The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10

By Lavinia Spalding

My best friend and I rarely call each other. Not because we don’t enjoy talking; we just prefer to catch up in person, ideally over frosty drinks in a foreign land. But before our recent trip to Nicaragua, I texted her, “Are we taking backpacks or rolling bags?” and my phone rang. “Rolling bags?” she asked, her voice high with alarm and disdain. “What have you done with my best friend?” It was a good question.

~ ~ ~Erin and I became friends thirty years ago, in a clear-cut case of teenage supply and demand: she had a car; I needed a ride. But before long, we discovered we were our happiest selves in that car, cruising the streets and cul-de-sacs of our small town, windows rolled down, heat cranked up, and some terrible music blasting from the stereo. In moments of abject boredom, we’d race along a stretch of road with an incline steep enough that if she floored it going up, we caught air on the way down. Other nights we sped in circles around the highway on-off ramp. We never cared where we went—all that mattered was movement.

Over the years we began inching out, driving to the next town over, and the next town after that. Soon we graduated to a cross-country road trip, then our first international border, Mexico, where we drank cheap tequila and haggled for trinkets in clumsy Spanish. In college we backpacked through Europe for three months. Later we lived in South Korea and vacationed in Thailand, Saipan, and Bali. We spent a month in Australia, where we met Erin’s future husband, and we married her off on a beach in Costa Rica. Four years ago, we celebrated our fortieth birthdays together in Cuba.

And not once, in all those years, had I proposed swapping backpacks for rolling bags. What changed? What had I done with her best friend? Was it a symptom of middle age? Did it have to do with the fact that I was recently married and trying to start a family? I’d been working insane hours to meet deadlines—could I blame fatigue? One final ignominious thought terrified me: Were my adventuring days over?

In Nicaragua, Erin and I backpacked, ate street food, stayed in hostels, took “chicken buses” (retired American school buses, brightly painted and squeezed tight with locals) and lanchas (small, crowded boats cheerfully described as “unstable” by one helpful official). All the other backpackers we met—mostly ten to twenty years younger—were hiking volcanoes, clearlythe thing to do in Nicaragua. We’d considered doing it too, but then we weren’t feeling especially motivated, and we hadn’t packed the right shoes, and we’d hiked volcanoes before. We’d also gone skydiving, hang gliding, trapezing, rappelling, ziplining, canyoneering, rafting, snorkeling, and scuba diving—not to mention participated in countless other adrenaline-buzzing activities, like the time in Korea we ran a high-speed relay race using an enormous slithering live eel as a baton. We reckoned our resumé of shared adventures gave us a pass this time. So we decided to skip the volcano boarding, too.

Instead, we walked miles each day in 95-degree heat and 85-percent humidity—blistered and sunburned and bugbitten— traipsing through museums, cathedrals, parks, and plazas, braking only for the occasional Tonya beer or jamaica (hibiscus) juice. In Granada we rented bicycles (I fell off mine), and in the evening we sang karaoke in a tiny bar filed with locals who treated us like American pop stars. We visited the markets in Masaya, still haggling in clumsy Spanish, and devoured heaping plates of vigorón (yuca root, coleslaw, plantains, and chicharrones). We toured the island of Ometepe, lingering in Ojo de Agua, Eye of the Water, a mineral pool the attendant swore would make us younger.

For our final two days I’d booked us into Surfing Turtle Lodge, an eco-hostel that Lonely Planet described as a “utopian beach paradise.” The reviewer wrote that we might stay “like forever.” We wouldn’t, of course—our jobs wouldn’t allow it. Two days would have to suffice. But even two hours sounded dreamy: it was off the grid, on a secluded stretch of island, 100 percent solar powered. Its main tourist draws were surfing and turtles, but since we wouldn’t be surfing (the current was too strong), and no baby turtles were hatching (wrong season), we’d be left with nothing to do but sit on the beach and let our blisters heal. I was enforcing a 48-hour time-out.

To get there, we hired a taxi from Leon, a canoe across a river, and a tiny horse cart through the jungle. When we finally arrived at the remote hostel, a British kid in a tank top that read, “¿Porque no?” gave us a tour, starting with the outside bar, which had swings instead of stools and served two-for-one Nica Libres all day long. A sign read: “Happy Hour is Every Hour.” As we settled in and met the other guests—all beautiful, tan, barely clothed twenty-somethings draped across couches and hammocks and beach chairs—I realized the Lonely Planet reviewer wasn’t being hyperbolic about guests staying “like forever.” The first three we talked to had been there three weeks, six months, and seven months, respectively.

