The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 13

An excerpt from Lavinia Spalding’s Introduction

Table of Contents

Introduction
Lavinia Spalding

Vast and Unknowable
Roxane Gay
ANTARCTICA

O Brother, Where Art We?
Melissa Remark
NEW ZEALAND

Time Passage
Alenka Vrecek
CROATIA

To the Thai Woman Who Touched Me
Pier Nirandara
SOUTH AFRICA

Playing the World by Ear
Abbie Kozolchyk
SENEGAL / FIJI / NEPAL / SLOVAKIA

Why to Climb a Volcano Twice
Marcia DeSanctis
ITALY

Unbridled Joy
Susan Orlean
VIRGINIA

Traveling with Baggage
Christina Brobby
DENMARK

Into the Wind
Laura Killingbeck
CANADA / USA

Radioactive Memory
Theresa Lin
JAPAN

It Can Be Beautiful for Everyone
Katrina Woznicki
LOS ANGELES

The Donation
Stephanie Knapp
FRANCE

Tenderheaded
Faith Adiele
MOROCCO / NIGERIA

Carrying On
Caletha Crawford
SPAIN

Meeting the Mistress
Lisa VanderVeen
SINGAPORE

The Weight of Paradise
Cherene Sherrard
HAWAI’I

The Sound of a Hummingbird’s Wings
Ann Hood
MEXICO

Surrendering the Search
Maggie Downs
COSTA RICA

Boob Deck
Paulette Perhach
BAHAMAS

The Magnificent Mother of Sea Country
Jayme Moye
AUSTRALIA

Pastizzi
Kristin Winet
MALTA

The Living Goddess
Adriana Páramo
NEPAL

Honor and the Sea
Janna Brancolini
ITALY

Ripple Effects
Aislyn Greene
FRANCE

You Can’t Get There from Here
Sue Parman
SCOTLAND

Shifting Sands
Emma Morrell
QATAR

Milonga After Midnight
Marta Hanson
ARGENTINA

Acknowledgments

More Stories We Love

About the Editor

Abbie Kozolchyk

Playing the World by Ear

Sometimes a bauble is just a bauble. But not often.

No sooner had I boarded the Dakar-bound ferry than I was down on my hands and knees.

“Tell her she’s not going to find what she’s looking for,” said a nearby woman to my guide, Yoyo, who translated for me from their native Wolof.

Amidst the swimsuit- and tank top-clad beachgoers on board, the stranger looked a tad monastic with her neatly pressed blouse buttoned up to the collar, but still, I wondered: By what oracular powers could she possibly make such pronouncements?

The mystery was short-lived: “Your friend got on the ferry with only one earring,” she explained to Yoyo, his customary equanimity showing some strain once he accepted that my search was truly for naught. As soon as I’d come aboard, the woman had clocked my lone naked lobe—along with my dawning realization that something was missing.

One of the cobalt hoops I’d just bought on Isle de Gorée—the hauntingly beautiful island off the coast of Senegal’s capital—had fallen out, probably on the dock that was fast receding in the distance alongside the weathered ochre beachfront buildings.

I hadn’t even intended to shop, as there had barely been enough time to complete my official mission: researching one of the island’s seafood restaurants for an article about Baaba Maal’s favorite places around Dakar. But what the singer-songwriter and national hero never mentioned was the profusion of earrings for sale by the Gorée dock, nor the persuasiveness of the local vendors. When one of these women stopped me, appraised my features, pulled some bright blue baubles from her inventory, inserted the wires herself, and thrust a mirror into my hand, who was I to disagree as she nodded approvingly?

The prim-looking passenger on the ferry was no less decisive. Clearly not O.K. with my newly naked lobe, she began fishing around in her purse. A triumphant smile spread across her face as she produced a heart-shaped golden stud with a tiny crystal in the center.

“Tell her she should take this,” she said to Yoyo.

