The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011

by Lavinia Spalding

Most of us can easily pinpoint the moment we began identifying ourselves as travelers. It was Paris or Jaipur or Chiang Mai—we were perched on a medieval castle wall or sitting cross-legged in a temple at dawn or riding an elephant through a dense jungle. We were someplace entirely foreign, doing something wholly unexpected, when we felt a sudden and overwhelming sense of astonishment, bliss, gratitude—or even horror. And from that instant, we would never be the same.

My defining moment was a little different. I was seated at a cramped kitchen table in Jersey City, drinking gin and tonics with a group of older women who had just announced that they wanted to sit down and have a talk with me.

I’d arrived two days earlier from Boston, where I was working at a Hallmark store while deciding what to do with my post-high-school life. My older sister Blake was visiting her girlfriends in Jersey City, and to my amazement, she had invited me to tag along.

On the first morning of the trip, we took the train into Manhattan, disembarking inside the World Trade Center. We wandered the city for hours, window shopping, squinting into the sun to photograph skyscrapers, hovering over artists as they made sidewalk chalk drawings, listening to street musicians. Eventually we stopped to rest on some steps across from the Hotel Fifth Avenue, and at that instant, a cavalcade of black state sedans, police cars, and motorcycle cops pulled up in front of us with lights flashing and sirens blaring. We watched as Benazir Bhutto stepped gracefully from a limo and hurried into the hotel, escorted by bodyguards. Then Dan Aykroyd sidled up to us. “This is exciting, isn’t it?” he asked me.

I ate my first gyro, played the giant floor piano in FAO Schwarz, and strolled through the Museum of Modern Art, where Blake and her friends rhapsodized over the Rothko exhibit and I tried to make sense of what I perceived to be enormous paint swatches. Back in Jersey City that evening, we climbed to the roof of their apartment building and looked out at the Twin Towers and a chocolate factory. We drank, danced, and sang “That’s Amore.” It’s possible I’d never been happier.

But it wasn’t until the second day that my moment of travel truth happened. It was late afternoon in Jersey City, but according to Blake, cocktail hour. She made us a round of Tanqueray and tonics and summoned us to the tiny kitchen table by the window. I waited nervously.

My sister and her friends, so wise and experienced at the ripe age of twenty-five, intimidated me. Sophisticated, adventurous, strong, and creative, these women bartended for money, rafted class-five rivers for fun, wore vintage camelhair coats and alligator-skin shoes, dabbled in ceramics and jewelry making and photography. They dated mysterious men, howled with laughter at things I didn’t yet understand, and—most impressive—they traveled. They sent postcards from Greece, Turkey, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and sometimes brought back small souvenirs. They regaled me with stories of clambering up a spiral staircase to a secret upper section of the Parthenon to drink ouzo under a full moon or of being scolded by women at the Turkish bathhouse for being too thin to ever find husbands. But one thing they did not do was sit me down to have talks with me. I was still young enough to worry that I might be in trouble.

Finally, Susie leaned close and looked at me intently, like a doctor about to deliver a critical prognosis.

“We think you’ve caught the travel bug,” she said. “And we want to talk to you about it.”

They were serious, and I’m sure they offered up all manner of sage advice that afternoon. Perhaps they urged me to save money or invest in a quality camera, to hoard frequent flier miles or head directly to college, to stay single or marry rich. The only advice I distinctly remember was to avoid buying unnecessarily heavy objects: furniture, art, books.

“That stuff will only weigh you down,” they insisted.

I nodded and drank my cocktail, grinning with delight. I wasn’t yet a traveler; before this trip, my experiences were limited to spending one spring break lounging on a Mexican beach and moving from Arizona to Massachusetts so I could stock greeting cards. But these women—these real travelers—recognized in me a kindred spirit, and that was all I needed. I would not let them down.

Since my visit to Jersey City twenty-odd years ago, I’ve steadily ignored their advice, carting unnecessarily heavy objects to thirty-five homes in six states, back and forth from one edge of the planet to the other. I’ve accumulated dozens of boxes of books and art, and despite my best intentions, I invariably return from even the shortest trip abroad with more luggage than when I departed. My desire to nest among heavy objects is as strong as my need to keep moving.

