The Best American Travel Writing 2015

By Andrew McCarthy

Outstanding stories of discovery in unexpected places by Kevin Baker, Lauren Groff, Gary Shteyngart, Paul Theroux, and many more.

In his introduction to this superb collection, guest editor Andrew McCarthy—New York Times-bestselling author of the travel memoir The Longest Way Home—offers a thrilling itinerary of great nonfiction, whether it’s the story of a marine returning to Iraq a decade after his deployment, a writer retracing the footsteps of humanity as it spread from Africa throughout the world, or looking for love on a physics-themed cruise down the Rhone River. No matter what the subject, the writers in this volume invite you to join them on their journeys. Drawn from the pages of periodicals including Smithsonian, the Believer, the New Yorker, Ski Magazine, Outside, National Geographic, and more, The Best American Travel Writing2015 includes selections by:

Iris Smyles * Paul Theroux * Christopher Solomon * Patricia Marx * Kevin Baker * Benjamin Busch * Maud Newton * Lauren Groff * Gary Shteyngart * Paul Salopek * and others

Acclaim for the series

“The Best American Travel Writing has been the gold standard for short-form travel writing from newspapers, magazines and the Internet since its inception.” —The New York Times Book Review 

“[A] superb travel annual . . . distinguished by its stellar guest editors.” —Booklist (starred review)

“[A] venerable series.” —Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9780544579286

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Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Andrew McCarthy

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Travel Writing™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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ISSN 1530-1516

ISBN 978-0-544-56964-5

Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Cover photograph © Getty Images

eISBN 978-0-544-57928-6

v1.1015

The Sound of Silence by Lisa Abend. First published in AFAR, February 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Abend. Reprinted by permission of Afar Magazine and Lisa Abend.

Lawrence’s Arabia by Scott Anderson. First published in Smithsonian, July/August 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Scott Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Scott Anderson.

21st Century Limited by Kevin Baker. First published in Harper’s Magazine, July 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the July issue by special permission.

Land of the Lost by Stephen Connely Benz. First published in JMWW, Summer 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Benz. Reprinted by permission of Stephen Benz.

Today Is Better Than Tomorrow by Benjamin Busch. First published in Harper’s Magazine, October 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the October issue by special permission.

The Happiness Metric by Madeline Drexler. First published in Tricycle, Fall 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Madeline Drexler. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Ashes to Ashes by David Farley. First published in AFAR, June/July 2014. Copyright © 2014 by David Farley. Reprinted by permission of David Farley.

Daughters of the Springs by Lauren Groff. First published in Oxford American, Summer 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Lauren Groff. Reprinted by permission of the Clegg Agency, Inc.

Tales of the Trash by Peter Hessler. First published in The New Yorker, October 13, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Hessler. Reprinted by permission of Peter Hessler.

Hail Dayton by Rachael Maddux. First published in Oxford American, Spring 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Rachael Maddux. Reprinted by permission of Rachael Maddux.

A Tale of a Tub by Patricia Marx. First published in The New Yorker, February 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Patricia Marx. Reprinted by permission of Patricia Marx.

The Great Pleasure Project by Tim Neville. First published in Ski Magazine, November 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Neville. Reprinted by permission of Tim Neville.

A Doubter in the Holy Land by Maud Newton. First published in the New York Times Magazine, April 6, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

My Timbuktu by Adriana Páramo. First published in the Georgia Review, Fall 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Adriana Páramo. Reprinted by permission of Adriana Páramo.

Berlin Nights by Nick Paumgarten. First published in The New Yorker, March 24, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Nick Paumgarten. Reprinted by permission of Nick Paumgarten.

Made in China by Tony Perrottet. First published in the Wall Street Journal Magazine, December/January 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Tony Perrottet. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Wall Street Journal Magazine.

Mr. Nhem’s Genocide Camera by Lauren Quinn. First published in the Believer, May 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Lauren Quinn. Reprinted by permission of Lauren Quinn.

Camino Real by Monte Reel. First published in the New York Times Magazine, February 23, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

Out of Eden Walk (Parts 1, 2, 3) by Paul Salopek. First published in National Geographic, December 2013/July 2014/December 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Paul Salopek. Reprinted by permission of Paul Salopek.

Behind Closed Doors at Hotels by Gary Shteyngart. First published in Travel + Leisure, February 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Gary Shteyngart. Reprinted by permission of the Denise Shannon Literary Agency, Inc.