I wished I could throw my arms around this woman but wasn’t sure of the cultural norms that govern the hugging of strangers on ferries. Though I couldn’t accept her gift, I wanted her to know how much it meant—not only because of her outsized generosity in the face of a random traveler’s minor loss, but also because earrings weren’t just earrings to me. They’d long since become my most beloved travel totems—tiny, improbable portals into any given culture, as much as they’re mementos of it.

You never know what you’ll learn about a place once you start coveting its earrings.

Consider the elaborately beaded, peacock-colored baubles I spotted on Anna, my guide in Bratislava. I quickly became so taken with their intricacy and iridescence that I lost all ability to focus on what she was saying during our tour of the city’s medieval center.

Mercifully, as we stood outside the iconic white castle—the Danube, a ribbon of glinting green nearly three hundred feet below us—she asked, “Does anyone have any questions?”

While other tourists were still formulating their inquiries about the museum collection inside, the historic adjacent gardens, and the so-called UFO Bridge in the distance, I could no longer contain myself.

“I know this is a weird one,” I began, “and it may be inappropriately personal.” But shameless and obsessed, I carried on: “Um…do you happen to remember where you got those earrings?”

“Ah,” she smiled, no doubt relieved that I hadn’t asked her to go deeper into traditional Slovakian gender roles—something she’d just tried to describe, a bit uncomfortably, in the context of an Easter tradition that involved boys dumping buckets of water on girls to foster fertility and beauty.

“I inherited these earrings,” Anna told me, “but not in the usual way.”

She explained that after the fall of Communism, Catholicism had enjoyed a major resurgence in Slovakia. And having been outlawed and persecuted during the so-called Operation R of 1950, various female religious orders began rebuilding locally after 1989—among them, the Salesian Sisters, also known as the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. A friend of Anna’s had subsequently joined the order, taken a vow of poverty, and bequeathed the gorgeous earrings to her. If I hadn’t fallen so hard for them, I would have missed that entire layer of local life—and the further reading it inspired (for example, about the sisters’ efforts to receive Ukrainian refugees at the border in 2022, just after Russia’s invasion).

I didn’t leave Slovakia with earrings—a rare failure on my part, despite Anna’s best efforts to commission replicas for me—but the lessons learned were at least as valuable as any beaded bauble.

In other corners of the globe, earrings have offered glimpses into diasporic life. From the moment I landed in Fiji, for example, I started spotting golden jhumkas, the bell-shaped, often filigreed adornments that dangle from many a traditional Indian earring. With a severe weakness for them, I decided to stop a passing jhumka wearer on a sidewalk in Nadi—Fiji’s main international port of entry—where I was already in the middle of a separate search.

I needed something that proved elusive in the tropics: an extra-thick, full-length wetsuit. Though I’d traveled to Fiji on an assignment that required me to complete my dive certification there, I couldn’t stay under water for more than a couple of minutes without freezing. (Born and raised in the blazing Sonoran Desert, I’m effectively reptilian.) But as I searched for any evidence of a neoprene garment district, I was immediately distracted by said jumkhas. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I blurted, startling the ornately bedecked woman as she breezed past me on the sidewalk. “Could you tell me if there’s a local store where I could buy earrings like yours?”

So unprepared was she for my question that she asked me to repeat it.

In fairness, Americans tend not to pop over to Fiji in search of Indian earrings. And until that day, neither had I. But now I was on a mission.

“Acha, acha” (basically, “okay, okay”), the woman said, finally accepting that she’d heard me correctly—at which point, I thought she might direct me to one specialty shop. Maybe two. Instead, I left with half a dozen recommendations on and around the commercial Queens Road.

I had known there was a sizable Indo-Fijian community that descended mainly from the sugar cane farmers who’d arrived as indentured laborers around the turn of the twentieth century. What I didn’t know was that in these remote Melanesian waters, almost any Indian goods you could possibly want (filigreed earrings, bridal lehengas, porcelain Ganeshas, Bollywood Blu Rays) were available in such abundance that it surprised even the Indian travel Youtubers who started posting from “the Little India of the Pacific.”