It occurs to me now that my sister and her friends might have done better to advise me against, say, falling for the Balinese painter with the hair down to his knees and the two other girlfriends. Or losing my passport in Thailand, or sleeping on flea-infested mattresses in Cambodia, or inhaling tear gas in South Korea, or drinking the water in Cuba. In the end, it wasn’t the advice that mattered. What marked me was the sensation of being invited into a community where I would become what they were convinced I already was. It was my first glimpse of how limitless life could be when I surrounded myself with women who believed that by entertaining the impossible, it became possible.

Many of us grew up hooked on a different kind of tale, one in which the heroine’s hardships are ultimately rewarded with true love, a royal home, and an unwavering sense of stability. So a story in which we choose instead to search for our happily-ever-after by wandering off to remote, grubby corners of the planet may read as a bit unorthodox and irresponsible—not to mention daunting. After all, it’s not easy to embark on a life of travel, much less continue once you’ve begun. It takes courage and sacrifice, flexibility, creativity, time, and money.

But first—and most importantly—it takes a spark of inspiration and a fan to coax that spark into a fire. Travelers’ Tales’ annual collection of women’s travel writing is both the spark and the fan. By reading the words of women who have accomplished what we dream of doing, obstacles and implications vanish, leaving nothing but a sisterhood of permission and validation.

Over the years, I’ve visited thirty-some countries on five continents—more than I ever imagined I would—yet reading the stories in this year’s The Best Women’s Travel Writing makes me feel like I’ve barely begun. More than ever now, my brain is like a world globe that spins endlessly on its axis, never slowing down, a constant blur of cities and nations and provinces and possibilities.

Suddenly, I want to ride a camel with a Bedouin through the Syrian Desert as Anena Hansen did and take samba lessons in Brazil so I can swing my hips like Jocelyn Edelstein. I want to experience Holikan in India with Kasha Rigby, and Tihar in Nepal with Laurie Weed, and I want Abbie Kozolchyk to take me shopping in Bhutan. Thanks to Angie Chuang, Marcy Gordon, and Anna Wexler, I’m now dying to taste ice cream in Kabul, pork fat in Italy, and even barbecued goat testicles in Serbia. I imagine myself joining the Peace Corps and moving to Niger as Susan Rich did, struggling alongside Nancy Kline to rekindle a love affair with Paris, and moving to Havana if only to be Conner Gorry’s next-door neighbor. I wish I were more like Bridget Crocker, who realized that if she could survive that river in Costa Rica, she could survive her broken heart. And I fantasize about leaving it all behind, as Annie Nilsson did, to slop pigs on a farm in Ecuador.

There are also stories in this book that may not inspire envy but underscore why we travel: to pay closer attention, to do more, care more, matter more, to change and be changed, to siphon some understanding out of a confusing world—or simply to bear witness. There’s Laura Flynn’s first trip to violence-torn Haiti, Sarah Bathum’s experience caring for a sick child at a nunnery in Ethiopia, and Kelly Hayes-Raitt’s return to Iraq, just months after the U.S. bombings and invasion.

This book will take you from Arezzo to Zinder, Baja to Barcelona, Baghdad, Boracv, Belfast, Bahrain, Buenos Aires. You’ll have lunch with a mobster and drinks with an IRA member, share your boat with a corpse and get naked with a student. You’ll lose your heart in Oahu and shed your inhibitions in Seville, search for your son among the ruins in Cambodia and meet the brother you never knew in France. You’ll get divorced and married, sick and healed, lost and found. Such is the way of travel.

If your passport has been stamped a few times, you probably already know that the surest method of keeping your travel fire alive is by reading and telling tales from the road, passing them along like a torch in a relay race. And if you haven’t yet traveled but aspire to, I hope this book provides the fan to turn your own spark of interest into a blaze of inspiration. Either way, consider this your invitation into the community of the thirty-three incredible women whose stories make up this year’s anthology. They think you might have caught the travel bug, and they want to talk to you about it.

