When he dug into the history of his instrument and learned of its Laotian origins, Olsen decided he wanted to become a proselytizing spokesperson for Laotian culture; he abandoned all Thailand connections to focus entirely on the lesser-known underdog style of Morlum Lao folk. His second album, all in Lao, took three months to record, and had a final budget of $4,000, which by American studio-a-day rates is absurdly low. The money was recouped by the record label, and Olsen’s songs were an immediate hit on Lao radio and in the karaoke bars.

Here he is rocking the khaen on YouTube:

Says the scholar who has launched the Yalta Chekhov Campaign: “[The dacha] is in a strange position. The Russian government didn’t want to fund the restoration because the house is in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian government didn’t want to pay to promote a Russian author.”

Among the actors supporting the effort: Kenneth Branagh and Ralph Fiennes. Classy gents.

Photo by henribergius via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

The movie is angling to be a major holiday hit next month, and probably to scoop some award nominations, too; if that happens, don’t be surprised to see Western Australia and the Northern Territory popping up on a lot of travel wish lists. The Guardian has already run the first travel story I’ve seen on the flick—and I very much doubt it’ll be the last. Check out the trailer below.

Related on World Hum:
* More Family Lanes Coming to Airport Security Lines

Photo by David Paul Ohmer via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Of course, the rule would create some stinkers, too: “If Indiana Jones IV followed right after the end of The Last Crusade, it would consist of little more than everyone riding out of the desert and going back to work.”

Related on World Hum:
* World Hum Travel Movie Club: ‘The Art of Travel’

So he sets out for Snow’s with a posse from Texas Monthly, and delivers a terrific piece about barbecue and what a top ranking from a prestigious publication can do to a place.

Related on World Hum:
* Texas Monthly: ‘The State of Our Barbecue Union is Strong’

And no country in Africa is more troubled than the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, formerly—in what must be the most mind-boggling, inaccurate appellation of all time—the Congo Free State). From the horrifying reign of Belgium’s Leopold II to the crisis after independence to the kleptocratic dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, the country has been consistently unable to shake its haunted past. The Second Congo War, which burned through central Africa from 1998 to 2003, claimed more than 5 million lives; many of those who survived the Kalashnikovs and machetes and gang rapes of the conflict later succumbed to its attendant starvation and disease. It was the largest loss of human life since World War II—and much of the West knew nothing about it. The war “barely registered in the outside world,” Butcher writes in Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart, his book about venturing deep into the Congo. “Like so many other places in Africa, the Congo had come to be seen as a lost cause.”

When Butcher read that the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, often credited as the first white man to map the Congo River, had accomplished the feat on an 1874 expedition jointly commissioned by The New York Herald and his own paper, the Telegraph, he saw the coincidence as an opportunity to discard, as he says, his “complacency about modern Africa” and “try to understand it properly” by retracing Stanley’s journey. “I wanted to leave the journalistic herd,” Butcher writes of his 2004 trip, “to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.”

I’ll admit that I found these motives a bit troublesome at first, probably because of a point made by Jeffrey Tayler in Facing the Congo, his own story of taking on the legendary river (by dugout canoe, no less) in 1994. Looking back on the motives for his trip, Tayler wrote, “The alien in Zaire had seduced me; the threatening had challenged me; and I had pictured its wilderness as a bourn where I could rejuvenate myself through suffering and achievement and the conquest of my fear. But my drama of self-actualization proved obscenely trivial beside the suffering of the Zaireans and the injustices of their past.” Today thousands of Congolese don’t have any choice but to travel the river for trade, and many of them don’t survive its perils.

Fortunately, Butcher’s courage and fortitude during his almost 2,000-mile expedition, his obvious compassion for the Congolese, and his careful research into the blood-soaked history of the country combine into an engrossing adventure story. It makes the place, its people and its problems very real, far removed from the “which tribe, how many dead” convention of modern journalism. He travels overland from Lake Tanganyika to the river’s headwaters on the back of a motorbike, dodging mai-mai soldiers armed with machine guns, then downriver by UN patrol boat, dugout canoe and overcrowded barge. Along the way he talks to villagers, aid workers, UN personnel, missionaries and even elite businessmen in search of some kind of answer as to how things went so incredibly wrong.

On the surface of things, Butcher points out, the Congo should be the most successful country in Africa: It has more gold, diamond and mineral deposits, more arable land for farming, more fellable timber, and more navigable rivers than any other place on the continent. Yet everywhere Butcher travels, he finds a place plagued by stagnation and decay. Train tracks are choked with jungle vines, modern buildings crumble into dust, and people die by the thousands from diseases that were all but eradicated in the country 50 years ago. Even the river itself is greatly diminished—the crocodiles and hippos that once populated it were long ago shot and eaten by starving villagers.

“The failure of the Congo is so complete,” Butcher remarks, doing little to hide his anger, “that its silent majority—tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery—are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement, or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you.”

It is a place that was, ironically, far more developed and connected to the outside world in the 1950s—when the Congo’s colonial capital boasted one of Africa’s largest airlines, ocean liners docked at its ports and tourism was a thriving industry. The book’s thematic refrain is the author struggling to come to terms with this, with what he sees as the Congo’s persistent “triumph of disappointment over potential.” Its abundant resources proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, because they made the country vulnerable to greed and plunder, first at the hands of invading colonial powers during the Scramble for Africa and then from its own people. “The conquest of the earth,” Marlow observes in Joseph Conrad’s famous “Heart of Darkness,” inspired by Conrad’s tenure as a steamboat captain on the Congo River in the late 19th century, “is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

Walking around the capital of Kinshasa at the end of his journey, Butcher can’t quite make the signs of modernity he sees there (the stadium where the “Rumble in the Jungle” took place in 1974, for one) compute with the realities of life in the Congolese hinterlands. “I could not connect these places with the Congo I had traveled through,” he writes, “a country where I had seen human bones lying too thick on the ground to be given a decent burial; where a stranger like me was implored to adopt a child to save him from a life of disease, hunger, and misery; and where some people were so desperate they actually pined for the old and brutal order of Belgian colonial life.”

As brave a man as he was, Henry Morton Stanley’s expedition to map the Congo River, which ultimately made the country a target for colonization, had devastating consequences for the entire region, consequences from which it has never fully recovered. Over a century later it is up to those who travel there—like Tim Butcher, Jeffrey Tayler and Bryan Mealer—to report back on what they see and once again bring the world’s attention to a place it seems to have forgotten or given up on. This time around, maybe something good can come of it.

Bronwen Dickey’s work has appeared in Newsweek, Oxford American, Islands, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Independent Weekly. She recently reviewed Paul Theroux’s “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” for World Hum.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which Theroux retraces his “Great Railway Bazaar” travels some 30 years later, is, by contrast, a book I wanted to read again as soon as I’d finished it. It is as observant and finely drawn as the rest of his work, but it also manages to be honest without being caustic, incisive and funny without being snide. The author studies himself—both his past and present selves—as closely as he studies the people he encounters, for whom he has more compassion, and even admiration, than I have ever seen from him. In short, “Ghost Train” is the kind of travel book I’ve wanted to read for a long time.

If much of Theroux’s writing isn’t, as I say, “comfortable,” then let’s face it: neither is long-distance travel. It’s a series of delays, obstacles, bureaucracy, frustration, dangers, skull-crushing boredom and lots of stomach trouble if you’re lucky enough to do it right, more so if you’re lucky enough to do it often. About this Theroux has always been correct. “Travel is the opposite of a holiday,” he wrote in a 1999 New York Times op-ed. “It is about enlightenment, and at its best, is a form of disappearance.”

This disappearance—that which makes the traveler a “specter” in the world—is a recurring theme throughout “Ghost Train,” as Theroux once again ventures out from London by rail to explore the hinterlands of a changed, changing Asia. Parts of his original itinerary are no longer possible—Afghanistan and Iran are off-limits to him in 2006—and so the tracks take him through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, China (closed to Theroux on his first trip), Japan and across Siberia back to London. Despite the altered map, the trip brings back complicated, familiar emotions for him. “Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial,” the author writes, “like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people ...”

It is fitting, then, that Theroux’s travels wind through some of the most haunted countries in the world: an India more over-populated than ever, a post-tsunami Sri Lanka ravaged by sectarian violence. Almost three decades after the hell-on-earth reign of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia struggles to maintain what little infrastructure it has and to fend off the foreigners who come to sexually exploit its children. “The ghostliness was present even in the sunniest parts of town,” Theroux writes of Siem Reap, “a suggestion of the hideous past, of blood and unburied bodies, of torture, trickery, lies, punishment—like the darkness I had felt rising from the earth when I walked through Dachau, the stink of evil.”

