Just passing through

Since moving to New York, I haven't been itching to travel as much as I used to; I spend most of my weekends in Polish-occupied Greenpoint and most of my weekdays in equally alien sectors of Manhattan, and all this has satisfied much of my wanderlust for the time being. For the past few years my most exotic travel fantasy has involved a visit to a suburban Target with aisles as wide as my living room, overflowing with dustless, neatly shelved merchandise.

But I am getting restless again, probably thanks in part to a budget that could barely get me to Staten Island these days. It doesn't help that I'm surrounded by jetsetters. One of my best friends is currently traveling Taiwan, and another is off to Marrakesh in the morning. Oh, and did my mother tell you she's moving to Mexico next month? There, now you're the last person on the planet to know. And here I sit in an undisclosed location high above Wall Street or thereabouts, as I do most days of the week, idly surfing.

Of course you can learn a lot about the difference between what you think you might enjoy and what you actually would enjoy by letting other people suffer the experience. People with courage, expense accounts, and newspaper assignments, such as Sarah Lyall, whose trip to the top of Mount Snowdon has reminded me that I have a horror of heights and thus can cross this particular Welsh travel fantasy off my list.

And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you also can learn about places and things in which you never thought you had an interest. I've long been a fan of the travel dispatches of Roy Kesey, an American married to a Peruvian diplomat living in China, which are well worth your perusal on McSweeney's if you haven't read them yet. I never thought I wanted to live in China or marry a Peruvian diplomat before reading them; now I just have to figure out whether it's more advisable to go to Peru first to find the spouse, or just pack for Beijing and hope for the best. This week, The Elegant Variation features a fun interview with Kesey, coinciding with the publication of his new novella, set in Croatia (of course). In honor of "Kesey Week," TEV just wrapped up a contest in which commenters write in with tales of travel tedium and terror, describing how and which books saved them from said misery. Good stories here, though reading some of them only reminded me that I'm super-jealous of anyone who can read in a moving vehicle without becoming hyperemetic.

Anyway, this blog, Idle Words, gets my vote for some of the most consistently entertaining, finely observed travel writing around. The photos are great, too. Check out the entries from a trip from Argentina to Chile to see the glaciers:

A little Zodiac takes you out to the boat, which then heads up the lake. As we manoeuver past an imposing cliff, the captain taps the "Release Condor" button on the main panel and an enormous bird dutifully takes off from his nest a hundred feet above the water.

The entire boat ride feels this scripted. As we near the glacier, clouds roll in and start dropping rain and sleet on the boat. The ice is half-visible and ghostly through the mist. Then, as we pull within twenty meters of the glacier face (the retreating glacier doesn't pose the kind of threat from calving ice as the Perito Moreno), the clouds open and a lone sunbeam strikes the ice from the side. I turn around to look at a brilliant double rainbow to the south of the boat, and just then I hear a tinkling sound of ice on glass and a soft voice behind me, speaking the four most beautiful words in the Spanish language:

"Whisky o pisco sour?"

Our pilot has climbed up the metal ladder in horizontal rain to bring up a tray of cocktails. At this point I would not be surprised to see a pink-hooved pegasus flying in, bringing sandwiches.

Comments

[Jen]

Dearest City Mouse,
we country mice renew our invitation for you (and your special friend) to shower us with your Southern/Northwestern charm in our not-yet-sultry environs. You could satisfy your wanderlust and come back to your old stomping grounds at the same time. Plus we have a garden with ripening tomatoes. See you soon?

[cm]

You had me at "ripening tomatoes." Thanks, country mice! Jet Blue, here we come ...

[amy]

i will say this: i recently spent a wknd in the catskills -- no taiwan, maybe -- but a 2 hr drive from the city, an easy getaway, and it really felt like a world apart. a bookish friend, a campfire, a bottle of wine. ah. who needs marrakesh?

that said, um, let's go to marrakesh!

[cm]

wow, did you say "drive"?? Even driving seems so exotic to me lately, right up there with riding camels in the Sahara! I'll have to look into this "Catskills" place I keep hearing about ...