The Best Travel Writing 2010True Stories from around the World

James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger, and Sean O’Reilly, eds. Travelers’ Tales: Palo

Alto, CA, 2010.

Introduction: William Dalrymple

• Goes to Mani in the Peloponnese, where Chatwin had asked for his ashes to be scattered

• Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor goes with him (famous British travel writer known for bridging the gap between the UK and the Hellenic world)

• Both Dalrymple and Fermor have written books about the traveler-wanderer

• Fermor: A Time of Gifts and A Time to Keep Silence: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977)

• Dalrymple: Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (1999)

• Travel writing enjoys a bonanza in the 70s and 80s

• 20 years later, academics were accusing all the writers of orientalism and cultural imperialism

• This seems wrong, since travel writing is one of the oldest forms of literature

• Instead of being cultural imperialists, travelers are often misfits who set out alone

• Their vulnerability is often “an expression of rejection of home and embrace of the other: the history of travel is full of individuals who have fallen in love with other cultures and other parts of the world in this way.” (xxi)

• Do we need travel writing when we can easily turn to Google Earth and “travel” ourselves?

• Rory Stewart (travel writer of the Middle East): travel books allow us to explore in an importantly unhurried way

• Colin Thubron, another current travel writer (To a Mountain in Tibet, March 1, 2011) notes that many world places are terribly misunderstood; we need to keep reading

• Dalrymple: “It’s no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly traveled…” (xxvi)

Laura Lee Huttenbach: “Stuck in Bulawayo”

• She’s told not to trust anyway in Zimbabwe, but winds up in Bulawayo, stuck because the train to Victoria Falls has been cancelled

• She doesn’t know anyone there, but has a contact from someone who hosted her in another village

• She’s a tall blond woman—hardly inconspicuous• She calls and says Rafuro gave her the number in

case she needed help, and the man immediately says he’ll come for her

• Mark escorts her all around—all on the word of a friend– he didn’t even know whom he was supposed to be helping out! It was enough that she was a friend of a friend.

• “I entered Zimbabwe without one contact. I would leave with a notebook full of Zimbabwean friends and family.” (24)

• Her intention had been to speed through a country noted for danger and corruption. “Now I wished for more time in this beautiful country, with the best people in the world.”

Peter Wortsman: “Epiphany of a Middle-Aged Pilgrim in Tea-Stained Pajamas”

• He’s almost falling asleep reading the news when an article catches his eye: a stolen Caravaggio has just been found

• He remembers back to 1969, when he was in Europe and on a quest to track down every Caravaggio he could find.

• His parents are ecstatic he’s interested in culture.. But it’s mostly the virgins he likes-and Caravaggio’s blend of grace and violence

• In Palermo he’d been searching for a certain Caravaggio titled “Nativity with Saints Francesco and Lorenzo”

• When he finally finds the church, he’s devastated to learn that the painting has been stolen

• “It’s a bad joke. Unable to believe my eyes, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I’ve traveled the length of Italy’s boot to see a painting that isn’t there, a phantom masterpiece.” (48)

• What does this suggest about our expectations for travel?

• What are we looking for when we travel? Is it really Caravaggio?

• When do we have the right to be disappointed?

David Torrey Peters:“Takumbeng, C’est Quoi?”

• In Ugborodo, Nigeria, a seething mob of several hundred women takes over the Chevron Texaco Escravos refinery, the largest oil processing facility in Africa

• How do they accomplish this?• They’re all naked.• Are they the stuff of legends?• But they appear in Cameroon as well

• Peters gets a grant to study the ties between witchcraft and politics

• Keeps hearing tales about the naked women• Peters even goes to lunch with Fru Ndi,

Cameroon’s president, but the man doesn’t want to talk about this group

• Peters turns to the work of a doctoral student, Nwga Mary-Anne Ngengang

• She defines the Takumbeng as “a secret society of women that can only appear when the deities themselves have called the women together.” (138)

• It’s not a club. It’s a “physical manifestation of a higher power.” (139)

• The members are older women who preserve moral order. (Usually they appear to avenge wives who have been beaten or mistreated.)

• When they pass through the neighborhoods, everyone clears out of the way. Men who accidentally gaze at them run the risk of death, or at least impotence.

• When French soldiers go to the area, they famous ask, “Takumbeng? C’est quoi?” It becomes a joke indicating someone doesn’t know what he or she is getting into.

• Novelist Francis Nyamjoh: In the Western world, reality has to be rational. In Cameroon, however, the natural and supernatural merge, as do the real and unreal.

Richard Goodman: “L’Inondation”

• He and his girlfriend have been living near Nimes when a terrible flood hits. Houses are destroyed, cars are overturned, nine have died.

• They are so moved that they go to help out. (cf “angeli del fango” in Florence)

• The first people they ask turn down the offer of help.

