Travel writing

Continental Breakfast, Reykjavík, December 2018

The hotel room is a muffled womb, buffering us from the frozen dark outside. We crossed an ocean with our one-year-old daughter to hunt for the Northern Lights. She’s deaf, and although she has cochlear implants, she was always such a visual creature, a lover of lights. It had been thrilling to feel the change in atmosphere as soon as we boarded our Icelandair plane, mythological ponies on coloring-book pages, those green wisps of light waving on back-of-seat TV screens. Yet even here above the Arctic Circle I cling to one familiar thing: bottles of Starbucks mocha frappuccino I bought after we landed and placed in the hotel room’s mini fridge. This is my Linus blanket, my woobie.

I rise before my husband and daughter, dress in a shaft of light from the bathroom to not wake them up. Slip down to Continental breakfast, passing Björk coffee-table books and vinyl records on the walls in this hotel that’s too hip for us. (You can borrow a record player down at concierge. We did this; I have a video, the three of us dancing to corny Icelandic Christmas records, my daughter hearing the music, a new world of sound enabled by technology.) I set my purse on a booth seat in this subterranean nook, to save a table, not that it’s crowded. A song called “Horchata” by Vampire Weekend seems to always be playing: “In December, drinking horchata/I’d look psychotic in a balaclava.” It sounds like winter in Iceland, as far as I’ve experienced it, which isn’t very far, being only a tourist.

Specifically, it sounds like a tourist winter spent mostly indoors in Iceland, bustling from warm, glowy place to warm, glowy place: hotel to the cafe where I order a daily Piparköku Jökull (frozen gingerbread-flavored coffee drink; cashier: “You… know that’s a cold drink, right?”), hotel to Bónus Mart to buy baby formula for our daughter, hotel to a small bar where I sat alone and drank mulled wine while my husband watched over our daughter as she slept, taking turns for solo walks through the abundantly safe-feeling downtown, passing giant Christmas cats who will eat you if you do not receive clothing as a present.

At the Continental breakfast, I beeline for perfect French toast, perfect bacon. How is it always so uniformly perfect? I chunk out a glass of ice, and pull the bottle of mocha frappuccino out of my purse, like a drunk with a flask. I pour the frappuccino over the ice.

And here, before the uncertainty of how our one-year-old will take to the bracing air as we scuttle from agenda item to agenda item, before the sticker shock of menu prices for even something like a bowl of bean soup to share, before my husband drops and loses his iPhone on the ice during a daylong tour of the “Golden Circle” sights, before our tour guide drives us around to search for — and fail to find — the Northern Lights, before my shyness prevents me from asking the tour guide to stop so I can take a photo of the little white church with the neon crosses for gravestones, before my husband gets sick and it casts a pall over the rest of the somehow still-photogenic trip: everything is warm, softly twinkle-lit, hygge, perfect.

Rainy Day in Kathmandu, Nepal, October 2014

When you’re from many other places, everything is exciting in Kathmandu. “I’m staring at some dust… in Kathmandu!” “I’m twiddling my thumbs… in Kathmandu!” “I’m sitting, catatonically inert, with a Zen-like absolute absence of thought… in Kathmandu!”

So when rain kept us from temples one of our first days in Kathmandu, that was OK. It felt exciting enough for my husband and me to chill at the quirky hotel he’d found for our delayed-by-one-year “Himalayan Honeymoon,” part of the week in that mythical-sounding city, the rest of it in the countryside, a bumpy 45-minute taxi drive away in the town of Nagarkot (NAG-arr-coat, the driver pronounced it). In Nagarkot, we slept in a deluxe treehouse and got lost hiking among rhododendrons and stumbled upon a schoolhouse where we heard children singing. And other “trip of a lifetime” stuff that, as I type this, I can’t believe happened in my actual life.

The day it rained in Kathmandu wasn’t like that. We wore fluffy hotel-issued bathrobes. We ate Nutella-filled sandwich cookies we’d bought at Everest Mart, a bustling supermarket where people more hard-core than I (but not my husband, who has trekked up Kilimanjaro and slid around on the ice with penguins in Antarctica) were getting supplies for going up the really big mountain, or at least to the base camp. We watched Bollywood music videos.

Outside the rain tamped down the smog. Outside there were no traffic lights, no sidewalks along the medieval streets, but constantly honking cars, bicycle rickshaws. Outside there were holy-looking men who dabbed red paint on my husband’s forehead and sprinkled him with marigold petals, seeking donations. At night, there were men wandering down the street muttering “hashish” under their breath, whispering their wares. And rainbow prayer flags draped everywhere. It was exhilarating, it was dizzying; we loved it, and we were also happy to recharge in a place that was both exciting and not.

