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  better than fiction

  Better than Fiction

  True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers

  Published by

  Lonely Planet Publications

  Head Office

  90 Maribyrnong Street, Footscray, Victoria, 3011, Australia

  Locked Bag 1, Footscray, Victoria, 3011, Australia

  Branches

  150 Linden Street, Oakland CA 94607, USA

  201 Wood Ln, London, W12 7TQ, United Kingdom

  Published 2012

  Printed by Hang Tai Printing Company, Hong Kong

  Printed in China

  Edited by Janet Austin, Kate James

  Cover Design by Roberto Devicq

  Design by Mark Adams

  Layout by Margie Jung

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Better than fiction: true travel tales from great fiction writers / edited by Don George.

  1st Edition.

  978 1 74220 594 6 (pbk.)

  Voyages and travels.

  Travelers’ writings.

  George, Donald W.

  808.8032

  © Lonely Planet and contributors 2012.

  LONELY PLANET and the Lonely Planet logo are trade marks of Lonely Planet Publications Pty. Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Don George has edited six previous Lonely Planet anthologies, including Lights, Camera... Travel!, A Moveable Feast, The Kindness of Strangers, By the Seat of My Pants and Tales from Nowhere. He also wrote the best-selling Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing. Don is Editor at Large and Book Review Columnist for National Geographic Traveler, Special Features Editor and blogger for the popular travel website Gadling.com, and Editor of Geographic Expedition’s online magazine, Recce: Literary Journeys for the Discerning Traveler (www.geoex.com/recce). He has been Global Travel Editor for Lonely Planet, Travel Editor at the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle; and founder and editor of Salon.com’s Wanderlust. Don has received dozens of awards for his writing and editing, including the Society of American Travel Writers Lowell Thomas Award. He appears frequently on NPR, CNN, and other TV and radio outlets, is a highly sought-after speaker, and hosts a national series of onstage conversations with prominent writers. Don is also co-founder and chairman of the annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference.

  Contents

  Introduction

  DON GEORGE

  Going South

  KURT ANDERSEN

  Kind of Blue

  SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM

  Huaxi Watermill

  ARNOLD ZABLE

  Shooting Pompeii

  DBC PIERRE

  The Mountain Mine

  CAROL BIRCH

  The Tin Can

  TOM CARSON

  Among Saudi Sands

  KEIJA PARSSINEN

  Quetzal

  FRANCES MAYES

  Off the Beaten Track in Malawi

  MARINA LEWYCKA

  Adrift in the Solomon Islands

  MARK DAPIN

  Confessions of a Coconut-Soup Eater

  STEVEN AMSTERDAM

  Sudan: The Scarface Express

  JOE YOGERST

  Chasing Missionaries

  SUZANNE JOINSON

  In Bear Trap Canyon

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  A Tohunga with a Promise to Keep

  KERI HULME

  Death Trip

  PETER HO DAVIES

  A Visit to San Quentin

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  On My Way Home

  LLOYD JONES

  You, Me and the Sea

  STEVEN HALL

  The Fairbanks Shakespeare Camp

  STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK

  When Things Make No Sense

  PICO IYER

  The Way to Hav

  JAN MORRIS

  A Tango with Freud

  ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  Getting Travel Dirt Under Your Fingernails

  BRYCE COURTENAY

  A Small World after All

  CHARLES FINCH

  The Thieves of Rome

  M. J. HYLAND

  Arriving in Luxembourg

  CHRIS PAVONE

  Mumbai: Before the Monsoon

  STEPHEN KELMAN

  An Alpine Escape

  ALIYA WHITELEY

  Who Wants a Girl?

  ISABEL ALLENDE

  Into Unknown Climes

  NIKKI GEMMELL

  Nuestro Pueblo

  TEA OBREHT

  Introduction

  BY DON GEORGE

  When I was preparing to settle in Greece for a year fresh out of college, in addition to my guidebooks, I packed two novels, The Magus by John Knowles and Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. As the year unfolded, in many ways the latter two proved to be the best guides of all, immersive, enlightening introductions to the landscape, people, and culture I was discovering.

