The Best American Travel Writing 2014 Read Free Page B

great travel writing never really change. I’d also like to thank Tim Mudie at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for his help in producing this year’s outstanding collection, our 15th. I hope you enjoy it.
    I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2014. As I have for years, I am asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2014 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, date of publication, and publication name, and they must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. All submissions must be received by January 1, 2015, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.
    Further, publications that want to make certain that their contributions will be considered for the next edition should be sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, Best American Travel Writing, 228 Kings Highway, 1st floor, Suite 2, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
    Finally, I would like to dedicate this year’s anthology to one of our contributors, Matthew Power, who died tragically in March of this year while on assignment in Uganda, reporting on an explorer walking the length of the Nile. Matt was 39, which made him a contemporary of mine, and he was a true adventurer and seeker of truth whom I admired tremendously. Those who are loyal readers of
The Best American Travel Writing
know Matt’s work well, as it has been included here several times over the past decade. He will be greatly missed.
    J ASON W ILSON

Introduction
    T RAVEL WRITING TODAY is pretty much what travel writing has always been, a maddeningly hard-to-pin-down form—one traveler boasting of luxury and great meals, another making asinine lists (“Ten Best Waterslides on Cruise Ships”), yet another breathlessly recounting an itinerary of hardships and mishaps, and a fourth (and the most valuable, in my view) holding you like the wedding-guest with a skinny hand and fixing you with a glittering eye and saying, “There was a ship . . .”
    If you’re looking for a model, the greatest writer-traveler the world has known is the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, who set as his goal to travel the entire Islamic world, including China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa, in the mid-14th century. This took him 29 years. He spent a year in the Maldives, that strange scattered archipelago of coral atolls, where he took a number of wives, and then moved on, leaving them behind. Unlike those other long sojourners Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville (who might not have existed), Ibn Battutah wrote his book himself. In the words of one of his early Arab admirers:
    Â 
All master-works of travel, if you will but look
Are merely tails that drag at Ibn-Battutah’s heel,
For he it was who hung the world, that turning wheel
Of diverse parts, upon the axis of a book.
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    Ibn Battutah wrote about everything, great hospitality as well as catastrophes, miseries, wars, famines, plagues, pestilences, and xenophobia. Centuries later, what has changed? With—to speak only of Africa—the Ebola virus ravaging Guinea, the fanatical Boko Haram jihadists massacring thousands in northern Nigeria, tribal rioting and terrorist bombs in Kenya, and sprawling squatter camps in South Africa and Angola, travel in some of Africa is as much a challenge as it ever was. And yet in those same countries, there are still safari-goers, bird watchers, colorful dancers, and tarted-up tribal splendor. And there are travel writers reporting this somewhat hackneyed African experience, in pieces published in the glossier travel magazines extolling the spa experience and the cupcake culture in other pages. Some of these magazines are