Favored Places

     The traveler can hardly name a favorite destination any more than a favorite food or play. Roast lamb does not compete with cashew-fig ice cream or a dish of just-shelled peas in butter. One might laugh with Aristophanes in the morning but be ready to cry with Aeschylus by evening. It is inevitable, though, once the traveler has wandered long enough to make comparisons, some places are recalled more fondly than others, and the traveler finds himself musing on ratings, pretending for a time that all the world was made for nothing more than a pleasure trip.
     Travel is about experiencing difference. There would be little point in visiting a destination very like one’s home. A destination may gain sensational appeal if it deviates radically from one’s home. I recall my first sight of Morocco. On my Wanderjahr, after months traipsing about Europe, thinking myself full to capacity with admiration, I was struck with that seemed a new magnitude of wonder when I crossed from Algeciras to Ceuta and found myself feeling as though I was not merely walking the streets of a medieval neighborhood (as one may do in Carcassonne if one is unbothered by small boys with wooden swords); I seemed rather to have been transported to an earlier age. All around me were the sights and smells of a preindustrial society: charcoal fires with bubbling tajines, incense of unknown kinds, street musicians, animal handlers calling warnings to those with whom they and their beasts shared the narrow lanes. From the minarets the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. On top of everything else fifty years ago Morocco held out a kief pipe with its long stem and small clay bowl to the visiting American, ideal accompaniment to a glass of mint tea, a beguiling bonus indeed. We stayed in Fes for several months, mostly sitting in cafes chatting, rarely seeking out sights. When we were not socializing with our friends, the youths of the streets, marvels came to us. We observed nomads forming a vast camp, enacting rodeo-type games (the tbourida or fantasia), firing their blunderbusses in a grand fête for the circumcision of the king’s son, now the ruler.
     Visiting India provided a similarly rich sensual assault, sometimes retaining even the cannabis as well. A week on the shore of the Ganges in Varanasi included countless rhesus monkeys snatching food and offerings and scampering over roofs, onto terraces, then to trees while holy men chanted and sang below and a constant stream of devotes came to partake of the river’s divinity. To the foreign visitor the scene is a pandemonium of marvels: Shiva-lingams on every corner, Hanumans dripping with sindur-tinted ghee, paan vendors whose trays offer a galaxy of accompaniments, scents of burning incense and burning corpses. The imagery is expressed in one of the most elaborate and variegated pantheons of mythological beings ever imagined on earth. Active temples are everywhere with chanting here, prayers there, a friendly, English-speaking priest in a third. Every evening at the Dashashwamedh Ghat a service is held, the Ganga Aarti, with worshippers exhibiting the same brand of fervor one might expect at a pentecostal service. The visitor who grew up in the suburban Midwest can hardly stray further afield.
     Difference alone is no guarantee of satisfaction, though. I enjoyed Morocco and India on my own terms. Working in rural Nigeria was exceedingly unlike home. While exciting and rewarding at times, the daily difficulties often seemed overwhelming: living apart from shops (other than the market every four days in Agbarho) in a place where such ordinary goods as cooking gas were rarely obtainable even to those who knew the ways of the black market, while playing as neophytes our roles near the bottom of the formidable Nigerian bureaucracy, all of this in steam-room temperature and humidity. It did get the better of us.
     Around the great attractions of the globe, the places that comprise people’s “bucket lists” (a horrid term), the volume of crowds can distribute the pleasure more widely, though unfortunately in markedly smaller doses. When I was last in Pisa’s Campo dei Miracoli I could view the bell tower only past myriad other spectators, half of whom seemed to be posing gag photos in which their subjects were either holding up the structure or knocking it down. It is enough to make one feel like a snob.
     If people are not standing shoulder to shoulder, though, or even if they are, some sights live up to their reputation. The mountainous setting of Machu Picchu is flat-out breathtaking as is the prospect from the far less remote Delphi. The Taj Mahal has a precise symmetrical beauty like that of Versailles. For me perhaps the greatest revelation among wonders of the world was Angkor Wat. The vastness and grandeur of the place with literally miles of unfamiliar reliefs made it an easy matter to avoid the groups and lecturing guides, the selfie-takers and vendors they attract, by simply stepping a few feet off the standard route. The grand panoramas of events mythic and historic seem never to come to an end, and it is all carved upon vast fanciful, partially overgrown structures and overseen by the massive big-lipped heads on the Bayon temple.
     One could hardly sustain being bowled over every day, though, and a mood for the monumental at times gives way to a wish to sit in a quiet cafe. Two small towns that I find utterly charming are Nafplio in Greece and Český Krumlov in the Czech Republic. Neither is in any sense off the beaten path; both are popular, yet each has a beauty that has so far survived the crowds. In Nafplio a short stroll takes the visitor from the pleasures of the town with its battlements and bougainvilleas to Arvanitia Beach which seems more secluded than it is. Český Krumlov with its medieval streets and looming castle struck me as the closest approximation of the illustrations in fairy tale books.