  As I have learned over and over in my wanderings, some of the best travel writing is fictional. And some of the best travel writers, going all the way back to Lady Murasaki, Homer, and the authors of One Thousand and One Nights, are the fiction-spinners who transport us to the worlds they create with their words.

  This truth was the inspiration behind the anthology you hold in your hands. What would we get, we wondered, if we asked some of the planet’s most acclaimed fiction writers to describe their most meaningful non-fictional journeys?

  The answer is this treasure trove of surprising and inspiring tales: thirty-two stories that span the thematic spectrum from disorientation to revelation, disillusion to redemption, life-threatening risk to life-saving connection; in settings as varied as Antarctica, Alaska, and Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Sulawesi, and South Africa; written by a distinguished corps of contributors who have humbled us in their enthusiasm for this project.

  Exhilaratingly varied in place, plot, and voice, these tales all share one common characteristic: They manifest a passion for the precious gifts that travel confers, from its unexpected but inevitably enriching lessons about other peoples and places to the truths – sometimes uncomfortable but always enlarging – it reveals about ourselves.

  May your own life’s journey be enriched and enlarged by these master storytellers’ true travel tales!

  Going South

  BY KURT ANDERSEN

  Kurt Andersen is the author of Heyday, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2008 Langum Prize as the year’s best American historical novel. His earlier novel, Turn of the Century, was a Times Notable Book and national bestseller, and his most recent novel is True Believers. Andersen is also the author of the nonfiction book Reset, about the 2008–09 financial and economic crisis. In addition, he is host and cocreator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award–winning public radio programme, and a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and Time magazines. Previously, he was a columnist for New York magazine and the New Yorker, as well as the design and architecture critic for Time. He also cofounded Spy magazine, and served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine and editorial director of Colors.

  I suppose it was inevitable. My family’s annual vacations had always consisted of weeks-long summer driving trips, and almost exclusively north, to cool, tidy, familiar Minnesotas and Wisconsins and Manitobas. I had studied Spanish for ten years. I was 17 going on 18, out of high school a semester early, working a minimum-wage job and admitted to the college of my choice. And for three years my favorite book had been The Electri
c Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s iconifying 1968 chronicle of Ken Kesey and his dozen friends’ pointless and profound coast-to-coast-to-coast 1964 trip across America in an old school bus. It was a moment, for people my age, when high adventure seemed not only possible but easy, not only easy but obligatory.

  And so in the summer of 1972, five other Omaha boys and I bought a stubby old yellow school bus. It got atrocious mileage, even by the standards of that era, but gas cost only 35 cents a gallon. We ripped out most of the seats, built some crude wooden storage cabinets, installed a cassette tape player and speakers, tacked down 100 square feet of gold loop-pile carpeting, bought some maps, and – cell-phoneless, internetless – lit out for the territory. We were headed south, due south, way south, beyond the frontier, to Mexico.

  Two or three days later in Texas, at the end of I-35, we learned that anyone who looked like a hippie was being turned away at the border. Although not exactly hippies, we were a half-dozen teenage boys with longish hair, dressed in T-shirts and jeans and jammed into a funky school bus. (Also, it turned out, we were about to bring coals to Newcastle – that is, mescaline to Mexico. The most hell-bent of my companions, unable to abide throwing away perfectly good hallucinogens, swallowed his entire two-gram stash in Laredo.) At a Woolworth’s in Laredo we bought a tube of Brylcreem, and for $3 apiece the squarest dress shirts we could find. Those of us with mustaches and sideburns shaved. Voilà! De-counter-culturalized, looking more like Mormon missionaries or The Partridge Family’s nerd cousins than Merry Pranksters or Easy Rider dudes, we were waved right across by two sets of border guards, out of America and into Mexico.