Ship of Wonks by Iris Smyles. First published in the Atlantic, June 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Iris Smyles. Reprinted by permission of Iris Smyles.

Baked Alaska by Christopher Solomon. First published in Outside, May 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Solomon. Reprinted by permission of Christopher Solomon.

Bonfire of the Humanities by Patrick Symmes. First published in Outside, May 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Patrick Symmes. Reprinted by permission of Patrick Symmes.

Soul of the South by Paul Theroux. First published in Smithsonian, July/August 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Paul Theroux. Reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency, LLC./Paul Theroux.

Foreword

TRAVEL HAS the singular ability to turn the most banal events into heightened drama. This can be great for travel writing. This can also be not so great for situations that call for less drama.

Not long ago, following an exhausting and not-prosperous work trip, my flight home from Bilbao was delayed seven hours by a terrible windstorm that shut down several European airports. I spent five and a half of those seven hours stuck in a line of hundreds, while two overwhelmed workers at the Lufthansa desk ever so slowly attempted to reroute more than 300 passengers. As the line trudged forward, I watched the departures board helplessly as flights left, one by one, for Paris, for London, for Madrid, for Lisbon, all connections that would have gotten me home. I had an important meeting in the morning, and then my son’s first soccer game, which I’d committed to coach. As the hours passed, I knew I would miss both. By the time I reached the front of the line, there was no way across the Atlantic until the next day, and I was assigned an evening flight to Frankfurt. I was given a handwritten voucher for a hotel, and another voucher for a free dinner.

In the grand scheme of my travels and travails, this was all relatively small potatoes. I’ve been a passenger on two planes that nearly crashed, a bystander caught in the midst of political demonstrations that turned into riots, and a victim of several felony crimes during many years of travel. My normal response to this seven-hour delay would include some cursing and a few useless, angry phone calls to the airlines, finally giving way to heavy sighs and then drinking.

When I arrived at Frankfurt airport, it was dark and rainy, and a taxi took me to a hotel in the middle of an industrial park in a suburb called Mörfelden. After checking in and explaining to my son that I would not be home in time for soccer, and hearing my boss’s dismay at my absence, I slumped down to the hotel’s overlit restaurant and grabbed a menu. I was a wreck. My career had suffered some recent blows and this trip was supposed to help turn things around; but it hadn’t. In any case, I badly needed some comfort food, and the first item that called out to me was Wiener schnitzel. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I was channeling my mother’s old veal parm back in Jersey. Maybe it just felt like the opposite of the tapas, especially the ham, I’d been gorging on for days. Whatever the reason, I said, Yes, please, may I have some Wiener schnitzel? and presented my voucher. The stern waiter sneered and pointed over to a pathetic buffet in the corner: some stale rolls, a congealed soup, and a platter of rubbery chicken that had been sitting out for hours. This, apparently, was the Lufthansa Stranded Passenger Special that my voucher covered.

I waved the waiter back over. Please, sir, I pleaded. Please. I’ve had a very long day, and what I really need is to eat this Wiener schnitzel.

It’s twenty-one euros, he said. That food over there is free.

I had kept mostly cool and Zen all day long, but I suddenly had the urge to scream or cry. Look, I don’t care what I have to pay for it, I said, my voice rising. I just need you to bring me this Wiener schnitzel. Right now. Please. Something in the stern waiter’s demeanor seemed to change; empathy washed over his face. He nodded, wrote my order, and whisked away the menu. A few minutes later, he brought a plate with the schnitzel. And along with it, a bottle of Rheinhessen Riesling.

Sir, he said. I am so sorry. I cannot honor the voucher for your meal. But please. I asked my manager, and he said I could pour you this Riesling in exchange for the voucher. I thanked him quietly and averted my eyes, blushing.

I ravenously tucked into that schnitzel and took a long drink from the wineglass. It wasn’t the greatest schnitzel or Riesling, but for some reason, my eyes started to well up and tears ran down my cheeks. These were tears of frustration, but also very much of embarrassment. I’d suddenly realized that the heightened travel drama happening in my own head had selfishly put this poor waiter in a tricky professional spot. He’d only wanted to make sure I clearly understood that I was passing up free food. Surely I wasn’t the first agitated, stranded passenger he’d faced at this airport hotel, and surely there’d been misunderstandings and complaints in the past. He didn’t need any trouble from his manager on this lousy night in Mörfelden. Meanwhile, I’d chosen to turn the moment into some kind of angsty, M. F. K. Fisher-esque epiphany.