Déjà vu hit. Erin and I had once made a habit of lingering in spots like this—sunny hostels in Greece, Thailand, Bali, Australia. We’d arrive intending to stay a night, and weeks later still be installed poolside or surfside. We could do that then; time was elastic and languid, belonged only to us. Now there’s less lollygagging. Travel obliges us to pay closer attention, squeeze more from each moment. Plus, we have careers and husbands and homes to return to now. But truthfully, these days we’d also go stir-crazy, staying still that long.

~ ~ ~Our first night at Surfing Turtle, one of the owners, Aldo, joined us for a beer. He was closer in age to us than to his guests, and I confessed that although I loved his place, I was feeling self-conscious—after all, we were decades older than the others.

“Age doesn’t matter,” he said.

Cliché, I thought.

Aldo leaned forward. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “about Barbara.”

He used to lead adventure tours, and Barbara joined one of his trips through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. A dozen travelers made up the group, all young, fit backpackers except Barbara, a tiny octogenarian who arrived hauling a gigantic flowered rolling bag behind her.

Erin shot me a grin, which I ignored.

“Central America is a hard place to travel,” Aldo said, “with its cobbled and uneven roads, but there was Barbara every day, dragging this huge bag behind her, bump bump bump bump, everyone offering to help—but she always waved us off, insisting she was fine.”

Aldo regaled us with story after story about Barbara: how she misplaced her passport and emptied her suitcase onto the airport floor in Costa Rica, flinging clothes everywhere until she located it; how she refused a short flight from Nicaragua to Honduras in favor of a two-day haul on multiple chicken buses because she knew she’d get a seat (and how she then sat comfortably while the others stood, hanging on for life, sardined and cursing her name); how one afternoon Aldo discovered her clutching a coconut she’d found on the ground and hacking at it with a knife, and when he asked what she was doing, she answered, “I need mixer for my rum!”

“Barbara was awesome,” Aldo said. “In fact, she’s the only person I remember from that group. So you see, age really doesn’t matter.”

This time it didn’t sound like a cliché. Over the next two days while Erin and I read in hammocks and got massages, the twenty-somethings surfed, played volleyball in thong bikinis and—like backpacker versions of Midas—turned everything they touched into drinking games. They tried to recruit us, and though we declined, we liked being asked.

Our last night at Surfing Turtle, rain brought out the wildlife. As we walked to the bar in the dark, dozens of baseballsized moon crabs scuttled across our path, and we screamed and ran, laughing hysterically. Later we huddled under a mosquito net reading by the light of our phones, like kids at camp with flashlights under covers. I felt young and—so what if we hadn’t volcano-boarded or surfed or even played hula-hooping drinking games?—like we were having a great adventure.

~ ~ ~I’ve been traveling for more than twenty years now, and the thrill of being on the road has always been wed, for me, to the thrill of never knowing what a day might involve, knowing only that I’d say yes. But lately when I travel, I struggle to reconcile my aging, mellowing self with the younger, intrepid me who leaped at every daring stunt. While plenty of my friends—some decades older than I—continue to leap, and while I still want to leap, sometimes I just really don’t feel like leaping anymore. And while I wholeheartedly celebrate the fact of aging (on good days at least), I deplore the thought of slowing down. Yet I also truly enjoy the actual practice of slowing down. At the same time, the exhilaration of accomplishing something physically challenging is unbeatable.

It gets confusing.

What helps, I’ve found, is reading travel stories, because the more I read, the more I’m reminded that adventure is limitless, since it can mean absolutely anything. It’s deeply personal—one woman’s gutsy escapade is another’s ho-hum afternoon. Adventure is also ageless, evolving as we do. I can attest to this, because in some regards I’m far braver than I was when I began traveling in my twenties. Meanwhile, certain acts I’d have classified as ordinary back then strike me as exciting now. Getting married was an adventure. Trying to start a family is an adventure. Practicing foreign languages, eating weird foods, making new friends: these all feel like adventures. Getting back on a bike was clearly a misadventure (I have the bruises to prove it), and come on: when is karaoke not an adventure?