Similarly, Theroux finds the people of Myanmar have been all but crushed under the weight of military dictatorship, and this part of his journey yields some of the most compassionate, humble writing in the book. It also brings Theroux to reflect on his own role as a ghost returning to his former life: “If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse than before, it is almost shaming to behold. Like a prayer you regret has been answered, it exists as a mirror image of yourself, the traveler, who has to admit: I’m the same too, but aged—wearier, frailer, fractured, abused, weaker, shabbier, spookier.”

Faced with the political graft and social distress in places like Cambodia and Myanmar, Theroux ruminates on the circumstances rather than raging against them (as he did in his book about returning to Africa, “Dark Star Safari"). “Older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law,” he says in the book’s first chapter. “Nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.”

Theroux’s softened attitude undoubtedly says something about the perspective that age has given him, but it also speaks to the happier circumstances of his own life. We learn that while he was traveling through Asia for his “Great Railway Bazaar” journey, he was “miserable” the entire time, guilt-ridden for leaving his wife and children behind. Upon his return, he discovered that his wife had been having an affair. When writing “The Great Railway Bazaar,” he says, “I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my children, my wife, my happy household.”

There is marked change in the author’s temperament, certainly, but one of the greatest differences between the man who wrote “The Great Railway Bazaar” and the one who wrote “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” is that this time, he is traveling as Paul Theroux, Writer, which perhaps keeps him from being as “unobserved” as he once was, but also makes new opportunities possible. There is a dinner party with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, a visit with Arthur C. Clarke (author of “2001: A Space Odyssey") in Colombo, a tour of “underground” Tokyo with Haruki Murakami, a stroll through southern Japan with Pico Iyer. Would anyone not kill for this man’s connections?

While Theroux finds certain places from his first trip greatly diminished, others bustle with a new vitality. Istanbul is more vibrant and welcoming than he remembered ("I had been too young and hurried to appreciate its virtue,” he says), and Bangkok “had gotten bigger but had kept its soul.” The desperate, devastated Vietnam that Theroux evoked so well in the early ‘70s is now wholly renewed, “the embodiment of peace and hope.” Throughout the book he is as eager to revel in Asia’s improvements as he is to mourn its decay. (In fact, the words “pleasant” and “lovely” and even “uplifting” appear so many times in “Ghost Train” that I at one point wrote in the margin: “Is this Paul Theroux?")

The old Theroux is still there, though, still as trenchant as ever, only this time he seems to have found the right targets for ridicule. He dubs Turkmenistan “Loonistan” for the unchecked megalomania of its then-president, Saparmurat Niyazov (who renamed the days of the week and months of the year, one after the title of his own book); Singapore, under the ?ber-strict dictates of prime minister Lee Kwan Yew, “is a place of great loneliness and fear, the apprehension of people who know they are forever being watched.” And yet Theroux largely keeps his criticisms to the governments’ officials who create these climates, rather than skewering the citizens themselves. Here he is not pointing out their flaws; he is trying to understand their lives.

Despite its colorful vignettes and frequent humor, there’s a layer of seriousness—not a darkness, but a seriousness—to “Ghost Train” that directly relates to the war in Iraq. In a globalized Asia, American politics radiate outward, and Theroux finds that most people have an opinion on America’s invasion of Iraq. Hardly any of them (exactly two) support the actions of the Bush administration. Theroux uses the history of Asia as a strong lens for focusing this point. In Cambodia, for example, he finds that the Khmer Rouge used an “enhanced interrogation technique” not too far-removed from water-boarding:

The traveler’s conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government.

He learns that the people of the world resent (and fear) American policies abroad, but nearly everyone envies the lives Americans lead. The world has its eyes turned west.

“Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” is Paul Theroux at his best. It is a gracious, expansive book that lives up to the gifts of its author, and delivers on the premise he set out to unpack in 1975, that “anything is possible on a train.” Even more is possible, perhaps, on the ghost train.

Bronwen Dickey is a writer in New York City. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Oxford American, ISLANDS, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Independent Weekly.

Related on World Hum:
* What’s a Ride on a Sleeper Train Without the Company of Strangers?
* Paul Theroux on Why He Likes Obama

I’m planning a round-the-world trip, but I worry about transportation costs once I start traveling. Ideally, I would like to travel to most places overland, exploring along the way. However, civil unrest, war and such make that virtually impossible. Any suggestions about how to get around these obstacles without resorting to expensive flights and spending too much money?

-- Leah R.

Dear Leah,

You bring up an interesting issue, since the difficulty of far-flung overland travel has always been (and always will be) an intoxicating challenge for long-term travelers.

First off, I’ll commend you for choosing to explore the world overland. This may prove slow and difficult at times, but it’s the best way to truly see and experience the destinations you seek. Moreover, on a global scale, traveling overland is much more possible than you might think, despite the news you hear of wars and civil unrest.

The fact is that wars and civil unrest have always been with us, and in comparative terms this is a rather easy point in history to travel the world overland. One reason many people think it’s not possible to travel long distances overland is our collective romantic memory of the Hippie Trail of the 1960s and ‘70s, when thousands of young people were able to journey from Istanbul to India—and points beyond—entirely by bus, train and hitching. This is still possible, actually, though wars in places like Afghanistan and red tape in places like Iran have made it more complicated. One should keep in mind, too, that Hippie-Trail-era wanderers had almost no access to Russia, Central Asia and China—places which are much more welcoming to overland travelers today.

Since overland access is a constantly changing phenomenon, I encourage you to buttress whatever I tell you here with on-the-ground information, political and safety information from official sources, and up-to-date road reports from traveler message boards.

In general terms, however, long-distance overland travel is often impeded less by wars and unrest than by regional bureaucracy and local government restrictions. Just because your map shows a road going from India to China, for example, doesn’t mean it’s going to be open to international travelers. In many cases, special permission is required for far-flung border crossings, which is why it’s important to collect local information as you travel. Good indie travel guidebooks will contain detailed border-crossing information, though this should be cross-referenced in-country, since conditions are always subject to change (both for better and for worse).

In some parts of the world, such as North America, Europe and Australia, overland travel is not a problem (though, oddly enough, air travel in these places is often cheaper for long hauls than taking a train or bus). The countries of Central and South America (which I traveled by Land Rover in 2003-2004) are also quite accessible overland—though one should keep up to date on regional dangers, be aware of geographical roadless areas (such as the Darien Gap separating Panama and Colombia), and know that not all border crossings accept tourist traffic.

Overlanding in Asia, Russia and the Middle East can be more complicated, since some border crossings (such as Israel-Lebanon) have been closed for decades, some countries (such as Myanmar) decree that you must exit from your port of entry, and other countries (such as Iran and Russia) require high fees or complicated red tape to enable an overland crossing. Still, Asia has abundant overland possibilities that are worth the time and effort.

Finally, there’s Africa, where long-range overland travel is both notoriously difficult and strangely popular. Traveling overland from Cairo to Cape Town, for instance, can be a logistical nightmare, but it’s also a popular and classic route—a fact that Paul Theroux’s recent Dark Star Safari attests. Again, just stay aware of dangers, know that roads will be rough (or nonexistent), and use local and guidebook information to plan the best route.

In short, keep three things in mind when considering overland travel. First, overlanding in most parts of the world is very doable, and while you might occasionally have to resort to air travel, even this shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive. Second, remember that overland travel is not always as simple and linear as it looks on a map, so you should be prepared to change your overland itinerary to accommodate red tape, official border crossings and existing travel infrastructure. And, finally, keep up to date on logistical, political and safety information as you travel, since all of these factors are subject to change on an overland journey.

Columnist Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.

Has Rolf already answered your question? See the Ask Rolf archive. If not, send your questions to .

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I will be traveling to southern Spain and possibly Morocco. What is the best way to travel if we have five days for Seville, Tarifa, Tangiers and Granada? How would you distribute your time?

--Joan, Alaska

Dear Joan,

This might not be the answer you were looking for, but my advice would be to pick one town and spend all five days there. Better to have the relaxed, deliberate experience of one place than a rushed taste of four. Which place you choose is up to your own tastes (I’d personally go with Tangiers, since I’d reckon Morocco is grittier than the Spanish towns—but that’s just my own preference).

In general, whether traveling to Spain or Suriname or Syria—for five days or five months or five years—it’s best not to be overambitious with your itinerary. This can be hard to do sometimes, since the world is huge and you naturally want to see as much as possible during your allotted travel time.