Introduction
Lavinia Spalding

Masha
Marcia DeSanctis
RUSSIA

Returning
Jocelyn Edelstein
BRAZIL

Elvis Has Entered the Casa
Conner Gorry
CUBA

Of Mountains and Men
Kasha Rigby
INDIA

Naked
Sarah Katin
SOUTH KOREA

Beauty, Beauty
Katherine Jamieson
GUYANA

I Am
Anena Hansen
EGYPT/SYRIA/KENYA

Going Underground
Anne Van
JAPAN

A Hundred Unspoken Rules
Meera Subramanian
INDIA

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY
Bonnie Stewart
IRELAND

The Labyrinth
Bridget Crocker
COSTA RICA

Belle of the Ball
Anna Wexler
SERBIA

Unsilent Night
Michelle Theriault Boots
GHANA

The Boy with the Green Blanket
Sara Bathum
ETHIOPIA

Up the Río Frío One Last Time
Erin Van Rheenen
COSTA RICA/NICARAGUA

Blue Gates
Susan Rich
NIGER

Aloha, with Love
Nicolle Elizabeth
HAWAII

Jersey Girl
Abbie Kozolchyk
THE WORLD

Cab Fare
Layne Mosler
ARGENTINA

The Rhythms of Arezzo
Laura Deutsch
ITALY

The Goddess of Wealth
Laurie Weed
NEPAL

Tongue-Tied
Kelly Hayes-Raitt
IRAQ

Finding Gilbert
Diane Covington
FRANCE

Common Tongues
Marianne Rogoff
MEXICO

Vice and Virtue
Angie Chuang
AFGHANISTAN

CONTRATIEMPO
Carol Reichert
SPAIN

In Lardo We Trust
Marcy Gordon
ITALY

Ex Marks the Spot
Aubrey Streit Krug
IRELAND/SPAIN

Carrefour
Laura Flynn
HAITI

Without Knowing I Had Ever Been Lost
Eva Tuschman
ISRAEL

Traveling with Ghosts
Jacqueline Luckett
CAMBODIA

Missing Paris
Nancy Kline
FRANCE

Fish Tale
Annie Nilsson
ECUADOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Masha

by Marcia DeSanctis

Two women, one skirt, and an untold story.

The first time I met Maria Konstantinovna, she was wearing a black leather skirt. It was Italian, brand new, and it was mine.

Masha, as I would come to know her, was a dejournaya in Moscow. Women like her sat on every floor in every hotel in the Soviet Union. They performed a range of duties—they served tea from a samovar that simmered behind their station. They ordered your phone call to America and came to wake you if it ever went through. They even washed lingerie and t-shirts, leaving the latter folded like fine envelopes, whiter than they ever deserved to be. They also handed out your room key with varying degrees of suspicion, charm, or ennui, and if you wanted to leave it for safekeeping, collected it when you left the floor. But allegedly, the real purpose of these hall monitors was to observe your comings and goings on behalf of the security apparatus of the Kremlin.

It was my second trip to Cold War Moscow.

One year earlier, I had arrived there with a new degree in Russian Studies and stayed in an old hotel in the center of town. On nights when I drank too much Georgian champagne, I crossed the street and walked alone past the cupolas and red brick walls of Red Square. Now I was back as a tour guide of sorts, a liaison, for groups of doctors who were on continuing education junkets. I was a translator, a babysitter, holder of boarding passes and whipping post if need be when tempers grew hot traveling around the Soviet Empire—which they often did. It was part of my job description to be cheerful, but when my busload of jetlagged gastroenterologists and I arrived at our hulking mass of a hotel, I despaired.

Our official Intourist guide told us it had been built in 1979 to house athletes and guests for the Olympics the following year. That much was obvious; it was a model Soviet vanity project, from the monstrous scale to the banners out front which erupted with optimism: “Onward!” they proclaimed. Across the street was a giant park devoted to the fruits of socialism, as well as a massive Space Obelisk. Inside, it was as sprawling and noisy as a city, and the air was dense with cigarette smoke and the grease from several restaurants.