In the end, I found so many gorgeous jhumkas, I was nearly foiled by decision fatigue. But I left with a pair of particularly delicate danglers, as well as a belly full of Indian snacks that fueled my ramble through a side of Fiji I would have missed otherwise. And yes, I also left Nadi with a wetsuit.

I wasn’t always such an earring fanatic. Pierced at birth, as is the way in my Cuban-American clan, I got an infection three years later that meant removing one earring and letting the hole close. As soon as my pediatrician cleared my lobe for re-piercing, my mom was standing by with the tiny gold stud that had been relegated to a drawer for months. I, however, was adamantly opposed to the idea. I preferred the one-earring pirate look to the return of bilateral bling.

A détente ensued, as did an eventual bribe: I’d long been begging for a Barbie, and until then, I’d been denied my dearest wish on feminist grounds (the earring irony seemingly lost on my mom). Instead, I’d received one bearded and bellbottomed member after the next of The Sunshine Family, Mattel’s over-earnest, hippie-adjacent, and wildly dissatisfying answer to Barbie, Ken, Skipper, and Ginger. But by consenting to getting re-pierced, I finally scored my first Barbie. In my three-year-old mind, I’d arrived.

I’m not sure my earring obsession is entirely unrelated, but I’d like to think it grew (mostly) from something else. In the time-honored tradition of collecting local tchotchkes on the road, I used to come home with tiny wooden boxes, ceramic figurines, and yes, the occasional snow globe. Eventually, though, I realized that while my prized knick-knacks gathered dust on a shelf, any earrings I picked up along the way became portable memories, connections, and conversation starters that—in a sense—were integrated into my person.

And sometimes, not just in a sense.

When I turned forty, I went on an eleven-day trek to Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal. And as much as I told myself to focus on the Himalayan peaks at every turn, something considerably smaller kept catching my eye: the gold hoops that seemed to occupy every spare nanometer of ear cartilage on the matriarchs of the villages along the route.

A super-saturated yellow gold—similar to the Indian earrings I loved so desperately (see: Fiji)—these Nepali hoops had an aesthetic all their own: rough-hewn, bottom-heavy and conspicuously handmade. I had to have a pair, and learned from my guides that I wouldn’t find any for sale until we reached the town of Pokhara at the very end of the trek. So I forged ahead, Gollum-like, ever in pursuit of my own golden “Precious.”

When the blessed day arrived, and my fellow hikers beelined for the local massage therapy centers, I proceeded to the jewelry district, where I eventually found Saran, the only shopkeep with my hoops on hand. Or rather, on his wife’s ears, which I began pointing to like a desperate Charades contestant once I realized words alone wouldn’t clear the language barrier, no matter how many ways I tried to say, “You know…gold village earrings?”

Saran, who wore a wool beanie and looked to be in his twenties, sold the same standard tourist fare I saw in other neighborhood shops—wrist malas, ohm pendants—and I gathered I was the lone visiting weirdo who came looking for local-lady hoops.

Bewildered but amenable, he led me to the nearby gold market, where we bought the requisite raw material: a pea-sized 22-karat ball. Then we went back to his home studio, where he invited me to stick around. And however enticing the town beyond his walls—with its lakes, temples, and museums—nothing appealed more than watching Saran work.

Relying on ancient-looking, world-weary tools that had been passed down from his great grandfather, he fired, filed, scrubbed, and soaked the metal into submission over the next several hours. All the while, I drank tea with his wife, played hide and seek with his son, and made a new English sign for the store.

Yes, Saran asked me to produce marketing materials for him. And how could I not? I’d quickly come to adore the whole family. I loved that his seven-year-old son would rather keep his dad company at work than play with the neighborhood kids outside. And—maybe because I have my own chatty sister—I loved that Saran’s wife spent half the day on the phone with hers. But what I loved most was how readily and unselfconsciously these hours-ago strangers invited me to drop into their lives.

