Introduction
Travel writing, as I once observed elsewhere, is the most
accommodating - one might almost say the most promiscuous - of
genres. Write a book or essay that might otherwise be catalogued
under memoir, humor, anthropology, or natural history, and as long as
you leave the property at some point, you can call it travel writing.
With luck or persistence, you might even find a publisher
willing to underwrite the cost of the trip. I remember the moment it
occurred to me that this was an unusually agreeable way to make a
living. It was in the early 1980s, when I was living in London. In
those days I had a desk job for the London Times, but to supplement
my income I began in my spare time to write small articles for
newspapers and magazines. Usually these were features on some aspect
of British life or culture, but once, more or less out of the blue, I
was asked by an editor of the in-flight magazine of Trans World
Airlines if I would go to Copenhagen, where the airline was about to
inaugurate flights, and write of its attractions.
Well, Copenhagen is a splendid city, and I had the most
marvelous time. It was while dawdling over a coffee on Strøget, the
city"s principal pedestrian thoroughfare, that the giddy if somewhat
tardy realization dawned on me that I was spending five days in a
European capital at someone else"s expense, having an awfully good
time, and that all that was required of me in return was to write
down a thousand words or so of observation on what I saw and did. And
for this I was to be paid real money - pretty good money, as I
recall. It was then it occurred to me that this was a pretty well
unbeatable way to make a living.
So I began to write travel books. The problem was that in the
1980s there wasn"t any real market for them in the United States.
Travel books at that time meant guidebooks and almost nothing more.
Occasionally someone would write a travel narrative that would
attract critical attention and sell well - Paul Theroux with The
Great Railway Bazaar, William Least Heat-Moon with Blue Highways -
but for some reason they weren"t allowed into the travel section.
Once a travel narrative was published and had finished its time on
the "New Releases" shelves (which in my case seemed to be something
in the region of three or four hours), there wasn"t any place to put
it. On those occasions when I dropped into bookstores to visit my old
titles and helpfully move them to positions where they might catch
the eye of someone less than eight feet tall or not lying supine in
the aisle, I would generally find them in the oddest places, shelved
under current affairs or social commentary or geography - anywhere,
in short, but near the travel section, where Fodor, Frommer, and
Let"s Go reigned supreme.
How happy I am to report that all that has changed, though it
took an amazingly long time when you consider how big the travel
literature market has been in other countries for years. The first
time I can recall seeing travel books (by which I mean real books
with chapters and a story to tell) gathered together in their own
section anywhere in the United States was only in about 1990, in San
Francisco. But little by little the practice has spread until now it
is customary, if not quite universal, for bookstores to offer an
assortment of literary travel titles among the more conventional
guides. It is telling, I think, that while anthologies comprising the
year"s best essays, short stories, sports writing, and plays, among
goodness knows what else, have been around for years, and sometimes
decades, it is only now, thanks to the dear and enlightened folks at
Houghton Mifflin, that travel writing is being accorded equal
standing. It feels like a genre whose time has come.
The question that naturally arises is why all this has taken
so long. The United States is, after all, a nation predicated on the
idea of movement - the movement that brought people to the country in
the first place and then kept them spreading out from east to west.
There is still a restlessness in the American character - a
willingness to up sticks and move elsewhere without much in the way
of a backward glance - that would strike many people in more settled
countries as at the very least unusual, perhaps even just a trifle
shiftless. In any case, if anyone ought to be predisposed by nature
and history to an interest in the excitement and possibility
presented by the unfamiliar and far-flung, then surely it would be
us. Yet with a few exceptions - Mark Twain and S. J. Perelman from
time to time, the tireless Paul Theroux more regularly - few American
writers of a literary bent have been tempted into the field. Insofar
as the exotic features in American letters, it is nearly always as a
backdrop for fiction. What a pity we haven"t got Dorothy Parker
traveling through Weimar Germany, say, or William Faulkner in Africa,
or Robert Benchley bemusedly scrutinizing the Orient, or John Updike
anywhere at all.
