My favorite mountaineering book is The Mountains of My Life, by legendary Italian climber Walter Bonatti. While I love being in the mountains—it’s a rare day I don’t daydream about the Alps or the Himalayas—I am not a climber. It isn’t so much Bonatti’s exploits that inspire me as his attitude towards life, the preeminence he gives to the expression of his deepest instincts (which in his case is represented by a risky ongoing encounter with the natural world). “Courage,” he says, “makes a man master of his own fate. It is a civilized, responsible determination not to succumb to impending moral collapse.”
This attitude is reflected throughout this year’s Best Travel Writing volume, by the many contributors who, like renowned traveler and writer William Dalrymple (whose Introduction follows), are life-long, hardcore travelers. Whether they are explorers (Cameron Smith), expat gourmands (Richard Sterling), modern Don Quixotes (Brad Newsham), cultural bloodhounds (David Peters), or old-fashioned pilgrims (Amy Carlson), they have woven over the years a cloak of experience for others to wear, a kind of divine raiment to protect those who would follow them.
The Best Travel Writing 2010 is the seventh volume in the annual Travelers' Tales series launched in 2004 to celebrate the world's best travel writing — from Nobel Prize winners to emerging new writers. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes encompass high adventure, spiritual growth, romance, hilarity and misadventure, service to humanity, and encounters with exotic cuisine. In The Best Travel Writing 2010 readers will explore the mysteries of superstition in Cameroon, discover the meaning of life with an Irish carpenter on a long flight, take adopted children to Korea on a Homeland Tour, delve deep into a sacred Japanese pilgrimage, travel solo in Panama's forbidding Darien jungle, comprehend the nuances of bargaining in Senegal...and much more.
