didn’t seem to be a big deal for him, it was part of the art. He shrugged off accusations from critics.

  When his health started to give out, around age forty, he told friends he’d gotten a rare Chinese fungal infection, perhaps “from eating a slice of raw Cantonese whale.” He told someone else he’d caught a disease from bat feces. But he knew he had HIV. At age forty-eight, he died in the South of France, and his ashes were scattered near the ancient town of Kardamyli in Greece.

  The Australian poet Les Murray, who knew him, said of Chatwin, “He was lonely, and he wanted to be.”

  * * *

  Maybe that’s what it takes to write a true masterpiece of a travel book. Myself, by the time I got to Patagonia, I was lonely and I didn’t want to be.

  The Bottom

  The first guesthouse I’d tried in Punta Arenas, capital of Magallanes and Antártica Chilena, was already closed for the winter. But the owners, a young couple, made me a cup of tea anyway. They told me not to miss the cemetery in Punta Arenas.

  “It’s the most beautiful cemetery in the world.”

  It might just be. The next morning before the sun came up, I walked out to the cemetery gates. Inside were white marble tombs, mausoleums for landowner families that got rich in the sheep boom of the 1890s. The cemetery gate was paid for by Sara Braun, a daughter of Baltic German Jewish immigrants who inherited from her husband and then ran herself an empire based on sheep raising and seal hunting.

  I climbed up the hill overlooking the town, and could see across the water to Tierra del Fuego.

  Welp, I thought, that’s it. That’s pretty much the bottom.

  There was still Puerto Williams to visit. That’d been my original destination all along, the southernmost city in the world. I could hop a plane and check it off.

  Meh, I thought. What’s over there, buncha sheep and oil wells? I’ll catch it next time.

  I mean, I could keep going to Antarctica, but really, what would the point of that be? Time to go home.

  Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty I was still curious about. The tepui plateaus of Venezuela, say. Pain in the ass to get there, but it looks worth seeing. And hadn’t I skipped entirely the Llanos Orientales of Colombia, where gauchos have the roughest rodeos in the world? Could be an interesting time. Quito, I really should’ve seen. And it was a shame, really, that I’d skipped Belize entirely.

  Maybe I could keep at it. Just: Never stop. Keep wandering until I’d exhausted the world. How about Bhutan? Grassy Lesotho, and the cows of Swaziland? Ireland and Italy: There’re two whole worlds right there. Those I’d been to, and I still wanted to go back.

  But when I scrolled back through my memory of all the wonders I’d experienced, what mattered more than anything was people. Even strangers had become, in a few hours, more important to me than any wonder I saw, any mountain or ruin. And those were strangers. What about the people I loved? The people I loved the most were all back in the United States. They were hanging out in Los Angeles, drinking in New York, going to bed in Needham, Massachusetts.

  People are what’s best in the world, I say. Or maybe “people are who’s best in the world.” Quote me both ways. People are what’s most interesting, too. People are who’s most interesting.

  * * *

  For one last Chilean sandwich, I stopped at Lomit’s. SANDWICHES PARA SERVIRSE Y LLEVAR. LOMITOS—SCHOPS—TORTAS—HELADOS—BEBIDAS. I ordered a lomito Italiano.

  “Perdon, amigo. De donde eras?” A kindly looking older guy sitting next to me at the bar had taken a break from talking to his friends and turned to me. I told him I was American.

  “Your Spanish is very good,” he said to me, in Spanish. This wasn’t true, but I was proud of it anyway. “Are you spending long in Patagonia?”

  No, I told him, I was, in fact, leaving that afternoon.

  “Well,” he said, “if you come back, give me a call. I give tours of this area. Out to see the penguins, to Tierra del Fuego.”

  “Do you ever go to Puerto Williams?”

  “Yes, sometimes. There’s not much there.”

  “I’ll come back sometime and go there,” I told him, and he gave me his business card. A German name. He said his ancestors had immigrated here in the 1880s.

  That afternoon I flew back, by way of Santiago and Panama, took a taxi back to my house, plopped my bag down on my floor, and let my cat consider my return. The next day, I went back to doing my stuff, and tried to spend as much time as possible with the people I loved.