It"s a curious omission when you consider just how durable
and popular the field has been elsewhere. In Britain, travel writing
has long been a mainstay of publishing. Since at least Smollett"s
Travels Through France and Italy, published in 1766, scarcely a
writer of note in British literature has not at some time turned his
hand to travel writing. Johnson and Boswell, Sterne, Dickens, Darwin
(with The Voyage of the Beagle - a travel book par excellence),
Anthony and Frances Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, D. H. Lawrence,
E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Winston
Churchill, and others well beyond enumerating all produced travel
books, often very good ones. Moreover, many of Britain"s most gifted
writers - Redmond O"Hanlon, Jonathan Raban, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris,
Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin, and Colin Thubron - have built successful
careers largely, sometimes all but exclusively, on the idea of
traveling to a place and writing about it.
It seems entirely possible that something like that may be
happening in the United States now. As the pages that follow amply
demonstrate, many of the sharpest minds and freshest voices in
journalism are drawn to foreign subjects these days - increasingly
(and encouragingly) to places far beyond the trampled paths of
tourism. A generation ago, I daresay a book of this sort would have
been dominated by European and American destinations - Capri and
Pamplona and the Florida Keys. Today instead we get places of a far
more diverse and challenging nature: Zanzibar, Cambodia, the Atlas
Mountains of Morocco, the forbidding Cape York Peninsula in
Australia. That the geographical spread of this collection is so
largely exotic pleases me no end, but I should note that it is less a
reflection of my own predispositions than those of the publications
from which these selections were culled.
All this, it goes without saying, is heartening to see. One
of the first things that struck me when I first ventured abroad in
the early 1970s was how much more attention, compared with America,
the rest of the world paid to the rest of the world; and one of the
first things that struck me when I returned to the States to live
twenty years later was how much less attention we paid now than we
had before. Though there are some commendable exceptions - notably
that great underappreciated asset National Public Radio and some of
our larger daily newspapers, as well as many of the magazines whose
contributors are represented in this volume - most of our popular
media seem to be much less drawn to foreign matters than formerly. I
urge you sometime to go to a library and look at Time or Newsweek
magazines from the 1950s or early 1960s. You will find that they are
dense with reports from abroad - of tottering governments in Italy or
corruption scandals in South America and so on - and their covers
were as often graced with portraits of foreign notables as of
domestic ones. There seemed then to be a genuine and natural interest
in the politics and culture of foreign societies, a presumption that
what people were up to in Paris and Rio and Capetown was worth
knowing. In those days too, if you are old enough to recall, the
evening news on television would always have at least a sprinkling of
reports each showing a serious-looking correspondent in a trenchcoat
standing with a microphone in front of a foreign stock exchange or
flotilla of bobbing sampans or Congress of the People"s Revolution -
something that was patently not North American. Even if you paid no
attention to these dispatches, they at least reminded you that you
existed in a wider world.
No longer. In 1997, for a column I was then writing for a
British newspaper, I tracked Time for the first three months of the
year. In that period, our most venerable news magazine offered its
readers not one report from France, Italy, Spain, or even Japan,
among many, many others not present. Britain attracted notice just
once, for the cloning of a sheep in Scotland, and Germany likewise
managed a single appearance, because of a dispute between its
government and American Scientologists. As I write (in the early
spring of 2000), this week"s issue of Newsweek contains three
articles filed from abroad. Time has none. Not one. (In fairness, it
does have one article on the United States" troubled relationship
with Colombia, but written in Washington.) For purposes of
comparison, the current issue of Britain"s Economist has sixty-four
articles on foreign topics.
Television can hardly claim to be much better. During the
same period that I was monitoring Time magazine I devoted five
weeknights to watching CNN"s main hour-long evening news program. In
the course of that week it ran 112 news reports, of which just 8
concerned non-American topics - and this on a program that calls
itself (with exquisite if unintended irony) The World Today.
I don"t mean this as a criticism - at least, not exactly.