Reading travel stories also strengthens my belief that adventure isn’t a physical feat or even an experience, but a state of mind. I think true adventurers are those who treat every ordinary day like the mysterious gift it is; who greet strangers with an expansive mind and an eager, helpful heart; and who aren’t necessarily fearless but who confront fears, little or large, and attempt to transcend them. (“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life,” wrote the great artist Georgia O’Keeffe, “and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”)

This is precisely why many of us travel—to face fears and slake our thirst for the unknown. To force ourselves to be a little bolder, a little bigger. We seek renewal, and we’ve discovered it’s most easily attained with passport in hand. Travel is one of the most important acts we can engage in as humans, if only because it reboots our regular lives. The more we set out to discover the universe, the more we habituate ourselves to pursuing rich opportunities and infusing wonder into every moment. Being alive—truly alive, not merely existing—requires a refusal to grow complacent, and a deliberate effort to routinely wake ourselves up. And in travel we have an obvious—and exquisite—wake-up call.

So answer the call to adventure. Dare to do something different. Book a ticket to a place you can’t pronounce, and when you arrive, climb a volcano. Go trapezing. Or hang gliding. If you’re invited to run an eel relay race, say yes. Or don’t, but say yes to something. Wherever you go, find an experience you can turn into an adventure.

~ ~ ~This year I had the great privilege of reading 450 submissions to select the 30 essays forThe Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10. As always, the process was enormously fun and ridiculously challenging. The quality of writing astounded me, and I was left with heaps of stories I would have loved to include but couldn’t—stories that kept me reading late into the nights, set fire to my wanderlust, gave me shivers, brought me to tears and laughter. Stories that still walk around inside my head, rearranging my notions of travel and adventure. And indeed, although the essays I selected for this year’s edition are wildly diverse in geography, subject, and tone, they are all alike in that they are tales of true adventure, because each author made the same simple but critical decision: she went.

From Australia to Afghanistan, Thailand to Tanzania, Ireland to India, Cuba to Croatia, thirty talented writers have invited you along on their expeditions of body, mind, heart, and spirit. Some stories are of journeys requiring not only physical but also mental fortitude, such as Peggy Orenstein’s deeply moving account of dog sledding in Greenland after her mastectomy. I think you’ll find Jill K. Robinson’s diving trip through the cenotes (underground caves) of Mexico moody and mesmerizing, and Serena McClain’s journey of 400 miles along the Camino de Santiago in Spain—with some nasty travel companions—downright terrifying.

You’ll read tales of bona fide danger, like Eva Holland’s “Chasing Alexander Supertramp,” a fascinating profile of the pilgrims who risk life and limb each year in Alaska to reach an abandoned bus, and Jayme Moye’s “The Road Not Ridden”—about courageous young female bicyclists in Afghanistan who continue to ride, though doing so endangers their lives.

And of course, there are plenty of essays that prove adventure is beyond definition. Carly Blitz perfectly illustrates my thesis that getting married is an adventure (especially if you do it the way she did, at Burning Man). Sarah Katin finds her adventure crossing the road in Vietnam. And Judith Campbell’s “Indian Ocean Commotion” illuminates, to my mind, the highest form of travel adventure: finding yourself an unexpected guest stuck in an unpopular, untouristed place—and welcoming the experience with sheer delight.

Along with chocolate, coffee, and rum, I carried something equally delicious home from Nicaragua: a clear vision of Erin and me, two little old ladies rolling our bags along cobblestoned streets someday. Misplacing our passports, riding chicken buses, hacking away at coconuts. It brings me joy to imagine. And so does the realization that Aldo was right: age doesn’t matter. Nor does baggage (literal or metaphorical). What matters is continuing to sign up. Hurtling into unknown places—or merely inching out, even if all that entails is driving fast over a hill to catch some air. What matters is going.

I hope you enjoy this tenth-anniversary edition of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and that the thirty stories within (and Barbara’s, of course) inspire you to grab your backpack—or your gigantic flowered rolling bag—¿porque no?—and go have your own definition of adventure.