  * * *

  At night I wrote this book. Through which I hope you went on a kind of a trip, too.

  Now that it’s done, I’m thinkin’ about going to Honolulu. The Hawaiian Islands are super interesting. Forget that they were once called the Sandwich Islands, after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, who had an affair with the opera singer Martha Ray while his wife was going insane, and who probably invented the sandwich so he could eat roast beef without looking away from his gambling. How about when the last queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, who married a Boston ship captain, spent five years imprisoned in the ‘Iolani Palace writing songs? Did you know that twenty-three sets of brothers died when the USS Arizona was sunk at Pearl Harbor? How terrible is that? Hawaii sounds like a paradise, but it seems to shimmer just out of the grasp of so many of the people who have passed through there . . .

  Could I do the Kalalau Trail barefoot? I wonder . . .

  Detail from Diego Rivera’s mural Dream Of A Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park. That’s a lot of Mexican history packed into one mural.

  A Mayan church and graveyard in the hills outside San Cristóbal. Seemed like it could be a very cool start to a horror movie.

  The waterfall at Agua Azul. Would you rather watch this or Dragon Ball Z?

  Mural of a royal festival, Bonampak, Mexico. Not pictured: captives getting their fingernails ripped out.

  Road, Guatemala, seen from the bus.

  Motorbike parked under a tree in El Remate, Guatemala. This is the photo I would enter into a travel photography contest. If you’re having one let me know.

  Temple of the Cross, Palenque.

  All the food groups, Guatemala.

  Lake Atitlán, Gua
temala. Don’t look for me here.

  Guatemalan boy stealing my look.

  Shag mural depicting the inspiring history of Nicaragua.

  Volcano on Ometepe, Nicaragua, seen from the island’s main (only?) road.

  The Panama Canal Railway. Definitely Panama’s #1 railway.

  A ship squeezing its way through the locks of the Panama Canal. Not a ton of wiggle room.

  The ruins of Old Panama. A crap UNESCO site, in my opinion.

  Guna women waiting in the San Blas islands.

  The crew of the Jaqueline. The girls are making lanyards, which was a fad aboard.

  Cartagena. I don’t think the theater is open.

  Good Friday procession, Popayán. An angel and her skeleton-slave.

  Soccer game, Iquitos, Peru.

  High water on the Amazon.

  The shaman's house.

  A sloth, trying his best to keep it together.

  Llama, Machu Picchu

  The author at Machu Picchu, smiling with altitude-related lightheadedness and delight at seeing a llama eat an apple.

  León Dormido, or Sleeping Lion Rock, the Galápagos. (Doesn’t look that much like a sleeping lion if you ask me.)

  Blue-footed boobies doing their thing in the Galápagos.

  Dried llama fetuses for sale in the witches' market of La Paz, Bolivia.

  La Paz, Bolivia. Twelve thousand feet and climbing.

  Roadside/seaside store, Chile.

  Sixteenth-century church in the Atacama Desert.

  I don't think the bus is running.

  Desert lake in the Atacama. Chile is so cool even their deserts have lakes.

  I feel you, pal. Santiago, Chile.

  Colored houses and steep streets in Valparaiso, Chile.

  New friends (guanacos) in Torres del Paine, Patagonia.

  Punta Arenas, the bottom of the world.

  (Free Offer for a Bonus E-Book)

  Back before I wrote this book, I had an idea to write a book called A Trip to Canada. I spent three weeks in British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories before it truly dawned on me that A Trip to Canada is literally the most boring title ever for a book.

  Anyway, I assembled the wreckage and if you’d like to read it, e-mail me—helphely@gmail.com—and I’ll send you the PDF for free.

  The one rule is you have to have bought The Wonder Trail.

  (If you got this book from the library, but you still want a copy of A Trip to Canada, well, write me. I’ll probably send it to you anyway.)

  (If you stole this book, then fuuuuuck you, dude.)

  Appendix

  Female Travel Writers

  Writing this book and looking at my bookshelf, it occurred to me, I have a strong bias toward travel books written by guys. That might be because men are more likely to brag or write books or publish books, or they’ve historically had all the time and money and reason to travel, and most of my books are old.