The fact is, however, that you actually see less when you schedule many sights into a short amount of time. Trying to see Seville, Tarifa, Tangiers and Granada in five days is the perfect way to see almost nothing of any one destination—since most of your time will be spent in taxis, buses, ferries and hotel lobbies, rushing from one location to another. And even in one location, it’s hard to truly acclimate to a place in a single afternoon. That’s why the best way to see Spain is not to shuttle through several destinations in five days, but savor a single place for five days. Both your experience and your memories will be richer as a result.

Columnist Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.

Has Rolf already answered your question? See the Ask Rolf archive. If not, send your questions to .

Related on World Hum:
* Can I Have Meaningful Experiences Abroad if I Don’t Speak the Language?
* Given the Weak Dollar Overseas, Any Tips on Long-Term Travel?

“He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself ... Gustave’s preferred form of travel was to lie on a divan and have the scenery carried past him.”—Julian Barnes on Gustave Flaubert

Wrong Way
Midway through a long-distance drive, bleary-eyed and tired at twilight, rounding the cloverleaf ramp linking two highways, my eye latches onto a phantom sign off to the far left. Wrong Way, it warns, immediately ticking off a twinge of terror. Have I entered an exit ramp by mistake? Am I headed for imminent collision with a tractor-trailer or a tanker filled with nuclear fuel? Reason kicks in, and I realize that the warning is inscribed on the rear of a road sign located on the far side of a divider. It isn’t meant for me. But relief gives way to annoyance: What’s the point of a sign that is either irrelevant, or by the time you see it, is too late? Gallows humor, I suppose, to keep the motorist on his toes. But now that the seed of doubt is planted, I have to fight a powerful, perverse urge to swerve and cross the divide, and, come what may, take the Wrong Way.

Motion Sickness
I travel badly. Cars, forget it, unless I’m at the wheel, and even so I often need to stop. Long-distance buses strain my stomach and bladder capacity. Airplane delays try my patience; departures are frightening. I don’t even try to understand the physics of flight but superstitiously mutter prayers and hum the national anthems of port of embarkation and port of call on takeoff and landing to placate transient and local spirits. Nausea and panic are part of the package. In-flight magazines beguile me with alternate destinations, airport travel posters confirm my doubt, disappointment is practically inevitable upon landing. I’ve made a big mistake and really ought to be headed someplace else. This, oddly enough, is the moment of truth. For while the prettiest locale, canyon or cathedral, soon enough loses its virgin sparkle, that lingering and disorienting feeling of having taken the wrong turn and being in the wrong place puts me on the spot and opens the way for what pilgrims call epiphany.

A Door to Nowhere
Leafing through an old family photo album from childhood, I come upon the snapshot of a bathhouse on the shore of Lake Thun in Switzerland. Two portals inscribed in faded Gothic lettering, one marked M?nner (Men), the other Frauen (Women), command separate entry. We, the unseen subjects of the picture, pause, wary, unsure of whether to obey or tear off our clothes and charge through helter-skelter, notwithstanding the absence of uniformed attendants or other would-be bathers. The onset of puberty and the shame of secondary sex characteristics just then asserting themselves foment my insistence that we respect the signs. Passing through different doorways, my brother and I to the left, mother and sister to the right, we immediately find ourselves reunited on the far side. It takes the blink of a camera shutter for the implied partition to crumble and the ludicrous truth to reveal itself: This is a bathhouse without walls. While I can’t recall what the lake was like or if we even went for a swim that day, all that remains is the tenuous tingle of passing through that door to nowhere: essence of travel.

Border Crossings
All other avenues of escape being closed, my late beloved father makes a sport of fate, fleeing his native Austria in the wake of the advancing German army, first into Czechoslovakia and then into Poland, catching one of the last boats out of Danzig for London en route to New York, the long way around. He has been celebrating displacement ever since. Over the crest of the waves, beyond the thin line that cuts blue from blue, he points, as we walk, hand in hand, ankle-deep along the shore. “We came by boat,” he says, and I wonder why people are always crossing borders and bodies of water, why my grandfather wrapped his possessions in a rubber bag and swam across a river, and when will I get to do the same? Some refugees cling with a fierce resolve to their new habitats, nevermore budging an inch. Not so my parents, who instead feel compelled to forestall any future forced expulsions by vaccinating themselves and their offspring with healthy doses of deliberate escape. Our old car is dubbed ”ein Kilometerfresser” (a kilometer glutton), which is how I come to think of myself. The atlas is our bible. Passports are never allowed to lapse. Our heroes are Odysseus, Sinbad and Arthur Frommer, who knows how to travel light. 

Elsewhere Beckons
At 7, I am seated in the holding cell of Miss O’Donahue’s second grade class, our teacher a licensed sadist who won’t let my classmate Stephen Long out to do his business before the bell and subsequently keeps him sitting in it all day. I myself have to go badly but don’t dare ask lest I be made to share the smelly shame of Stephen Long. With aching bowels I stare at the clock above the blackboard encased in its protective metal mask, as if time itself were kept locked up, when a knock at the door makes all heads turn. In steps a dapper stranger in a dark striped suit who turns out to be my father, though he might as well be the Messiah for he’s come to deliver me from Miss O’Donahue. Back from a business trip overseas, his first visit to the Old Country since it sent him packing, he can’t wait to communicate the bittersweet pleasure of return. I am most impressed by the miniature knights and medieval siege and torture equipment he brings us back as gifts and his lyrical evocation of the taste of German sausage.

Unreal Realities
The New York World’s Fair of 1964, a hodgepodge of inter- and multinational displays, affords me my first bona fide whiff of the world. I am particularly taken by two attractions: the Belgian Village and the Coca-Cola pavilion. The former, a cobblestoned copy of the tiny town of Durbuy in the Ardennes Mountains, improves upon the original, and is reduced to a florid and rather contrived imitation of its replica, souvenir stands included. As for the Coca Cola pavilion, a microcosm of the world as a consumer paradise, in every clime of which you can quench your thirst with “the real thing,” artifice likewise name-brands reality. No woodland trail have I since hiked, but that the natural forest bed fails to bring to mind that soft green simulated moss carpet with its canned sound effects, courtesy of Coca Cola.

In Praise of Ripe Tomatoes
Miracles do happen, though never when and where you expect, and certainly not in prescribed sites like Fatima, Jerusalem, Assisi or Lourdes. I who am ordinarily repelled by the unwholesome odor of religion, the suffocating fumes of candle wax and frankincense meant no doubt to simulate the passage of the Holy Ghost, do once indeed sniff eternity in a church in the former Yugoslavia, where my wife and I happen to be honeymooning in ‘87, oblivious to the fast-approaching winds of war. No suffering cloves of Christ, no sacrosanct essence of martyrdom do I smell, but the fertile scent of mercy, an olfactory cornucopia of nature’s bounty. It’s Mary’s perfume that makes my knees buckle under, me a Jew, constitutionally disinclined to genuflect before the god of the goyim or his immaculate mother! But I can’t help myself. “This must be a place where lovers bow and barren women come to bare their hearts and fill their wombs,” I whisper in awe to my wife, herself a non-believing atheist of Catholic culture. Nostrils twitching with the fragrance of ripeness unplucked, I comprehend the mystic meaning of the medieval cult of the Virgin, (more recently rekindled by new sightings in a village nearby) when all of a sudden the flimsy bundles I am clasping disintegrate in my hands, East Bloc brown wrapping paper being a poor prophylactic for the ooze of fruit. The source of my revelation, I realize, is no slow swinging thurible wielded by repressed priest or pimply choir boy, but the overripe plums and tomatoes we bought at the open-air market just outside the church, unintentionally crushed and vaporized by my innocent grip. So that’s why this place is famed for the essence of its fermented plums, I fathom in a flash, and why the same word designates both kinds of spirits: the ethereal kind you sense but can’t see and the liquid kind that makes you see the unseen. When later we picnic in the country on what’s left along with some bread, even a rabid carnivore like myself can’t resist the red flesh and sweet nectar, nature’s aphrodisiac. Our firstborn is the fruit of that revelation.

The Flying Unicorn
The memory of travel invariably arouses a desire for more. Whereas carnal knowledge is short-lived, travel keeps it coming, forever dangling the possibility of more before your sated gaze. Boats and planes are traditionally given female names, of which advertisers take full advantage—FLY ME! SAIL ME!—though I suppose those big bodies in motion can just as well double as floating and flying phalluses. When in the soft-core movie version of the French erotic novel, “Emanuelle,” the airborne heroine first stimulates herself into a pleasant frenzy and subsequently succumbs to the probing fingers of the stranger seated beside her, she is fulfilling the universal fantasy of the traveler. (The book chapter, by the way, is entitled “The Flying Unicorn,” an offhanded reference to the legendary lore that the only way to trap a unicorn is to lure it into a virgin’s lap.) Since time immemorial, travel has stirred the glands of virtual encounter. Shipwrecked and naked, Odysseus services Nausikaa and beds down Circe without making a pig of himself. Aeneas dallies with Dido. Marco Polo couples with the comely wives of accommodating Kamuls and Kaindus.