There are all kinds of extenuating circumstances for our failure to
follow the rest of the planet as keenly as we might. A very large
part of what happens in the world - in politics, finance,
entertainment, you name it - originates in the United States. All the
world"s news pages are disproportionately filled with happenings from
America. Only for us, of course, it"s domestic news, not foreign. Of
those sixty-four foreign articles in The Economist, almost fifty
concerned American affairs. It isn"t that foreign news publications
are inherently more devoted to foreign news coverage, more that they
are merely as interested in America as we are.
There is also the consideration that we are lulled into
complacency by the ubiquitousness of our culture. A Briton traveling
abroad who craves a serving of steak and kidney pudding or news of
how Leicester City fared in its soccer match on Saturday will, in
most places, be out of luck. A Frenchman traveling abroad is unlikely
to hear his favorite pop tunes playing in the background (and thank
goodness, of course). An Australian or New Zealander knows that for
the duration of any trip overseas he will almost certainly read or
hear no news of home. A poor Canadian has only to step over the forty-
ninth parallel into the United States to find his country
disappearing even from weather maps. But for a traveling American, in
most places America is there already - American foods, soft drinks,
movies, songs, newspapers, stock market results. It is entirely
possible for an American to travel abroad without, in a sense,
actually leaving home.
One of the oddest travel experiences I have ever had - odd
simply because I didn"t realize this was what it was like for so many
tourists - came early in my freelance career when I was invited as a
guest lecturer on a Rhine cruise. I had recently written an article
for National Geographic on the new Main-Danube Canal, a German
engineering wonder, and I was thus somehow deemed to be an authority
on European waterways.
The ship on which we cruised bore a complement of perhaps
seventy or eighty passengers, all American, of late middle age or
beyond, and clearly well heeled. (The week"s trip was costing them
something like $3,500 apiece.) It was a pleasant if somewhat low-key
undertaking, in that each day we would sit on a deck or in the grand
salon, watching Germany slide by in the background, rather as if we
were watching it on a very large screen television. Late each
afternoon the ship would tie up at some cheery and attractive
Rhineland village. After hours of such untaxing confinement, I
couldn"t wait to get off, to stretch my legs and wander through the
streets or browse in shop windows or have a cup of coffee - to be, in
short, in Germany. And here was the odd thing that struck me. Each
day, upon docking, all the other passengers would eagerly assemble by
the gangway and wait for the tour guide to step up to escort them en
masse, rolled umbrella held aloft, to the market square or Baroque
church or whatever other attractions the community offered, sparing
them the necessity of having to puzzle over German signs or fumble
with marks and pfennigs. On most evenings we ate aboard the ship, but
on a couple of occasions we were loaded onto buses and driven off to
some restaurant or Bierstube, which we would entirely take over, and
there over the perky cacophony of an oompah band we would sample
German life without Germans. On the last day, as we stood on the
quayside in Cologne waiting for our bags to be offloaded, I fell into
conversation with a fellow passenger, who professed the trip a huge
success. For no particular reason - just making conversation really -
I asked him how he had found the Germans.
He thought hard for a minute. "I"m not sure we met any," he
replied with a vaguely troubled expression.
I have since accompanied two other groups on similiar
excursions in which the participants paid large sums to be
transported to some distant place and then shielded from it. Seems
very odd to me. To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel
is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time,
to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar that it
can be taken for granted.
