Yesterday I received an e-mail from the Tourism Council of Bhutan. I have long been intrigued by the Himalayan country. Sometimes called The Hidden Kingdom, it limited, for years, the number of tourists it allowed in. It wasn't until 1999 that it permitted its citizens to own television sets. The government famously measures what it calls Gross National Happiness.
So I was surprised yesterday when I opened the e-mail and read: "World-Renowned Chef Eric Ripert to Visit and Cook in Kingdom of Bhutan." In a little over 10 years, the country has moved from banning television to inviting celebrity chefs.
My level of interest in the place immediately dropped.
On the subject of "bad trips, good stories," a friend writes:
It is 1985, on our first trip to Europe. Daniel and I looping through the back roads of the Swiss Alps in our rental car en route to Paris. At a remote border crossing in pouring rain, a surly guard orders Daniel to his hut and says we can't come into France because we have no visas. (What we don't yet know is there has been a bombing at the Tati department store in Paris during our week in Switzerland.) Daniel, in a panic, motions me to come to the hut and we manage to convince the guard we aren't terrorists.
Back at car - keys locked inside. Now, il pleut comme une vache qui pisse. As guard laughs his ass off, we break the passenger window with a big rock. A kind Canadian couple gives us a piece of dry cleaner plastic and we wend our way down to the only Ford dealership in SE France in an ugly village we come to call "The Town Without Women." The owner of the only auberge scowls at me like I am the source of all her unhappiness. We go to sleep on lumpy beds under a leaky roof, visions of a huge repair bill in our heads because you know how the French are...
Morning breaks with sun and a smile from the patronesse when I work up the courage to compliment her coffee in bad French. At the dealership, we find they have vacuumed up our baquette crumbs, cleaned out the wine bottles and washed the car. The bill is ridiculously small. The garage owner sends us on our way with a hearty "bonne journee" and fresh croissants.
A friend writes about her daughter, who is:
"... fourteen now and on her first big trip without parents. It's been quite an adventure, from having to get a new bike two days before leaving (due to a wreck that smashed her old one) and having Amtrak completely lose her only duffel.
"I've tried to be a thinking sort of parent. One of my goals was to raise a good traveler, a flexible person who likes adventure and who accepts the fact that things sometimes don't work. I just talked to her on the phone. She's as happy as I've heard her, in upstate New York with no pajamas and no parents and no tent and no sleeping pad. 'You're right, Mom,' she said. 'When things go wrong, it makes great stories.'"
I had my first chlodnik (cold borscht) of the season the other night (courtesy of the Russian supermarket in Hollywood) and the first sip instantly transported me to summer in Poland. The mix of sour cream and red beets, radishes and dill, invariably tricks my body into believing it's back in Warsaw, sitting on a stool at a table in an un-airconditioned kitchen on Dobosza Street.
As I savored the soup, it occurred to me that, for all their benefits, ethnic restaurants have ruined the transporting power of taste. Often now, we eat the food - pad Thai, bibimbap, ceviche - before we visit the country, so there is no gustatory revelation on arrival (other than of how much better it is when made with locally-grown ingredients) and thus no Proustian memory flood when we dine out back home. Risotto Milanese doesn't fill you with Milan if you first ate it in Brooklyn, which is a good argument for visiting countries that are off the culinary map.
If you were starting out as a travel writer in the 1980s one of the books you read was written not by a travel writer but by an academic, a man who taught English, at the time, at Rutgers University. The book was Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars by Paul Fussell, and it did more than just examine the authors you had studied in college (though not, alas, their travel writing) - Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene - it devoted entire chapters to brilliant writers none of your English professors had ever mentioned: Robert Byron and Norman Douglas.
It was like a course no college ever taught - British Travel Writing 101, my first introduction to a distance university. The scholarship was rugged, eclectic and sweeping; the writing authoritative, engaging and witty. With chapters titled "L'Amour de Voyage" and "The New Heliophily," the book reinforced the image of travel writing as a romantic endeavor, but it also championed it as art. Here, it said, is an overlooked genre that has attracted some of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Here is a literature worthy of academic regard.
The second of these ideas turned out to be the more lasting. Travel writing continues - despite Fussell's assertion that tourism killed it - but without the participation of the day's great novelists. At the same time, academic papers and conferences on travel writing keep proliferating. It is ironic that the book that announced the death of travel writing gave birth to the field of travel writing scholarship.
The Australian travel magazine get lost arrived in the mail yesterday with my article on travel in 70s, those halcyon, pre-Internet days when total separation made total immersion a whole lot easier.
Immediately preceding my piece is one you would never find in an American travel magazine, as it lists the 10 countries with the most beautiful people. The authors write about the men as well as the women, shielding themselves from charges of sexism. Still, judging nations on their citizens' attractiveness is not something an American publication would dare to do.
Lebanon was #10, giving credence to stories my old newspaper's foreign correspondent used to tell me. Japan was #9, an uninspired choice (I would have chosen Korea). They were followed by Ethiopia, Italy, Israel and Colombia (Secret Service men are no dummies). Denmark was #4, which perhaps explains, better than a culture of low expectations, why the Danes are also said to be among the world's happiest people. Argentina was #3, Ukraine #2 (though almost any Slavic country could have taken its place) and Brazil was #1, giving South America three of the top 10 countries for male and female pulchritude. Regarding the latter, I found one glaring omission: India.