Introduction

FOR SOME TIME NOW I’ve been sounding like a small child tugging at his father’s pant leg, asking again and again, Why? In my particular case, the “why” in question pertains to travel writing. Why does it matter? What’s the point? Hasn’t it all been discovered and chronicled? What can we possibly add to the storehouse of information that has come before?

Back in Sir Richard Burton’s day, tales brought back from darkest Africa had real import. Freya Stark’s journeys through Persia were a revelation. Ernest Shackleton’s escape from Antarctica with every soul intact was the stuff of real heroism. How do we top that? The 10 best beaches in the Caribbean right now(!)?

My own experiences with genre emerged only after a long gestation period, as an outgrowth of my travels, the initiation of which sprang from an unwitting urge to connect more with the world in an attempt to better locate my place in it. A 500-mile walk across the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain revealed a fear that had lurked behind so many of my life’s actions, and set in motion a decade of wandering that rewrote how I experienced the world. Travel became not so much about the destination as an end but a means of understanding myself in that place. The world became my university campus. I traveled, mostly alone, to Africa and Southeast Asia, Europe and South America. I was often lonely and learned not to fear travel’s false power. At times I was shrouded in melancholy and came to appreciate the lucidity it evoked. And of course I had serendipitous encounters that still live inside me.

Sometimes I was simply in the right place at the right time. As a young man working in West Berlin I passed through Checkpoint Charlie one early-winter day under the heavy gaze of Communist soldiers. I spent a memorably dreary afternoon walking the deserted streets of East Berlin, the noticeable absence of advertising helping to leave the city a uniform gray under a dirty sky. I ate soggy food and toured an empty museum. Back in West Berlin that night, for the first time I felt the expansiveness of a freedom I had never previously considered. Two days later the Wall fell and I danced amid exultant and pulsing crowds throughout those frigid November nights. I kept my tiny chip of the Berlin Wall for years before it was lost. By then it didn’t matter; my experience in Berlin had become a part of me. I had no need of tokens.

I’ve also been witness to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Deep in the Rocky Mountains I saw the frailty of human life and how quickly it can be vanquished—a swollen and rushing river, a bad decision, and a moment’s loss of concentration that led to tragic results.

My experiences affected me deeply, yet my meandering had an impulsive, almost random quality. It lacked a galvanizing cord. I knew that where I was going and what happened while there had value, yet I struggled with its context.

Then in Saigon I was walking down a sunbaked street one morning when a young man on a scooter drove up beside me and offered to show me the city. I told him to leave me alone and kept walking. He shadowed my movements, he grew insistent—he would be my guide. There was no shaking the young man in the dirty T-shirt. I hopped on the back of his scooter. The Saigon he showed me couldn’t be found in my Lonely Planet guidebook.

He took me to the street corner where his father had been arrested and with real anger told me of the elder man’s unfair treatment. We spent an hour amid wilting plants under the oppression of Southeast Asian humidity, trudging through the community garden that his mother had often taken him to as a child. At the one temple we visited, my guide skulked in the doorway without removing his shoes, smoking, waiting for me to finish a perfunctory walk-through. Mostly I remember zipping down the wide boulevards and slashing through roundabouts, holding on amid thousands of others on scooters in the life-threatening jigsaw jumble that is daily traffic in Saigon.

When he deposited me back at my hotel, my guide demanded more money than we had agreed upon. As I sit writing this more than 20 years later, I can see him before me, his bloodshot left eye adding threat to an already insistent glare as the last rays of daylight cast a fiery glow over the yellow wall of my hotel just past his shoulder. The traffic buzzes behind me, forcing me to lean in to be sure I understand his command correctly. “I show you real Saigon”; his voice is harsh, his already outstretched hand shaking under the strain of his gathering tension.

I can feel the myriad emotions that raced through me at the time—my naive shock at his outburst, my confusion, my sense of powerlessness under his sudden aggression. Surely he needed the money more than I did. Was I really that stingy? Yet there was shame in my acquiescence as I handed over the extra five dollars.

