The Best American Travel Writing 2000

I chose to read this book as we were travelling from Winnipeg to Colorado and Utah for our 2011 annual vacation. The twenty-five short pieces were chosen from all the travel writing published in 1999 to represent the interesting field of writing about journeys. Reading these pieces from the perspective of 12 years later some of them seem dated. The one piece set in Canada is about Nunavut, the new territory created from the Northwest Territory in 1999. The writer, William T. Vollmann, worries about the future of the territory and how the Inuit will adapt to increasing tourism. Twelve years later I can assure him that Nunavut is doing quite well although I’m sure it has changed from what he saw then and in the years previous. I can’t show more be sure because, like many Canadians, I’ve never been in any of our territories even though I’ve been through each province.
The concern about how tourism changes the country it seeks to explore was expressed by a number of the writers. Tony Perrottet, in Zoned on Zanzibar, talked about Zanzibar’s government “banking on balmy weather, tropical reefs and mile after mile of heartbreakingly beautiful beaches” to “fix …its development blues.” In the Two Faces of Tourism Jonathan Tourtellot muses about how tourism will change the Copper Canyon in Mexico. Patrick Symmes wanders through Cambodia looking for the Khmer Rouge Tourism Minister and considers how “The Wonderful People who Brought you the Killing Fields” will market the country for tourism. (Several years ago my nephew was in Cambodia and did actually tour the killing fields so it has come to pass.)
Interestingly, although there are a number of articles set in Africa, Asia and Europe, several in North America and Central America, and one in Australia, there are none from South America. Maybe no-one was travelling to South America then or maybe there were no well-written pieces about South America but it seems a strange lack. Certainly lots of people I know have been to South America and there are lots of exotic places to visit there. It would be interesting to know if the next year South America received the overdue attention it deserves.
I would recommend many but not all of the pieces in this book. Nantucket on my Mind by David Halberstam was no more than a complaint about the “new” people who were buying up property on the island and despoiling it. Seems to me that several decades ago other people probably would have made the same complaint about him.
There’s bound to be some articles other readers will like in this compilation. I hope you enjoy! show less

This is a review of the audiobook version released by Houghton in 2000, it is abridged with 10 of the original 25 essays. Each piece has a different narrator, including Bill Bryson for a number of them (he is great to listen to even when he is reading a different author). A couple stood out including "From The Wonderful People Who Brought You The Killing Fields" (Outside) about a trip to a Khmer Rouge village with the guy who wrote the chapter in the travel guidebook World's Most Dangerous Places - the article is classic dark tourism complete with allusions to Heart of Darkness. The essay "Lions and Tigers and Bears" is an entertaining piece about spending the night in central park, where the author discovers most people are more afraid show more of him, except the random homeless person who offers him free food. This was a twist on the dark tourism theme made humorous. "Lard is Good For You" is a cute piece by a young American woman working in a rural Guatemalan village where they grow coffee, her favorite thing, but the household she is staying in refuses to brew any for health reasons, but eat lard in every dish. "Hitchhikers Cuba" by Dave Eggers is very well done, about driving around Cuba and picking up hitchhikers, one of the primary means of transportation in the country. "Exiled Beyond Kilometer 101" is about the zone outside major Russian cities, at 101 km or about 60 miles, which was established in Soviet times and defines the border between rural and urban Russia and respective cultures. show less

Read for a Bingo challenge. Mostly forgettable, except for one horrifying essay and one that I did do further research on (felt compelled to see if the two decades of development have totally spoiled Copper Canyon, Mexico). Common theme is looming despoilment. More 'anthropology' than travel... but maybe that's natural... I'm not an experienced reader of travel books and I despise most of Bryson's own works, so, I dunno.