The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  As we parted, he asked me for money. I gave him the coins in my pocket. And as I did so, I knew I was not about to get lost—not in Tangier.

  But over the next week, I discovered other forms of lostness. Tangier’s mix of languages—French, Spanish, English, and Arabic—was joyfully disorienting. I could begin a sentence in one, throw in a word or phrase from a second, and end in a third. Thirsty in the afternoon, I’d seek out a café, but since I couldn’t remember the French word for watermelon, I’d order un jus de sandia. Shukran! And I’d be understood, as if this were an everyday request! Indeed, it was.

  In Tangier, hearing, not seeing, was the key. At a nightclub, I drank too much with a group of German, French, American, and Korean expats and closed my eyes to focus on the babble of languages, and the live band’s surprising segue from Miles Davis to salsa. Another day, my wanderings led me to a secluded hilltop spot where the frenzied drumming of a wedding procession whirled up from the unseen lanes of a neighborhood below. As hard as I tried to pinpoint the party, I never caught sight of them, and the intensity of their rhythms wavered only with the strength and direction of the breeze.

  These alternative losts may have made sense when I wrote about them in the Times (and now here), but on the ground in Tangier I still felt like a failure. There—and on subsequent “Getting Lost” treks to Ireland, Chongqing, Jerusalem, and Paris—it was impossible to step back, understand what was going on, and enjoy the myriad nongeographical ways I was losing myself. Instead, I was caught up with the concrete, step-by-step, practical process of getting lost. Do I turn right or left here? Have I seen this store, this intersection before? How can I shield my eyes from those maps on display at every bus stop?

  Paris in particular presented a challenge, as I’d been there at least five times before, and had walked—and walked and walked—across it on each visit, from the hills of Montmartre to the Marais to the corner of the 15th Arrondissement where Jean had lived during her year abroad. I’d shopped at flea markets on the far edges of the city, and picnicked on pizza by the Canal St. Martin. I knew Paris, not perfectly but well, and I thought getting lost there would require an extra effort. So, before I arrived, I immersed myself in research: I read about the flâneur, the aimless urban wanderer who became an icon of nineteenth-century poets like Baudelaire, and about le dérive, literally “the drift,” a theory of “psychogeography” developed by the situationist Guy Debord in the 1950s that described how we move through urban spaces without hesitation. Or something. Frankly, I couldn’t see much difference between flânerie and le dérive, but I did appreciate how very French it was to impose a highbrow intellectual framework upon something normal people already do all the time.

  In fact, I probably got too “French” or Debordian in my own thinking, because immediately upon landing in Paris one rainy September day I was consumed with imposing a theoretical framework on every single footstep. Any time I saw a landmark I recognized—the Carnavalet Museum, say, or the bar Prune—I’d turn around and walk the other way. Except that meant retracing my steps along the path I’d just come from, which also felt verboten. So . . . should I turn right or left? Push on through past the familiar into the unknown? And to what purpose? What was the point of this, except as an intellectual exercise? What would Baudelaire do?

  The walking was wearing me out, too. The first night, exhausted, I’d crashed in a small, nondescript hotel near Place de la République (though I was no longer officially Frugal, the Times hadn’t bumped up my budgets), and as I set off the next morning, a heavy pack on my shoulders, I knew I wouldn’t be able to go another day like this. Up in Montmartre, I happened upon a short-term apartment rental agency, and arranged to stay in a renovated seventh-floor garret for the rest of the week. The apartment—the Eagle’s Nest, they called it—was tiny, clean, and spectacular, with a jaw-dropping view of the city from Montreuil to the Bois de Boulogne. Every evening I’d sit at that window, drinking Sancerre and eating warm, prize-winning baguettes and imagining what might be going on beneath that sea of mansard rooftops.