Prior to my trip, a fellow tour guide had informed me that there were fiber-optic cables installed in every room, and that the entire twenty-fifth floor was devoted to surveillance. He claimed to have stumbled upon a wall of reel-to-reel tape recorders there. President Reagan had just given his Evil Empire speech, and the country was being run by an ex-KGB chief, Yuri Andropov. Paranoia was everywhere—in bars and on park benches where we changed dollars for rubles on the black market with people we had no reason to trust and who must have assumed we were listening to them.

As my new job paid little and I would depend on tips, I was eager to prove myself. But the first morning I woke up with a foggy head and aching limbs. So with apologies for being sick on day one, I loaded my fourteen physicians and their spouses onto the coach with their Russian guide and then repaired back upstairs, hungry for my bed. I peeled my clothes off and crawled in naked. The sheets were coarse cotton and delightfully crunchy, and the duvet still held a welcoming hint of my own body warmth.

I woke up to the sight of two men going through my suitcase at the foot of the bed. One man’s arm was buried in a zipper compartment; the other man was turned toward the window, holding my raincoat up to the light.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Russian literature was full of fever dreams, and I believed I was having one. The clarity was dazzling—two guys in blue shirts, the older one with a pale smoker’s complexion and hair all neat like a little boy on school picture day. The younger one had gray eyes that betrayed a flicker of menace, as if I were the one intruding.

Startled, the older man dropped the raincoat into the suitcase.

I was shivering and drew the comforter tightly around my bare body, sleeping bag-style.

“Excuse me,” he declared. “We thought you were out.”

They scrambled out the door and soon I fell backwards into sleep.

The next day, while my group toured Lenin’s tomb, I sat on the bus sweating, too ill to move. I had not spoken of my visitation the previous day. Many of my charges already supposed they were being watched; some were amused and some downright scared. They whispered to each other about the presumed KGB sightings and enjoyed the Cold War folklore. But they were all doctors and their American guide was sick, so they insisted on taking me back to the hotel.

I dragged myself through the lobby, into the elevator, down the hallway that was thick with the rotten-fruit smell of disinfectant. My feet carried me, quicker now, to my room, to that delicious, warm bed. The dejournaya station was empty. I had wordlessly passed her that morning, not stopping to leave my key. She had glanced up from her book and smiled, which was unusual for a key lady. I had noticed her wide-set green eyes.

And there she was, inside my room, wearing my skirt. She was curvier than I, and the waistband stretched tightly around her middle. The leather pulled across her hips sexily, as if the utterly random act of wearing a stranger’s clothes gave her an air of danger and power. She held a pair of black high heels that I had packed along with the skirt—I knew I would never wear them on my tour of Moscow and Central Asia, but they were new and expensive, and I didn’t want to leave them in the closet of my shared New York apartment. Her own satin blouse was unbuttoned; the frayed remains of trim drifted around the cups of her bra, which, at least a size too small, pinched her ribcage and crushed her breasts.

“Bozhe moi,” she said. Oh my God.

“It’s O.K., really.” What else could I say to this poor, mortified creature? “I just need to sleep.”

“Just a moment,” she said. One at a time, with two hands, she bent to place my shoes on the floor, toes pointed straight ahead like loaves on a baking sheet.

“Just a moment,” she repeated, unzipping with shaky fingers. I turned my head so as not to see her Soviet-issue panties, hoping at least she wore some. She nodded deferentially, her face creased with shame. In what seemed like one move, she slipped on her wool skirt and stepped into her shoes. She shuffled her breasts around, rearranging them as if to make room in her bra, and fastened her blouse.

I waved her out the door, saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. Please!”

I scanned the room, flipped through my suitcase. Only my make-up case looked disturbed, with pencils, brushes, and compacts strewn about the dresser. Strangely, despite my exhaustion and the fever that addled my brain, I knew I wasn’t angry. Rather, I pitied her embarrassment at being caught. Whoever this woman was, she was now exposed and compromised, and I wanted her to know that I, at least, didn’t care.

