The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology Page 3

  Eventually, the boy pedaled to some small shops. ‘You shop?’ he asked, stopping. I didn’t feel like buying anything else, but I felt obliged to at least go inside, not even thinking that he may have gotten a kickback from the store owner. Chimes tinkled as I opened the door, the smell of musty incense overwhelming. On the stained red carpet, I noticed a small tray of food: an offering, maybe, with fruit, nuts, and a small, glistening mound of what looked like intestines. My stomach did a somersault.

  I slowly browsed the aisles of the stuffy shop, crammed with a little bit of everything: chips and snacks, trinkets, statues shaped like temples. The owner, an unsmiling middle-aged woman, stared at me from the cash register as I picked up a small maroon Buddha, turning it over in my hand before putting it back on the shelf. This did not please her. ‘You no buy, you leave!’ she shouted at me.

  ‘Um, ok,’ I stammered, trying not to look at the innards on my way out.

  ‘Let’s go back to the market,’ I told the pedicab driver. I was over all of this: the heat, the crowds, this unfriendly shop owner, and feeling so far from home and so glaringly out of place. I checked my watch: thankfully, I had only about an hour before the cab driver would pick me up.

  Back at the market, the crowds had become even thicker. I didn’t have the energy to battle them, so I found a small cafe and bought a huge bottle of water. The fact that it was ice cold felt like my first victory of the day.

  Thirst quenched, I pulled out the postcards I’d bought. A lump formed in my throat as I wrote one to my grandmother in Alabama. I would have given anything to be in her cosy kitchen at that very moment, plowing through a plate of her buttermilk fried chicken and mashed potatoes, accompanied by a glass of iced tea. But I didn’t write that. Instead, I scribbled snippets of my trip so far and how much fun I was having.

  At about 1.15pm, I made my way to the designated pick-up spot. Like the market, the nonstop whirl of vehicles around the traffic circle seemed more frantic now, too. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like on a weekday. I looked for my driver, and quickly realized what a task it would be to distinguish his cab from the dozens of others that buzzed past. That is, if he was coming back. For all I knew, he was back at home, showering his grandkids with crisps from England, an Italian scarf, and a secondhand CD player brought right from America. I didn’t think to write down his license plate number or a phone number for the cab company – not that I could communicate with someone, anyway.

  Minutes ticked by. I frantically scanned the roaring maelstrom of taxis, small trucks, motorbikes with mask-covered drivers. My mind started to race with alarming thoughts. I had carefully saved enough baht for the return trip I’d already negotiated, but what if that wasn’t enough to get me back with another cab driver? Where in the world would I go to exchange more money? My beloved CD player – my savior on long, crowded flights – how was I supposed to survive the next 20 hours of travel without it? And, most disturbing of all, what kind of moron trusts a stranger to come back to pick her up after she’s voluntarily left her stuff in the trunk of his cab?

  Standing at the edge of that traffic circle, cars and vehicles maniacally zooming past, I fought back tears. My mom was right: I should never have left the airport. I was surely going to miss my flight, screwing up the rest of my itinerary and endlessly worrying my poor folks. Maybe I wouldn’t even be able to get to Australia. So much for a grand adventure that I could brag about later: in just a few hours, Bangkok had beaten me, and beaten me badly.

  I sighed deeply and tried to clear my head. It was now 1.45pm, and my next flight would depart at 5pm. I needed to figure out another plan – quickly. I started looking around to see where I could catch another cab, and then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something familiar: the mass of beads and jade hanging from my driver’s rear-view mirror. My heart leapt: had he really come back?

  I blinked my eyes as the cab rolled up to the corner, almost weeping with relief when I realized that, yes, it was him: the same frail, balding driver from before. Now, however, he seemed downright heroic. He smiled slightly and nodded, just like he’d done when he’d dropped me off. I wanted to throw my arms around him in a giant bear hug, but instead, I just smiled back and climbed into the cab. Unprompted, he then opened the trunk and loaded my carry-on bag into the back seat with me. I didn’t even check inside to make sure everything was there. I knew it would be.

