The Best American Travel Writing 2007

by Orlean, Susan

• ISBN13: 9780618582174
• ISBN10: 0618582177
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-10
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

"Travel is not about finding something. It's about getting lost -- that is, it is about losing yourself in a place and a moment. The little things that tether you to what's familiar are gone, and you become a conduit through which the sensation of the place is felt." -- from the introduction by Susan Orlean The twenty pieces in this year's collection showcase the best travel writing from 2006. George Saunders travels to India to witness firsthand a fifteen-year-old boy who has been meditating motionless under a tree for months without food or water, and who many followers believe is the reincarnation of the Buddha. Matthew Power reveals trickle-down economics at work in a Philippine garbage dump. Jason Anthony describes the challenges of everyday life in Vostok, the coldest place on earth, where temperatures dip as low as minus-129 degrees and where, in midsummer, minus-20 degrees is considered a heat wave. David Halberstam, in one of his last published essays, recalls how an inauspicious Saigon restaurant changed the way he and other reporters in Vietnam saw the world. Ian Frazier analyzes why we get sick when traveling in out-of-the-way places. And Kevin Fedarko embarks on a drug-fueled journey in Djibouti, chewing psychotropic foliage in "the worst place on earth." Closer to home, Steve Friedman profiles a 410-pound man who set out to walk cross-country to lose weight and find happiness. Rick Bass chases the elusive concept of the West in America, and Jonathan Stern takes a hilarious Lonely Planet approach to his small Manhattan apartment.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth 1 from WorldHum.com

Lost in Space 8 from the Los Angeles Times Magazine

High in Hell 24 from Esquire

A Kielbasa Too Far 43 from Outside

Lost in America 54 from Backpacker

Long Day's Journey into Dinner 71 from GQ

Arieh 89 from the Missouri Review

The Boys of Saigon 107 from Gourmet

Hutong Karma 115 from The New Yorker

Miles from Nowhere 129 from The American Scholar

Birth of a Nation? 148 from The New Yorker

The Long Way Home 168 from Outside

Do Not Disturb 184 from Gourmet

The Magic Mountain 190 from Harper's Magazine

Streets of Sorrow 210 from Condé Nast Traveler

The Incredible Buddha Boy 219 from GQ

Brazil's Untamed Heart 246 from Travel Leisure

Circle of Fire 255 from The New Yorker

The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment 288 from The New Yorker

Fantasy Island 292 from Gourmet

Contributors'

Notes 299

Notable Travel Writing of 2006 304

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction The second-worst travel experience I ever had was on a misbegotten trip to a marvelous place that I had gone to for all the wrong reasons. The trip was a few years ago; the place was Bhutan; the reason was love, or what I had mistakenly identified as love, which is probably, technically speaking, the greatest and also the stupidest reason ever to go anywhere. It was not my first time in Bhutan. I had gone there about six months earlier for a story about couples who were attending Bhutanese fertility festivals in hopes of heading home with the ultimate family souvenir. The timing happened to be quite awkward for me I was writing about happy families fulfilling their dream of having children, but the trip itself, coincidentally, marked the beginning of the end of my marriage. My then-husband had planned to come to Bhutan with me, and we figured a trip somewhere interesting and beautiful might extend the lease on our relationship; instead, I headed off with the fertility group, and he stayed back in New York to start clearing out his half of the apartment. I was pretty blue, but after a few days in Bhutan where, by the way, most houses are decorated with large, celebratory paintings of penises I fell madly in love with the tour guide and I started to enjoy the trip a whole lot more. When I returned to New York I was ecstatic. I was convinced that Tshering was my soul mate, notwithstanding the fact that he lived on the other side of the Earth, was somewhat age-inappropriate, and shared with me no cultural, social, intellectual, or religious common ground. Still, I adored him, and I think he adored me, and over the next few months we burned up hundreds of dollars on long-distance phone calls (this was in the pre-Vonage age), planning our future together (doesnt everybody live part- time in Manhattan and part-time in the Himalayas?), trying to figure out how to wangle a visa for him, and reminiscing about every detail of our long (two- week) shared personal history. Finally, the phone calls didnt feel satisfying enough and Tsherings visa wasnt forthcoming, so I mustered the frequent-flyer miles and the nerve to go back to Bhutan to visit him. My trip itself was a trial: the flight from Bangkok to Bhutan was diverted to Calcutta because of fog or smoke or something, so we were led off the plane, stripped of our passports, and locked in a Grade D Calcutta airport hotel. We werent allowed to leave the premises because we didnt have visas to enter India, and no one would say when we might hope to get to Bhutan. The owners of the hotel twin men with what looked like twin wives doled out skimpy portions of rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and seemed not happy to have us as guests. We had no idea when or how we were going to leave in fact, we were warned that we were probably going to have to finish the trip over land, a three-day haul via Indian Air Force transport vans, crossing through Assam, which was convulsing with civil war.

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Excerpted from The Best American Travel Writing
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