Читать книгу French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond - Susan Spano - Страница 10
ОглавлениеWhen people find out that I’m a travel writer, they often ask if I have a favorite place. They want itinerary advice; that’s understandable.
But I cannot give it. I’m not a travel agent. I’m a traveler. I tend to think of travel as more about the trip than about the destination. And trips are delicate, changeable, precious operations, all too easily derailed. Encounters with even the most fabled destinations—say, Paris or Angkor Wat—are colored by such mundane factors as the weather and the speeding ticket you got along the way, and by purely subjective matters such as your health (to me Istanbul is a stomach bug), how you feel about your travel companion, and what’s going on back home.
Soldier on, always. In travel, bad spells can be broken.
The trips I cherish most are the occasional ones that went precisely as planned, allowing me to deepen my understanding of people and places, exposing me to realities I never could have fathomed had I stayed home. But more and more, I recall surprise trips that didn’t go as anticipated or that disappointed in certain ways. Martha Gellhorn wrote a whole book about horror trips. “We react alike to our tribulations,” she said in Travels with Myself and Another. “Frayed and bitter at the time, proud afterwards. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”
The surprises are engraved in my memory—unforgettable, to use Nat King Cole’s refrain.