• The next man they find is streaked in mud.• He eagerly accepts their help, and they spend the

whole day helping him and his wife cart mud out of their basement.

• Everything in the house had been ruined—furniture, photos, rugs.

• At lunchtime they manage some conversation using rudimentary French. The man had been a policeman, but he had a bad back, so he’d been eager to accept help.

• Neighbors had brought over food—which the couple shared with Goodman and girlfriend

• When they leave, at 5pm, exhausted, they shake hands and say goodbye. That’s it.

• “They thanked us, but it wasn’t effusive or melodramatic. They still had much to do—weeks of work at least. That’s what they were thinking about. I’m sure they were still stunned.” (182)

• Goodman and girlfriend come back twice more and help strangers all day. They don’t mention what they did in the village (they assume their neighbors will think they’re crazy)

• Goodman’s recent book: French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France (2002)

Pico Iyer: Living among Incompatibles

• During the traditional Gion Matsuri festival in Kyoto, he notices gangster symbols, women with artificial tans, small boys with cell phones.

• “When I first came to Japan, these contradictions.. startled me every day.” (184)

• “If the test of a first-rate mind, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time, and still keep going, then Japan, I thought, had the best mind I’d encountered in a lifetime of traveling.”

• Perhaps part of the beauty of Japan is that “it invites, and sometimes forces the foreigner to leave his assumptions at home.” (184)

• We may assume a culture is modern or traditional, refined or coarse.. But it’s not usually so simple.

• “The Japanese are happy to see both things simultaneously. They adhere to a belief in both/and and more than in either/or.”

• “This allows them to collect an almost indefinite number of selves and surfaces without remaining any less themselves within.”

• He postulates that this might be partially due to the fact that the Japanese think in images—which can “sit side by side, belonging to different worlds, like parallel lines in haiku.”

• “It’s not uncommon, near where I live, to see a Zen abbot stepping out of a late-model Mercedes on his way to his favorite bar in the red-light district.”

• After playing your role, you’re allowed to slip out of your robe.

• Everything is reversed in Japan, so “what is exotic for them, and what is normal, is the opposite of the way it might be for us.” (186)

• How can they manage this? By drawing strict lines between their worlds.

• One result: appearances in Japan are more deceiving than anywhere else.

• McDonald’s offers “Moon-Viewing Burgers”; Japanese baseball players smile when they strike out

• “The newcomer arriving in Japan will probably find more that she didn’t expect than in any other country in the world.”

• “He will find, for example, a quiet people who (maybe for that reason) love nothing more than noise.”

• Near still Kyoto temples lie pachinko parlors• “The self, whether it belongs to Mrs. Suzuku

or Japan, is a pliable, fluid, mutable thing in Japan, less like a monument than a river. Try to put a Western frame on it, and everything slips through your hands.” (189)

Tim Ward: Frenzy and Ecstasy

• Goes to Skyros for the festival of Dionysus, in which the men become man-beasts, the women become wild maenads, and the gods possess both with divine madness.

• Dionysus intoxicated his worshippers and possessed them. The women would abandon their husbands and turn violent as they were filled with ecstasy.

• But this exists in modern Greece as well. A Dionysus website writer explains to Ward about this strange religious ecstasy. Since Dionysus is a god of extremes, he can only be reached through extreme acts: dancing, drinking, tearing apart live animals.

• Web writer: “Many people might cringe at these accounts, but there is no middle road for the wary, there is no way to tiptoe up to Dionysus and tap him on the shoulder.” (315)

• Divine madness can bring great results, or great ruin

• “For those who wish to go Beyond, to see the outer realms, to touch the gods, which is an incredibly dangerous but exhilarating path, there is no choice but to surrender part of oneself…”

• Ward has felt Dionysus too. He recognizes in all this “the force that tore through my life ten years ago like a whirlwind, crushing everything in its path.” (316)

• “For me there was the sexual barrenness of my married life, but just as my wife and I were talking of divorce, in a brief moment of passion, we conceived a child. I have never felt so twisted and confused in all my life: so happy over the child soon to be born, so desolate, bound by that child to a woman who recoiled at my touch.”

• “It was as if a split personality emerged, a Hyde to my Jekyll, a werewolf in my clothing.”

• “I began to lead a double life. It shocked me that this ferocious thing in me proved so adept at seducing women.”

• Dionysus reigns in him… but eventually he gets caught, and his wife takes off with the child. Now he has to live in the States to be near the child… but his ex won’t let him back into her life.

• “In my first glance at the “geroi” (old men), I felt such strong kinship, such recognition. These shaggy man-beasts, so see them dance round and around the streets, it was if someone had taken a picture of my insides and thrown it out in front of me.” (318)

• The men who perform the rite today wear very heavy costumes and have to run up and down the streets for hours. To keep going, they drink ouzo!

• Ward attempts to use the festival to understand relationships between men and women, but the results are confusing.

• Books: Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess (2006) and Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India (1996)