Into Borneo

Yogya was stifling. The heat and humidity of central Java was always difficult to endure. But it was more than that. I was being smothered by the cloying banality of the Yogya traveler scene. Along the tiny alleyways of Gang Sosrowijayan, embedded within central Yogyakarta, the cultural capital of Indonesia also known as Yogya, lay a travelers’ ghetto.

Young Europeans and North Americans, sprinkled with a moderate dose of Aussies and Kiwis, shared the narrow alleys with Indonesian food hawkers and sellers of garish t-shirts and fake batik. Street-side food vendors, known as warungs, sold tasty Indonesian favorites such as nasi goreng (fried rice), mie goreng (fried noodles), or laksa (fragrant noodle soup).

Bellissima

I tiptoed up the gray-carpeted stairs of the Gucci store in Rome. A single sweater folded with precision lay on a counter and another three lay perfectly forbidden on a shelf below. The only other shoppers were a Japanese teenager with no apparent budget and a model who I’d seen leave her boyfriend in his Ferrari outside. I felt out of my league and tiptoed back down the stairs.

But I felt no better on the street. Perfectly dressed Italians rushed past me, confident in their matching shoes and handbags, in the cut of their skirts, in the height of their heels. No one looked like me.

At home, my friends called me petite, but in Rome, I felt like a tank, a sack of potatoes—a frump. But how could I not shop for clothes in Italy? That seemed as grave a sin as not sampling the country’s pasta, pecorino or prosciuto.

If He Cries, They Kill Him

It would be easy to blame my sweat on the mid-afternoon Tanzanian sun.

But there’s more to why my glands are working overtime: I am sitting in a tiny Maasai enkaji, a circular hut constructed of a mud-manure mix that these five beaded women, my hosts, likely slapped together with their bare hands. The only light by which we inspect each other dissipates from the low doorway. Humid stuffy air, tinged with earth and a clamminess that is not completely my own, is as sure a presence as we are.

There’s one more reason I sweat, why my stomach sits in my throat and my heart pounds. I am fixing to come out to my hosts merely by exchanging cultural pleasantries.

12 Hours in Barcelona

The flight from Palma, Mallorca, Spain, to San Francisco, California, includes a long layover in the city of Gaudi. I land in Barcelona at 6 P.M. and will be on another plane from the same airport at dawn. I can easily “kill time” at the huge airport: shop, eat, read, sleep in uncomfortable chairs. I consider dropping some Euros on a hotel in town. But why kill time, when time is all I have? I place my luggage in a large airport locker and get on a bus to the center of the city. No plan, except to see where in the world I am tonight.

I’ve been to big cities: New York, Los Angeles, London, Mexico DF. Barcelona, too, is huge, a sprawl, with miles of concrete and uncountable numbers of people. Twelve hours seemed like a really long time and now I see it is a single half-moon on the face of the ever-cycling clock of eternity. No amount of time could be enough to absorb what is here: true of any lifetime, in any place: never enough time.

But I try. It’s all I can do.

Los Muertos

This is what I remember: White sheets limp with sweat twisted around his naked body, a low mattress in a small white room, sun streaming through a window above the bed, the musky smell of sex, briny raw oysters sliding down my throat.

I might not have remembered at all had I not found his letter in an old desk drawer. I read, “We shared something special…” and my eyes leapt to the signature scrawled across the bottom of the page. I couldn’t decipher it. I shook the letter as if that might cause it to speak. I checked the envelope. There was no return address.

I folded the letter back into the envelope and gazed out the window at my garden. The last rose of summer bravely held onto its petals as it wobbled in the light breeze. How could I not know who wrote such intimate words? Snapshot memories riffled behind my eyes. A woman patting tortillas. A copper-colored van. The silhouette of a small white hotel trimmed in blue. And in a flash, I knew.