  He hit the gas and we chugged back into the sea of Bangkok’s infamous traffic. We again rode in silence, the dangling beads and jade swaying gently and hypnotically, lulling my eyes to close.

  Hours later on my Australia-bound flight, relishing the feel of a fresh pair of underwear and T-shirt, I reflected on my long layover. Maybe Bangkok hadn’t beaten me after all. Instead, this vast, unrelenting, irreverent, unnerving, stifling city had revealed a lifelong truth about travel: that if you take a leap of faith, more often than not a net will appear in the form of a good, honest, trustworthy soul who will save the day in one way or another, sometimes simply by showing up.

  And that, I told my mom years later while finally ‘fessing up about my layover in Bangkok, is a lesson best learned by getting out into the world – and, most certainly, out of the airport.

  SMALL LIGHTS IN LARGE DARKNESS

  BY REBECCA DINERSTEIN

  My third voyage on the Hurtigruten was the first taken by night: a season earlier I’d crossed Norway’s Vestfjord on this boat under staggering daylight. Now, the Arctic’s Polar Night had become as dominant as the Midnight Sun had been, and as I waited for the boat to pull away from the shore, the water before us lay black. I could hear bells ringing on distant boats I couldn’t see. I sat on the observation deck in my down coat and fur-lined hat. The air was cleaner than any I’d breathed before – its impurities had frozen away. I breathed, and the bells rang. I couldn’t argue with that total darkness, I could only admire it; I could only rest within it and look out toward the invisible horizon at the far end of the fjord.

  I arrived on Little Christmas Eve. Growing up Jewish in New York City, I’d never celebrated regular Christmas Eve, let alone Little, so the Nordic embellishment of 23rd December enchanted me. In the home of a friend, I found the table set for a grand dinner, and the tree raised. Under the tree lay boxes of icicle ornaments, tiny paper Norwegian flags, and presents bearing every name in the family, including mine. I’d never seen my name under a Christmas tree before. This house sat on an island not far from the North Pole, and these presents struck me as the genuine offerings of elves. We can lose twenty years in ten seconds when presented with delight this pure; I became a child. I sat at the foot of the tree. I touched the green needles. I touched the blue ribbon that held my gift shut. The hills outside my friend’s windows were as dark as the fjord had been, but illuminated with glowing houses, each house full of its own tree. For the first time, I understood the holidays as light-oriented, as Pagan in the sense of being rustic and unaffiliated and merry. This was a time of celebration, no longer of obligation, a time of rest, not of strain.

  In the morning we walked to the graveyard. The graves lay under thick snow and the tombstones bore elegant, Scandinavian names with patronymic suffixes: -son, -datter. When you subtracted the birthdates from the death dates, the difference often approached a hundred years. Like the air, these lives had frozen their impurities away, had been preserved, had lasted. The trees rising behind the graveyard were pink because it was midday and the sun was both rising and setting. The snow was blue. As Mr Lockwood does at the conclusion of Wuthering Heights, I ‘wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’ My friend wished her mormor (mother-mother, a perfectly simple construction for ‘grandmother’) a God Jul, a Merry Christmas.

  At home again, we watched Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Goofy celebrate Christmas in their own colorful homes – a Disney series that has aired every Christmas in Norway for the past sixty years. We drank Julebrus, a crimson-colored soda that tasted like pears and cinnamon. Elaborate gothic font ran over the bottle’s label, forming the words EVENTYR BRUS (FAIRYTALE SODA) over an illustration of a panicked white goat butting a menacing troll. The fine print read:

  FAIRYTALE SODA

  THE THREE BILLYGOATS GRUFF

  ‘Now I’m coming to get you,’ screamed the Troll. ‘Yes, you just try! I have two horns, with them shall I gore your eyes out! I have two battle stones, with them shall I crush both marrow and bone,’ said the biggest goat. He attacked the troll, put out his eyes, beat out both marrow and bone and butted him over the waterfall. All the goats went to their summer house.’

