The Way of Wanderlust Read online

  PRAISE FOR DON GEORGE

  “These stories made me fall in love with the world again.”

  —Isabel Allende, author of The House of the Spirits,

  Eva Luna, and Maya’s Notebook

  “Don George is a legendary travel writer and editor.”

  —National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel

  “What shines with crystal clarity through all of these wise and wonderful essays is Don George’s irrepressible generosity of spirit. He loves the world he finds, and the world loves him back in equal measure. Those of us lucky enough to know him have long recognized Don as a seriously life-enhancing kind of fellow: this marvelous collection serves amply to reinforce the notion. And no: no favors were sought or offered for this message. Not a one.”

  —Simon Winchester, author of Pacific,

  The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa

  “If you meet Don George on the page or in the flesh, you quickly see that he’s always tilted toward the sun, as a perpetual singer of yes to life, to fun, to innocence, to vulnerability, and to surrender. All his writing, and much of his being, seems to be about rendering oneself open, daring to listen, and putting forward one’s best and most hopeful side, in the conviction that it will be answered in kind.”

  —Pico Iyer, author of The Lady and the Monk,

  Video Night in Kathmandu, and The Art of Stillness

  “Don George, the acclaimed and award-winning editor of ten anthologies of travel stories, has finally produced a collection of his own and it’s everything you’d expect from a Don George project: passionate, insightful, and humorous. What can I say? The brilliant editor is a brilliant writer.”

  —Tim Cahill, author of Jaguars Ripped My Flesh,

  Pass the Butterworms, and Hold the Enlightenment

  “Don George is an inveterate adventurer and master storyteller, with the biggest, most generous heart on the open road.”

  —Andrew McCarthy, actor, director,

  and author of The Longest Way Home

  “Don George describes himself as a ‘travel evangelist’ but he is much more than that. Yes, he loves to talk about the life-changing possibilities of travel, but he is also a bestselling author, regarded by many as the preeminent travel writer of his generation.”

  —Christopher Elliott, consumer advocate,

  journalist, and author of Scammed

  TRAVELERS’ TALES BOOKS

  Country and Regional Guides

  30 Days in Italy, 30 Days in the South Pacific, America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Grand Canyon, Hawai’i, Hong Kong, Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, San Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

  Women’s Travel

  100 Places Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Greece Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places in the USA Every Woman Should Go, 50 Places in Rome, Florence, & Venice Every Woman Should Go, Best Women’s Travel Writing, Family Travel, Gutsy Mamas, Gutsy Women, Mother’s World, Safety and Security for Women Who Travel, Wild with Child, Woman’s Asia, Woman’s Europe, Woman’s Passion for Travel, Woman’s Path, Woman’s World, Woman’s World Again, Women in the Wild

  Body & Soul

  Adventure of Food, Food, How to Eat Around the World, Love & Romance, Mile in Her Boots, Pilgrimage, Road Within, Spiritual Gifts of Travel, Stories to Live By, Ultimate Journey

  Special Interest

  365 Travel, Adventures in Wine, Danger!, Fearless Shopper, Gift of Birds, Gift of Rivers, Gift of Travel, Guidebook Experiment, How to Shit Around the World, Hyenas Laughed at Me, It’s a Dog’s World, Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune, More Sand in My Bra, Mousejunkies!, Not So Funny When It Happened, Penny Pincher’s Passport to Luxury Travel, Sand in My Bra, Soul of Place, Testosterone Planet, There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled, Thong Also Rises, What Color is your Jockstrap?, Whose Panties Are These?, World is a Kitchen, Writing Away

  Travel Literature

  The Best Travel Writing, Deer Hunting in Paris, Ghost Dance in Berlin, Shopping for Buddhas, Kin to the Wind, Coast to Coast, Fire Never Dies, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross, Last Trout in Venice, One Year Off, Rivers Ran East, Royal Road to Romance, A Sense of Place, Storm, Sword of Heaven, Take Me With You, Trader Horn, Way of the Wanderer, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

  Copyright © 2015 by Don George

  Foreword copyright © 2015 by Pico Iyer

  Travelers’ Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc. 2320 Bowdoin Street, Palo Alto, California 94306.

  www.travelerstales.com

  Credits are given starting on page 271.

