Travelers' Tales
Monthly Newsletter

Publishers of Stories, Wit and Wisdom from Travelers
Around the World

TravelersTales.com  |  January 2003

Come January it's common for even the stone-hearted to reevaluate priorities, to consider ways of engaging life more mindfully as the calendar turns. A new year brings out a hunger for new directions, for fresh ideas about how to do things better or grapple again with challenges that wore us down last year. Of course we could make "new year's resolutions" any day of the year, but it helps to have this annual reminder to reflect, dream, and resolve to not only make the future better, but to be better.

Here at Travelers' Tales we love to publish stories that take that step over the horizon and enter the territory of personal exploration, delving into the writers' souls and discovering new and sometimes startling ways to relate to life and the world. This month we look at some of the stories we've published in recent books that tread this path of renewal, helping to stimulate our own resolutions for the new year, and to point to discoveries we hope to make for ourselves.

—Larry Habegger, Executive Editor

IN THIS ISSUE

NEWSBOX

New Contributors Links
Check out the latest contributors that we've added to our Recommended Links list. Including: Broughton Coburn, Ted Conover, Richard Goodman, Roberta Beach Jacobson, and Joel Widzer.

With each book, our TT community is growing and we want to do whatever we can to promote the other books, personal projects, and careers of our authors. If you are a contributor to one of our books and want to have your web site added to our list of links, send an email with your URL to webeditor@travelerstales.com.

The State of Travel Writing
Is Travel Writing Dead? You make the call! Read Rolf Potts response, "Long Die Travel Writing," to Edward Marriott's article in the UK Magazine Prospect, "Where the Trail Goes Cold."

BOOK SALE!

WORLD WIZARD

Which region of Russia borders Poland, the Baltic Sea, and Lithuania?

1. Caucasus
2. Kaliningrad
3. Siberia
4. Urals

BOOKS

A recap of five of our most recent books to add to your collection:
Few lands are as beloved, mysterious, spiritual, or controversial as Tibet. Travelers' Tales Tibet, the latest destination collection from Travelers' Tales, brings this remote and fascinating region to life. Travel with world-renowned writers as they explore Tibet—from the flanks of Everest to the fabled city of Lhasa. Join the writers and adventurers as they work as extras on a Chinese movie set, visit the Potala Palace (eternal home of the Dalai Lama), enjoy a feast cooked by blowtorch on a high mountain pass, witness an ancient sky burial, and rebuild an ancient monastery. Pico Iyer, Alexandra David-Neel, Pamela Logan, Wade Davis, Lama Govinda, and Mark Jenkins all contribute to the collection. With an introduction by Heinrich Harrer, author of Seven Years in Tibet.

Turkey is quite literally the bridge between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, and is an ideal springboard for understanding the Islamic world because it is culturally Islamic but also an avowedly secular state. Travelers' Tales Turkey unveils this dramatic land through stories that range from whimsical to profound. Notable authors include: Robert D. Kaplan, Tim Cahill, Bruce Feiler, Mary Lee Settle, Jeremy Seal, Nicholas Shrady, Tim Ward, Stephen Kinzer, and many more. From cosmopolitan Istanbul to villages where people have never heard of America or England, the writers in this collection reveal Turkey as a place with a rich history (think Troy, Ephesus, Gallipoli, St. Paul, Kemal Ataturk), exceptional hospitality, engaging traditional culture—including Sufi mystics—and diverse landscape dotted with the ruins of antiquity. Read the introduction by editor James Villers Jr.

Paris is one of the handful of cities you should endeavor to know over the course of a lifetime. The City of Light is the center of the civilized universe, and has bestowed on millions the gift of the incandescent present, an image or experience into which all life is condensed and reflected upon for years to come. Travelers' Tales Paris captures the romance of the world's favorite city through stories that entertain, inform, and touch the heart. Notable authors include Jan Morris, Ina Caro, John Gregory Dunne, Edmund White, Mort Rosenblum, Julian Green, and many more.