Up in my room I became consumed with anger at being taken advantage of; the sensation of emasculation humiliated me. The indignity at having been overmatched and powerless threatened to consume me.

Travel is often a petri dish for both our character defects and our finer qualities, and in this moment my baser attributes had me in their clutches.

I did something I had never done before. I reached for a pen. I wrote it all down.

I had been walking along the street when a boy, maybe not out of his teens, approached me on a scooter. I wrote how I tried to discourage him and then hopped on behind him. I remembered things he had said and I wrote them down as well. I described the places he took me and what it felt like while I was there. Then I wrote of how our day had ended—with his demand for more money. I wrote of my embarrassment and anger—both at him and at myself for giving precedence to my feelings of inadequacy over his genuine need. When I was done, I stuffed the pages in my bag.

A few weeks later, in Luang Prabang, in northern Laos, I came upon a young American woman berating an elderly Laotian man about the inferior quality of the bicycle he had rented to her. When she left I crossed over to speak with the man and followed him into his home and ate lunch with him. I wrote that down, too.

At Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe on Christmas Eve I danced in a basement club, part of a throbbing, sweating mass, then walked out to a florid sun rising over the cascading falls on Christmas morning. In Machu Picchu, on a starless black night, my flashlight died after I had sneaked into the ancient citadel. I crawled on my hands and knees searching out an exit, for fear of stepping off the edge of the mountain.

I wrote it all down.

In my writing I began to make deeper sense of what I experienced. I started to see connections between seemingly unrelated events and glimpse the import they contained. Insights that had eluded me before rose up in front of me. Things that I had simply forgotten were indelibly recorded.

My writing wasn’t a journal. I had tried that and found my jottings indulgent and repetitive. Mostly they bored me. But almost unwittingly, what I was doing was writing stories. Things I wrote about captured a quality of where I was and what I experienced in a way my journaling couldn’t approach. Sure, others had been here before me, but no one had seen things exactly from my perspective. Suddenly what I saw mattered. I grew more and more connected to the world I inhabited, more invested. My travels had import.

Upon my return home I would toss the notebooks I had by then begun to carry with me into my top dresser drawer. My travel writings were something I did for myself while on the road. I never thought of them as anything more.

Until I did.

I published first one story, and then more. Underneath every piece I wrote was the unspoken message that travel was important. Travel, I was convinced, was not something frivolous, to be indulged in merely by the idle or the wealthy or the unshowered backpacker. It was something worth fighting for. Travel changed my life; it could change yours. Travel mattered: that was my message.

And if it mattered to me, then perhaps it mattered to others. That bond between writer and reader has been much chronicled, and so it follows that if travel mattered, and connecting with the reader was important, then certainly travel writing must have value. Maybe even urgent value.

I devoured the road and wrote about it all. I hiked to the top of Kilimanjaro and dove with sharks off the Tuamotu Islands. I drank tea in Darjeeling, ate prosciutto in Parma; I slept in the Sahara and occasionally in my own bed. I even published that first story from Saigon nearly 20 years after I wrote it. Yet as we grow proficient at anything it can become more and more difficult to maintain access to that original seed of inspiration and connection to the inner delight that first inspired us. Craft and competence are the rewards of repetition, but a dulling of our senses can be the tradeoff. And as any dinner party guest can tell you, there is no greater bore than the world-weary traveler, the been-there-done-that blowhard spewing pronouncements on the military junta in Burma or Patagonia’s vanishing wilderness onto whoever is unfortunate enough to be seated beside him. It ought never to be forgotten that travel can be a revelation, offering the very real possibility of recaptured innocence to our jaded eyes. The paradox of travel’s effort is the renewal it affords.

Which is why I owe all the writers in this volume a debt of gratitude. Underscoring every story here I can hear the silent calling out, Yes, this matters. Follow me!—serving to remind me again why I first left home.