  The holiday season in New York had been essentially competitive – a choice between endless options, gatherings, sales. In the Arctic, it felt merely essential, singular. The house was our one, small, true shelter. The landscape around the house proceeded with its brutal winter regardless of our festivities and did not ask anything of us. With nowhere else to be, nothing else to do, and complete darkness around us, we felt permitted to create boundless, reckless light.

  Christmas ended and winter remained. I left my friend’s home and returned to my own: a large empty building on a nearby island. I had come to write a book of poems and it was time to get back to work after so much Mickey Mouse. I hadn’t decorated every windowsill of my building with miniature elf figurines, but someone had. These creatures, called nisser, dominated every Norwegian household from November through February. I sat among the nisser and opened my miniature travel laptop, entering into an undersized realm balanced only by the enormity of the local weather: Arctic storms howled and threw the trees against my window.

  Every day, for two hours, the darkness would recede. It would be replaced by pastel colors that washed the
sky and snow indiscriminately until both land and heaven turned the same purple. When the darkness returned, I knew what fields and what mountains I wasn’t seeing – I learned to see beauty where it was and where it wasn’t. I learned to see beauty where it had been, and where it would appear again when the sun next came to town.

  This winter taught me how to brighten. I learned that a small flame makes a wide glow. I learned that even night can be visually scintillating, and that a landscape can communicate a lot of personality when no other persons are near. For lack of distraction, I worked hard that winter and finished my poems. Many of them examined the darkness I’d inhabited, and celebrated the sources of light I’d uncovered. On my final evening in the Arctic, I saw the Aurora Borealis for the first time. It arrived, green, to the patch of sky directly outside my window. Anne, a neighbor in a nearby house, came up to my door. It was two in the morning, I was packing up to leave in a few hours, and, miraculously, Anne had just baked an apple cake. We ate the warm cake in the green snow and thanked winter for its bounty.

  EGGS IS DONE!

  BY JAN MORRIS

  Driving somewhere in Wisconsin 70-odd years ago, near the start of my very first visit to the United States, I stopped off after dark at some simple lodgings by the highway (for I was short of cash, and it was before the time of the ubiquitous motel). I was bemused in those first American days by everything I saw and did – everything was new to me, everything was enthralling – so next morning while my breakfast was being prepared I took a cup of coffee and strolled out to the porch to contemplate the scene outside. It proved a climactic moment of my life.

  I remember my responses vividly to this day. Across the highway was a railway track, and beyond that rolled a river. I say ‘rolled’, because it did not seem to be simply flowing, like the rivers of home, but moving with an altogether different sense of purpose and self-esteem. Rolling was the word for it, and I dare say there came into my mind even then a lyric to go with it – ‘Away, you rolling river!’ – for 5000 miles away in Britain I had grown up in the haunting presence of Shenandoah, without ever knowing where or quite what it was. There were fishermen out there that morning, in small black boats, and clusters of islands, and somewhere on a distant building the Stars and Stripes were flying.

  Well, it wasn’t the Shenandoah River, but it was the young Mississippi, rolling silently down to the Gulf of Mexico, and it caught at my emotions as no other river ever had, and seemed to speak to me of dimensions I had never contemplated. Ever since then the idea of the mighty American rivers has bewitched me, and I have come to think of the greatest of all Americans, Abraham Lincoln, as a sort of American river himself.

  I am not making this up, not entirely – I took notes at the time, and have them beside me to prod my impressions. While I marvelled there at the river, as if on cue in an allegorical pageant there came erratically into my line of vision an all-American urchin. He was riding a bicycle along the road, but sort of halfheartedly, lolling sideways on it, hardly bothering to steer the thing, idling his way down the road with an almost arrogant ease. Was he whistling? He may well have been. Was he chewing gum? Of course. Did he have a wodge of newspapers under his arm, ready to be thrown to people’s front doors? He surely did, because of course he was conforming to an archetypical figure of my American imaginings, familiar to me already from movies and cartoons and Huckleberry Finn, and here, I thought, most satisfyingly fulfilling the concept.