Introduction
Lavinia Spalding

Good Is Coming
Angela Long
INDIA

Snails
Faith Adiele
NIGERIA

Bad Pilgrim
Serena McClain
SPAIN

Day Dreamer
Erin Byrne
FRANCE

Fly Girl
Abbie Kozolchyk
UGANDA

Miss Associated Supermarket
Katherine Jamieson
GUYANA

Chasing Alexander Supertramp
Eva Holland
ALASKA

Oh Captain, My Captain
Johanna Gohmann
CROATIA

Ashes Over Havana
Magda Montiel Davis
CUBA

The Siberian Connection
Carrie Kirby
MONGOLIA

For the Sake of the Sin
Blair Braverman
NORWAY

The Road Not Ridden
Jayme Moye
AFGHANISTAN

Milagros and the Underworld
Jill K. Robinson
MEXICO

Why Did the American Cross the Road?
Sarah Katin
VIETNAM

Waiting for the Sun
Marcia DeSanctis
PUERTO RICO

An Hour Like Water
Kate McCahill
ARGENTINA

Snow in Mongolia
Shebana Coelho
MONGOLIA

Juan’s Jukebox
Christina Ammon
MEXICO

An Unwanted Guest
Simone Gorrindo
INDONESIA

Indian Ocean Commotion
Judith Campbell
THE COMORO ISLANDS

Private Lessons
Colleen Kinder
EGYPT

That Time I Got Married at Burning Man
Carly Blitz
NEVADA

Incoming
E. B. Boyd
AFGHANISTAN

Travels with Carly
Rachel Friedman
AUSTRALIA

The Grease Devil Is Not Real
Hannah Tennant- Moore
SRI LANKA

Balloons Over Burma
Becky Hutner
BURMA

Free Range
Anne Korkeakivi
TANZANIA

Sea Change
Candace Rose Rardon
THAILAND

Pretty Red
Kimberley Lovato
IRELAND

Leader of the Pack
Peggy Orenstein
FINLAND

Acknowledgments

About the Editor

Good is Coming

By Angela Long

Breakfast at epiphanies.

Every day, I walk down to the Ganges River for a swim. Along the way, I pass a small cave chiseled out of the rock. There’s an old man there, a holy man. He’s usually crouched low over a fire, snapping twigs. I try my best not to let him see me looking inside his home. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but I’m curious. I’ve never seen a holy man’s living quarters before. Sometimes, when I think he’s bent low enough, I walk slowly to catch a better glimpse of life inside the cave. I’ve seen a battered pot, a wool blanket. I’ve spied an altar at the back: candles burning, pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses.

Today the holy man is sitting very still at the mouth of his cave, gazing at the lemon trees. It’s difficult not to stare at his long, neatly combed white hair and intense brown eyes.

Every day, when I get to the river, I wait behind the rocks until the groups of white-water rafters have bobbed past, and then I come out and dive straight into water fresh from the Himalayas. The cold is shocking.

At the ashram where I’m staying, they joke I must have Canadian blood to be so foolish as to swim up here in November. I humor them, saying I come from a people who run naked into oceans in subzero temperatures on New Year’s Day. To be honest, my blood rebels against the water temperature. It numbs my every cell. But I have no choice except to swim in it.

The river cures everything, eventually, I’ve been told. Rheumatism. Cancer. Snakebites. Broken hearts. Bad karma. For thousands of years people have found their way to its banks and prayed to it, adorned it with flowers, burned their dead beside it, swum in it. Millions and millions of people. I like to float along in its current, thinking of this. I like to imagine my body as a sieve and the river straining through me, the rapids crushing any molecules of disease. I like to imagine my broken heart coming dislodged and floating downstream like a dead branch, my bad karma sinking to the bottom with the silt. Like the silt, every day it seems to pile higher. Every day I remember some new misdemeanor: Lies. Jealousy. Unkindness. It’s all there. Cringing in the cold water, I think back on turning thirty, and on my twenties, and all the way back to my teens, to the worst thing I’ve ever done—something I’ve never spoken of and probably never will. Do we all hold one such secret? I float there, thinking about that night I’d rather forget, and wait for the river to swallow me whole. But it doesn’t.

After my swim, I walk along the beach and shiver. Sometimes I see the holy man farther downstream making elaborate gestures with a stick of incense. Other times he’s just sitting and looking at the rapids. If it’s a sunny day, the flattest rocks will be covered with his laundry: cantaloupe-colored sarongs, matching handkerchiefs, and towels. If he’s close enough, I smile broadly, place my hands in prayer position, bow slightly, and say, “Namaste.” The holy man always seems amused by this, but he never returns my greeting. I’ve been told by the ashram’s meditation leader, Lalita, that he’s taken a twelve-year vow of silence. I’ve also been told to avoid contact with him at all costs. But I figure even holy men like to be smiled at now and again.

I confess that, while he’s busy with his incense stick at the river, I take advantage of his absence from the cave and linger for a few moments at the threshold, looking more closely at the gods and goddesses and his neatly kept fire-pit, until I start to feel guilty and walk quickly back up the hill to the ashram.