Back in the days of single solo travel, I myself once faced a memorable dilemma, pinned in on a wide-bodied Boeing between a French woman of a waning but enticing middle-aged beauty to my left, and a tantalizing Pakistani teen to my right, the latter ritually painted from head to toe. “I wonder if it will please my husband,” frets my French neighbor, fondling a bottle of perfume purchased duty free, whereupon I gallantly propose to offer my humble opinion, on her husband’s behalf. She smiles and dabs her wrist. ”C’est bon, tr?s bon!” I whisper, nostrils aflutter. And just then the plane drops several feet, our stomachs rise and thighs collide. We may never come out of this turbulence alive, I reason, considering my options ? la Emanuelle, as I feel a head thump against my right shoulder. The lovely Pakistani has fallen asleep with me as her pillow. I sit out the flight frozen in place, gripped by conflicting stimuli. And when finally Miss Pakistan wakes up and her scandalized companions tell her how she let her head fall on the shoulder of the young gentleman to her left, she shrugs and smiles: “I’m sure the gentleman didn’t mind!” Indeed he did not. As to Madame, an almost imperceptible smile of complicity and regret passes between us in the welcoming crowd as she looks up from her husband’s embrace—“What’s that scent?” I hear him ask. The vivid memory of what might have been is relived every time I board a Boeing and hear the click of a seat-belt buckle. 

A Fleeting Fix of Elsewhere
Ask me why I travel, and I’ll tell you that I’m ever on the hunt for extreme particularity of place. New Jersey or Senegal, I don’t care where, as long as it’s virgin terrain to my eye: towering gray smokestacks or red termitaries, ugly or beautiful, even Coney Island’s rickety old Wonder Wheel will do for a whirl. A travel junky, I’m lying, of course (though the lie is essential to the illusion I’m after). All I really want is to dissolve in a fleeting fix of elsewhere and get lost.

Peter Wortsman wrote Confessions of a Born-Again Cowboy in France and The Art of the Deal for World Hum. His writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Columbus Dispatch, FranceGuide, Grand Tour, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, San Jose Mercury News, Washington Post and Travelers’ Tales The Best Travel Writing 2008. He also writes fiction (A Modern Way to Die) and drama ("The Tattooed Man Tells All” and “Burning Words"). He is also the translator of the German travel classic Travel Pictures, by Heinrich Heine.

Photo by Peter Wortsman.

I’d arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on a warm August evening a week earlier. While waiting around for the luggage belt to start moving, I watched all the tourists in their wide-brimmed sun hats, sandals and fashionable low-cut jeans. I couldn’t help but feel superior in my boots and work clothes. I had spent nearly $2,000 on airfare and half as much in program fees to join a volunteer work camp. But, I told myself, none of it was for my own pleasure. Three weeks later, when I would be back at this airport to take the plane home, there would be a new school, or at least a new classroom, somewhere in a remote Maasai village, thanks in part to my work.

The setbacks began almost immediately. Instead of the 20 volunteers I expected to join, there were only two of us. Giordano, an Italian civil engineer, and I sat in a tiny shack in one of Nairobi’s poor neighborhoods, listening to a lengthy explanation of the changes in the program. We couldn’t work at the Maasai village because a certain official hadn’t signed a certain paper before going on vacation. But, the head of the local organization said with a big smile, they had found us another school in another village. A Kamba village.

I looked to Giordano for reassurance, but he seemed as distraught by the news as I was. The Maasai, adorned with bead necklaces, earrings and bracelets, and wrapped in bright red blankets, were the most definitive symbol of “tribal” Kenya, the ones whose photos were featured in the Kenya Lonely Planet travel guides we both carried. 

Which raises the question: Why should this matter to us? The Kamba children must need a school just as much—even if their clothing isn’t as exotic. After all, who were we here for? Ourselves or them?

After a two-hour bumpy minibus ride on dirt roads, and then a six-kilometer ride in the back of a pickup truck, we arrived in Katheka-Kai, a small Kamba village about 100 kilometers southeast of Nairobi. The school was a one-story U-shaped stone building with 12 classrooms and two teachers’ offices. The unplastered walls in each room featured two small holes covered with mesh which served as windows. The floors were the same sandy ground that was outside, but that didn’t seem to bother the barefooted children in blue school uniforms. The desks were made from unfinished wood and the blackboards were painted onto the stone walls. The only classroom with a cement floor was used for storage and was vacated for us.

We spread the mats on the floor and hung the mosquito nets and brought water from the village well. We lined up our food supplies for the next few weeks—rice, flour, salt and potatoes—on a desk over old newspapers. The next morning, pumped with excitement, we joined the local crew of three paid workers and started digging the baked soil for the foundations of new classrooms.

We made little progress. We spent days waiting for the wheelbarrow to be fixed, or for the engineer to arrive to decide where to dispose of the soil. We exchanged pleasantries with the headmaster, the principal, the deputy, the chairman of the community, the treasurer—a seemingly endless line of officials who showed up to talk to us. And then, there was the never-ending traffic of villagers who stopped by to watch and chat.

Observing all these people gathered around, it dawned on me that the last thing this community needed was our unskilled labor. Most of the villagers were unemployed, and during the dry season—which would last for another two months—they had nothing to do on their farms. They didn’t need Giordano and me to build a community school that they could build themselves. I weighed 100 pounds. My contribution was little more than symbolic.

Hundreds of local and international organizations now offer volunteer abroad programs, most of which come at a stiff price payable in dollars or euros. Voluntourism is a bona fide trend. I’m sure many of these organizations provide a valuable service. Yet I wonder if I would have contributed a lot more to this particular project by simply donating the money for my airplane ticket and staying home.

But that would have meant giving up the trip. And, if I’m honest with myself, it was the trip—the adventure, the experience in another culture, the unknown—that had inspired me to volunteer in Kenya.

Besides, I tell myself, my contribution should not be measured by buckets of excavated earth. Cultural exchange is a two-way street. Living and working with the Kamba people of Katheka-Kai, I learned a lot about their world, but I also brought something from my own. And this is why, given the chance, I would do it all over again—albeit with more realistic expectations.

Daniela Petrova volunteered in Kenya after quitting her job at the United Nations Development Programme. Her essays and short stories have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, the Portland Review and Skirt! magazine. A story of hers is forthcoming in “Best New Writing 2008.”

Photos by Daniela Petrova.

The Quiet American has left you with romantic notions of Vietnam: Whirring ceiling fans at the Hotel Metropole, wide, tree-lined avenues and crumbling colonial villas, ochre paint peeling in lazy drifts. You look forward to real croissants (unavailable in the Chinese-speaking world), thick, cinnamoned coffee and young women swanning through the heat in split-sided ao dais.

You arrive and it’s all there, like Graham Greene promised, but that isn’t the story of your trip. You figure out pretty quickly that Vietnam wants a piece of you.

On earlier trips, to Prague and Chiang Mai, you knew what was expected of a woman alone, the stereotypes locals preferred to paint you with, out of pity or curiosity or naked self-interest. You played them to your advantage, to smooth things over, but Vietnam won’t let you off so easily. Right away, it asks more: six degrees of you as a traveler, six ways to see yourself moving through the world.

The Damsel in Distress

There’s always that pregnant moment, just off the plane, when the acrid smell of unfamiliar earth hits the back of your throat, and you wonder how you’ll manage the next leg of your trip. The uncertainty brings an adrenaline rush: Your ride might not show; your visa might be rejected; the ATMs might be out of cash. But in truth, nine times out of 10, your entry comes off without a hitch.

Hanoi is the one time it doesn’t.

You’re five minutes down the highway when you realize the taxi driver doesn’t speak a word of English, and your guidebook’s locked in the trunk. You try a little Chinese to direct him to the hotel, but he looks nonplussed, so you motion that you need the book. Soon the problem presents itself: The trunk is jammed shut and there’s no help at hand, only a cell phone to call for advice. You gaze out over flat green fields—expecting to see water buffalo and tiny women harvesting rice, but finding none-- and wonder if it’s an omen. The driver sucks the air through his teeth, shrugs, and signals that we’re reversing course.

His sidekicks back at the garage are equally flummoxed. When you pull in, they smile embarrassedly, kick off their flip-flops, climb onto the back of the car, and jump. You watch, open-mouthed, and when nothing gives, they pull out the tool box of last resort, go in like surgeons through the back seat, and deliver your pack as if by cesarean birth.