"As glimpsed here through the eyes of beatniks, hippies, surfers, 'lavender cowboys' and talented writers from all walks, San Francisco comes to vivid, complex life." —Publishers Weekly
Travelers' Tales San Francisco is an engaging collection of stories about the fascinating City by the Bay, TT's home town. Everything that makes San Francisco great can be found in these pages: romantic cable car rides, rowdy Gold Rush history, all night parties in the Mission, a complex and diverse mix of cultures, even first person earthquake accounts. Andrei Codrescu, Barnaby Conrad, Herbert Gold, Michele Anna Jordan, Herb Caen, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, and Richard Rodriguez all contribute to the collection.

The new year offers a chance at renewal, a clean slate. Journeys and pilgrimages can bring this same sense of opportunity and discovery to travelers. The Road Within: True Stories of Transformation and the Soul is a very different kind of travel book, one that explores the spiritual benefits of trips that transform and renew lives. Newly designed, this book was named Best Travel Book by the Independent Publishers Association and was also a Benjamin Franklin Award finalist. The collection includes global stories by Annie Dillard, Huston Smith, Redmond O'Hanlon, Nathalie Goldberg, Andrew Harvey, Holly Morris, and many more.

THE FLYING CARPET

Editors' Choice
New! Every week we will now choose TWO of the great stories we've received from travelers around the world and present them here as our "Editors' Choice." In this week's featured stories, Richard Goodman looks past the rain to discover the deeper beauty of Paris in "Paris, When It Drizzles"; and in "The Richest Gift," Richard Sterling remembers a small kindness he once offered in a time of war, and its surprising ramifications many years later.

SUBMISSION CALL!

SAMPLE CHAPTERS

Read "The Space Between" by Tom Joyce

In late June of 1921, two members of a British reconnaissance team set out from the Tibetan village of Tingri to survey the northern approach to a mountain determined to be the highest point on Earth. One of the mountaineers, George Mallory, made mention in letters to his wife of a Buddhist monastery he and Guy Bullock had encountered at the mouth of a vast glacial floodplain fanning out below the peak. Indigenous people had called the massif Qomolangma, but it was now christened with a proper English name after India's Surveyor General, Sir George Everest. Mallory referred to the monastic complex they visited as "Rongbuk," assuming it to be the Tibetan name for the glacier. Eighty years later, I found out just how wrong Mallory had been.

Designated by that same corruption in every Tibetan travel guide, except the one written by my friend and companion, Gary McCue, this ochre mud-brick gompa—literally "a place in solitude"—had been virtually destroyed by the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. It was rebuilt, predominately as a Western tourist attraction, twenty years later. Gary had reasoned that since the actual name of the glacier was Rongphuk, the monastery likely bore the title of Dza Rongphu. But now, as we sit in the cramped, candle-lit chamber of Tsongpa, one of the young monks in residence, we learn that even Gary's deduction had been in error.

Read the whole story here...

Read "Illumined in Sainte-Chapelle" by Tim O'Reilly

After visiting Notre Dame, I headed across the street, nose in a map, driven by a faint memory of a passing mention of a small church "with the best stained glass outside of Chartres."

Sainte-Chapelle. That must be it, I thought. But where was it? On the map it looked like it was actually in the courtyard of the police headquarters building, the Palais de Justice. And indeed it was. As we approached, it seemed we had to go through metal detectors to get anywhere near.

With my wife and daughters in tow, I walked to the back of a courtyard, rounded the bend and entered a small, low-ceilinged Romanesque chapel. It was quite pretty, but it hardly justified the high praise I'd heard.

Then I noticed that people armed with guidebooks were passing by with hardly a glance at the frescoes and stained glass I was trying to admire. Instead, they were streaming right to a doorway in the back wall of the chapel. There must be more through there, I said to myself.

We squeezed through the narrow doorway and up a circular stone staircase…into Glory.

Read The Best View of Istanbul by James Villers Jr.