Alone in Punta Arenas, Chile, December 2010

My husband has gone off to Antarctica. He boarded a little plane with his buddy Keith early this morning. I’ve got the day to myself in Punta Arenas, a town at the tippy bottom of Patagonian Chile. Jon was supposed to go to Antarctica the year before, but then there was an earthquake in Chile, his departure point. This year he asked if I wanted to tag along, but I knew it would cost thousands of dollars I didn’t have. And I’ve never been the type to stick my flag in every continent and the moon; I’m happy to have a day alone here to explore.

We’ve only been here a few days, and I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m undaunted. Walking around places is one of the things I do. When I lived in downtown San Diego, especially before I found a job, I spent days roaming around, hanging out with homeless people, walking back and forth along the bay. I had my canvas sun hat; I had an iPod Nano and some songs. I was young and healthy. I never got tired.

The wind in Punta Arenas is so strong there are poles for children to hang onto.

I walk.

The aboveground cemetery, white stone tombs with bright plastic flowers and glassed-in dioramas. The waterfront, the Strait of Magellan beyond. A hilly neighborhood, stray dogs — a bicycle-tour guide in Santiago, way up north, later told us the country is so Catholic and anti- birth control that they don’t spay and neuter pets — and “El Pac-Man,” an Internet cafe where you can use the photocopier and order “completos,” hot dogs “with everything.” A man with predatory eyes who followed me on opposite sides of multiple streets until I lost him, heart pounding, close to the city center. All under a blazing blue sky.

Questioned by Border Patrol, Niagara Falls, Canada, 2011

I had a couple of “use or lose” vacation days and wanted to go someplace, but didn’t have enough time off for a plane-ticket kind of trip. Maybe a road trip. My cool co-worker Paul said, in an offhand way: “You should go to Niagara Falls.” So I did. I almost didn’t make it.

It seems you set off some triggers for Canadian border patrol when you are:

a) traveling alone;
b) wearing a hippie-ish (and midriff-baring) peasant top with a denim micro-miniskirt, plus Manic Pixie Dreamgirl braids;
c) without lodging reservations (my plan was to scope out the place in-person and get a cheap motel room close to the falls); and
d) only planning to be in the country for one day/night.

It seems, under these conditions, they think you are some kind of drug mule.

They motioned for me to get out of the line of normal, non-suspicion-arousing, non-potential-scofflaw cars, and come around to the side. They searched my car, and sent me inside a building where I was quizzed.

Them: “What’s your occupation?”
Me: “Writer.”
Them: “I mean, what’s your job?”
Me: “That’s my job. I write for a nonprofit.”
Them: “I mean, what do you do for money?”
Me: “…I write for a nonprofit. They are a nonprofit — but I profit. They pay me.”

Eventually they let me go, but with raised eyebrows — as if they were sure there was something sketchy about me, hmmm, but they couldn’t officially detain me any longer. I later saw they had scrolled through addresses in my GPS, and searched through my trunk. But the rip in the corner of my trunk’s lining happened later — when I was stopped again, by border patrol on the U.S. side.

Third Date: North Island Road Trip, New Zealand, 2009

Have you ever taken a vacation only to think back on it, years later, and realize you only have a scant few memories that exist outside the photos you took there? Maybe it happened too long ago. Maybe your life was in flux at the time so your head was too clouded to record and retain much, plus maybe you drank a few nights there. And maybe you’re the mom of a toddler right now so forming two complete sentences in a row feels like a Nobel-worthy achievement, let alone producing thought that extends backwards or forwards in time.

In 2009 my now-husband invited me to tag along with him and a couple friends to New Zealand, for two weeks in a rental car driving in a loop around the North Island. If I could spring for my plane ticket, he’d pay for everything else.

This was our third date.

At the time he was working in Baghdad, having already been to Iraq with the Army, returned home, started up a life in West Virginia, then accepted a job over there as a civilian. I had just come home after living in San Diego for half the year. We talked for months, mostly online; he’d been two grades older than me in high school, and we’d had some mutual friends (i.e., he wasn’t a “rando”). He flew back home for the Fourth of July, and we had a romantic first date. Later in the week he helped me move into my new apartment; he carried a heavy mattress, and I insisted on buying him a Slurpee afterward as a “reward.”

So, two weeks in New Zealand — Date 3. Totally normal. Nothing to be nervous about at all.

I find that anxiety tends to short-circuit my brain; it makes me less perceptive, narrows my peripheral vision. Squeezes my perspective to a squint.

To an anxiety-prone person like me, it makes no difference that the dude who invited me on this most epic of Date Threes was maybe the nicest guy I had ever known, who had never been anything but a calming and reassuring presence to my Nervous Nelly. It makes no difference — almost no difference — that, unlike in my previous relationship, this was a guy who wanted to be seen in public and in pictures with me (“I would be honored,” he said when I asked if it’d be OK to post trip photos of us on Facebook). Despite all of that, a person like me is still going to be too nervous to relax, to say much of substance, to focus on anything outside of: “Am I doing OK?”

