Holiday in Cambodia

When I was at home, I was in a better place.
—Shakespeare, As You Like It

“I’m somewhere in a godforsaken rainforest on the north coast of West Papua, Indonesia, and I’m ready to get the hell out of here.” So begins Michael Behar’s “The Selling of the Last Savage,” which originally appeared in Outside magazine and eventually turned up in the 2006 volume of the annual Best American Travel Writing series. You’ll notice Behar’s use of the first-person point of view, the clear suggestion of a masochistic impulse, and the use of the present tense. These characteristics are all now pretty much standard features of a certain subgenre of travel narrative.

Travel writing is a curious, and increasingly risky, business. Not that long ago (2004, actually), Pico Iyer, one of its most successful and respected practitioners, observed that “American travel is about looking for the light.” It’s frankly hard to know what to make of such an odd statement, given much of what has been packaged as travel literature in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Reading through a batch of The Best American Travel Writing anthologies—six of them over a period of a couple months—was a disorienting experience, to say the least. Alongside breezy accounts of what might properly be characterized as larks or rambles (riding the bus in New York City, a road trip along Route 66, pigging out in Iceland, spending the night in Central Park) are perilous and disheartening dispatches that go well beyond the merely exotic to the truly terrifying. There was a below-deck report of a doomed boat packed with Haitian refugees; a story of slaughter in Uganda; an account of the horrific ecological disaster at Karakalpakistan (“a place of almost unimaginable misfortune”); not to mention numerous tales involving murder and child abduction and war. You can’t help but notice that the sense of discovery that was once such a staple of travel writing has given way to what Jamaica Kincaid, in her introduction to the 2005 edition, gently called a “sense of displacement.”

Paul Theroux, in his own introduction to the BATW 2001, goes to some lengths to mark the changes that have taken place in travel writing in a world that exists in a now-permanent state of limbo between post- and pre-catastrophe. The response of a new generation of intrepid travel writers has been to wade into the teeth of such catastrophes, to report on what they see in such places that have been changed (for the worse) beyond recognition.

“It is not hyperbole to say there are no Edens anymore,” Theroux writes. “We live on a violated planet. Travelers are witnesses to change and decay, and when they write we are entertained and sometimes enlightened. But the mode of expression, like the world, has changed.” To write about that changed world, Theroux contends, requires “a different sensibility and different expectations.”

He goes on to explain the myriad ways that travel writing has changed since the days when writers went abroad or rambled far afield in search of indolence, civilization, the remnants of fading cultures, or a relatively benign sort of exotic adventure—which was virtually always seen through the wide and incredulous eyes of Westerners on holiday. Travel writing today, Theroux says, “is not about vacations or holidays, not an adjunct to the public relations industry.” Nor is it, he contends, “necessarily tasteful, perhaps not even factual, and seldom about pleasure.” This relatively new breed of travel writers, and this disturbing and increasingly prevalent strain of travel narrative, is a product of a “postmodern view of travel as adversity,” and its proponents most often drag themselves to the ends of the earth in search of “hellish places” and “a rewarding misery.”

Keath Fraser, in his introduction to an anthology of travel writing called Bad Trips, spells out this new paradigm thusly: “Without fear, travel has no meaning.” Adds Jason Wilson, the series editor of BATW, “We are all tourists now, and there is no escape.”