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The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places
Klara Glowczewska (editor)
By
Published: Feb 17, 2010
Category:
Travel
In mid-winter, the clever FM stations play “Marrakech Express.” The dull ones play “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).” I prefer armchair travel.The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places, I took 17 trips with some great and a few less than great writers:
Nik Cohn, Savannah
Philip Gourevitch, Tanzania
Shirley Hazzard, Capri
Pico Iyer, Iceland and Ethiopia
Nicole Krauss, Japan
Suketu Mehta, the Himalayas
Edna O’Brien, Bath
Patricia Storace, Provence and Athens
James Truman, Iran
Gregor Von Rezzori, Romania
Edmund White, Jordan
Simon Winchester, Mount Pinatubo
William Dalrymple, pilgrimage to Santiago
John Julius Norwich, the Vatican
Jan Morris, Hawaii<
You take a trip, you hire a guide, you roll the dice. Nicole Krauss visited gardens in Japan and never even mentioned Katsura. I was right with Russell Banks in the Everglades National Park until — proof I’m a city boy — I was suddenly bored by nature. Hawaii has always seemed to me best enjoyed by those who live there; I’ve never understood flying five hours from Los Angeles to go to… a beach.
But a few pieces — Robert Hughes on Barcelona, Francine Prose wandering through Mozart and Kafka’s Prague — captured me completely and propelled me, like the 3-D glasses in “Avatar,” into the scene. And that raised me up, sharpened me; what the writers experienced was my experience.
Two pieces in particular made me actually want to Go There.
Nik Cohn — he’s best known for writing the piece of urban sociology that became “Saturday Night Fever” — went to Savannah, Georgia, where he promptly became a sloth. He felt guilty at first, but once he understood indolence was the Savannah code, he was right at home, collecting bon mots (“Nothing looks more like a bottle of liquor than a bottle of liquor in a paper sack”) and odd encounters.
Indolence, of course, is the mark of the white aristocracy. African-Americans are 55% of the city’s population, and they don’t live in the beautiful houses overlooking park-like squares, so off he goes to those quarters. And to cemeteries (Johnny Mercer is buried under a stone that reads: “And the angels sang.”) Bums and prophets, antique stories and great accomplishments (all of which ended with the Civil War and floods that wrecked the cotton fields), dazzling architecture and an active preservation movement — to Cohn, who clearly likes to settle in, it all adds up to Urban Paradise.
A more rarified destination is Iceland. During the tech boom of the ‘90s, I knew bunches of dot-com kids who would fly over for a weekend of partying. Listening to them and, now, reading Pico Iyer, I see they missed everything.
Iyer’s piece is called “The Loneliest Place on Earth,” and he makes the case that Iceland is "otherworldly…a country so lunar that NASA astronauts did their training there…" It’s hot springs and mud pools, the biggest glacier in Europe. And it’s a very busy, smart citizenry: four daily newspapers in the capital, round the clock parties in winter, and a requirement that, one night a year, every legislator must speak in rhyme.
Iyer falls under Iceland’s spell, and his writing shows it. He finds himself “walking through a sleeping world in the dove gray light of 2 AM.” He notices that Icelanders have eyes as blue “as the sea suddenly glimpsed around mountain curves.” But it’s more than that: < Sometimes it feels as if the forty miles or so that people can see across the glassy air here they can also see inside themselves; as if, in this penetrating emptiness, you are thrown down and down some inner well. Sometimes it feels as if the land itself invites you to see in its changing needs a reflection of your own, and in the turning of the seasons, some deeper, inner shift from light to dark. Iyer’s pieces --- he wrote also about his quest for spiritual awakening in Ethiopia --- had the effect of a great trip. I was tired and happy, soothed and, at the same time, oddly excited. And, like all satisfied travelers since the begging of time, I wanted to tell my friends about my travels To buy “The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys” from Amazon.com, click here. To buy the Kindle edition of “The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys” from Amazon.com, click here.]