  Art Direction: Kimberly Nelson Coombs

  Cover and Interior Illustrations: Candace Rose Rardon

  Page Layout: Howie Severson, using the fonts Centaur and California Titling

  Author Photograph: Jennifer Nunn Tarbutton

  Production Director: Susan Brady

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  George, Donald W.

  The way of wanderlust : the best travel writing of Don George / by Don George. -- First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60952-106-6 (epub)

  1. Travel--Anecdotes. 2. George, Donald W.--Travel. I. Title.

  G151.G47 2015

  910.4--dc23

  2015022620

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Mom and Dad,

  Kuniko, Jenny, and Jeremy,

  and all the pilgrims who have enriched

  and enlightened my journey

  Table of Contents

  Foreword: Saying Yes to the World by Pico Iyer

  Introduction

  Prologue: Every Journey Is a Pilgrimage

  Part One: Pilgrimages

  Climbing Kilimanjaro

  A Night with the Ghosts of Greece

  Ryoanji Reflections

  Connections: A Moment at Notre-Dame

  Conquering Half Dome

  Impression: Sunrise at Uluru

  Castaway in the Galápagos

  Machu Picchu Magic

  A Pilgrim at Stinson Beach

  Japan’s Past Perfect

  Home for the Holidays: A Thanksgiving Pilgrimage to Connecticut

  Part Two: Encounters

  In Love, in Greece, in the Springtime

  A Day in the Life of Dubbo

  A Passage to Pakistan

  Insights into Nice at the Musée Matisse

  Treasures of Dubrovnik

  Letters from Jordan

  Baja: Touched by a Whale

  Building Bridges in Mostar

  Into Africa

  Making Roof Tiles in Peru

  Living-History Lessons in Berlin

  Part Three: Illuminations

  At the Musée d’Orsay

  California Epiphany

  Japanese Wedding

  Prambanan in the Moonlight

  In the Pythion of Time

  Finding Salvation in the South Seas

  The Intricate Weave

  Unexpected Offerings on a Return to Bali

  Spin the Globe: El Salvador

  French Connections in Saint-Paul-de-Vence

  Piecing Together Puzzles in Cambodia

  Epilogue: Travel Writing and the Meaning of Life

  Acknowledgments

  Story Credits

  About the Author


  Foreword:

  Saying Yes to the World

  PICO IYER

  THE LAST TIME I RAN INTO DON GEORGE, it was one of those piercing, radiant early autumn days in Japan that leave you exultant and strangely wistful all at once. The sky was a richer, deeper blue than you’d see in California; the sun was so warm, even shirtsleeves seemed too much; most of Kyoto was spilling out into the leafy lanes, to enjoy yuzu-flavored “soft creams” and aloe-and-white grape juice cordials and the exhilarating buoyancy of a “second summer” Sunday afternoon scented with what smelled like daphne. Don and I sat out by a stream, the blaze of the sun beating down on us, and spoke of some of the wandering heroes—Peter Matthiessen, Jan Morris, Donald Richie—who had sent us out into the world to be transformed.

  Both of us, in our twenties, had chosen Japan as our secret home; both had married women from western Japan and raised kids on Doraemon, the 22nd-century blue robotic cat from Japan who has a “doko-demo” (or “anywhere you want”) door in his stomach. Both had found in Japan a way of making gentleness, courtesy, affirmation, and robust public cheerfulness seem not the stuff of childishness, but something seasoned and mature. But Don spoke perfect Japanese, as I could never dream of doing; Don had taught English here and appeared as a talk show host on Japanese TV. Don could open the door of any Japanese person we met along the streets, with his idiomatic, unaggressive, always smiling manner; it wasn’t hard to imagine that he had taken the optimism and openness of his longtime home in California and somehow wed it to a natural sweetness and unintrusive sympathy I associate deeply with my home near Kyoto.