I’ve overstayed my time here. A one-week retreat to learn the basics of Hinduism and yoga has turned into three. I’ve self-tailored the past two weeks to suit my own spiritual needs, which include reading novels, writing poems, and, of course, swimming in the river. Luckily the ashram is slow this time of year, and Lalita is happy as long as I keep quiet. I think she sees me as a bit of a lost soul, too fragile to return to the rigors of traveling alone in India. I think she’s right.

As the river becomes colder, Lalita begins to talk of closing for the season. Though I worry the Ganges hasn’t yet cured me, I decide it’s best to leave. I walk five kilometers into the village and buy a bus ticket to the deserts of Rajasthan. On impulse I buy the holy man a bag of oranges and leave them by the mouth of his cave.

On my last day at the ashram I walk to the Ganges for my final swim. I see the holy man inside his cave, bent over the fire, snapping twigs. The moment my footstep falls by the cave entrance, he turns and gestures for me to enter. I look nervously back toward the ashram. He slaps the ground hard with a twig and fixes me with a scowl. I go inside.

He leads me to the altar. There, beneath the portrait of Shiva, balances a pyramid of oranges. He points to me, to the oranges, to Shiva. He places his hands between his chest in prayer position and bows his head. Then he rubs the spine of a cabbage leaf onto the dirt floor and begins to write with its juice in English: Breakfast. Tomorrow. 7 a.m. He looks to me for a response. I nod. He claps his hands together twice, smiling so widely I can see that he has only four teeth. Then he turns his back to me, bends over the fire, and snaps twigs.

When I arrive the next morning at seven, the holy man is stirring a pot over the fire. I offer him the only item I have left in my chocolate stash: a Kit-Kat bar. He claps his hands and smiles, gesturing me toward a cushion atop a bamboo mat. He busies himself with the pot, and I fidget on the cushion, growing more and more nervous, but my nervousness is soon overtaken by curiosity. I’m at leisure to examine every detail of the cave: the holy man’s bedroll, the symbols written in ash on the wall above it, the package of incense, the books stacked neatly in a recess. He walks to a shelf made of branches lashed together by twine and extracts an assortment of bags from a large box, then returns to the fire.

Finally the holy man presents me with a mysterious concoction in an ornately patterned copper bowl. He sits in front of me and watches as I take my first spoonful. I’ve prepared myself to love it no matter how horrible it tastes. But when it reaches my tongue, I raise my eyebrows in surprise, then take another bite, and another. I can’t stop eating. It’s as though he’s captured every flavor I’ve ever loved. The sweet, the savory. It’s all there in my copper bowl.

He laughs and gives me more. He points to Shiva, to the pot on the fire, to me. He goes outside and returns with the spine of a cabbage leaf. Deva, he writes, points to me and then to the center of his forehead. I see you, he writes. I must look confused because he squeezes his eyes shut, opens them, and then writes: Good heart. I see you. Inside.

I panic for a moment. Can he read my mind? I try to think pure thoughts, and he laughs again. Suddenly his expression changes to one of pain. Suffer, he writes quickly, the cabbage stem beginning to turn to mush. Too much.

“I’ve suffered too much?” I ask, and he nods his head. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I know.”

The holy man claps his hands and smiles. He throws the cabbage stem aside and picks up a twig. Good is coming, he scratches into the dirt. He points to every word. “Good is coming,” I say, and he claps again. “Good is coming,” I say, liking the feel of the words in my mouth.

* * *At the age of eighteen, Angela Long flew from Toronto to Frankfurt to begin a long-term love affair with faraway lands. She’s hitchhiked, cycled, bussed, walked, driven, sailed, and ridden trains throughout Europe, Mexico, Central America, Northern Africa, India, America, and Canada. She’s volunteered in soup kitchens, orphanages, literacy centers, and farmers’ fields. She’s worked in restaurants, tree-planting camps, hotels, hostels, English-language schools, tutoring centers, gardens, pottery studios, and transition houses. Her writing is a distillation of these experiences and has appeared in numerous publications including The Sun, Utne Reader, and The Globe and Mail. She’s also the author of Observations from Off the Grid, a collection of poems about the nomadic life.

Lavinia Spalding is the author of two books: Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, and With a Measure of Grace, the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant, and she introduced the reissued e-book edition of Edith Wharton’s classic travelogue, A Motorflight Through France. Her writing has appeared in many print and online publications, as well as in tattered, coffee-staind journals around the world. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s a member of the Writers’ Grotto and co-founder of the award-winning monthly travel reading series Weekday Wanderlust.