  My recollection of most of the trip is strangely vague. I know we slept on the bus and ate mostly bread, cheese, cold cuts and fruit. I do remember certain specific, redolent neo-ugly-American moments – blasting Traffic’s The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys out of our open door and windows as we rumbled through small towns, leaving scraped streaks of chrome yellow on masonry walls as we squeezed down streets barely wider than the bus. And I recall our route around the country – Monterrey, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City, then Cuernavaca, Acapulco, Mazatlan, Nogales. But forty years later, out of all those hot, dusty, windy weeks, one single day remains distinct and extraordinary.

  It was the golden age of hitchhiking – a year earlier a friend and I had hitchhiked from Nebraska to the east coast and back to look at colleges – and as we approached Mexico City from the northwest, we stopped to pick up a kid, maybe a year or two younger than us, who had his thumb out. Between our shaky Spanish and his shaky English, a friendship was struck up. Standing at the front of the bus, holding on to the chrome pole next to the driver’s seat, ducking to look out the giant windshield, for an hour our new pal, Fernando, guided us deep into the city and finally to his working-class neighborhood.

  He demanded we come up and meet his parents and siblings. His mother insisted she was going to serve these six hungry young American strangers a late lunch. His father required that we each guzzle a submarino, a tall tumbler of Coke over which a shot glass of tequila was held with two fingers and dropped like a depth charge – and then another and maybe one more.

  We talked about the last Summer Olympics, which had taken place in Mexico City, and the two black American medalists who had raised their black-gloved fists as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ played. And our new friends were still excited about the 1970 World Cup, also staged in Mexico, in which their national team had gotten to the quarter-finals. Fernando or one of his buddies who’d joined the party asked us, ‘¿No es jugar al fútbol, fútbol mexicano, en los Estados Unidos, verdad?’ – You don’t play Mexican football in the U.S., right?

  He meant soccer, of course. And back in 1972, American kids did not play soccer – except, providentially, the six of us. I’d been the first to learn, at a nerdy international-themed summer camp when I was 12 and 13. Because soccer was foreign, it seemed cool, and because none of the real athletes in Omaha were any better at it than we were, a few of us freaks and geeks had organized a tiny intramural league in high school.

  ‘Sí,’ I said, ‘en nuestra escuela hemos jugado en un equipo de fútbol mexicano!’ – In our school we played on a soccer team!

  By means of phone calls and shouts, Fernando instantly assembled a local team of six. Minutes later the block was cleared of all parked vehicles, and a few empty oil drums – traffic blockades and goalposts – had been lined up at each end. The street was at the bottom of a ravine, the opposing hillsides covered with multicolored cinderblock and stucco houses from bottom to top. In other words, it was a kind of natural stadium, each terrace and porch its own skybox. Children and adults stepped outside, sat on walls, leaned on posts, opened Cokes and Coronas. And awash in the preternaturally perfect August light of six o’clock, the game began.

  Until that day we had played only on grass, but years of school-recess asphalt kickball had prepared us, more or less, for the hyperspeed and crazy bounces of street fútbol. And the pre-game tequila probably made our pothole contusions and gravel-studded abrasions less painful. We had a goalie, but our positioning otherwise was highly ambiguous, with backs racing upfield to shoot, and forwards falling back to defend our oil drums.

  The most glorious and dreamlike part of the experience was the spectator mob. There were 100 people watching, maybe 150, but the loud, happy chants and cheers – provoked by any and all dramatic action, whether committed by a local kid or a gringo – made it feel like a crowd of thousands. At half-time a raspador, a vendor of fruit-flavored shaved ice – an actual concessionaire! – wheeled his cart onto the block.

