The Best American Travel Writing 2004 Book

I was not as crazy about this as I was about the 2005 edition, but it still had a number of excellent pieces. A large number of them take place within the USA, and I am more interested in international travel essays. Iyer (the editor) seems to like muscular writing and visits to places that are aching from battles and strife. He also selects mediocre pieces by big names like Adam Gopnik, Tad Friend, Bill McKibben, and John McPhee.

Of course, there were several fine pieces that I enjoyed very much. Bill Donahue revisits Paul Bowles's Tangiers in one. In another, Heather Eliot describes a fling with a local stud on a Pacific island. Kevin Fedarko visits some dreamers who run a ski resort in conflicted Kashmir. Tom Haines checks in with some seriously hungry villagers in Somalia. Peter Hessler does a superb job of exposing the myth of the Great Wall of China. Apparently the wall was always several walls that do not follow an exact line, and which are not visible from outer space, as everyone seems to believe. In my favorite piece, Mark Jenkins tries to trace the old Stilwell/Burma Road, but runs into the dangerous political repression occurring in contemporary Myanmar. Rian Malan, an excellent writer, contributes a piece about buying a house and settling down in Cape Town, South Africa. George Packer checks out the troubled youth and political conflicts in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, and he really gets in with the locals, who have odd ideas about America as a potential saviour of some kind. Kira Salak goes to the rural Congo, where some gorillas are being threatened by local militia conflicts. Patrick Symmes contributes two fine pieces - one about a visit to Butch and Sundance's old house in Patagonia, and the other a quick look at Kabul, Afghanistan, along with the destroyed Buddhist statues in Bamiyan. Undoubtedly worth reading for people who like this kind of stuff.