  And that was the problem: my imagination. I had set off for Paris with a too-fixed idea of what I might find if I got lost—eccentric museums hidden in fourth-story apartments, lively cafés in little-touristed quartiers, Parisians who would, unlike every other Parisian in Paris, greet the arrival of a moderately Francophone American with surprise and glee. (Or whatever passes for glee among Parisians.) But I didn’t really know if such things existed, and I’d denied myself Internet access to find out. Instead, I relied on advertisements in the Métro, and I fixated on strategy: How could I get to the areas I hadn’t yet seen? This was a vexing question—I was staying in Montmartre, from which walking to far-flung parts of Paris would not only take hours but also drag me through those familiar areas again and again. There was the Métro, of course, but if I rode it blindly, I still might resurface somewhere I knew. Unless . . .

  Unless I looked at the subway map.

  So I looked at the subway map.

  In full contravention of my own “Getting Lost” rules, I picked out corners of Paris, plotted my Métro connections, and emerged in Passy, at Tolbiac, at Bel-Air, at Pré-Saint-Gervais, fully prepared to discover what no other travel writer had yet discovered. Which was that my longed-for eccentric museums did not really exist. Instead, I walked past beautiful buildings and saw on their brass nameplates that all those mysterious third-floor suites and garden studios were the offices of gynecologists and physiotherapists. I sat in those side-street cafés and ate duck confit and braised lamb shanks that were, as far as I could tell, awfully similar to the duck and lamb I’d eaten at cafés in other neighborhoods. Innumerable little roads leading up to Père Lachaise, through forgotten swathes of the Marais, or toward the Bourse were lined not with underground boutiques but with wholesalers of crappy Chinese-made clothing.

  It wasn’t that every neighborhood in Paris was the same. Not at all. Passy was crammed with teenagers and bourgeois families browsing international chain stores, while couples in their twenties lounged in the sunny, quiet public parks of the 15th. The primly designed region around the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand had pockets of color—an artists’ collective housed in an old cold-storage warehouse, a shop devoted to Japanese manga, anime, and video games—and La Butte aux Cailles, in the 13th, was precisely what I’d been looking for: the kind of tight-knit, old-school village no one believes still exists in Paris. (It’s not like it’s unknown, but somehow I’d never heard of it.) And yet, when I reported back this discovery to my Parisian friends, they dismissed it. La Butte aux Cailles, they said, was too far from anything to bother visiting—never mind that it’s about five hundred feet from three different Métro stops.

  What I began to understand was that the parts of Paris I already knew—the Marais, the Bastille, the cheap, creative restaurants of the 10th and 11th, Montmartre, and so on—were the parts of Paris that were, to me at least, the parts worth knowing. And instead of recognizing that, instead of trying to enjoy them purely, as if this were my first time in Paris, I was pointlessly pursuing an impossible goal, and filling myself with an angst that masked a weird truth: I was having a great time. Down the rue Catherine in St. Germain, I’d found a postage-stamp cinema showing Humphrey Bogart movies, and (thanks to a subway ad!) I’d discovered an exhibition of body-part-themed art at the Espace Fondation EDF, and I’d been plowing through a new Haruki Murakami novel at cafés across the city. And then there were the baguettes and cold wine at sunset . . .

  But there on the ground, it was hard to see that. Instead, all I could see was failure—a lazy, cheating hipster doing what he always did in Paris.

  It shouldn’t be this way, I kept thinking. And on other “Getting Lost” trips, it wasn’t. In Las Vegas earlier that year, the adventure had unfolded so smoothly. I’d landed at the airport, picked up my rental car, and proceeded to find, by accident, with almost no conscious effort, exactly what I’d hoped to find: an old-school Mexican re
staurant frequented by eye-patch-wearing locals; a revitalizing downtown with lively bars and coffee shops; the Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Hawaiian restaurants of Spring Mountain Road; and crazy-friendly people, like the brilliantly named Krissee Danger, who directed me to odd institutions like the Pinball Hall of Fame. One afternoon, I randomly bumped into James Oseland, the editor of Saveur magazine, in the lobby of the Comopolitan Hotel; we went hiking together in Red Rock Canyon the next day. And one night, Krissee and I wound up in a cocktail bar with Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com, who bought our round of drinks.