Perhaps only someone who reads too many travel stories would think of Ryszard Kapuściński while eating schnitzel alone in an airport hotel. But I was reminded of Kapuściński’s masterpiece, The Soccer War, when he writes: There is so much crap in this world and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity. This sudden shift, from banal to dramatic, from ugly to beautiful, from tragic to comic, from insignificant to profound, is what travel writing, at its best, does. I believe you’ll see the dynamic at work throughout this anthology.

The waiter reappeared and said, Is everything OK, sir?

Yes, yes, I said. Thank you very much. Everything is quite OK.

The stories included here are, as always, selected from among hundreds of pieces in hundreds of diverse publications—from mainstream and specialty magazines to Sunday newspaper travel sections to literary journals to travel websites. I’ve done my best to be fair and representative, and in my opinion the best travel stories from 2014 were forwarded to guest editor Andrew McCarthy, who made our final selections.

I’m fascinated by McCarthy’s journey from box-office heartthrob (as a teenager, I was insanely jealous that he’d ended up with Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink) to travel writer. Andrew has come to the travel writing genre humbly, with great respect for the work, and he has admirably paid his dues. His selections have been surprising and unique, and I’m happy to have so many new voices and new publications represented in our collection.

I’d also like to thank Tim Mudie, at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for his help in producing this year’s outstanding collection.

I now begin anew by reading the hundreds of stories published in 2015. As I have for years, I am asking editors and writers to submit the best of whatever it is they define as travel writing. These submissions must be nonfiction, published in the United States during the 2015 calendar year. They must not be reprints or excerpts from published books. They must include the author’s name, date of publication, and publication name, and must be tear sheets, the complete publication, or a clear photocopy of the piece as it originally appeared. I must receive all submissions by January 1, 2016, in order to ensure full consideration for the next collection.

Further, publications that want to make certain that their contributions will be considered for the next edition should make sure to include this anthology on their subscription list. Submissions or subscriptions should be sent to Jason Wilson, The Best American Travel Writing, 230 Kings Highway East, Suite 192, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.

JASON WILSON

Introduction

FOR SOME TIME NOW I’ve been sounding like a small child tugging at his father’s pant leg, asking again and again, Why? In my particular case, the why in question pertains to travel writing. Why does it matter? What’s the point? Hasn’t it all been discovered and chronicled? What can we possibly add to the storehouse of information that has come before?

Back in Sir Richard Burton’s day, tales brought back from darkest Africa had real import. Freya Stark’s journeys through Persia were a revelation. Ernest Shackleton’s escape from Antarctica with every soul intact was the stuff of real heroism. How do we top that? The 10 best beaches in the Caribbean right now(!)?

My own experiences with genre emerged only after a long gestation period, as an outgrowth of my travels, the initiation of which sprang from an unwitting urge to connect more with the world in an attempt to better locate my place in it. A 500-mile walk across the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain revealed a fear that had lurked behind so many of my life’s actions, and set in motion a decade of wandering that rewrote how I experienced the world. Travel became not so much about the destination as an end but a means of understanding myself in that place. The world became my university campus. I traveled, mostly alone, to Africa and Southeast Asia, Europe and South America. I was often lonely and learned not to fear travel’s false power. At times I was shrouded in melancholy and came to appreciate the lucidity it evoked. And of course I had serendipitous encounters that still live inside me.

Sometimes I was simply in the right place at the right time. As a young man working in West Berlin I passed through Checkpoint Charlie one early-winter day under the heavy gaze of Communist soldiers. I spent a memorably dreary afternoon walking the deserted streets of East Berlin, the noticeable absence of advertising helping to leave the city a uniform gray under a dirty sky. I ate soggy food and toured an empty museum. Back in West Berlin that night, for the first time I felt the expansiveness of a freedom I had never previously considered. Two days later the Wall fell and I danced amid exultant and pulsing crowds throughout those frigid November nights. I kept my tiny chip of the Berlin Wall for years before it was lost. By then it didn’t matter; my experience in Berlin had become a part of me. I had no need of tokens.

I’ve also been witness to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Deep in the Rocky Mountains I saw the frailty of human life and how quickly it can be vanquished—a swollen and rushing river, a bad decision, and a moment’s loss of concentration that led to tragic results.

