The Best American Travel Writing 2014 Read Online Free Page A

was starving and jailing his opponents in the 1990s, visitors to Zimbabwe were applying for licenses to shoot big game and having a swell time in the upscale game lodges. This is, to a degree, still the case.
    By contrast, the free market–inspired, somewhat democratic, unregulated country can make for a bumpy trip, and a preponderance of rapacious locals. The old Soviet Union, with nannying guides, controlled and protected its tourists; the new Russia torments visitors with every scam available to rampant capitalism. But unless you are in delicate health and desire a serious rest, none of this is a reason to stay home
    â€œYou’d be a fool to take that ferry,” people, both Scottish and English, said to me in the spring of 1982 when I set off at Stranraer in Scotland for Larne in Northern Ireland. I was making my clockwise trip around the British coast for the trip I later recounted in my book
The Kingdom by the Sea
. At the time and for more than 10 years, a particularly vicious sort of sectarian terror was general all over Ulster. It seemed from the outside to be Catholic versus Protestant, centuries old in its origins, harking back to King Billy (William of Orange) and the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, the decisive event still celebrated by marchers in silly hats every year on July 12. Ulster violence in the 1970s was pacified and then stirred by British troops, and the terror given material support by misguided enthusiasts in the United States.
    How do I know this? I was there, keeping my head down, eating fish and chips, drinking beer, and making notes, while observing the effects of this confederacy of murderous dunces, the splinter groups, grudge bearers, and criminal hell-raisers of the purest ignorance.
    The narcissism of minor differences was never more starkly illustrated than after that rainy night when I boarded the ferry from Scotland and made the short voyage into the 17th century, setting off to look at the rest of Northern Ireland. What I found—what I have usually found after hearing all those warnings—was that it was much more complicated and factional than it had been described to me. And there were unexpected pleasures. For one thing, the Irish of all sorts were grateful to have a listener. This is a trait of the aggrieved, and to be in the presence of talkers is a gift to a writer.
    It was all a revelation that has become a rich and enlightening memory. Nor was it the only time I have been warned away from a place. “Don’t—whatever you do—go to the Congo,” I was told when I was a teacher in Uganda in the mid- and late 1960s. But the Congo was immense, and the parts I visited, Kivu in the east and Katanga in the south, were full of life, in the way of beleaguered places. In the mid-1970s, I was setting off from my hotel in Berlin for the train to East Berlin when the writer Jerzy Kosinski begged me not to go beyond the Brandenburg Gate. I might be arrested, tortured, held in solitary confinement. “What did they do to you?” he asked when he saw me reappear that evening. I told him I had had a bad meal, taken a walk, seen a museum, and generally gotten an unedited glimpse of the grim and threadbare life of East Germany.
    Not all warnings are frivolous or self-serving. I have mentioned being cautioned about dacoits in Assam: it was good advice. Passing through Singapore in 1973, I was warned not to go to Khmer Rouge–controlled Cambodia, and that was advice I heeded. There is a difference between traveling in a country where there is a rule of law and visiting one in a state of anarchy. Pol Pot had made Cambodia uninhabitable. I traveled to Vietnam instead, aware of the risks. This was just after the majority of American troops had withdrawn and about 18 months before the fall of Saigon. My clearest memory is of the shattered Citadel and the muddy streets and the stinking foreshore of the Pearl River in Hue, up the coast, the terminus of the railway