  That summer, too, I’d undertaken a remarkable odyssey across the Mediterranean. Make that Odyssey, for I was retracing the voyage of Odysseus, whose epic tale of getting lost is the foundation of Western literature. Having flown into Istanbul, I made my way by bus down to the ruins of Troy, from which, emulating the great hero, I would proceed to the island of Ithaca, on the far side of the Greek mainland. Our routes, I knew, would not be identical. Odysseus had gone north from Troy, then been blown off course somewhere near Kythira, winding up in absolutely imaginary lands. (No matter what the literalists believe, those lands are mythical.) I, however, went west and south, taking ferry after ferry across the islands of the Aegean—but without knowing either the precise geography of the archipelago or the web of ferry connections among the islands. Who knew if a ferry onward would leave the next day—or the next week? Or where I could get to two or three hops down the line? Certainly not the Greeks themselves, who had only rough ideas of which islands were reachable from their own. Each step forward, then, could have led to a dead end, forcing me to backtrack, as Odysseus had through the twin horrors of Scylla and Charybdis.

  Every day I boarded a new boat and landed at a new port, usually with enough free time to rent a car, drive up into the switchbacked hills, find a taverna, and sip sour wine along with a dish of braised lamb and a cucumber-tomato salad. I hiked through Cretan gorges and discussed with a Greek named Little Jim the deaths of his father (at the hands of the Nazis) and his mother (decades later, at the age of one hundred), and stayed at a whitewashed boutique hotel for a mere €40, and met a young hipster with a penny-farthing, and drank Belgian beer while watching clouds rise over a ridge on the island of Kythira, where Odysseus had lost his way.

  “That one looks like a man,” said a bartender.

  His boss agreed: “Like the god Hermes.”

  My Odyssey was a fraught one, in which I alternated between a wanderer’s ebullience and a writer’s deadline anxiety. There was so much to discover on each overlooked island—cafés next to earthquake-ravaged churches, Greeks who’d returned from overseas to restore their grandparents’ houses, tantalizing hints of the historical Homer, the looming political and economic chaos in Athens. Each hospitable Greek who offered me friendship or a free espresso was a Calypso, bent on trapping me here in these edens of olives and ouzo. And yet I had to go, to stumble forward and trust that Tyche, the Greek goddess of luck, would be with me at the port and on the seas. Nothing would be certain until I set foot once more upon a new shore.

  And despite certain last-minute delays (no bus out of Neapoli after 5 p.m.!?!) and expenses (€30 for a taxi across Kefalonia!?!), I made it at last, after ten days of unsure island-hopping, to Ithaca, Odysseus’s home, a camel-humped green island wreathed in morning mist, where I did nothing but rest and stroll and, for a handful of hours, attempt to process my adventures.

  I could not. I never could—not there in the moment. I needed time, and distance, and a blank computer screen to make sense of what I’d gone through. That was where the epiphanies exploded, in the act not of traveling but of writing. But no, I can say now, as I write this, they happen in both places at once—the former may uncover the latter, but the latter was always there, hidden, lost. With perspective, the revelations begin to flow. I can see now, for instance, the difference between getting lost in Vegas and Greece versus elsewhere. On those trips, I’d forgotten to care about geography. Vegas was so flat and obvious I never considered the possibility of losing myself in its grid, while my odyssey was so fast-paced I could look only forward—onward! And by setting aside the prosaic practicalities of getting lost, I opened myself up to the far more important act of getting lucky.

  I was, although I didn’t know it until now, really traveling like an amateur again, trusting that the world would reveal its secrets to me if only I went looking for them. Though I’d honed my navigational skills over decades, it was luck that had always guided me—luck and the courage to accept its sometimes ambiguous consequences.

