The Best American Travel Writing: 2000
“This first collection of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING reads like a good novel. Best-selling author Bill Bryson and series editor Jason Wilson have put together a book that will surprise knowledgeable travelers and entrance newcomers with the glories of new worlds.” - Amazon
✈️ ✈️ ✈️ (3 Airplanes)
Why The Best American Travel Writing 2000 are brilliant travel essays that make you nostalgic for the ghosts of travels past.
“Through stories of adventure, laughter and even horror, editor Bill Bryson and series editor Jason Wilson meticulously weave a tale of what travel was like at the turn of the century.”
How was I introduced to this?
Having wanted to get into travel writing, I picked out this book alongside its more contemporary 2020 version and John McPhee's Draft No. 4. This is far superior to the more modern version, but there are many reasons for that. The main one is that it was a different time to write about travel, and many of these stories you have to understand are more than twenty-two years old. I was sixteen years old when this book was published, and I was just on the verge of being bitten by the travel bug some four years later when I first moved to China. But at this time, you already have people writing, as Rolf Potts (The Vagabond's Way) does in his excellent essay "Storming The Beach," that:
"Laos, incidentally, is still charming and unspoiled, like rural Thailand in the eighties. The hill-tribe trekking around Sapa in Vietnam is as full of wonder and surprise as Chiang Mai treks were a decade ago. Goa and Koh Phangan still can't live up to their early nineties legacy; rumor crowns Central America the new cutting edge of rave. Sulawesi is, part and parcel, Bali ten years ago.
Granted, I have condensed what I heard – but for all talk, you would think that paradise expired some time around 1989."
It brings to mind a conversation I had just the other day about my travels in Cambodia in 2007 and how what I experienced no longer exists. The old huts I used to rent for 5 dollars a night in Sihanoukville are now 5-star Chinese casinos. Nepal, where I live now, will unfortunately soon be like that too.
Chinese Casinos, Sihanoukville, Cambodia 2022
This book has hidden adventures galore, making you want to pick up your backpack and travel, but our world has changed.
Jonathan Tourtellot writes in his essay "The Two Faces of Tourism" that:
“The World Travel and Tourism Council predicts that people will be making one billion international trips annually by 2010... Try to imagine enough tour buses to hold a billion people... Hardly surprising, then, that tourism is transforming the world.”
I hate even to Google what it is now, but that shows that this book is dated and that you need to look at these stories with eyes of nostalgia, wonder where they are now and maybe do a little research on them yourself. If you want something current, this is not for you, but it's an excellent snapshot of what the turn of the century was like.
Essential Book Information:
Published in 2000, this edition of The Best American Travel Writing series was the first. A handful of travel essays hand-selected and put together by guest editor Bill Bryson (Notes From a Small Island) and series editor Jason Wilson (Godforsaken Grapes). About 26 essays in total, the stories traverse the world from America to Zanzibar, a literal A to Z of travel writing. It is 295 pages long, with the longest essay being around twenty pages. The selection of essays come from The Washington Post Magazine, The New Yorker, Outside, National Geographic Adventurer, Time, Town & Country, Conde Nast Traveler, Coffee Journal, National Geographic Traveler, Audubon, Men's Journal, Escape, Salon Travel, Talk, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic Monthly and the St. Petersburg Times.
What's it about?
A foreword by Jason Wilson states it nicely:
"One of the beauties of travel writing lies in its simplicity. What other genre has a premise that's so straightforward? Pick a place. Tell about it. It's the most basic of writing exercises, one we can all remember from school. What fourth-grader hasn't written an essay called "What I Did on My Summer Vacation"?"
The exercises that follow in the book are far more complex than a fourth-grader essay, but the essence remains the same. They picked a place and wrote about it, and in each story, you hear the author's passion, like a school kid yearning to tell the class about his summer adventure.
Top 10 ten favourites were (in no ranking order):
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A New Yorker essay by Isabel Hilton about finding the next Panchen Lama.