We did stuff in New Zealand. So much stuff, thanks largely to a friend who’d planned their agenda long before I was aboard. We went kayaking at a place called Cathedral Cove, where during a beach break our shirtless hippie tour guide summoned us over for hot cocoa by, I swear to God, blowing on a conch shell. We rolled around in a water-filled Zorb. We saw hobbit houses, of course, and a cave full of glow-worms. I fed baby sheep. There were hot springs, a Maori cultural performance, kiwi cocktails (for me), Mount Doom from, yes, “Lord of the Rings” (actual name: Mount Ngauruhoe). In Auckland he and I put two NZ bucks in a slot machine and won four.

Outside a handful of things — such as this one kind of cookies we kept getting at convenience stores, and how stupid I felt for not packing a jacket, and OK, a few of the more amorous private moments between my now-husband and me, in the rental car and hotel rooms — the photos are my memories. So I’m glad that we’ve got them.

Clubbing in Rome with My Sister, 2008

The guidebook says there are only a few nightclubs open in the summer in Rome. The locals are mostly someplace else. My sister and I are on the prowl. We’re in our twenties (my thirtieth birthday on the horizon), each of us in relationship limbo back home; her boyfriend just broke up with her, and I’ve got… something going on with a guy I met at a work conference who lives in Denver, two time zones away. He doesn’t want to label it.

We’re searching.

Uphill, along back streets, postcard-pretty pink sky. Vacant parks, boarded-up carousels. Down some stairs into a creepy metro tunnel to the club — closed. We find another one, “Miami Party Night”… everyone wearing Hawaiian leis. A model-looking guy flirts with my model-looking sister. A boy with a shaved head and glasses says I’m sexy and puts me up on his shoulders, and I drum on the low ceiling. He gives me a hickey. He gives us roses at the end of the night.

It was just what we needed.

It was better than the mime who berated and mocked us for being American, bowing and making exaggerated fawning gestures, who made me cry. (Aren’t mimes supposed to… not speak?)

It was better than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Photo: Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2006

You see the Adriatic Sea and the sky above in matching twilight blue.

You see me sitting on the white stucco balcony of the apartment we rented for the week in Dubrovnik. I’m wearing a short yet demure skirt, seasonally appropriate camisole, these lime-and-white tweed flats from Old Navy that I thought made me look like a “creative professional” at the job I had that supported us both. I’m dressed for an evening in the straight-out-of-a-travel-magazine Old City, which looks as if the whole thing were carved out of limestone that glows at night. I’ll get gelato again, maybe at the place with the tall ponytailed girl who seemed disdainful toward me at the time but who, given the region’s recent history, the bullet holes and walls pocked by mortar shells, the benefit CDs organized by Pearl Jam, had probably just lived through hell.

You see the photo album I post online. It looks like a great trip. A tour bus into Bosnia & Hercegovina, to see the UNESCO World Heritage Site town of Mostar, a jewel-box mosque, a place where young men jump off an old bridge to impress the girls. Another tour-bus trip through the newly separated Montenegro, up a vertiginous road called the Serpentine to a farming village for ham-and-cheese sandwiches with hyper-local ingredients (including the pigs) and honey wine, the national drink. We took a ferry to a haunted island called Lokrum, site of an abandoned Napoleon-era monastery, olive groves, and peacocks; once the last ferry leaves for the night, there are no people there, on account of the haunting.

I regurgitate the trip for people in these photo captions when I get home. I parrot the well-worn phrases.

You don’t see the separate beds he and I slept in at the apartment, a mirror of how we were back home, where I would go to bed at a normal time to get up for my 9-to-5 job, and he kept lunatic unemployed hours, crashing onto the couch just as I was rising for the day, waking when I returned from work.

You don’t see that he and I are at the end of our decade together, but he doesn’t want to acknowledge it. We are about eight years past when we should have broken up. You don’t see that we had this trip planned and budgeted months in advance, so I cynically decided to go ahead with it, with him, rather than do the harder, more complicated thing.

You don’t see that he told me, only after we were back home: “I wanted to hold your hand in Croatia.” I didn’t touch him in Croatia, or any of the other countries. I am not a cold person.

You see this photo, Adriatic Sea, twilight blue.

Private Jokes: London with My Sister, 2002

My sister and I haven’t always had the best relationship.

In 2002 we spent a week in London together.

There’s a silly backstory: She and her friend Jennifer were superfans of Bush, the British late-alternative band that my snobby Gen X self thought of as “Nirvana lite for kids who missed the real thing.” While my sister dutifully saved her waitressing tips for a pilgrimage to the anointed homeland of the band’s lead singer, Gavin Rossdale, her Number One heartthrob (she held up “Will You Marry Me?” posters at concerts)… her friend did not, and had to bail out of the trip last minute. My parents didn’t want my sister traveling alone. I was just out of college and at my first “career” job, writing for a community newspaper, living with my parents and sister. I had some money saved up, so I bought a plane ticket to accompany her.