You’re relieved that the driver now understands where you’re headed, but on arrival, he wants a bigger tip than you’ve offered, for rescuing you from your unfortunate mistake. In Vietnam, you learn, there’s a price for princely conduct.

The Easy Mark

The first day, you’re approached four times around Hoan Kiem Lake and at the war museum, and the line is always the same: I’m a poor student from the country. But before that, there’s the buttering up. They sidle up, fresh-faced and speaking perfect English, to tell you how much they admire America. They want to know what you think of their city, whether you’ve been to see Ho Chi Minh, and recommend hiking with the hill tribes in Sapa.

You are polite at first, but underestimate their tenacity. They follow you for blocks, having figured there’s no husband around to intervene. You resent this, so on the fifth try, you turn to the smiling young woman in the pink baseball hat and Western logo T-shirt and ask, “Do you know how many times I’ve heard that same story today?”

She gets it, and cuts her losses with cool efficiency. Her demeanor melts into a scowl; she turns on a dime and evaporates amid a cloud of motorbikes. She’s practiced at this, you think—gauges her marks carefully. But you’ve caught her off guard with your cynicism, a first-time souvenir.

The Mystery

What you need is to get out of Hanoi, away from the death-wish traffic and the unsmiling hotel receptionist who is baffled by your frequent internet use. You decide on a two-day cruise on Ha Long Bay, hoping that a glide over jade waters will remind you why you wanted to come. Thuy is your escort to the coast. He stands at the front of the tour bus and makes bad jokes, a new graduate in a freshly pressed polo shirt and eager to please. He says things will go well for him if you compliment his service on the post-cruise evaluation.

Later, in the blue hour, he sees you sitting alone on deck with a beer and figures you need company. He recognizes you as a woman of a certain age, lines etched around your mouth like insistent parentheses. You wonder what he’d think if he knew how they got there: betrayal at the hands of a diplomat’s son and the loss of a loved one.

Thuy settles into the chair opposite and asks, unexpectedly, if you’ve heard of Arthur Conan Doyle.

“Sure—he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories,” you say.

“Do you also know he wrote a book called ... ‘The Woman Who Travels Alone’?”

He utters the last word, “alone,” in a lower register, raises one eyebrow and gives you a sidelong glance, making it clear he thinks there’s more to your story. The limestone karsts loom over windless water, and you feel not unlike an Agatha Christie heroine. You let the unsaid dangle in midair and vow to make the “woman with a past” thing work for you in future travels.

The Confidante

Here’s one thing you didn’t know before Vietnam: “Sex sells in the Halloween business.” The lithe Californian, sitting cross-legged on the aft deck, should know. She tells you she’s rediscovered herself, having opened a costume store in the wake of a failed marriage to an older man who stifled her spirit, in business and in mind. Now she teaches yoga on the side and has the freedom to travel in summer when business is slow. Soon she’ll spend her days stocking the black-cat bustiers that are the lifeblood of her trade.

She, too, is ambivalent about Vietnam. Her dad was a GI and her mom is from Saigon, so she’s got a history here, but she says the people aren’t any friendlier in the South. Her sister got flattened by a motorbike on their first day and ended up with six stitches in her scalp. The trip didn’t get much better from there.

What she really wants to know is why you struck out on your own and are you single by choice? “Unattached is the way to go,” she sighs, and you imagine she has no problem finding lovers with the yoga body and the long, dark hair, and maybe an item or two borrowed from the shop. She figures you for a quasi-academic—not a likely purchaser of bustiers—but that’s OK: Out here, what’s a lack of lingerie between two women who refuse to be boxed in?

The Comrade in Arms

Back in the city, you draw on a strawberry smoothie at a backpacker caf? and recover from a rain-streaked afternoon jostling through the narrow lanes. You lean back on oversized saffron and magenta pillows and wonder what percentage of the clientele is Australian. They’re everywhere, but you strike up a conversation with a group of Canadians, recently out of grad school and winding through Southeast Asia.

The girl with the mud-caked sandals tells you they’ve come from Cambodia, where the poverty depressed her, but they were in for a greater shock once they hit the train station in Hanoi. The warnings were right there in the Lonely Planet guidebook: Beware of touts offering illegal guest houses. They ignored the advice, and got dropped off at a flophouse; then the manager screamed for money when they refused to check in. “You can’t trust them,” she says. “You need to be on guard at all times.”

You think, first, you’re glad you’re not in your 20s anymore, and second, you usually bristle at this kind of thing, but in Hanoi it’s been truer than not. So you tell her you’ve had run-ins, too—those motorbike taxi guys ("Madame, where are you going, Madame?") have hounded you from day one—and agree that Vietnam is not for the travel naif.

The Love Interest

Jean-Marc is at least a breath of fresh air. He’s 10 years younger and not really your type, but still, he’s sweet and speaks some Mandarin, so you have that in common. You meet on the Ha Long boat, where he studies you through a haze of blue smoke, bats his dark eyelashes and asks, incredulously, “Why do you not have a boyfriend?”

“It’s complicated ...” you hedge, but admire him for being unintimidated and think, yes, the French do appreciate their women.

A silence swells between you as the boat heads for port. Then he says, “We should go out,” as if it’s been decided.

You arrange to meet for lunch near the cathedral, at a Western caf? with granite tabletops and high ceilings, a place that could have been lifted from Amelie’s Montmartre, and one that reminds him of home. The conversation is easy. You exchange your Chinese names in traditional characters and discuss the wonderful economy of the language, how it compounds words like “good” and “eat” to make “delicious.”

He tells you that Vietnam isn’t easy for a Western man, either: The staff at his budget hotel have spent the week trying to sell the delights of local women, irritated by his rebuffs.

The afternoon doesn’t take a romantic turn—you knew it wouldn’t—yet he can’t help but kiss you on both cheeks and email you a photo from the lunch three weeks later, just to make sure you haven’t forgotten.

When you open the photo back in your flat in Taipei, the night market roiling below, you see that you are smiling and unwary, and wonder if perhaps you were too hard on Vietnam. Perhaps six days in the land of a thousand come-ons restored something—a small, grudging something—in you after all.

Julia Ross is a frequent contributor to World Hum and a former Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. Her last essay for the site was Talking Trash in Taiwan.

It was the week of Tet, the Chinese New Year. Specifically, we were entering the Year of the Monkey—the same year in which, in 1968, communist forces launched their stunning offensive against South Vietnamese and American targets. The Tet Offensive was a tactical defeat for the communists, but it rattled the American public who watched it play out on television screens, contributing to the erosion of public support for the war.

Thirty-six years later, Tet brought to mind anything but that violent year. Instead, a decidedly festive atmosphere filled the city of 300,000 people. Crews stretched celebratory banners across streets. Men prepared the fireworks that would be fired from the roof of city hall. And so many motorbikes were hauling kumquat trees to set up in family homes—a Tet tradition—that the city’s traffic circles looked like gardens run amok.

I was thinking about doing something to mark the new year, as well, something that would take a little bit of courage. Throughout most of my life, I have tended to be—what is the word?—“cautious” in my approach to women. I remember the evening during my sophomore year of college when I asked Paula, a curly-haired blonde from Alabama, out on a date. It did violence to my cardiovascular system. The pounding in my chest verged on breaking a rib, and my face turned red from the strain of it all, which is why several years would pass before I tried that again. Though by now my sophomore year was very much a thing of the past, it still wasn’t my nature to ask out a near stranger.

But travel is about change. And if you throw on top of that the advent of a new year, the traveler may be thoroughly inclined to stretch himself. All this to say: One afternoon after I had been served my banana pancake, I took a deep breath, rose from my chair, and turned toward the counter behind which sat the conscientious waitress, Vi. What I was now doing I likely would have done anyway, but it helped that the two Israelis with whom I had just eaten—a man I had met earlier in the week and a woman I had been traveling with for the past month—were nudging me forward. They too thought highly of Vi. How was it, we had sometimes wondered aloud, that a country so steeped in the ravages of war could still produce such refined beauty?

With my stomach a little in knots, I reached the counter and looked on as Vi turned to face me, probably thinking all I would ask for was a plate of fresh fruit. Then I did it.

I asked if I could treat her to dinner.

Vi looked worried—not mildly worried, but worried like I had just set a grenade on the table and held the pin in my teeth. Crushed by how worried she appeared, I wished there were a grenade on the table, for instead of feeling like a moron I could have attempted chivalry, grabbing the grenade and running until it exploded. Instead, I explained what dinner was—“only eating and talking”—and assured her that “no” was a perfectly legitimate answer.