  Luck, for instance, was with me my first day in Chongqing. Luck sent me to the no. 601 bus headed downtown, past Prada billboards and cloverleaf highways and across the snarling Yangtze River. Luck delivered me a schoolboy who directed me down an alley to a good bowl of noodle soup, crimson with chili oil, fragrant with numbing, citrusy Sichuan peppercorns, studded with bits of pork and intestine. Luck led me past the contradictions of the explosive city: the defunct revolving restaurant atop a skyscraper, the historic neighborhood where trees grew from brick walls and brass plaques championed the deeds of Communist heroes, the central People’s Square where retirees warbled old songs accompanied by guitar and two-stringed erhu. (It took me a few minutes to realize this show was no tourist trap but simply how Chongqing’s elders amused themselves.) All I had done was walk, and ask simple questions, and walk some more, allowing myself to be overwhelmed by the physicality of a city where everything existed on a massive scale—like San Francisco with more hills, two rivers, ten times the population, and neither building codes nor centralized urban planning—and luck had done the rest.

  Until, at last, luck was done with me. As the sun went down, luck deposited me at what I thought was a tidy little hotel but turned out to be seedy, run-down, filled with all-night mahjong players and their rented girlfriends. Luck lured me down to a raucous nightlife area where every bar and club was so flashily, noisily packed that I despaired of ever meeting anyone interesting, or even audible. There were fancy hotels here, and I asked their English-speaking concierges where I might find quieter, more convivial watering holes. They looked at me quizzically and directed me back to the scrum, in which I would be helplessly alone.

  This shouldn’t have unnerved me the way it did. I’d managed days—weeks!—alone before, in Vietnam and on small American highways, and I’d always found my way, always found a bartender happy to discuss Thelonius Monk for an hour, or a friendly bistro owner ready to offer me a few nights’ stay in her guest bedroom. I’d been other kinds of lost before, too, had been lost every which way but geographically, and I’d pushed on, ignored the language barrier, gotten lucky, survived.

  But Chongqing’s size and chaos were beyond me. How could I find anything human-scale and relatable in these concrete-and-steel depths? All my travel powers had fled me, it seemed, and I despaired of making any connection. By the next morning, I was ready to give up. I caught a bus back to the train station, where I’d stashed my bags, and on the way I considered fleeing not just the city but the country. Could Cathay rebook me to Hong Kong or Japan? Danielle would understand. She trusted me. This trip was an adjunct to an assignment for another magazine; it would barely cost the Times a thing; it would be okay. I’d written hundreds of stories already. I could live with one failure, right?

  No, I couldn’t. This would gnaw at me forever.

  The bus rolled on. Another twenty-four hours and I’d be far away, visiting friends in Shanghai or Osaka and trying to forget this unfortunate interlude. I sweated and ground my teeth and wished I were back in Brooklyn, and I cursed these idiotic “Getting Lost” rules. Who came up with them, anyhow?

  I had, I suddenly understood, and if they were my rules, and arbitrary ones at that, I could change them any time I liked. I took out my iPhone—equipped with a local 3G SIM card—and Googled “Chongqing hostel.” And there it was, Tina’s Hostel, a funky little warren of cheap rooms not far from whe
re I’d been staying, in the 18 Steps, an old, hilly neighborhood almost all of whose buildings had been painted with the character “chai,” meaning they were slated for demolition. Inside were a gaggle of young Chinese employees and travelers (it was hard to tell the difference), most of whom spoke decent English, all of whom were curious to explore Chongqing—from its funky underground bars to its far-flung art galleries—and happy to invite me out for a dinner of spicy Sichuan hotpot.

  My room was small, my rules were broken, and I knew exactly where I was, but I felt free at last to make new friends, to ride buses to nowhere, to nibble rare chili peppers in hilltop gardens. And although I never admitted it to myself until just now, I’d discovered what happened when I finally got well and truly lost: I freaked out—and then moved on.

  Chapter 7

  Happy Families

  How I Faced the Ultimate Horror—Traveling with My Family—and Survived to Tell the Tale