I fell fully clothed into bed.

When I woke up, she was sitting at her station and rose to greet me when I came down the hall. She seemed taller and more beautiful, having regained her composure, and must have been twenty-five or twenty-six, a few years older than I.

“Do you want tea?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I answered. “What’s your name?”

“Maria Konstantinovna,” she replied, using her patronymic rather than her last name. “Masha.”

“I’m Marcia too,” I said. In Russian, they sounded the same. “Is there anything to eat?”

She walked me back to my room, where I stripped down to my underwear and slipped into bed. Soon, Masha returned with rolls, cheese, and black tea. I drifted in and out of sleep. At times, I could hear the door swish open and closed or feel her swab my face with a damp cloth. Once I sat up to sip some tea and felt her hands bolster my shoulders, brace me as I lowered myself back to the mattress, and finally tuck the covers under my chin.

“I’m not working tomorrow,” she said. I looked at her, puzzled. “I think you will be well enough to leave for Tashkent.”

“Thanks to you, I think I will be,” I said.

I had not mentioned my itinerary to her, but she knew. The next day would be our last in Moscow, as we were flying to Uzbekistan the following morning. In the room, the shades were drawn. There was still daylight behind them, but I had no idea what time it was. Loud voices erupted in the corridor, and Masha stood to return to her station.

“I’ll be back in a few weeks. May I bring you something from America?” I asked.

She pressed the starched napkin that rested underneath the tea glass, and held her finger there while her eyes caught mine. I could see the corner of a folded square of paper, which I later slipped between my fingers and tucked into my wallet.

Within a month, I returned with another group of doctors, this time seventeen thoracic surgeons. At the airport, an agent had confiscated Vogue and Newsweek, but I still had the illustrated collection of Pushkin fairytales Masha had requested. She wanted the book, she wrote in her note, to read to her young son. At the Russian bookstore in New York City, I had easily procured what was impossible to find in the shortage-ravaged Soviet Union. Of course, I brought a few extra things—a leather handbag stuffed with lip gloss, eye shadow, red licorice. The scene had never left my mind—her open shirt, the tattered lingerie, and her eyes that shifted around mine until that moment of comprehension and convergence: had our fates been reversed, I would have discovered the Italian skirt from the depths of her luggage. And I would have slipped it on as she had done to see myself reflected, just once, in something beautiful.

Right after checking in, I hopped the elevator to my old floor and found the on-duty dejournaya.

“Is Maria Konstantinovna working today?” I asked.

“She left,” the woman answered.

“For the day, or for good?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, and turned to rearrange the keys, inviting no further questions.

Over the next six months, I was back at the hotel several times with the book in my bag, but I never saw Masha again. In the winter of 1986, I returned to Moscow, this time with an American television network. Change was afoot, Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, and glasnost was the order of the day. I was low man on the nightly newscast I worked for, but in those days it still meant I had a car and driver. Snow fell gently, unstoppably, on the black Volga sedan. My old hotel seemed closer to town than I remembered.

She wasn’t there.

Rounding the circular drive to leave, I recalled a brief embrace Masha and I had shared at the end of the one day we knew each other. I had recognized her perfume—Amazone—because it had come from my own bottle.

Over the years, I returned many times to Moscow.

I went with Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, and 60 Minutes. Each time, I packed that book of fairytales, and each time I journeyed out beyond the Space Obelisk, past the All-Russia Exhibition Center, to the ever–forbidding hotel. Always a fool’s errand, to be sure. And each time I got off the elevator, I swallowed harder as I confronted the empty space she once occupied.

After an eighteen-year absence, I recently returned to Moscow. As I packed, I slipped the slim, orange book into my suitcase. I was, frankly, surprised when I found it on the bookshelf, after six moves, a couple of renovations, and decades of neglect. The stories were in Russian so I never read them to my own kids, yet there it was, shelved patiently, a talisman to guilt, gratitude, and unfinished business.