“Think about it, and if you decide you would enjoy it, just tell me,” I said. “I’ll be sitting at my table reading for the next hour.”

Then I returned to my seat and waited.

Back at the table, my two Israeli friends inquired how it went. “I don’t know,” I said, “but I think not well. I suspect she’ll never talk to me again, except maybe behind my back as she tells her friends what a frightening experience this was for her.” Feeling deflated yet relieved (at least I had done it), I hoped Vi would recover from the shock I seemed to have given her.

Almost the full hour passed, and I was just about to give up hope and move on when I looked up to see her walking toward us, full of both physical beauty and the poise of one who is well-centered. Her eyes—innocent and uneasy, wanting to trust yet aware of the risk—betrayed how she, too, was stretching herself through the very act of approaching my table. I couldn’t tell if I was more delighted or humbled, but I smiled as softly she said, “Yes.”

The next evening we met outside my hotel. She had borrowed her father’s motorbike and, according to custom, I was the one who would drive us to an elegant Italian restaurant called Cyclo. Only once had I driven a motorbike in Vietnam, and never with a passenger on the back. This is why the five minutes to Cyclo would be the most nerve-racking of the date. Since the previous night, the image of Vi being deskinned on lumpy asphalt had put the fear of God in me. All day I had been replaying the quiet determination with which, after saying yes to my request, she had made clear that the male would be responsible for the driving. And now as we stood before the bike and I expressed my concern to Vi, she calmly indicated that what people might think of her driving a man was more a concern than her possibly being shorn of her epidermis (though she didn’t word it this way). And so, with adrenaline pushing through my veins, a profound sense of responsibility dilating my pupils, and Vi’s beautiful black hair occasionally slapping my face, I drove us to Cyclo.

I cannot recall what we spoke of over dinner, but I know that we shared a small pizza and shrimp pasta, and I remember that I drank a Saigon beer while she drank fresh milk. I also remember that at five dollars this was one of the more expensive meals I would pay for in Vietnam, but that it was worth every penny.

We had only two hours together since her father had set a 9:30 p.m. curfew. With 25 minutes left, we went for a walk on the beach. I asked her which way she would like to go, and rather than choosing the route I thought prettier, she chose the one that had the best lighting. I had noticed that even at dinner she was worried that those who saw us together might think she was a prostitute, or at least a woman with little integrity. By walking under the brighter lights, we could avoid feeding people’s suspicions. When we passed several young men loitering on the sidewalk, they said something to her in Vietnamese and laughed.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“It was very dirty,” she said. “The men think very bad things about a girl with a foreign man.”

Vi told me that she had never been asked out before. I was flabbergasted, unable to comprehend how it was that thousands of backpackers had passed through her caf? without a single one ever doing so. She also said that the night before, when I had asked her to dinner, she wasn’t worried; she was simply confused. She did not trust her English comprehension enough to be certain what I was asking. And even if I were asking her out to dinner, she wondered, why would I want to do that?

The two hours slipped through our fingers as quickly as I knew they would. I would be lying through my teeth if I said I hadn’t gone into this night hoping for even the tiniest kiss. But I was hoping for something even more: to respect her, and to acknowledge her graciousness in saying yes to my invitation for dinner even though it would bring her unwanted attention. And so as we stood beside her motorbike, with the parking attendant just a few feet away, I knew there could be no kiss. I extended my hand instead, even afraid to allow the handshake to linger too long.

Vi offered to drop me off at my hotel, but I knew she was running late and did not wish to delay her any longer. “I will walk,” I said. “It is such a beautiful evening to walk.” And then we smiled at each other in silence, for it is difficult to speak when two people understand that in a moment all they will have left of each other is a memory. Our handshake complete, she climbed onto her motorbike and I backed away.

“Thank you for this evening,” I told her.

“You are a very good man,” she replied.

Early the next morning in a cold rain, my body boarded a bus to leave Nha Trang, but my heart decided to stay behind a while. I knew it would. Rarely does one’s entire being board the bus, train or other vessel that will take him from the person or place he has grown fond of. And so I felt pain as I sat in my seat, watching the palms and rice fields pass by in a blur as the bus carried me farther and farther from Nha Trang. But it was a worthwhile pain, even a cherished pain, the accepted cost of my own little Tet offensive.

Joel Carillet, a Tennessee-based writer and photographer, is the author of 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia.

Photo by Joel Carillet. 

But recently in Lyon, riding on the open upper deck of a Grand Tour bus, I felt tipsy with discovery once more. Evening’s blue pallor was washing over shiny Citroens and Renaults that scooted around beneath us like giant bejeweled beetles. My bus, amid them, skirted place Bellecour, an expanse of raked beige pebbles dominated by an equestrian statue of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and glided down the smoothly paved streets of the Presqu’?le (or “Peninsula,” as the commercial center is known) past the glittering gilt shop windows of Praho and Kenzo, Milano and JB Martin. We soon mounted the bridge to Vieux (Old) Lyon, crossing over the river Sa?ne, near where the embankment curved west beneath the labyrinthine hilltop neighborhood of Croix Rousse, the longtime abode of silk weavers.

Above, by the twin belfries of a soaring white basilica atop Fourvi?re promontory, stood a floodlit golden statue of the Virgin Mary. My audio-tape guide told me that Roman invaders had initiated Lyon’s history up there, founding the military colony of Lugdunum after capturing, in 43 B.C., this part of France in the Gallic wars. But Vieux Lyon, with its m?lange of burnt sienna and peach fa?ades, recalls Florence—apt, since Lyon flourished during the Renaissance, following an influx of Italian bankers. It came as no surprise when the tape informed me that, in 1998, UNESCO had designated the arrondissements on both banks of the Sa?ne a World Heritage site—the largest urban environs on Earth so designated, in fact.

An hour and a half later, after having wound up Fourvi?re’s switchbacks, passed by the basilica (the Notre Dame de Fourvi?re) and France’s oldest Roman theater, and rolled down to cross a bridge over Lyon’s second river, the Rh?ne, we pulled back into place Bellecour. I jumped off into the dreamy light, and joined the promenade of elegantly dressed Lyonnais heading toward the outdoor caf?s near the H?tel de Ville.

Though Lyon, with more than 400,000 people, is France’s third-largest city, it has never counted among its most popular tourist destinations. Partly this stems from its reputation as home to a plethora of polluting riverside factories. But also a certain Lyonnais reclusiveness—or bourgeois aloofness, many French would say—has been to blame. Wealthy from its banking, viticulture, printing and silk industries, Lyon, until the 1990s, preferred to repose in relative solitude, doing little to attract tourists.

“Lyon always relied on word-of-mouth advertising,” Blandine Thenet, the press attach? for the municipal Office of Tourism and Congresses, told me the day after my arrival. But, she explained, that changed in the 1990s, with the launching of a campaign to attract visitors, especially business tourists, and the enactment of Plan Rh?ne and Plan Bleu, development projects that aimed to revive the city’s rives gauches and rives droites, which had suffered damage from now-defunct factories. They succeeded. Tourism, mostly French, has been growing, and (for example) from 2004 to 2005, increased by 7 to 8 percent, bringing in revenues of a billion euros. Among the French, at least, for the first time, Lyon has become branch? (cool) or, more colloquially, “in,” to use the English slang they often employ.

What surprised me most, however, was the relative absence of tourists at a time when Paris is full of them. Whatever the stats may be, I found the Lyonnais as unjaded, even solicitous, as the inhabitants of any small town. The driver of my tour bus, a pencil-thin woman in her 50s who looked like a Gallic Pippi Longstocking, in bright red lipstick and candy-stripe stockings, urged me not to buy my day-long tour ticket at such a late hour, and so lose money; my taxi driver spontaneously offered me a free map; and, when I stepped out of the metro holding that map, an old man stopped and asked if he could help me find anything. I have always considered the French reputation for coldness undeserved, but this was all more than I expected.

Wandering through the alleys of the Presqu’?le one day, I pored over, with some consternation, the window menus of the bouchons: “fowl poached inside a bladder,” “silk-weaver’s brains,” “death’s fingers” and “tripe gratin.” I hardly knew where to start, what I should start with, or, frankly, whether I wanted to start. But I persevered. Blandine had told me that the bouchons were not just restaurants, but “a Lyonnais way of life.”