  As we sat in the sun, drinking tea made from maple leaves (seasoned with apple and apricot), as we meandered through the 19th-century European park that leads toward the tiny lane on which our favorite tatami tea house is hidden—Don had come here ten months earlier to collect himself after his Japanese father-in-law died—I thought how distinctive Don’s relaxed and responsive spirit can be. I’d walked these same streets with other friends for twenty-seven years now, many of them celebrated travelers; they’d fired questions at me, shot out theories, spun this notion about Japan and that judgment.

  Don, by comparison, hung back. He seemed eager to take in as much as he possibly could. He didn’t have agenda or preoccupation, and in that regard appeared to rejoice in the rare traveler’s gift of allowing the day and the place to take him where they wanted him to go.

  He recalled for me the dorm advisers at Princeton who had opened the door to Asia for him, forty years before; the way he’d read This Side of Paradise before going to university, and still remembered his first reading of Tender is the Night. He reminded me of his early travels to Paris and Greece and then to an M.A. writing program in the hills of Virginia; by the time he was barely thirty, he had a lovely Japanese wife, a new perch in San Francisco, and a job that allowed him to call up writers as established as Jan Morris and invite them to write for his newspaper on the places that had changed their lives.

  “How’s your mother?” I asked him, as we walked along the narrow, willow-lined lane of Kiyamachi, in central Kyoto, sidestepping girls in pinkly flowering kimono sipping at Starbucks’s seasonal frappuccinos.

  “She’s ninety-eight!” he said with an astonished laugh. “But she doesn’t complain about a thing. She has this way of greeting everything that happens to her, and not getting sidetracked by what she’s lost.”

  “So that’s where you got it from,” I said, and he laughed again. “Hidamari.” The Japanese, not surprisingly, have a word for the strip of light the sun makes on otherwise chilly days, akin to the one where we had been sitting, by the stream.

  As a boy, traveling between California and England, I’d come to think, in my simplistic way, that the cultures of the Old World were the cultures of “No” (or, at best, “Maybe”), and those of the New World the ones of “Yes.” That’s much too reductive, of course, but if you meet Don on the page or in the flesh, you quickly see that he’s always tilted toward the sun, as a perpetual singer of yes to life, to fun, to innocence, to vulnerability, and to surrender. All his writing, and much of his being, seems to be about rendering oneself open, daring to listen, and putting forward one’s best and most hopeful side, in the conviction that it will be answered in kind.

  This is in any context a kind of balm, but never more so than in the realm of travel, which is one of life’s most charged leaps of faith (writing, of course, is another). Every time you set out from home and throw yourself into somewhere as alien as Tokyo or the Peloponnese, you’re trusting in the universe, you’re counting on the capacity of friendliness to inspire friendliness in return, and you’re assuming you don’t have all the answers and don’t even need them.

  There are many travelers, from Old World and New—Paul Bowles, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux—who revel in the shadows, and in unsettledness and dislocation; all of them give us wonders with their readiness to look unflinchingly at the dark. Don gives us something else, healthy and cheerful and forward-looking, that tells us that, if you leave yourself at home and are eager to let the world remake you as it sees fit, you can be at home almost everywhere you go. Home is the condition, the state of unencumbered ease, you export to everyone you visit.

  —Nara, Japan

  October 2014

  Introduction

  I TOOK MY FIRST SERENDIPITOUS STEP on the path to becoming a travel writer the summer after I graduated from Princeton. While all my friends were preparing for graduate school, law school, business school, or medical school, or starting jobs with banks, I arranged to go to Europe for a year, first to spend the summer in Paris on a Summer Work Abroad internship and then to teach in Greece on an Athens College Teaching Fellowship.