For one bittersweet year, I lived in an apartment with a balcony overlooking what my friends described as the best view in all of Istanbul. It was maybe the only view that could irrefutably prove I was not dreaming, that I was, in actual fact, living in old Constantinople. From my balcony, I could see the peninsula of Sultanahmet thrusting into where the waters of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn converge and flow into the Sea of Marmara, the lesser-known cousin of the Aegean and Mediterranean.

Though I paid more than a handful of visits to the peninsula's famous monuments, I was more often content to sit and watch the spires and walls of Topkapi Palace and the domes and minarets of the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia change color and hue with the passing of the sun and the seasons. The sun rose from the left and set to the right, rolling along the sky, arcing above the shining waters. In the summer, fireworks lifted from the waterfront below Topkapi, flowering the night. The sky and water embraced me or smacked me across the face, depending on my mood, my company, or the number of drinks I'd had. The call to prayer drifted on the breeze with the seagulls. It was quite a show. Ever changing, never familiar, no matter how many times I looked at it.

Read the whole story here...

Read "If You Meet the Buddha on the Road" by Gladys Montgomery Jones

As the empty pedestals and barren niches of a thousand temples attest, people have been taking away Asia's treasures for centuries. Perhaps, along with their Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, they hope to possess something that cannot be possessed—the intangible mystique of cultures that hold these images sacred. I was as willing as any materialist that came before me. Yet, one acquisition eluded me until the end of my expatriate days.

Every Westerner I knew in Asia, it seemed, not only owned a Buddha, but a big, impressive Buddha at that. I spent a great many of my days in Asia wanting one too.

Early in my expatriate life, I met the Buddha of my dreams, sitting cross-legged on a lotus blossom in a Bangkok antique shop. Its crown was a spire, its ancient patina a dull, brownish green, flecked with particles of gold leaf. It was a Buddha that few practicing Buddhists would want: its arm from shoulder to wrist had broken off leaving a jagged hole in its side. Despite this. I noted, the perfect peace of its smile remained unaltered. I could not afford to buy that Buddha, but took its photograph and left.

Read the whole story here...

Read "I Was a Teenage Yogi" by James O'Reilly

Prana, the adepts will tell you, is the life force of the breath. It is that which animates us, you and me, with each inhale, and every exhale. Now and again, over and over and over, the measure of all "time" and life.

And it was a matter of prana which brought me to a rocky glen near the Pacific Ocean in Marin, where finches twittered and darted and mists unfolded among shifting lattices of sunbeams. For J.M., my dear friend, had taken his last breath-prematurely, thought most of his friends who had gathered in his honor.

The high priest was another old friend, and I do mean high priest, for there was something in his demeanor of that eternal line of priests and priestesses who are simply born to their calling, which is to show us the gateways to Heaven that lie open all around us but are generally hidden by fear, self-deception, and ugly buildings. There was something, too, in his gathering of the strands of our friend's unusual life which made me do the same for my own, which made me see in this "New Age funeral" (for that is what any outsider would have called it) a brief history of San Francisco, the city of Saint Francis, as a spiritual Mecca in the late twentieth century.

Read the whole story here...

WEB SITE OF THE MONTH

TELL A FRIEND

THE LAST WORD

It was New Year's Eve. I was going to go to the beach at midnight, like most of the residents of Copacabana and Ipanema, who, dressed in white, congregate to light a candle in the sand and throw a white flower into the ocean with a prayer for the goddess Iemanjá. I asked my friend Doña Jurema how I should pray.

"I would say something like this," she began. "Iemanjá, Our Mother, please make this year a better year than the last. Not that last year was a bad year, don't get me wrong: I received many benefits, many good things happened to me, and I'm not complaining. But now, thinking over everything that's happened, I would like to ask you for something from the bottom of my heart: please bring me twice the amount of good things, and take away half the number of bad."

— Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba
From 365 Travel: A Daily Book of Journeys Meditations, and Adventures