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A Coffee Journal piece by Alden Jones on living as an ex-pat school teacher in Costa Rica.
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A Men's Journal article by P.J. O'Rourke on travelling 1,700 miles over six days from Islamabad, Pakistan, to Calcutta, India.
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An Escape piece by Tony Perrottet, on the opening of Zanzibar in the 90s and its embrace of tourism.
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A Salon Travel article by Rolf Potts on Phi Phi Leh island in Thailand, where they filmed the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach.
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A Talk essay by Mark Ross about being kidnapped by the Interahamwe in Uganda.
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An Outside essay by Patrick Symmes on the Khmer Rouge's last outpost in Cambodia and how they tried to make it a tourist destination.
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An article from The Atlantic Monthly by Jeffrey Tayler on the history of Xinjiang and its future.
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An article from The Atlantic Monthly by Jeffrey Tayler on Ozyory, Russia, a town for exiles outside of Moscow.
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A National Geographic Traveler piece by Jonathan Tourtellot on ecotourism surrounding Mexico's Copper Canyon country.
My praise and critique:
I'll refer again to something Rolf Potts wrote:
"In his 1975 essay "The Loss of the Creature," Walker Percy attributes traveler's angst to the idea that our various destinations have been "appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already formed in the sightseer's mind."
In other words, the angst originates not in watching fat, Speedo wearing German men defile once-pristine beaches - the angst comes from our own media-driven notions of how those beaches should be in the first place. We cannot hike the Himalayas without drawing comparisons to the IMAX film we saw last summer; we can not taste wine on the Seine without recalling a funny scene from an old Meg Ryan movie; we cannot get lost in a South American jungle without thinking of the Gabriel García Márquez novel we read in college. It is the expectation itself that robs a bit of authenticity from the destinations we seek out."
Well, if this book does the same thing about the places it features to me in its own meta way, then I will say it's a success. Because the writing is all topnotch, I saw I think travel writing at its best, and for a struggling travel writer himself, I know that it's hard work to write such stories. Most stories border on creative nonfiction, so the words are unique, and the scenes painted are colourful. The notes must have been endless, none of this could have come from just memory alone, but the writers made it seem like it did.
My only critique would be for fewer stories; maybe three could be left out, and I feel an anthology like this should include travel poetry.
Would I recommend it?
My rating system:
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International first class to a destination like French Polynesia. A book of this calibre took me to a place I had never dreamed of and has forever changed me. Perfect prose and contemporary content. Very rare.
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International business class. These books have everything you are looking for, except the champagne isn’t Dom. The writing is top-notch, has a unique style and I would reread it in a heartbeat.
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Premium economy. It costs double an economy ticket, so probably twice as good. The structure’s there, the point comes across clearly, and you learn something. You have room to stretch but can’t help to notice that there are better books a few rows ahead of you, and why should you be spending your time with these types?
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Domestic economy. Airport bookstand reading at its best. These books can take your mind off of life’s problems for a short 1-hour to 2-hour flight. But then you lose interest. They might lack some substance but still have what it takes to be a solid read. Just in small doses.
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Who wants the middle seat? No one. But it does get you to your destination, and that is what these types of books do. They played their role and had their moments, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to everyone, and I probably skimmed through a lot.
I give it ✈️ ✈️ ✈️ (3 airplanes), meaning it's like a premium economy airline ticket. It costs double of economy and is probably twice as good. The structure's there, the point comes across clearly, and you learn something. It's better than your average airport bookstand reading, but it won't blow you away. Overall, I highly enjoyed it, and even though it's dated, it, in the end, is timeless.
Yes, I recommend it. I even recommend it for long trips, for some of the stories are excellent, one after another, but it's also nice to read one to two a day—kind of like what I did.
Who is it for?
For someone interested in travel writing and learning how varied it can be. In the end, they are short stories, so if you aren't in the mood for a book and like to learn about the world in small doses at a time, this is the collection for you.