We were different there. Something changed between us. I partly credit that drizzly gray-stone city, its Paddington Bear vibe, its jolly friendliness. Its lack of a foreign language for us to learn. The way you felt like you were supposed to wear a blazer everywhere. Its overall easiness and soft, woolly edges.

In London there was no ancient jealousy, no simmering resentment over injustices of the past. Instead, we had private jokes.

“Remember the panhandler who looked like Popeye, with the cockney accent out of a movie, who asked us for money, and how we weren’t yet used to how much our new coins were worth, so we panicked and gave him the equivalent of twenty dollars, and he beamed at us and exclaimed: ‘Luv’ly ladies!’ ”

“Remember how we saw our first double-decker bus and were so excited we clambered right onto it, without paying, and the driver yelled at us: ‘Do you not speak English?’ ”

“Remember how we were the last tourists on the London Eye one night, and afterward we went to McDonald’s, famished from walking all day, and the guys there were at the end of their shift with lots of leftover burgers, so they loaded us up with cheeseburgers, and we went back to the motel room and I collapsed on the bed like a starfish, and said: ‘Hit me,’ and you tossed me a burger and I devoured it in maybe one second?”

“Remember the day our agenda said go to the British Museum, home of the Rosetta Stone, among other storied antiquities, and we went and both of us were being polite, thinking the other was enjoying it, but really both of us were so bored, and so finally we said: ‘Do want to go to Topshop?’ and it was such a relief, and we bought colorful bohemian clothes we’d never have bought at home? And how we wore those clothes, plus dangly earrings we bought on Portobello Road, when Mom and Dad picked us up at the airport, and we sighed and were probably insufferable, talking about how boring people in the U.S. dress in their Abercrombie & Fitch? How we said the trip had changed us?”

Tijuana, Mexico

The first time, I went with my family and it was like “The Brady Bunch Goes to Tijuana.” We had lunch on the main tourist drag, Avenida Revolución, and had the sense of being on a trapeze without a harness. Vendors approached us, shouted offers, kissed my sister on the cheek, and we weren’t used to that. Golly! It’s not like the Mexico at EPCOT! It felt both thrilling and tame, maybe what it’s like to “dive” with sharks even though one of you is in a cage. We requested “no ice” in our drinks (“Don’t drink the water”). My brother bought brass knuckles (a “Mexican divorce” the vendor called them, laughing and demonstrating a punch) and slipped them into my mom’s purse, which got searched at the border, and they just tsk-tsked and took the brass knuckles away and we joked about how dear old Mom could have wound up in a Mexican prison. We were out maybe twenty bucks. We shrugged, crossed the border, and went to the San Diego Zoo.

The second time was with the ex-boyfriend I spent all of my twenties with. He was weird about travel, and got jealous any time I took a trip with my family or for work. He wanted to go to Tijuana so our checklists would match. He’d never been out of the country before and was determined we’d spend one night in Mexico, to one-up my family. So we booked a room at a hotel, one street off the main tourist drag. We chose to walk back up to the border instead of taking whatever shuttle we’d used on the way in. We wound up on a local bus with people going to work, and a mariachi band playing for tips. There were no brass knuckles, no incidents at the border.

There was no third time, but there could have been. I lived in San Diego, which is right next to Tijuana on the map, if you ignore the border, which of course you can’t. The jolly red trolley that rolled through downtown went as far south as Tijuana. “TIJUANA” its forehead blared, with what felt like audacity, at least to my Virginia eyes. I met a cocaine dealer named Columbo on the night of my 30th birthday, and through him I met a guy named Jaliv; I guess Columbo passed my number around. (I never did any drugs, in San Diego or anywhere else — booze was my thing — but I liked knowing these colorful characters. Golly! They don’t have these folks at EPCOT!) Jaliv invited me to “party” with him in a hot tub one time; Jaliv invited me to go “house hunting” with him in Tijuana another time. I always made excuses not to go. I only wanted the characters at arm’s length.

The closest I came that year was when a twentysomething couple who lived on their small rented yacht — I’d met them, walking along the bay, when they were drunk and fighting, having just lost a lot of money in the stock market; this was 2008, and these stories were common — invited me to tag along as a sort of waitress on one of the “sunset dinner cruises” they took millionaires on. I chopped vegetables below deck; I poured wine. When no one needed anything, I got to stand above the deck and see the sights: sea lions, and a Shell gas station just for boats, and clustered on the hillsides on the opposite side of the water — houses in Tijuana. The captain didn’t narrate this part of the cruise. The wind blew our hair all around; we sipped our wine and bobbed on the yacht and just stared.