Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 9: True Stories from Around the World (Best Women's Travel Writing, 9, Band 9) - Softcover

Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, and coauthor of With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant. Her work has also appeared in such publications as Sunset Magazine, Yoga Journal, Inkwell, and Post Road Magazine. She grew up in New Hampshire and Flagstaff, Arizona and graduated from the University of Arizona creative writing program. She has kept travel journals throughout thirty countries on five continents, and is the editor of The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011 and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2012.

Featuring stories by Holly Morris, Marcia DeSanctis, Apricot Anderson Irving, Laura Fraser, Amanda Jones, and Laura Resau.

Featuring stories by Holly Morris, Marcia DeSanctis, Apricot Anderson Irving, Laura Fraser, Amanda Jones, and Laura Resau.

Introduction
by Lavinia Spalding

In January, I sat with six women around a table in a dimly lit restaurant in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. And while they drank and laughed and clapped, I cried.

When we first arrived, I was fine. Really. It was a perfectly intimate room with a handful of tables; the ceilings were high, the yellow walls covered with artwork, and a small lamp with a punched tin shade threw stippled prisms of light around the room. We ordered quesadillas, pes a la Veracruzana, tacos de nata, chiles rellenos, margaritas, martinis, wine. We toasted and gossiped and passed iPhones, comparing photos. A week before we had been mostly strangers—just two teachers and a handful of writers convening south of the border. Now we felt inexorably bound by the stories we’d shared and the colonial town we had quickly grown to love.

About ten feet from our table, two men wearing all black sat with guitars in their laps next to a pair of striking women in flamenco dresses. One was young and sexy, in a tight black dress with a flowered pattern; the other was older, elegant, in bright red with long yellow fringe.

As our laughter crowded the small room, the other diners—mostly twosomes leaning into each other—started to shoot tiny annoyed glances our way. We ignored them; it was our last night together and we felt entitled to a little noise. But when the first guitar chords struck, our attention drifted to the musicians. And when the dancers stood and began to stomp their feet and clap their hands loudly, quickly, above their heads, we fell silent.

It didn’t take long for me to start crying, and once I started I couldn’t stop. The musicians’ fingers flurried across the strings, gently, then fiercely, occasionally rapping on the body of the guitar, sometimes muting the sound with a palm of the hand before all ten fingers fired again toward a furious crescendo. I watched and listened, and the stitches on an old hole in my heart tore open.
It was the first time I’d heard live flamenco music performed since my father—an acclaimed flamenco guitarist—died eight years before. I suddenly saw him in front of me, his lanky frame and tanned, balding head bent ever-so-slightly over his own instrument, his long slender fingers flying across the strings. I closed my eyes and listened to the notes. They were his own voice, returned to visit me in the place he once loved.

Marianne, my friend and co-teacher, sat to my left. “Are you O.K.?” she whispered.

“I miss my dad,” I told her—and the music had moved me in ways I couldn’t explain, ways I didn’t even understand.

#

Before I was born, my parents spent a summer in San Miguel de Allende. I grew up hearing stories of the town where my father studied guitar, and where at dusk my mother loaned my then-two-year-old sister to the local teenage girls so they could parade her around like a doll as they strolled the main plaza—the Jardin—during paseo. And now, almost fifty years later, I was finally in the fabled town myself.

Though this was my first visit to San Miguel de Allende, I’d spent my share of time in Mexico. Growing up in Arizona, border towns were the natural choice for spring breaks, camping trips, shopping excursions, and underage tequila runs. In my teens and twenties I partied in Puerto Peñasco; in my thirties my best friend and I rented a casita in San Carlos. When I wanted to retreat alone after my father died, I chose a quiet old silver-mining town called Alamos. I collected seashells at dusk on a beach in Kino Bay, and one quiet midnight in Puerto Vallarta, I rode on a marine biologist’s ATV in search of turtles hatching eggs in the sand. I was fond of Mexico, but after spending much of my life exploring more remote countries, it didn’t seem “foreign.” To me, it hardly counted as travel at all.

Nevertheless, I was thrilled to spend the first two weeks of 2013 teaching there. I had arrived on New Year's Eve, and standing in the Jardin beneath an almost full moon, an enormous Christmas tree, and the magnificent gothic La Parroquía church (its doors wide open for midnight mass), it occurred to me that nearly everything I saw was illuminated from within, including the locals surrounding me. When the hands on the clock tower met and pointed to the stars, thousands of revelers cheered and twirled two-foot-long sparklers—and when I asked a little girl in pigtails if I could buy one from her, she happily handed me two, refusing my pesos. Then a giant metal “Feliz Año Nuevo” sign exploded in flames and scared the hell out of me, and fireworks brightened the sky. As the band played cumbia, grizzled cowboys danced with their daughters, and gorgeous couples made out shamelessly. Skinny little boys hurled rocket-shaped mylar balloons into the air, and grown men wore blinking plastic Minnie Mouse bows on their heads. I stayed till the end, following the cobblestone streets back to my rented casa at 3:00 A.M.

#

Now, two weeks later, I was crying into my margarita.

Libby, sitting on my right, rubbed my arm gently, while across the table Jen photographed the performers, sensing I would someday want to see the images. The other women in our party just held my gaze tenderly.

Eventually I stopped sniffling, ate my quesadilla, and enjoyed the show. And after dinner when the guitarists were packing up, I approached one and tried to explain what his music had meant to me. I wanted to tell him about my father—that he studied with Paco de Lucia and played for the Prince of Spain and dedicated his life to music, the very same music they played that night—but my Spanish was limited and his English was basic. He smiled and nodded, but I knew he didn’t quite understand. It wasn’t until later that night, walking the narrow roads home past orange walls and blue doorways, beneath icicle lights and fiesta flags strung between rooftops, that I finally understood. I stopped, closed my eyes, and made a belated New Year’s resolution: I would start playing the dusty guitar that hung on my office wall back home—the one my father left me.

#

Mexico surprised me. I’d assumed I knew what the country had to offer, but I was wrong; I underestimated it. And while reading submissions for The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 9 this year, I found myself similarly surprised by the number of exceptional stories that came from not-so-far-away. Among the four-hundred-plus submissions I read were dazzling essays from locations that did not seem all that foreign to me—places that, like Mexico, “hardly counted as travel.” There were mesmerizing tales of adventure in the United States, life lessons learned in Mexico, heartbreak in Canada.

Was it a sign of the economy, I wondered? Were people staying closer to home these days? Were travel writers running out of frequent-flier miles? Or had these places suddenly become more popular destinations?

Of course, I still read hundreds of stories that flew (and ferried and taxied and tuk-tuked) me clear across the globe—to Egypt and India and Rwanda and Afghanistan, Laos and Bangladesh and Spain and Cambodia, Jordan and Australia and Italy and Namibia—plus some places I never even knew existed.
But to my delight, this year I was transported equally far, both emotionally and culturally, by stories close to home.

I find international travel ineffably rich and profound; I believe the first taste of foreignness is one of life’s greatest joys and opportunities, and that immersing oneself in another culture for an extended period of time should be required for every human being. I think listening to the words of people far away and...