Traveling the World Without Leaving the Table of my Local Chinese Diner

I was greeted by that distinctive 'gas leak smell, when I got off of the elevator this evening.  The experience was further enhanced by me walking in on my stove sitting in the middle of my tiny kitchen, instead of against the wall where I left it this morning. This worrisome combination was reassuringly explained by a note, left by building management, that the gas would remain off until the recently discovered gas leak could be found and then fixed.  No gas meant no cooking—so I grabbed a book of travel essays and struck off to support my local Chinese restaurant.

Which finally brings me to my point—I want to say right here and right now how much I LOVE the essay form.  My current and constant companion is anything in the ‘Best American Travel Essays’ series, and right now I’m reading both ‘The Best Travel Essays of 2000 and ‘The Best…2006’.  I have 2002 and 2005 sitting on my bedside table, ready and waiting.  

Without a doubt the essay is the best literary form—it’s flexible, adaptable, and it celebrates economy and elegance in writing--if it takes only two pages to say it then only two pages will be used.  With a well-formed essay there’s no such thing as filler.  And of the essay form, travel essay is ‘…the most promiscuous – of genres’, or so says Bill Bryson in the 2000 edition introduction.  He explains, ‘…as long as you leave the property at some point, you can call it travel writing’.   That's why I like it so much; I don’t know what I’m going to get, where I’m going to go, or how I’m going to get there, but I’m just about guaranteed a treat every time.

One of my favorite essays in the 2000 edition starts off this way:

‘It’s was like trying to drink a beer on the subway at rush hour. Jostled from all sides, I stood hard against the flimsy railing of a makeshift stall and tried to hold my place against the various swirling currents of humanity

Several of the drunks I’ve been cultivating peeled out of the crowd to greet me.

“You are my friend,” said Maurice , who at nine o’clock in the morning was already in the condition I aspired to achieve. “Buy me a beer”. It was his ritual greeting.

“No way in hell,” I said, which had become my ritual reply.’

                                    [from ‘This Teeming Ark’ by Tim Cahill, Outside magazine]

Don’t you just want to read MORE?  Aren't you just sucked in immediately? Since I won’t type out the whole article, I’ll instead say that the author continues to talk about a 10+ day trip on ‘…a conglomeration of eight flatbed barges cabled to a great throbbing riverboat motoring down the Congo River’.  There’s no thesis statement, no moral to this essay; he just shares his (very unique) experience of traveling, en masse, down an African river. Reading this essay reaffirms my belief that life will always be stranger, and more wonderful, than any fiction we can dream up!

Here’s another fabulous beginning:

‘There’s an expat in a bar called the Blue Marlin, which is on the ground floor of a pink hotel in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica. He used to be a detective, did a bit of vice, enough to know how the world works, how people think. It’s late, and he’s drinking gin.

“These girls,” he says, waving his glass at the chicas. The place is packed with chicas. “They average out at, what? An eight and a half? Nine?”

He’s partial to Latin women. Make it a seven.

“OK, seven. But c’mon, a lot of them are beautiful.”

Conceded, assuming your taste runs to python-tight clothing. And, you know, prostitutes.’

            [from the 2006 edition: ‘Where They Love Americans…for a Living’ by Sean Flynn, for GQ]

I am tickled at how the author includes us in this opening scene—like we're standing next to him in that bar, and the expat is too drunk to notice us. This article, using blunt and unromantic language, speaks of Costa Rica’s other tourist attraction: the prostitution and peddling of it’s under-aged, female population.  It has a definite point to make, and a moral to under-score. 

Here’s how varied the selections in this series are: the first edition (2000) includes essays on the first World Ice Golf (WIG) Championship in northern Greenland, spending the night in Central Park, racing a catamaran from southern California to Mexico, hitchhiking Cuba, and motorcycling through Cambodia to find the Khmer Rouge Minister of Tourism. There’s one titled ‘Lard is Good for You’, while another is called ‘The First Drink of the Day’.  One essay gives insight into how two incarnations of the Panchen Lama were divined—one by the Dalai Lama, and the other by the Chinese government.  Another describes a travelers attempt to turn his trip into an experience by ‘storming’ the movie set of ‘The Beach’.  There’s a stark account of being stranded in an African desert under a broken-down truck, and an even starker recollection of a terrorist attack during a safari tour.  Rounding out the first edition are articles on leaving Ohio, going beyond 101 kilometers outside Moscow, visiting the Islamic Western provinces of China, and remembering Nantucket of the past. 

Are you intrigued yet?