My experiences affected me deeply, yet my meandering had an impulsive, almost random quality. It lacked a galvanizing cord. I knew that where I was going and what happened while there had value, yet I struggled with its context.

Then in Saigon I was walking down a sunbaked street one morning when a young man on a scooter drove up beside me and offered to show me the city. I told him to leave me alone and kept walking. He shadowed my movements, he grew insistent—he would be my guide. There was no shaking the young man in the dirty T-shirt. I hopped on the back of his scooter. The Saigon he showed me couldn’t be found in my Lonely Planet guidebook.

He took me to the street corner where his father had been arrested and with real anger told me of the elder man’s unfair treatment. We spent an hour amid wilting plants under the oppression of Southeast Asian humidity, trudging through the community garden that his mother had often taken him to as a child. At the one temple we visited, my guide skulked in the doorway without removing his shoes, smoking, waiting for me to finish a perfunctory walk-through. Mostly I remember zipping down the wide boulevards and slashing through roundabouts, holding on amid thousands of others on scooters in the life-threatening jigsaw jumble that is daily traffic in Saigon.

When he deposited me back at my hotel, my guide demanded more money than we had agreed upon. As I sit writing this more than 20 years later, I can see him before me, his bloodshot left eye adding threat to an already insistent glare as the last rays of daylight cast a fiery glow over the yellow wall of my hotel just past his shoulder. The traffic buzzes behind me, forcing me to lean in to be sure I understand his command correctly. I show you real Saigon; his voice is harsh, his already outstretched hand shaking under the strain of his gathering tension.

I can feel the myriad emotions that raced through me at the time—my naive shock at his outburst, my confusion, my sense of powerlessness under his sudden aggression. Surely he needed the money more than I did. Was I really that stingy? Yet there was shame in my acquiescence as I handed over the extra five dollars.

Up in my room I became consumed with anger at being taken advantage of; the sensation of emasculation humiliated me. The indignity at having been overmatched and powerless threatened to consume me.

Travel is often a petri dish for both our character defects and our finer qualities, and in this moment my baser attributes had me in their clutches.

I did something I had never done before. I reached for a pen. I wrote it all down.

I had been walking along the street when a boy, maybe not out of his teens, approached me on a scooter. I wrote how I tried to discourage him and then hopped on behind him. I remembered things he had said and I wrote them down as well. I described the places he took me and what it felt like while I was there. Then I wrote of how our day had ended—with his demand for more money. I wrote of my embarrassment and anger—both at him and at myself for giving precedence to my feelings of inadequacy over his genuine need. When I was done, I stuffed the pages in my bag.

A few weeks later, in Luang Prabang, in northern Laos, I came upon a young American woman berating an elderly Laotian man about the inferior quality of the bicycle he had rented to her. When she left I crossed over to speak with the man and followed him into his home and ate lunch with him. I wrote that down, too.

At Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe on Christmas Eve I danced in a basement club, part of a throbbing, sweating mass, then walked out to a florid sun rising over the cascading falls on Christmas morning. In Machu Picchu, on a starless black night, my flashlight died after I had sneaked into the ancient citadel. I crawled on my hands and knees searching out an exit, for fear of stepping off the edge of the mountain.

I wrote it all down.

In my writing I began to make deeper sense of what I experienced. I started to see connections between seemingly unrelated events and glimpse the import they contained. Insights that had eluded me before rose up in front of me. Things that I had simply forgotten were indelibly recorded.

My writing wasn’t a journal. I had tried that and found my jottings indulgent and repetitive. Mostly they bored me. But almost unwittingly, what I was doing was writing stories. Things I wrote about captured a quality of where I was and what I experienced in a way my journaling couldn’t approach. Sure, others had been here before me, but no one had seen things exactly from my perspective. Suddenly what I saw mattered. I grew more and more connected to the world I inhabited, more invested. My travels had import.

Upon my return home I would toss the notebooks I had by then begun to carry with me into my top dresser drawer. My travel writings were something I did for myself while on the road. I never thought of them as anything more.

Until I did.

I published first one story, and then more. Underneath every piece I wrote was the unspoken message that travel was important. Travel, I was convinced, was not something frivolous, to be indulged in merely by the idle or the wealthy or the unshowered backpacker. It was something worth fighting for. Travel changed my life; it could change yours. Travel mattered: that was my message.