     The museums that remain most strongly in my memory are the ones anyone would name: the Louvre, the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, the Archaeological Museums of Athens and of Mexico City.
     Smaller museums of which I am especially fond include the Musée Moreau in a little-visited street of Paris with paintings covering the walls and endless cabinets, cupboards, and drawers of intricately imagined and constructed mythic scenes. I recommend as well Teylers Museum in Haarlem, fundamentally unchanged since its founding in 1784, which bills itself as a Museum van de Verwondering. With the Illumination of daylight only, the visitor can wander the galleries and central multitier library and see a large collection of elegant eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific instruments, with marvelous fossils and crystals around the corner, and drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the next room. In Bangkok the walker can enjoy a green respite from the sometimes sweaty streets by entering the gate of the Wang Suan Pakkad Palace (called the Lettuce Farm), in fact a small museum with a number of objets d’art as well as entire buildings, including the wonderful Lacquer Pavilion. A pleasant attendant added a grace note, giving us woven fans, saying they were a gift from the queen, but they seemed superfluous in that leafy and refined realm.
     And then there was the Ramnagar Fort Museum in Varanasi which we reached in a pedicab passing over an unsteady pontoon bridge to reach the crumbling structures where the current maharajah resides (though his title was abolished a half century ago). Here one may view tigers killed in royal hunts during the days of the raj, now leaking their stuffing amid decayed crocodiles and the remnants of the old glory: palanquins, howdahs, ivory carvings in glass cases covered with a layer of dust. When a tourist entered a room, an aged gentleman arose from the seat he seemed to have been occupying for the last century to gesture with a whisk, raising a bit of dust and justifying his request for baksheesh.
     In hotels I look for character over grandeur, but I appreciate the Ottoman Legacy Hotel in Istanbul with its majestic central court and high ceilings. Though built originally for offices, the structure features domes on either side modeled after those of Jerusalem’s Masjid al-Aqsa and in the interior a generally princely waste of space. The window of my room overlooked the spice market, the Mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, and, further off, the water. It was only a few steps to the Topkapi and Hagia Sophia.
     I loved the San Tomas Hotel just by the market in Chichicastenango. Once the residence of the United Fruit agent, its rooms wander on sometimes in irregular levels, with courtyards with macaws and monkeys and luxurious plantings, religious art on the walls, rooms without television or air conditioning. I only hope it has not changed.
     A share of every day is given to eating. I think it is true that in France the diner is likeliest to be given a memorable plate, often notable for smoothness and elegance what with butter and cream and pureed vegetables, capable, too, of the intoxicating aroma of bouillabaisse, the earthiness of truffles or buckwheat, and the simple straightforward excellence of a fresh baguette. Not surprisingly, Italy and Spain can offer comparable pleasures. Greece hasn’t the range but, using only garlic, oregano, and thyme, can prepare the best roast lamb or grilled cuttlefish with which cold retsina is the best wine, little as one would wish to drink it daily.
     India offers the most dazzling array of “aromatics,” as the spices and herbs are termed in Dharamjit Singh’s cookbook. A thali plate, like a mandala, represents a universe, including the spectrum of flavors of sweet, salt, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy. Without a doubt the finest vegetarian cuisine in the world, Indian cooking is superb at making tasty dishes out of inexpensive ingredients while requiring considerable cutting, chopping, and the assembly of grand symphonic combinations of seasonings.
     Much good criticism is at bottom appreciation, but discernment is impossible without value judgments. Britain’s grey peas are not extinct, nor is the fried bread that might await the traveler at breakfast there. Yet the U. K.’s colonial history redeems it: inexpensive Indian restaurants are often a wise choice as are Indonesian places in Holland. Generally, I found little to like in the cuisines of the Czech Republic, Nigeria, or Puerto Rico. I can recall a dish in Prague with both potato dumplings and wheat dumplings and a bit of pork, a grey-brown assemblage, filling to be sure, but with little to recommend it other than the accompanying beer. And in San Juan the second frying of the plantains in mofongo rendered them hard and heavy, resembling the carnitas with which they are served. A Nigerian meal is typically a ball of starchy tuber – cassava or yam – with some meat and hot pepper in a bit of sauce called stew.
     As I write I remember the pleasure I took in hearing stories from friends who had bummed around Europe before I made it there and the delights of reading books that allowed me a wider range of experience vicariously than I could accomplish on my own. There is an equally abstract delectation as well in recalling these details from a lifelong travel habit. They are now arranged in the house of memory like a series of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, baubles one can study and turn over in the mind, sparkling yet fixed. The living fetish, though, of travel, is always in the future; the appeal is surely in not knowing, in vacuity in fact. Before visiting a place for the first time, I entertain an odd vacancy about what I might experience. In fact no one knows tomorrow, but the future contains a promise which is only enhanced by its mystery. That next trip, the visit to a place previously unknown, beckons always from the horizon.