  When I set off for Europe, I was thinking that year would be a brief interlude between undergraduate and graduate schools, but then, one sun-dappled June morning in Paris, the course of my life changed. As I had every morning for the previous two weeks, I took the rickety old filigreed elevator from my apartment—right on the rue de Rivoli, looking onto the Tuileries—and stepped into the street: into a sea of French. Everyone around me was speaking French, wearing French, looking French, acting French. Shrugging their shoulders and twirling their scarves and drinking their cafés crèmes, calling out “Bonjour, monsieur-dame,” and paying for Le Monde or Le Nouvel Observateur with francs and stepping importantly around me and staring straight into my eyes and subtly smiling in a way that only the French do.

  Until that time I had spent most of my life in classrooms, and I was planning after that European detour to spend most of the rest of my life in classrooms. Suddenly it struck me: This was the classroom. Not the musty, shadowed, ivy-draped buildings in which I had spent the previous four years. This world of wide boulevards and centuries-old buildings and six-table sawdust restaurants and glasses of vin ordinaire and fire-eaters on street corners and poetry readings in cramped second-floor bookshops and mysterious women who smiled at me so that my heart leaped and I walked for hours restless under the plane trees by the Seine. This was the classroom.

  Hungry in a way I’d never been before, I gorged on Paris. I marveled at Molière at the Comédie Française and the Ballet Béjart in the park; I idled among the secondhand shelves at Shakespeare and Company, eavesdropping on poets and poseurs; I immersed myself in Manet and Monet in the Musée d’Orsay; got lost in the ancient alleys of Montmartre and the Marais; savored the open-air theater from a sidewalk seat on the Champs-Élysées; and conjured Hemingway on rue Descartes and in Les Deux Magots café.

  At the end of that summer, I rode the Orient Express to Greece and settled on the campus of Athens College. As it turned out, my fellowship duties were to teach five hours of literature and writing classes a week, write occasional speeches for the college president, and write and edit articles for the school’s quarterly alumni magazine. This left me uncharted expanses of free time, which I exuberantly filled reading Plato by the Parthenon, sipping ouzo on bouzouki-
bright nights in the Plaka, communing with muses among the red poppies and white columns of Corinth, and exploring the beaches of Rhodes and the ruins of Crete. Winter and spring vacations afforded the time to venture even farther, and I wandered footloose through Italy, Turkey, and Egypt, intoxicated with the newness and possibility of this unfurling world.

  My wanderlust bloomed. Every moment seemed unbearably precious, every outing an exhilarating lesson in a new culture, place, and people—full of thrilling sights and smells, tastes and textures, creations and traditions, encounters and connections: a whole new world!

  That year changed my life. And as the end of the school year approached and the question of what to do with my life loomed again, I found the courage to relinquish the student’s hand-me-down desire to become a tweedy professor and choose instead the uncharted path of becoming a writer. I had no idea where that path would lead; I just knew that I wanted to walk it, wild and wide-eyed, daring to dream.

  I entered an intensive one-year Master’s program in creative writing at a small school in Virginia called Hollins College. I lived in a log cabin on a lake and wrote a collection of poems, a few desultory chapters of a novel, and a description of an impromptu expedition I and a traveling companion had made up Mount Kilimanjaro the summer after my stay in Greece. I learned much about the rigors and rewards of being a professional writer that year, but no clear career path emerged. And so, as winter thawed into spring and the question-filled future arose once more, I followed my wanderlust and applied for a two-year Princeton-in-Asia Fellowship. Miraculously, I won and was awarded a position teaching at International Christian University in Tokyo.

  Before leaving for Japan, through some polite and persistent letter-writing, I was able to meet with a few magazine editors in New York, and I brought my Kilimanjaro story with me as a writing sample. To my astonishment, when I arrived in Tokyo in September, a telegram was waiting for me from one of these, the Travel Editor at Mademoiselle magazine. It read: “A hole opened up in our November issue and we put your Kilimanjaro story in it. Hope you don’t mind.”