The Chaperone

"Signora," reads the message in Italian, "we request your presence at Police Headquarters for fingerprinting on February 11." This is great news: I applied for a work permit six months ago, and Roman authorities are finally getting around to making me legal. My eyes skid to a stop at the appointment time. 9:12??? Fantastico! This office sounds positively Teutonic—unlike the others I've known in Italy. I'll sail right through.

On the chilly morning in question, I arrive twenty minutes early. A line of extracommunitar snakes partway down the block behind a police barricade—mostly young Chinese and North African men, but also some women: a young one with cenote eyes and a diamond in her nose, a stout one in hijab, and an elder swaddled in white wool, completely invisible but for eyes, toes, and tattooed chin.

We compare notes—I've got the first appointment at 9:12, and the girl with eyes like cenotes has one for 9:17. It appears they've shoehorned us in at five-minute intervals, which sounds about right because, after all, how long could a digital scan of a few digits take? The men, some who have slots an hour or two from now, exhale puffs of clove-scented smoke, or grind butts into Rome's chunky black cobbles.

The Best Women's Travel Writing 2010

Since the publication of A Woman's World in 1995, Travelers' Tales has been publishing award-winning books by and for women. We continue this tradition with The Best Women's Travel Writing 2010, the sixth collection in our annual series guaranteed to inspire women to take their first trip—or to continue exploring the world with wit, soul, and verve, as so many adventurous women do each and every day.

This best-selling, award-winning series presents the finest accounts of women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples — and themselves. The common threads connecting the stories are a woman's perspective and lively storytelling to make the reader laugh, cry, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn't. From climbing a volcano in Ecuador to running a kennel for pariah dogs in India to helping prepare meals in Iran, the points of view and perspectives are global and the themes eclectic, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.

100 Places in Italy
Every Woman Should Go

“Makes me want to pack my bag and follow Van Allen’s alluring suggestions for traveling in Italy. Her knowledge reveals an intimacy with the country and a honed sense of adventure. Andiamo!”
—Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun

Imagine creating your Italian dream vacation with a fun-loving savvy traveler girlfriend whispering in your ear. Go along with writer Susan Van Allen on a femme-friendly ride up and down the boot, to explore this extraordinarily enchanting country where Venus (Vixen Goddess of Love and Beauty) and The Madonna (Nurturing Mother of Compassion) reign side-by-side. With humor, passion, and practical details, this uniquely anecdotal guidebook will enrich your Italian days. Read the Introduction, and also this superb review.

“Are you in a rut? Is your gut reaction to change a negative response? In You Unstuck, Libby Gill will help you understand the way you look at risk-taking so you can start moving past your fears and excuses, toward success. This book is a powerful tool if you know you need to change but don’t know how. Read it and get your life back on track!”
—Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager® and Leading at a Higher Level

Everyone gets stuck. It's part of the human condition. Maybe you're stuck in your career, finances, health or relationships. Or maybe life dealt you a bad blow like a layoff or divorce. The real question is: What are you going to do about it? You Unstuck is designed to give you hope and tools, backed with science, to get you past your sticking points. "Hope" because that's the one thing you can't afford to lose if you're going to succeed in work and life. "Science" because you need the latest brain research to understand why you behave the way you do. And "tools" because the process of life change is so misunderstood, you may have been going at it all wrong. Otherwise, you wouldn't be stuck right now, would you? Author Libby Gill wants to help you change all that. Read the first chapter here.

Writing Away
“Lavinia Spalding has given travelers a witty, profound, and accessible exploration of the hows and whys of keeping a journal. Novices and veterans alike will find inspiration and fresh ideas on every page, along with practical suggestions to bring out the best writer in anyone.” —Anthony Weller, author of Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road

Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, inspires budding memoirists and jetsetting scribes alike. But Writing Away doesn’t stop there—author Lavinia Spalding spins the romantic tradition of keeping a travelogue into a modern, witty adventure in awareness, introducing the traditional handwritten journal as a profoundly valuable tool for self-discovery, artistic expression, and spiritual growth. Read the Introduction.