While I’d gone in seeking earrings, I wound up with an abbreviated home stay. Plus earrings.

Finally declaring them perfect, Saran said he’d put them in for me. And why not, I thought, suddenly distracted by several mice that began sprinting across the store. But soon I noticed he was using pliers—and twisting somewhat alarmingly.

A bit too late, I asked, “Will I be able to get these in and out myself?”

“Oh, no,” he replied, “but your mommy or aunties will.”  And with that, he charged me not even $50, showed me to his motorcycle, and drove me back through the streets of Pokhara to my hotel.

I did, in fact, see both my mommy and my auntie shortly after I got back to the US, but neither had a Himalayan goldsmithing kit handy, so I wound up leaving the earrings in for more than a year, until a jeweler removed them for me.

As sad as I was at that moment—and oddly guilty, because it felt like a betrayal of a longstanding unspoken bond—I knew I couldn’t keep the earrings in forever. I had more bonds to forge—maybe even on a Senegalese ferry someday.

When that day eventually came, I couldn’t accept the austerely dressed stranger’s own gold heart. But after Yoyo, my tireless guide, declined her generous offer as effusively as possible on my behalf, he reached into his backpack. As if there were a specific compartment inside for consolation earrings, he pulled out two pairs.

“Choose the one you like best,” he said.

There could be no polite refusals this time; I knew he was the determined sort.

By then, I’d spent hours with this man, who—despite clear difficulties with his legs—had gleefully marched me all over the greater Dakar metro area, where friends and admirers alike would emerge at every turn to greet him. Little wonder he’d wound up with the earrings I chose. They were tokens of affection he’d received during his travels among the region’s Tuareg people, whose sleek bronze handiwork soon dangled from my ears.

He wouldn’t let me pay him for them; he felt I needed them. When I asked why, he simply cited Senegalese hospitality.

“It is the tradition,” said Yoyo.

He added that he wanted me to have good memories—especially from Isle de Gorée, a place known as much for its eighteenth-century House of Slaves memorial as for any beach or restaurant, however inviting.

This reasoning echoed something Baaba Maal had said before dispatching me to the island in search of his favorite seafood spot, where a gifted chef loves feeding friends and strangers alike: “You can go from very hard, very sad experiences to see that after all, there is hope, there is light, and we can build something from that.”

Would these conversations stay with me no matter what? Of course. But am I reminded of them regularly because, say, I reach up to untangle some hair that’s gotten wrapped around a bit of well-worn bronze? Without a doubt. And while not every travel memory is equally affecting, each is a part of me—whether it’s hanging from my ear, tucked into a jewelry pouch, lost on a West African dock, or offered by a stranger who knew just what I was looking for, and why.

~ ~ ~

Abbie Kozolchyk is the author of National Geographic Books’ The World’s Most Romantic Destinations and a contributor to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. If you spot a stray cobalt hoop on a Senegalese dock—or pretty earrings anywhere—feel free to DM her: @abbiekozolchyk 

Lavinia Spalding has edited six previous editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing. She is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Keeping Traveler and the co-author of With a Measure of Grace, This Immeasurable Place, and two editions of the Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. Lavinia’s work appears in such publications as the New York Times (where she has published two Modern Love essays), AFAR, Tin House, The Walrus, Longreads, River Teeth, Post Road, Off Assignment, Yoga Journal, Sunset, Ms., The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The New Zealand Herald, and many more national and international publications. Her essays have been widely anthologized, and she introduced the e-book edition of Edith Wharton’s classic travelogue A Motor-Flight Through France. She is also a TEDx speaker and the co-creator and co-host of the storytelling podcast There She Goes. Lavinia has also taught for more than thirty years and is a co-founder of Studio Unfurl, an online creative community. When she isn’t leading writing workshops around the world, Lavinia lives with her family in New Orleans. Visit her on Substack or at laviniaspalding.com.