I settled on the family-owned Le Garet, a bouchon dating from 1918 that is hidden on a side street of the same name near the opera house. I opened the door on a scene from another time, presided over, of all things, by a reproduction of “The Ricotta Eaters” hanging crookedly between an array of old photos and ancient clocks. In the wainscoted smoky dining hall, patrons sat stuffing themselves, their napkins tucked into their collars, their jaws chomping away. They spoke throaty French through full mouths as they decanted pots (crude greenish demi-bottles) of Beaujolais and C?tes du Rh?ne into stout glasses, while I sensed an aroma of fricasseeing pork mixed with the bouquet of fresh-cut roses decorating the bar. The spiky-haired hostess, whose orange halter rode up to reveal love handles, seated me at the table d’h?te and urged me, in a squeaky falsetto, to try the quenelle. ("Comment?") She handed me a menu, and my eyes lit on the first line: “A woman who farts is not dead.” Another Lyonnais dictum followed: “At work we do what we must/In bed we do what we can/But at the table we really try.”

Thus began the first of my many meals at Le Garet, under the direction of its flamboyant, if rumpled, owners and hosts, Agni?s and Emmaneul Ferra (a renowned chef, it turned out), who ceaselessly circulated among the checker-clothed tables, taking orders and chatting with their client?le. This time, I started with a simple salade de march? lyonnais (lettuce, egg whites, bacon, and hot croutons) and quenelle de brochet ? la lyonnaise, which turned out to be a fluffy pike dumpling not really to my liking. On following days, rather than deal with the bizarre dish names, I just ordered the menu Gnafron—Gnafron being the worldly-wise wino character from Lyon’s Guignol (puppet theater). Every meal opened with a basket of warm pain campagnard (country bread), crusty and rich, and a pot of red C?tes du Rh?ne.

To the menu Gnafron. I first dug into a pile of cold peas laced with baby onions and doused in vinegar. A bounty of steamed potatoes arrived next. I ate and ate, unable to stop.

“Doucement!” cautioned Emmanuel.

He finally brought me the pi?ce de r?sistance—andouillette vin blanc, moutarde—a pair of truncated pig intestines stuffed with charcuterie and drenched in tart wine sauce. I set to work on it, truly unable to resist, not knowing whether I would down the meal and live to return, or expire then and there, fork in hand.

Unable to finish, I sat back in my seat. Emmanuel slipped a fromage blanc cr?me in front of me. I spooned it in and raised my head. Emmanuel was still standing over me, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Dessert, monsieur?”

“I thought that was dessert.”

“You thought wrong, monsieur. This is not work or the bed. At the table we must make an effort.” He named three or four sweet dishes, but I asked to be excused with a few slivers of vanilla ice cream. Somewhat disappointed in me, he relented.

On one of my last days in Lyon, after lunch in Le Garet, I stopped by Kiosque Bellecour, a caf? on place Bellecour. For the first time during my stay, it felt like spring. The sun was shining, bright but not hot, and the snow-covered Alps glistened against the azure on the eastern horizon. 

I ordered a glass of Beaujolais from the waitress, a young student with creamy skin and plucked eyebrows, and opened the slim volume of Rimbaud’s poetry I had brought along.“Le Soleil, le foyer de tendresse et de vie/Verse l’amour br?lant ? la terre ravie.” (The sun, source of tenderness and life/Pours burning love over the delighted earth.) Rimbaud may have never visited Lyon, but in a city of mostly gray skies and cool and rain, his words fit the moment.

My waitress brought me the Beaujolais and smiled as she set it before me. After a week in Lyon, my life again felt like a feast, and the wine, once more, was flowing.

Jeffrey Tayler is the Moscow correspondent for The Atlantic and a frequent contributor to World Hum. His last story was Black Gold and the Golden Rule. His book Facing the Congo made our list of the top travel books of all time.

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The basics: Before writing them off as oily anchovies, know that herring are an integral part of Nordic culture and cuisine. They’re known as sill in Swedish. Chances are you’ll be eating either Atlantic or Baltic herring in Sweden.

Atlantic herring, commonly referred to as North Sea herring, are mostly found in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean. Baltic herring, hailing from the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea, are the smaller, leaner, less salty cousins of North Sea herring.

Relegating herring to a side dish is nothing short of heresy, and as such, it is often eaten as the main course in Swedish homes.

How it comes: Pickled, smoked, salted, fried, broiled, marinated, saut?ed or baked are the primary ways to prepare this delectable fish. Herring are suited for just about any cooking technique you can imagine, and mustard herring, onion herring, dill herring, herring in wine sauce, herring with beets and blackcurrant herring are a few of the tastier varieties you may find in your sm?rg?sbord.

The fish also make regular appearances in much-loved casseroles called str?mmingsl?dor. All you need to make a classic str?mmingsl?dor are rolled up herring filets topped with an artery-clogging amount of butter, dill, a myriad of light spices, onions and stewed tomatoes.

The mother of all herring: Popular in Northern Sweden and Swedish Lapland is surstr?mming—fermented Baltic herring. Usually sold in pressurized tin cans, it smells like vinegary flatulence—it’s putrid. Due to its overpowering odor, surstr?mming is traditionally done outdoors, usually during the month of August.

Making surstr?mming requires storing salted herring in barrels for about two months, then transferring them into tin cans to continue their process of decay. Six months to a year later, the tin cans (now bulging and rounded from the pressure of fermentation) are shipped to stores.

Before you think of bringing a can of surstr?mming home as a souvenir, know they have been banned on a few major airlines.

A museum? Surstr?mming is so integral to Swedish tradition that dedicating thousands of square feet to highlighting this oily aquatic vertebrate seemed logical to locals. Open on Saturdays in the small fishing village of Skeppsmaln, the museum offers visitors surstr?mming history and preparation techniques, and even lets them take a whiff of the fish from a sniffing box.

Other herring museums dot the Swedish landscape, including Sillebua, located on the island of Kl?desholmen.

Essential sidekicks: Eating herring is simple: Spear the little fish with a fork and lift it to your mouth. Once ready to eat, herrings are so flavorful that the only occasional additions are onions, boiled almond-shaped yellow potatoes called mandelpotatis and thin bread known as tunnbr?d.

Similar to sour cream, gr?ddfil—fatty fermented milk—can also be added as a topping.

Washing it down: Nothing beats cold milk for washing down herring. If you dislike milk, any mild-tasting beverage to counteract the salty, strong taste of herring will suffice. Some Swedes have been known to down herring with beer and a variation of vodka called akvavit—a 40 percent distilled alcoholic beverage made from potatoes or grain.

Disclaimer: Herring, especially the Baltic kind, has gotten a lot of bad press in recent years. Because the Baltic Sea is the world’s most polluted sea, large amounts of chemicals were found in Baltic herring in the 1990s. Before you worry about developing possible DNA mutations from eating herring, European Union (EU) policies still permit the export of Baltic herring that meet certain criteria as long as customers are adequately warned of any potential side effects.

Still scared? The EU recommends you vary the fish you eat, reducing the amount of large Baltic fish in your weekly diet. So, simply enjoy Baltic herring in smaller portions. Ever wonder where Swedes get their youthful glow? Eating fish supplies essential proteins, vitamins and fatty acids that help keep skin healthy.

Now, dig into that brined aquatic goodness, and rest assured that you are partaking in centuries-old authentic Swedish fare.

Lola Akinmade is a writer and photographer who has been shuttling between Stockholm and Washington, D.C., for the last few years and is learning to love herring each passing season.

Photo by berzowska via Flickr (Creative Commons).

When to go: While most cevicher?as are open daily, Sunday is traditionally their busiest day and visiting one is a weekly ritual for many Lime?os. After partying until dawn the night before in Lima’s discos, you might rest for a few hours but still feel like the bottom of your shoe. The act of going to a cevicher?a is something that can both refresh and revive; a combination of hair of the dog and raw seafood. The experience begins in the late morning and typically lasts all day; the overindulgence may, on a good day, eclipse that of the night before.

The basics: Early, crude forms of ceviche began to appear in pre-Colombian times in the coastal civilizations of South America where fish was “cooked” with a fruit called tumbo. Later the Incas ate salted fish marinated in chicha, a fermented corn drink, and when the Spanish arrived, they added limes and onions to the mix.

Ceviche preparations vary from place to place—in Mexico, finely diced fish in lemon juice is served with crackers and Tabasco; in Ecuador, ceviche includes tomatoes and is much soupier; in the Andes, chefs use trout—but it’s the Peruvian version that’s recently caught on outside Latin America.

In Peru, ceviche is eaten as a first course or appetizer. The dish requires fresh, quality ingredients; precise and lightning-fast execution; and a basic understanding of spices and acidity. The chef tosses fresh chunks of any firm white fish, such as flounder or sea bass, with onions, bits of Peruvian aj? peppers, seasoning and—most importantly—lime juice only minutes before serving. Ceviche isn’t exactly raw like sashimi is raw, though. The acid in the lime actually cooks the fish just before you eat it, resulting in an explosion of taste and texture. In the same dish you’ll find a slice of sweet potato, a few sticks of boiled yucca and a small piece of corn on the cob.

