The Turk Who Loved Apples Read Free

making friends, and then traveling frugally and turning a profit from travel. Ethical dilemmas are followed by the quirks of getting lost, and the ultimate, unavoidable horror of traveling with family. After addressing the eternal debate of tourist versus traveler, I finish with one of the heaviest burdens: homecoming.
    Throughout, I refer back frequently to the postcollegiate year I spent in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Though that trip took place long ago, in 1996 and 1997, it was my first major solo adventure abroad and brought me face to face with the epiphanies and anxieties I would encounter again and again for decades to come. WheneverI am lonely, or ill, or guilt-ridden, I think back to the model that year provided me. It doesn’t always give me answers, but it does remind me that I survived once before and can do so again.
    That year abroad provides a backbone for the book as its various themed chapters leap around, from country to country, from my childhood to my most recent experiences. This is, I’ve discovered, one of the inevitable consequences of a lifetime of travel—that one’s constant dislocation in space produces a parallel dislocation in time. An ill breeze in Brooklyn recalls to me with instantaneous effect the streets of Saigon, and a bar of music overheard in a Taipei bar puts me in a Volvo crossing the Texas desert. I trade messages with Facebook friends I haven’t seen in person in years and make plans to see others far from their homes—in eastern Java, in Mongolia. Wherever I happen to be at this moment, I can close my eyes and imagine myself a million other places.
    If your life has not been filled with constant travel, these sorts of jumps may be disconcerting—a kind of narrative jetlag, I suppose. For me, at this point in my traveling life, it’s become normal, and I know I’m not entirely alone. When my travel-writer friends and I gather over drinks, our conversation is always filled with lines like “That reminds me of when I was in Osaka . . . ” or “Oh, just like in Bogotà!” Yes, it’s insufferable to outsiders, I’ll be the first to admit, but for us the world has opened up, and to act like we don’t notice the deep connections between disparate points on the globe would be to pretend we’ve learned nothing at all.
    Another, more important phenomenon I’ve learned in assembling these nearly thirty years of travel anecdotes is that they tell the tale of a very independent traveler—one who almost never outsourced the planning and execution of his adventures to travel agents, tour companies, concierges, or friends and family. In many ways, I was an independent traveler by default. At first I didn’t have the money to depend on outsider help, and by the time I had the money, it wasmy duty to readers to deal with everything myself, so that they might learn from my example.
    Still, those practical factors were always secondary. From an early age, I’ve simply wanted to do things myself. Whether I was spending hours on Lego projects in my room or taking independent study courses in high school and college, I’ve always been more comfortable figuring the world out on my own, and enjoying the private rush of triumph that comes from knowing I alone was responsible for my success. Or something like that: I never set out to be independent, and until recently wasn’t self-aware enough to identify that as one of my character traits.
    Of course, no one is born independent, nor is independence an absolute value, immutable once it’s achieved. This book is a chronicle of my ongoing progress toward independence, each minor step forward a tentative one, each victory shaky, liable to be overturned at the next foreign challenge. By the end of my story, you should be able to see how far I’ve come—and how that’s also not, maybe, really very far at all. When you go around the world, you wind up back