  But whatever, it’s like 95 percent to 5 percent. I’m sure I have all kinds of biases, but this one I noticed, and when you notice a bias, you should try to correct it, right? So I did. I tried to read books by female travel writers.

  Here are, for my money, some of the best ones:

  Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels. Now, that is just a baller title, by an obvious baller of a woman. Freya Stark got half her hair ripped out in a factory machine when she was a teenager. In World War I, she was a nurse. In World War II, she wrote propaganda in Arabic. In between, she wrote some twenty books about one incredible adventure after another.

  Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer. This isn’t really a book about a trip, but it is about a place she was visiting, on the coast of Brittany, where the men harvest oysters and the women have all kinds of drama happening. Sometimes she goes a little nuts with it, just sometimes, just my opinion, like it can’t possibly be as heartbreaking as she describes it. But maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age. I hope not! Anyway, great book.

  Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love. Okay, the first time I tried to read this, when it was already superfamous, I was like What the fuck? I mean, in the first few pages, this bitch is in Connecticut and she has her fucking dream job traveling the world for fancy magazines, a fucking dream husband who was also rich, a dream life with an apartment in New York City and a house in the country, who had everything she admits she ever wanted, and then is like “I was crying on the floor because there had to be more for me!”

  But: I kept reading. Now I think it’s like a spiritual masterpiece.

  Elizabeth Gilbert is hypnotizing, and I understand why thousands of people pay to hear her talk on Oprah’s The Life You Want Tour. She’s obviously got something figured out.

  Cheryl Strayed, Wild. To many women I know, Cheryl Strayed is like something better and stronger and more heroic and valuable than a saint. I’m definitely not gonna mess with her or them: all respect to this book. One thing about this book is that it was a good, like, I guess reminder to me that when women walk around in strange places, they are constantly being stared at and preyed on by men. Whereas I could stroll the streets and nobody was gonna think about me much at all. That’s an advantage, I’d say.

  Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle. Here’s the first sentence of this book: “On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.” Then she did. Dervla is an Irishwoman, and she is tough and no-nonsense and sharp. I can’t help but think she’d find a lot wrong with the way I traveled, but hey: I’m not as clearheaded as she is, I’m doing the best I can.

  This book is great.

  Early on in it, Dervla Murphy says, “The temptation to make myself sound more learned than I am, by gleaning facts and figures from an encyclopedia and inserting them in appropriate places, has been resisted.”

  Well, obviously, in my book the temptation hasn’t been resisted. I hope I’m not being dishonest. The truth is, I think part of my job here is to glean facts and figures, from encyclopedias and whatever else I can find, and insert them in appropriate places, so you can have them, Reader. It’s part of my service as writer.

  I promise you I’m not just trying to make myself sound more learned. I make no claims at learneditude.

  Anyway: I love you, Dervla!

  (I can picture her curtly dismissing my cheap American affection.)

  * * *

  When he was twenty-seven, in 1953, James Morris, a newspaper reporter, was at the base camp of the British Mount Everest Expedition when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit for the first time. He wired the news, in code, to London and broke the story. His book about this, Coronation Everest, is pretty fun. A few years later, in 1964, James started transitioning to Jan Morris. Jan has written a bunch of great travel books: To pick one more or less at random, how about The Great Port: A Passage Through New York. Or Journeys. Bow down to Jan.

  Guides (Human)

  If you’re a gawky idiot who bumbles through eleven countries, the number of people from whom you must seek help is obscene. If you’re any kind of person, you should try to thank all of them in person, and I tried to, but here are some people I thought I should double-thank.

  Marco of Croozy Scooters. I endorse this man and his business. His patience and generosity to a traveler was one of the finer displays of coolness and good character I can remember. If in San Cristóbal, why not check out Croozy Scooters?

  The people of Mayabell, in Palenque. These people were unusually good to me in many ways and I loved being in this place.

  The journalist and the graphic designer who were very patient with me in answering many questi
ons about Mexico. Thank you.

  Guatemala Pam, I tried to change enough of your story that it will never unravel, yet keep enough of it so I could share some of your human amazingness.

  Miah and dude at La Tortuga Verde, thanks for talking to me about surfing.