And if it mattered to me, then perhaps it mattered to others. That bond between writer and reader has been much chronicled, and so it follows that if travel mattered, and connecting with the reader was important, then certainly travel writing must have value. Maybe even urgent value.

I devoured the road and wrote about it all. I hiked to the top of Kilimanjaro and dove with sharks off the Tuamotu Islands. I drank tea in Darjeeling, ate prosciutto in Parma; I slept in the Sahara and occasionally in my own bed. I even published that first story from Saigon nearly 20 years after I wrote it. Yet as we grow proficient at anything it can become more and more difficult to maintain access to that original seed of inspiration and connection to the inner delight that first inspired us. Craft and competence are the rewards of repetition, but a dulling of our senses can be the tradeoff. And as any dinner party guest can tell you, there is no greater bore than the world-weary traveler, the been-there-done-that blowhard spewing pronouncements on the military junta in Burma or Patagonia’s vanishing wilderness onto whoever is unfortunate enough to be seated beside him. It ought never to be forgotten that travel can be a revelation, offering the very real possibility of recaptured innocence to our jaded eyes. The paradox of travel’s effort is the renewal it affords.

Which is why I owe all the writers in this volume a debt of gratitude. Underscoring every story here I can hear the silent calling out, Yes, this matters. Follow me!—serving to remind me again why I first left home.

Nowhere in these pages did I feel as if I was being handed a bill of goods. I’ve grown weary of skimming glossies extolling the luxurious vacation and branding it as travel. (After a good session of travel I’ve often found myself in need of a nice vacation.) Tell me a story, don’t sell me a destination, I’ve thought more than once as I toss a travel magazine aside. You’ll find no selling here, just hard-won experience offered up.

These tales are a testament to the importance of setting out, a call to the open road and its possibilities, lessons, heartbreaks, and occasional joys—a reaffirmation of the value of the investment required to leave the safety of shore. As yet unknown riches await the bold.

In reading many of these stories I’m reminded that in so much of the best travel writing, it is the anonymous and solitary traveler capturing a moment in time and place, giving meaning to his or her travels, that inspires and elucidates. I’ll always take the subjective account from the lonely troubadour, with all the traps and fallibility it is prone to, over the detached second- or thirdhand summing up by the scholar who never left home.

The tale that Benjamin Busch tells of his return to Iraq 10 years after his posting as a Marine is among the most dispassionate and affecting reportage I have encountered in the thousands and thousands of words I’ve digested about that conflict. It is also one of the most engrossing pieces of travel writing I’ve read in a very long while. I’m thrilled to include it here. And Stephen Connely Benz’s recounting of his Fulbright year placed me beside him in a Moldova I will most probably never see.

Still another type of travel writing seems to reside almost entirely out of time. Patricia Marx floats in watery limbo during her transatlantic crossing aboard a freighter. David Farley’s elegiac meditation exists in a Varanasi that holds a very long view of time, while Paul Salopek’s epic walk across much of the planet endeavors to retrace time from man’s first steps. And then there’s Gary Shteyngart. His hilarious assessment of hotel sex occupies a time and place all its own.

Despite the cynics’ cries to the contrary, the world is still there waiting to be discovered. The globe keeps spinning, sometimes at an alarming rate, reinventing itself almost daily. Timbuktu, once an end-of-the-rainbow ideal, recently plagued by strife, is represented in this volume by two stories. Patrick Symmes and Adriana Páramo give us very different reports of intrepid travel to that desert Oz. While Nick Paumgarten’s recounting of wild nights in Berlin tells of a different kind of mettle needed on the road.

Of course there are the rabbit holes of travel. Lauren Groff’s discovery of mermaids in central Florida, Iris Smyles’s cruise down the Rhone River, and Rachael Maddux’s unlikely visit to Dayton, Tennesse, hint at lives many of us might never consider. Here also, Maud Newton offers a candid reexamination of a visit to the Holy Land in her brief treatise, and Lauren Quinn takes us to Cambodia to assess Pol Pot’s final resting place.

Motion itself has long been a staple of the travel narrative, and it is represented here as well. Monte Reel transects South America and captures much of the continent’s internal contradictions, while Kevin Baker’s rail journey across America reminds us what a long strange trip in the wrong direction train travel in this country has become.