  Where is he now? I suspect he exists no more, in particular or in kind. He himself must be pushing 80, and I suspect he has no successors in his news-round, but he meant a lot to me that day. He was all I wanted of American insouciance, American chutzpah, American youth, riding away there so cheerfully brazen, chewing his gum, chucking his newspapers, I suspect, with perfect accuracy at the thresholds of his clientele, and seeming to me a late and heartening example of what the Frenchman Jean de Crèvecœur long ago called that New Man, the American!

  On a shack nearby an election notice was pinned, inviting passers-by to continue their support for an incumbent local sheriff, and engagingly adding YOUR VOTE WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED – and oh! how greatly I appreciated that addendum! I knew very little about American politics, and the style of this approach seemed to me reassuringly domestic, as it were, intimately and comfortingly down to earth. I was soon to learn that it was hardly characteristic of American hustings, but as I copied it into my notebook I thought it hinted at a fundamental, underlying kindness to the American way of life – and as a matter of fact, I think so still….

  Now you must believe me – I perhaps make the most of my experiences, but I don’t lie. Hardly had that newsboy gone wayward on his rounds, hardly had I scribbled down the sheriff’s endearing message, when there appeared on my stage out there one of the supreme symbols of the American drama. Did I really hear a whistle sound? Well, perhaps not, but there is no denying that with a mighty rumble and a rush there swept past me that morning the Great Northern Railway’s Empire Builder, bound for Seattle out of Chicago. It is lodged in my memory now with all the other great American trains I was later to encounter, but in my fancy at least it stormed by me then with a colossal splendour of silver coaches, a terrific whirling of wheels, a glimpse of white napkins and, yes, that unforgettable sad wail of the whistle that was to become in my mind a very essential of the American ethos, 1950s style.

  Like rivers, like urchins, like country politics, the Empire Builder stamped upon my mind profound conclusions about the meaning of America, as I stood there so wonderingly that Wisconsin morning, and very soon a text of the occasion, too, was imprinted once and for all upon my consciousness. It was not something from Walt Whitman, not a snatch of the Gettysburg address nor even a ditty from Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo, but it has remained in my memory from that day to this with a truly poetical clarity. It sang out to me from the cook-house behind my back, and what it said was this:

  ‘Eggs is done!’

  THIS BLESSED PLOT, THIS EARTH, THIS REALM

  BY ELIZABETH GEORGE

  Although I’m an American, I have spent my entire career writing crime novels that are set in Great Britain and that feature a cast comprising nearly all English characters. This is hardly unusual now, but when I started out more than thirty years ago, there was only one other American writer who was using Great Britain as a setting. Unlike me, she was working in mystery fiction – different from crime – and at the time she was rather slapdash in her terminology and her facts. For my part, I set a different course, and I was determined to do well by it.

  Since people are often surprised to discover, after reading one of my novels, that neither am I British nor have I ever lived in Britain, they want to know why. Why write novels set in England? Why do it when you’ve never even lived there? Why go to the trouble that this must cause you? Why compete with genuine British crime writers, who are obviously the real article? Why? Why? Why?

  I’ve come up with a variety of answers to these questions through the years because early on I discovered that answering them in an identical way was quite tedious and possibly the route to madness. So sometimes my reply has to do with my enduring love of Shakespeare. Sometimes it has to do with my exposure to pop culture in the ’60s, which was influenced greatly by British films, a crowd of brand new British actors, British music, and British fashion. Sometimes I tell the story of my friendship with a thirteen-year-old girl from Manchester, England, who came to join my eighth-grade class at St Joseph’s Grammar School in Mountain View, California. More often than not, I add that since my background as an English major largely revolved around English and Irish and not American literature, I was naturally drawn to the place, as I’d read so much about it. But I have never told the real story, and I have never touched upon the real reason. It is this: the entire direction of my life was altered by a television commercial.

  I can see it even now. Worse, I can hear the little song accompanying it. (As it was quite pretty, I am loath to call it a jingle.) I know exactly what it was advertising: a cologne made by Yardley.