I grew up in the middle of the country in a middle-income
household in the middle of the century. As with most families of that
time and place, we were not great adventurers. In our house, ketchup
and Cool Whip were the most exotic sauces. Overseas travel was not
remotely an option. So when, in 1972, I arrived as a gangly (for
which read pimply and squinting) young backpacker in Europe, I was
about as innocent as a traveler can be. In those days the only cheap
flights to Europe were on Icelandic Airlines to Luxembourg, so it was
in that endearingly diminutive country"s equally small-scale capital
that I had my first look at another world. I cannot tell you how
exciting it was. I walked about for hours in a kind of vivid daze,
astounded to discover that there were so many interesting ways to do
fundamentally mundane things. Everything that came before me was
novel. I hardly knew where to put my amazed and besotted gaze. As I
wrote in a book called Neither Here Nor There:
I had never seen a zebra crossing before, never seen a tram, never
seen an unsliced loaf of bread (never even considered it an option),
never seen anyone wearing a beret who expected to be taken seriously,
never seen people go to a different shop for each item of dinner or
provide their own shopping bags, never seen feathered pheasants and
unskinned rabbits hanging in a butcher"s window or a pig"s head
grinning on a platter. And the people - why, they were Luxembourgers.
I don"t know why this amazed me so, but it did. I kept
thinking: "That man over there, he"s a Luxembourger. And so is that
girl. They don"t know anything about the New York Yankees, they don"t
know the theme tune to the Mickey Mouse Club, they are from another
world." It was just wonderful.
I regret to say that I have never advanced terribly far from
that happy day. My own requirements for adventure are so easily
achieved that a stroll around Luxembourg still gives me nearly all
the buzz I need, I"m afraid. So I have long been fascinated by, and
filled with admiration for, those people who really travel - people
like Tim Cahill, Mark Hertsgaard, Isabel Hilton, and Jeffrey Tayler,
whose contributions I am proud to see included here. I once did a
reading in Birmingham, England, with the British travel writer Colin
Thubron, long a hero of mine, and afterward rode with him on a train
back to London. He had just returned from a long trip through the
remote parts of western China, as I recall. Thubron is a modest and
undemonstrative fellow, but he grew animated as he described for me
the pleasures of spending weeks sleeping on hard floors, eating
strange and stringy foods, being days beyond the reach of editors and
friends. I had always thought of that kind of discomfort and
dislocation as the price you paid to experience interesting places,
but not part of the pleasure. For Thubron it was - he positively
rejoiced in it - and to me it was the greatest revelation. I suppose
we most admire what we cannot do, and I cannot be truly adventurous.
For that reason, many of the articles collected here represent risky
travel to challenging places. One in particular, "The Last Safari,"
by Mark Ross, is, I guarantee, one of the most harrowing reports you
will read this year. It isn"t strictly travel writing at all, but it
was too good and too moving not to include.
Essentially, however, the pieces that follow are here simply
because I liked them. In almost every instance I started off reading
about some trip or experience that I had no certain expectation that
I would find absorbing, and quickly found myself immersed and
engaged, sometimes transported. Apart from the deftness of touch and
originality of observation that you would naturally expect to find in
any compilation of the year"s best of anything, about all that the
pieces that follow have in common is that their authors went
somewhere, though as some of the contributions prove - notably Bill
Buford"s game and good-natured account of a night spent in Central
Park and David Halberstam"s fond survey of the changes that have
overtaken his beloved Nantucket in a generation - you don"t
necessarily have to go far to achieve something memorable. You just
have to be able to see things in a different way.
They share, I think, one other outstanding quality: a
penetrating curiosity, an almost compulsive desire to experience and
try to understand the world at some unfamiliar level. Even when
matters are not proceeding smoothly, as in Ryszard Kapuscinski"s
brilliantly unsettling account of being stuck in the middle of
nowhere in Africa or Patrick Symmes"s no less gripping portrayal of a
run-in with former Khmers Rouges in Cambodia, you have a sense that
these authors would not have traded their experiences for anything.
In nearly every case, you feel that if it were not for the mildly
irksome need to return to civilization to file their stories, they
would just have kept on going.
The fact is, of course, that there is an amazing world out
there - full of interesting, delightful, unexpected, extraordinary
stuff that most of us know little about and consider much too seldom.
Turn the page and I promise you will begin to see what I mean.
Bill Bryson
Introduction copyright ©2000 by Bill Bryson
Continues...
Excerpted from The Best American Travel Writing by Bill Bryson Copyright © 2000 by Bill Bryson. Excerpted by permission.
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