The Best American Travel Writing

The Best American series includes collections of short stories, essays, sports writing, travel writing, science and nature writing and more. I'd never read any of these collections, but when I heard that Anthony Bourdain edited and wrote the introduction for the 2008 collection of The Best American Travel Writing, I figured that would be a good place to start. I'm a sucker for Bourdain and will greedily eat up any little snippet he tosses out. The collection contains 25 essays that appeared during 2007 in publications such as The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Outside, National Geographic, and others. As one might expect from Anthony Bourdain, the essays that were chosen to represent the best travel writing are "evocative of the darker side" of travel. Although all of the essays are so well written and fascinating, some of my favorites include: Bill Buford's trip to cacao country in search of Extreme Chocolate; James Campbell's description of his 130-mile trek across the dense, unforgiving jungle of Papua New Guinea in Chasing Ghosts; J. Malcolm Garcia's African Promise, which exposes life in the corrupt and ruined country of Chad; Karl Taro Greenfeld's Hope and Squalor at Chungking Mansion, which describes the 17-story maze of curry stalls, brothels, meth dens, electronics vendors and guest houses that make up this "mansion" that is home to over twenty thousand residents in Hong Kong; Peter Gwin's Dark Passage, which gives a first-hand view of modern-day pirates in Malaysia; and John Lancaster's look at poverty tourism in Mumbai in Next Stop, Squalor. These essays certainly do illuminate the darker side of parts of the world that most of us never hear about and most of us will never see. But it is for this reason that I love travel writing and why these essays are so captivating. Absolutely fantastic reading.