The Best American Travel Writing 2012 Read Online Free

pays respect to such absurdities as this farewell to the renowned Georgi Dimitrov: “We promise to guard like the pupils of our eyes our maritime border for the successful building of socialism in our beloved Motherland.” Here we could almost be in Tijuana’s fake bell tower. Kenarov remarks that “the eternal border between the upper world and the underworld, the city and the cemetery, has disappeared in Bulgaria. No one is truly dead without a necrologue, and yet necrologues are meant to keep the dead alive.” So it is with Burton and Emerson, Dark Continents and Chernobyl. (As Pink Floyd said: “Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”) This ambiguity, or whatever you want to call it, shines out at us in Pico Iyer’s account of Varanasi, where Shiva met Vishnu—what could be more emblematic than that? Hence the Ganges with its thirty sewers: “Bathe yourself in its filthy waters . . . and you purify yourself for life.” Wandering among sadhus who “want to live in a world of ash,” Iyer concludes: “Spirituality in Varanasi lies precisely in the poverty and sickness and death that it weaves into its unending tapestry; a place of holiness, it says, is . . . a place where purity and filth, anarchy and ritual, unquenchable vitality and the constant imminence of death all flow together.” Here too he experiences a turning-backward epiphany not unlike that of Gorra in the Parisian repertory theater: Varanasi comes to remind him of his twisting-laned birthplace, Oxford.
    Lynn Freed’s mini-memoir of the approaching end of apartheid in South Africa is of the highest order, not only for its style but also for its very profound meditation on fear in relation to political change. In his essay, Kenarov references the Bulgarian sociologist Emiliya Karaboeva, who seeks to classify what most recurs in necrologues. She concludes: “The key words are love, pain, and sorrow, but the most important one is love.” In Freed’s brief vignette the love of what is endangered is implicit: this family, this home which may someday be invaded by killers, this life.
    In every anthology of travel writing there should always be a hot-and-miserable piece bookended by a cold-and-miserable one. This year the first is furnished by Luke Dittrich, who shares with us the first installment of his walk along the Mexican-American border. Like many wise journalists, he has provisioned himself with a stroller full of water. Although the voracious mouthparts of copy editors have gnawed random holes in his narrative in obedience to their commercial instincts (I know this area somewhat, and was saddened by the deletion of localities that I know that Dittrich must have passed through), what remains is a pleasing read. His encounters with smiling or poker-faced Border Patrol agents are always an entertainment.
    So much for hot. For cold, I give you Mark Jenkins’s skiing trek with his brother through Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park. Roald Amundsen, who as you probably know led the first successful expedition to the South Pole, tried twice to cross Hardangervidda. Each try almost killed him. Just as Amundsen’s own organizational excellence and modest understatement damaged him in comparison to the dead hero Scott, so Jenkins’s account (which also shows certain signs of editorial damage) first struck me as less impressive than his accomplishment. But as I thought over that chilly escapade, I grew increasingly glad not to have accompanied the cheerful Jenkins brothers. Although they had the benefit of those newfangled trekking huts, the headwinds and whiteouts described in this story could easily have been fatal. The Jenkins brothers are obviously fine orienteers and in excellent shape. I salute them.
    During this same year, Mark Jenkins (are there two of him, or is he just busy?) also managed to spelunk through the beautiful world of Vietnam’s Hang Son