Even though Moscow had changed beyond recognition, I hadn’t. Nor had the feeling of dread and sensory overload I experienced when I got to the hotel where Masha worked the day shift twenty-seven years ago. The lobby was still garish, but now it was loud with Italian cafés and gift shops selling nesting dolls and amber jewelry. A large man in a suit would not allow me to pass beyond his checkpoint to the elevators, so I went to the front desk.

“Would it be possible to go to the fifth floor?” I asked the receptionist. “I’m researching a book.”

“You are writing something on the hotel?” she asked.

“Not really….” I hesitated. “Well, yes.”

“What is the nature of your project?” she asked.

“Actually,” I said, “years ago, I met someone here.”

Her face softened. “I understand,” she said, and turned. “Just a minute.”

Within seconds, an official-looking woman approached me at the desk.

“Please leave your passport,” she said, “and we’ll go upstairs.”

I handed it to the receptionist and was ushered past the guard.

“Do you still have dejournayas?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. It is not the same as it was. Mostly, they just take care of the floor.”

“Can we please stop on five?” I ventured. She pressed the elevator button.

“Twenty-five is the only floor non-guests may see,” she stated.

The doors opened.

There was no sign of tape recorders, only a fancy carpet runner and an eerie stillness that bore the echo of empty rooms. There was no dejournaya, either, and certainly no Masha. As we strolled back down the corridor, I murmured niceties about the lovely, modern décor.

Back in the elevator, I took out the book and turned to “The Tale of Tsar Saltan,” the great writer’s most famous children’s story about the prince who saves the life of a swan, who in turn becomes a beautiful princess. The illustrations were simple but unremarkable, and I skimmed through the pages, stopping at a drawing of a bird flying across a starry violet sky. I closed the book and put it in my bag. It seemed that Masha had at last given it to me.

For all I knew, she emigrated, and I had passed her on a New York City sidewalk. Maybe she got sick or simply quit her job that day and was somewhere in Moscow now, her son grown. Perhaps she did vanish one night in that hazy time right before her country’s sea change.

I would never find out. Masha was in my life so briefly it shouldn’t have mattered. But to this day, I have not known comfort like the sound of her footsteps padding in and out of my hotel room as I sweltered with fever. I was twenty-three, in a strange land, nursed by the hands of a woman who, but for the clothes, might have been me.

Marcia DeSanctis spent years traveling the world as a network news producer and is now writing a memoir. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Departures, The New York Times Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, More, Princeton Alumni Weekly, and theHuffington Post. She loves to travel alone and her idea of heaven is arriving at a new place, opening the hotel room door, checking out what candy is in the mini-bar, and then heading outside to explore her new, temporary neighborhood. She tries to pinpoint a place to have her coffee every morning and always ducks into a pharmacy. She loves to bring home toothpaste or a jar of vitamins as souvenirs. This story won the Grand Prize Silver Award in the Fifth Annual Solas Awards (BestTravelWriting.com).

Lavinia Spalding is author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, chosen one of the best travel books of 2009 by The Los Angeles Times, and coauthor of With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant. A regular contributor to Yoga Journal, her work has also appeared in a wide variety of literary and travel publications, including Sunset Magazine, World Hum, Post Road, and Inkwell.

She spent her bohemian childhood in Kensington, New Hampshire and Flagstaff, Arizona, climbing trees, writing poetry, and playing the classical guitar. Upon graduating from the University of Arizona’s creative writing program, she took a one-year position teaching ESL in Busan, South Korea, and stayed for six years. An incorrigible nomad, she has traipsed through more than thirty countries on five continents, a blank notebook and a clutch of pens her constant companions. She is a practicing Buddhist, a Scrabble junkie, an avid kimchi maker, and an amateur knife thrower, but her greatest sense of accomplishment comes from her ability to say, “I love you” in twenty-five languages.

She currently lives in San Francisco and can always be found at laviniaspalding.com. Visit her there to see more of her work, including interviews with the contributors of this book.