Mousejunkies!
Where should you turn if you want the best inside information for your Walt Disney World vacation? Why, to the fanatics who go year after year, several times a year, who spend all their waking hours planning their next trip and devising strategies to make the most of their time there—for them it’s not a vacation, it’s a way of life. That’s right, you’d turn to the Mousejunkies!

Inside these pages lies the accumulated wisdom of many years and countless trips to Walt Disney World, on all the topics that make a difference to you, such as how to beat the crowds and the lines, how to take full advantage of passes, when to go and what to bring, where the best restrooms are, where to stay and why, the psychology behind Walt Disney World, what to do when overload strikes, where to splurge and where to eat cheap, how to get the best discounts, and more. Follow the Mousejunkies and mainline the magic!

The Best Travel Writing 2009 is the sixth volume in the annual Travelers’ Tales series launched in 2004 to celebrate the world’s best travel writing—from Nobel Prize winners to emerging new writers. These 29 stories cover the globe, from riding horseback across Mongolia to discovering Hemingway’s ghost in Cuba to driving the long red road through equatorial Africa. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes encompass high adventure, spiritual growth, romance, hilarity and misadventure, service to humanity, and encounters with exotic cuisine. Read the Introduction by Tony Perrottet, the Publisher's Preface by James O'Reilly, and a sample chapter, "In a Place of Wind" by Erika Connor.

Cruise Confidential: a hit below the waterline
“Part Love Boat, part Mutiny on the Bounty, Cruise Confidential does for cruising what Animal House did for higher education.” —J. Maarten Troost, author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Cruise Confidential is a delightfully funny, wild, and romantic adventure that reveals what it's really like working on a cruise ship. Brian David Bruns worked for a year in the ships' restaurants and his account will astonish you as you are assaulted with circumstances ranging from the absurd to the bizarre. Did you know that waiters are required to steal cutlery and even food from each other for their own guests? Can you imagine what the crew thinks of the passengers? And sex, don't forget the sex. Read Chapter 1 here.

Marco Polo Didn't Go There
“Potts encourages us to think about travel in a way that has been almost
lost.” —Tim Cahill

For the past ten years, Rolf Potts has taken his keen postmodern travel sensibility into the far reaches of five continents for such publications as National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The New York Times Magazine. This book documents his boldest, funniest, and most revealing journeys—from getting stranded without water in the Libyan Desert, to crashing the set of a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, to learning the secrets of Tantric sex in a dubious Indian ashram.

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is more than just an entertaining journey into fascinating corners of the world. The book is a unique window into travel writing, with each chapter containing a “commentary track”—endnotes that reveal the ragged edges behind the experience and creation of each tale. Offbeat and insightful, this book is an engrossing read for students of travel writing as well as armchair wanderers. Read the Introduction here.

Venturing in Italy: Travels in Puglia, Land between Two Seas

History abounds in Puglia: from prehistoric caverns to archaeological sites of Greek cities and temples, from houses built in caves to stone trulli to medieval castles and fortresses. Today’s Puglia is vibrantly alive with unique local wines and cuisine, thermal spas in Santa Ceasarea, championship golf courses and its own reggae music. In Venturing in Italy: Travels in Puglia, Land between Two Seas, nineteen writers set loose in the region find stories everywhere they look. Be inspired to visit Puglia on your own voyage of discovery.

A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean

"P.J. O'Rourke and Paul Theroux in a blender."
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil's Highway

From Nevis to Havana, Antigua to Grenada, and everywhere in between, be the gecko on the wall in Gary Buslik's strange and hilarious love affair with the Caribbean, and, occasionally, his wife. Each chapter of A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean recounts another island-hopping, culture-clashing crisis that pits the homesick author against falling coconuts, singing Rastas, topless beaches, cricket, steel drum bands, and even the French. Screamingly funny and often poignant, Gary Buslik plies the Caribbean with shark eye and barracuda wit. Read a sample chapter here, or a Q&A with the author, or even find out why he's so rotten.

"Fast-paced, quick-witted, and dangerously irreverent."
—Elliott Hester, author of Plane Insanity