Where to go: Pick up Lima’s restaurant guide, “Guia Gastronomica,” for suggestions, or head to the seaside districts of Barranco and Chorrillos, and look for the crowds spilling into the street from restaurants like Punta Arenas or La Canta Rana. For a step up in price and quality, check out dining options in the Miraflores district such as Caplina or the trendster hot spot La Mar, owned by Lima’s outspoken TV chef Gast?n Acurio. At either you’ll find local celebrities and wealthy Lime?os sipping on pisco-infused cocktails and noshing on Novo Andino (New Andean) foods, including a lineup of ceviches and tiraditos.

Still, the best cevicher?as are a bit out of the way. Sonia, a ceviche shack near the Chorrillos fish market that has grown a fanatic following, is tucked away in a far corner of the city. Sankuay, aka Chez Wong, sits in an unpretentious part of Lima, but the loyal ensemble of BMWs and Mercedes outside give it away as a culinary gem. Inside, chef Javier Wong takes a look at you and decides what you are going to eat. If you don’t like it, then leave.

Order like an expert: To begin, pick at the toasted, salted corn kernels called cancha serrana already on the table, and make your first order. Start with something to drink, say, Leche de Tigre, aka Tiger’s Milk. It’s like a kick in the face. More clearly defined, it’s the tangy juice left over at the bottom of the ceviche bowl served in a tall shot glass. Sometimes it’s mixed with a shot of pisco, a white brandy that is Peru’s national spirit. Throw in a few 32-ounce beers (always Pilsen or Cusque?a) for everyone to share. If dining after a rough night, opt for a pisco sour. Better yet, make it a double.

Next, move on to the goods: ceviche or tiradito. Ceviche comes in many forms: cl?sico (the traditional mix), mixto (with fish, squid, octopus and scallops), camar?n (with crayfish), black conch (said to increase your sexual prowess), pato (with duck), and champi?ones (with mushrooms). Tiradito is the modish, young cousin of ceviche. Created by Nikkei (Japanese) chefs in Lima, it relies on the tradition of dousing raw fish in lime juice, but the slices are paper thin and its makers add a spicy aj?-based sauce.

Once you’ve finished your ceviche—another round of drinks, by the way, has likely been put on the table without your asking—you can order the rest of your meal. Your second course will be something hearty, and typically served with rice.

Need more starch? Try tacu-tacu de mariscos: day-old rice and beans refried and stuffed with seafood. Something more filling? Lenguado a la macho: flounder in a zesty sauce of onion, garlic, paprika, cilantro and rocoto peppers. Something unusual? Arroz negro: rice cooked in squid ink with saut?ed squid, scallops and crayfish. Something multinational? Camar?n saltado: a variation of Peru’s favorite Chinese fusion dish with shrimp instead of chicken.

Bask in the benefits: Die-hard connoisseurs will try to sell you the health attributes of ceviche like a can of snake oil—it will prevent sleepwalking, cure a hangover, and even increase your sex drive. While there may be some truth to their words, a visit to a cevicheria will at the very least guarantee good times and a full belly. Buon Provecho!

Writer, guidebook author and photographer Nicholas Gill splits his time between Lima, Peru, and Brooklyn, New York.

Photos by Nicholas Gill. 

Now, however, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey have put together a new anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, inspired by the Federal Writers Project. But they wanted their book to be more than just a simple guidebook; they wanted to reveal what it’s like to be in these states now. So they contacted writers to create a modern portrait of America. 

The result is a fantastic collection of essays about America by some of its best writers: Susan Orlean writing on Ohio, Jonathan Franzen “interviewing” New York, Alexandra Fuller spinning yarns about Wyoming. It’s the kind of book that makes you realize there’s still a huge, beautiful, complicated place out there to fall in love with all over again.

I spoke with Weiland by phone at his office in New York, where he’s an editor at the Paris Review.

World Hum: I know you wrote a little about how you came up with this project, but could you explain a little more specifically where the idea came from?

Matt Weiland: A couple years ago, we’d done the Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, and it did really well. And the way these things work at the big publishing houses is that they came back to us and said, “Would you guys do another anthology to come out at the time of the elections in 2008?” They have ways of being convincing about such things, but we thought “Nah, what would we do? The thinking fan’s guide to democracy?” It just seemed dreadfully dull. And I wouldn’t want to do a book that I wouldn’t want to read myself, so we said no.

But then we went away, and were thinking about it. And I’ve always loved the old WPA state guides. So Sean and I talked about it a bit, then we went back to them and said, “Look, we’d like to do something on the same principle as the first book, which was 32 writers on 32 countries. This would be 50 writers on 50 states. It wouldn’t be a practical guidebook. It wouldn’t say anything direct about the elections. It would just be a lasting book about America now.”

I thought they were going to say no, but instead they were really enthusiastic.

Yeah, I love those old WPA guides, too.

They’re so great. And a funny thing about them is they had all these wonderful writers: Nelson Algren, Saul Bellows, Zora Neale Hurston, Jim Thompson, Richard Wright, John Cheever. A lot of them were edited down, and they were published anonymously and some of them can be really boring, unfortunately.

We were aware of that. We wanted ["State by State"] to be inspired by that, but we didn’t want it to get ground down in a meat grinder. We wanted the writers to do their thing, and to let them bump into whatever they bumped into. And I think that makes it a much more idiosyncratic book, and one that’s much more fun.

It seems like there were two ways to go about picking writers: Either choose a writer who knows a place really well, or a writer who comes to a place with fresh eyes.

You’re right. What we decided early that we didn’t want was for the book to be a kind of beauty pageant where 50 writers from a particular state write about that state and why it’s so great. And as appealing as it would be to have some of these writers come out with their little staff and tiara and to do their little dance, we wanted it to be stranger and even ambivalent at times. So some of the writers we went to are from the place they’re writing about. Others are writing about the place they moved to, or are residents of. And still others visit places they’d never been before, because we thought it would be interesting to get that perspective that you only get with fresh eyes and a deadline looming over you. I think in some ways those pieces are the best, some of the best of the book, like David Rakoff in Utah, and Dagoberto Gilb hanging out with the Mexican workers in the cornfields of Iowa. They’d never been to these states before, but I think they tell us something about the states that we haven’t much heard, and that’s important. 

As far as the things that they’ve bumped into, was there anything that surprised you most?

One thing that surprised both of us was how much the writers found that hasn’t been bulldozed for speed, as Laurie Lee once said about the English landscape. We think of the country as being so homogenized, and of course it is if you only stay on the interstate and only shop at the big box superstores and listen to commercial radio. But when you get out in it, you see that there are still all sorts of things that are still very local and that vary from state to state, whether it’s mint farming in Indiana, or pawn shops in Las Vegas, or a little mom-and-pop diner in Key West. These things are all under pressure from larger commercial firms, but nonetheless exist and retain some of their idiosyncrasies and their fundamental authenticity and localness.

Yeah, most people seem to think America is done, as far as authenticity and localness go.

It may be. I don’t know. It’s certainly on the outs. But not if we don’t let it be. The way to defend those things is, first of all to recognize they’re still there and not give up on them. And that goes as much for independent stores as for ways of living and building. Ha Jin writes about how the clay in Georgia is different from anywhere else, so the bricks are different. And that hasn’t changed. 

What are some other things you were surprised to find?

Even the writers who said they were going to write negatively about their states came out with these wonderfully ambivalent pieces that reveal just how much they love the places they’re from, or that they live, despite their flaws and imperfections. And that really surprised us both. And I think that’s really true of a lot of people when they think about place and where they live. The place is you. And if you grow up in a place, you may complain about it endlessly, but nevertheless its flaws are lovable and worth defending.

Did doing this book kind of make you want to hit the road?

It sure did. You know, the whole book, when we started, we hoped would replicate the experience you have when you go on a road trip. You get off the interstate, and you bump into surprising, interesting things wherever you go. Or that’s my experience anyway. And that’s one of the great things about the road trip. As you go along, the next town is different from the last. And that’s what makes it fun to keep going. Every time you see a sign that reminds you you’re in a different state, you kind of already knew it, by the way things look, the way people talk, the look of the landscape, the sort of stops you see. And that’s sort of what we wanted the book to feel like. And having now finished it, I am really ready to get on the road again. 

Frank Bures is a World Hum contributing editor. He recently wrote about the Monster of Florence, and interviewed Bryan Mealer.  His story, The Lost World of Nigeria, was selected as Notable Travel Writing in the