  The game ended as sunset approached and church bells struck seven. I’m pretty sure we didn’t play for a regulation 90 minutes. The thin air at seven-thousand-feet-plus was rough on us boys from the low plains. And we lost decisively – Mexico City 5 (I think), Omaha 2 – but we scored, twice, playing their national pastime on their street. We were breathless, sweaty, filthy, bloody, bruised and totally, deeply, existentially gratified.

  We awoke at sunrise, performed quick ablutions in the family’s single bathroom, ate Fernando’s mother’s breakfast of scrambled eggs and tortillas, offered money that was refused and refused again, reboarded the bus and headed out, on the road again, more than ever ready for adventures.

  But nothing else on the trip – not our first visit to Las Vegas (Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing, published the previous fall, was a kind of sacred text), not our first visit to Disneyland (the Merry Pranksters had been headed for the World’s Fair in 1964), not the archetypal young California blonde speeding around a curve in Big Sur and smashing her yellow convertible into our parked bus – was as wondrous as our impromptu soccer match in that ragged, random, impossibly hospitable Mexico City barrio whose name I don’t remember and maybe never knew.

  The process of recalling and reconstructing my faded and fragmentary memories of that ancient journey and heroic game has been as much like writing fiction as nonfiction. If it were fiction, I might have an unexpected and ironic and life-changing encounter years later, as an adult, with Fernando. Real life was not so obliging. In a piece of fiction, surely, the bonds forged over the course of 7000 miles on a bus – we few, we happy few, we band of brothers – would endure yet be tested and twisted over the decades. In fact, I haven’t been in touch with any of my fellow travelers for more than 30 years; two of them died young, the mescaline-eater by his own hand at age 41. In a work of fiction, I might right now have the dusty, yellowed old The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys cassette in front of me, an elegiac artifact of my youth, as I construct a remembrance of things past. But I unsentimentally tossed out all my old albums long ago. I discovered on Google just now that that particular tape sells for between $60 and $500, depending on condition.

  As it happens, however, I am in Mexico, at the end of a month-long stay, longer than I’ve spent in the country since 1972. I’m on the sunny rooftop of a house on a street called the Alley of th
e Dead, overlooking a hillside covered with a jumble of brown and white and yellow and red stucco houses. I hear afternoon church bells. And in the schoolyard at the bottom of the hill, children are kicking a soccer ball.

  Kind of Blue

  BY SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM

  Sophie Cunningham has worked in publishing in Australia for twenty-five years. She is the author of two novels, Geography and Bird, and a nonfiction book, Melbourne. Her third novel (in progress), This Devastating Fever, is about Leonard Woolf’s years in Sri Lanka. She is also currently writing a nonfiction book on Cyclone Tracy and extreme weather.

  Once upon a time I lived in a turquoise-blue bungalow next to a vegetable garden planted at the back of a red-brick house. At the back of the veggie patch was a stand of bright-yellow sunflowers that stood tall as a human, faces toward the sky. On the ground lay pumpkins, their tendrils unfolding so fast that you could, I used to fancy, see them grow – if you were patient, if you watched closely enough. As it happened, my attempts to watch pumpkins grow didn’t go so well – were as difficult as noticing those moments when you feel yourself grow. How often can we pinpoint when a conversation, a landscape or simply a gesture has stretched us, and broadened our view of the world?

  The reason my bungalow walls were turquoise blue was that I’d been, just a couple of years before, to India and you can’t go to that country and not have your relationship to colour change. In Australia, colour is, or was, a matter of taste, of restraint, of following rules. (Never wear pink and red together, my grandmother used to tell me. She’s been dead 30 years but still I hesitate, if I’m wearing pink, as I lean in towards the mirror to put my red lipstick on.) In India colour was used with a flourish and confidence. It exploded around you. In fact I bought some of it home in little plastic pots, pots of powdered paints that I have, for 25 years now, carried with me from house to house. My talismans. The colours are as intense, as fresh, as the day I bought them from a market in Madras: golden yellow, bright grass green, cobalt blue, china red.