Nowhere in these pages did I feel as if I was being handed a bill of goods. I’ve grown weary of skimming glossies extolling the luxurious vacation and branding it as travel. (After a good session of travel I’ve often found myself in need of a nice vacation.) Tell me a story, don’t sell me a destination, I’ve thought more than once as I toss a travel magazine aside. You’ll find no selling here, just hard-won experience offered up.

These tales are a testament to the importance of setting out, a call to the open road and its possibilities, lessons, heartbreaks, and occasional joys—a reaffirmation of the value of the investment required to leave the safety of shore. As yet unknown riches await the bold.

In reading many of these stories I’m reminded that in so much of the best travel writing, it is the anonymous and solitary traveler capturing a moment in time and place, giving meaning to his or her travels, that inspires and elucidates. I’ll always take the subjective account from the lonely troubadour, with all the traps and fallibility it is prone to, over the detached second- or thirdhand summing up by the scholar who never left home.

The tale that Benjamin Busch tells of his return to Iraq 10 years after his posting as a Marine is among the most dispassionate and affecting reportage I have encountered in the thousands and thousands of words I’ve digested about that conflict. It is also one of the most engrossing pieces of travel writing I’ve read in a very long while. I’m thrilled to include it here. And Stephen Connely Benz’s recounting of his Fulbright year placed me beside him in a Moldova I will most probably never see.

Still another type of travel writing seems to reside almost entirely out of time. Patricia Marx floats in watery limbo during her transatlantic crossing aboard a freighter. David Farley’s elegiac meditation exists in a Varanasi that holds a very long view of time, while Paul Salopek’s epic walk across much of the planet endeavors to retrace time from man’s first steps. And then there’s Gary Shteyngart. His hilarious assessment of hotel sex occupies a time and place all its own.

Despite the cynics’ cries to the contrary, the world is still there waiting to be discovered. The globe keeps spinning, sometimes at an alarming rate, reinventing itself almost daily. Timbuktu, once an end-of-the-rainbow ideal, recently plagued by strife, is represented in this volume by two stories. Patrick Symmes and Adriana Páramo give us very different reports of intrepid travel to that desert Oz. While Nick Paumgarten’s recounting of wild nights in Berlin tells of a different kind of mettle needed on the road.

Of course there are the rabbit holes of travel. Lauren Groff’s discovery of mermaids in central Florida, Iris Smyles’s cruise down the Rhone River, and Rachael Maddux’s unlikely visit to Dayton, Tennesse, hint at lives many of us might never consider. Here also, Maud Newton offers a candid reexamination of a visit to the Holy Land in her brief treatise, and Lauren Quinn takes us to Cambodia to assess Pol Pot’s final resting place.

Motion itself has long been a staple of the travel narrative, and it is represented here as well. Monte Reel transects South America and captures much of the continent’s internal contradictions, while Kevin Baker’s rail journey across America reminds us what a long strange trip in the wrong direction train travel in this country has become.

And it strikes me as fitting that this volume concludes with a piece by the spiritual godfather of contemporary American travel writers. Forty years ago Paul Theroux, with an immersive style, barbed-wire observations, and sometimes merciless candor, rewrote what a travel narrative could be in The Great Railway Bazaar. His exploration here through the American South shows us that this lifelong road warrior has not lost a step.

All these writers have rejuvenated my sometimes flagging travel spirits and inspired me to look again to the horizon. Each has reinvigorated me in a different way. Each has reignited my passion to hit the road, to set out—for it is of course in the leaving that we afford ourselves the opportunity to be found. As the stories here reveal, the world is still eager to receive the solitary sojourner with a hungry spirit who is willing to keep a keen eye out and an attentive ear to the ground in an effort to capture the telling moment, then send it back across the wire—and, perhaps, through the years.

ANDREW MCCARTHY