And it strikes me as fitting that this volume concludes with a piece by the spiritual godfather of contemporary American travel writers. Forty years ago Paul Theroux, with an immersive style, barbed-wire observations, and sometimes merciless candor, rewrote what a travel narrative could be in The Great Railway Bazaar. His exploration here through the American South shows us that this lifelong road warrior has not lost a step.

All these writers have rejuvenated my sometimes flagging travel spirits and inspired me to look again to the horizon. Each has reinvigorated me in a different way. Each has reignited my passion to hit the road, to set out—for it is of course in the leaving that we afford ourselves the opportunity to be found. As the stories here reveal, the world is still eager to receive the solitary sojourner with a hungry spirit who is willing to keep a keen eye out and an attentive ear to the ground in an effort to capture the telling moment, then send it back across the wire—and, perhaps, through the years.

ANDREW MCCARTHY

LISA ABEND

The Sound of Silence

FROM AFAR

I WAS ABOUT 20 minutes into the four-hour train ride from Glasgow to Fort William when I realized I couldn’t stand the two men seated in front of me. This realization was based on nothing other than what I could overhear—which was every bloody word—of their conversation. They were traveling to a friend’s house, but before they arrived they would need to stop at the supermarket for cheese and wine, of course; though white, not red, since the carpets were beige and the host had a policy. One of the men also had a sister of whose parenting skills he disapproved, a nephew who would likely end up in juvenile court, a new backpack whose every compartment required minute explication, and a penchant for a Danish television series whose plot twists he could recall in terrifying detail. Did I mention that the train ride was four hours long?

I know. The problem wasn’t Mr. Chatty and his mate. It was me. In the weeks before I went to Scotland, I had found myself increasingly irritated by the constant crush of other people, crowding me in line at the market, checking their phones at movie theaters, coming at me nonstop in tides of e-mails, tweets, and status updates. This happens to me periodically: the deadline pressures and everyday annoyances that normally pass unnoticed accumulate until even benign human interactions begin to feel like too much, and the only thing that helps is radical solitude. I didn’t have the time for a trip to Greenland or Mongolia or some other distant, empty place, so when I read a British newspaper story about Inverie, the only town on the Knoydart peninsula, one of the most untouched parts of the Scottish Highlands, I thought it might be just the cure for my misanthropy.

The problem? Getting there. Inverie is accessible only by boat or on foot. In my state of mind, the two-day hike seemed the better choice. I planned to start at the nearest access point—a road that dead-ends at a settlement near a lake called Loch Hourn, about 50 miles from Fort William—follow the trail along the lake’s edge to Barisdale Bay, spend the night there, then head over a pass and down to Inverie. It would be a 16-mile trek through steep and rocky terrain, and at hike’s end, I would be in a town with a population of roughly 100 people, no cell-phone coverage, and a pub billed as the most remote in mainland Britain.

At last, the train arrived in Fort William. I picked up some granola bars and a map and checked into a hotel for the night. The next morning, a taxi driver named Jamie picked me up, and we set out for the 90-minute drive to Loch Hourn. I had not a minute to contemplate the hills and sheep as we passed, as Jamie and I were too busy chatting. I learned about Scottish independence (It’s the football hoodlums that are for it) and a tiny biting insect, smaller than a mosquito but given to traveling in swarms, that was an annual plague in these parts. Midgies, Jamie said. Worse than the independentists.

Unlike the self-absorbed man on the train, Jamie was a charming conversationalist, so I didn’t terribly mind the barrage of sound. Still, after he left me at the trailhead, a quiet fell with the abruptness of a tsunami. It wasn’t silence. Birds chirped and water ran in small, stony falls down to the loch. But there was no human sound except for the crunch of my feet on the trail. The weather was gorgeous: bright sunshine, a warm-but-not-hot temperature. The view was even better: wildflower-covered hills jutting down to shiny blue water. And when I went to check my phone for the weather forecast, I had no connection. For the first time in months, I felt relaxed and at peace.

The walk that afternoon was easy. There were a few climbs, but mostly the trail hugged the lakeshore. Before I knew it, I had reached the juncture where the lake spills into Barisdale Bay. It was low tide, and across the shimmering flats, a few people dug for cockles. I picked my way through a flock of sheep until I came to a small house where a bare-chested, sunburned man was mowing the grass. He cut the engine, but he wouldn’t speak to me until he had run in to put on a shirt. Barisdale, it seemed, was an estate, and it was his job to manage it.

Craig explained that I could stay in the bothy, the first of several adorable Scottish words I would learn. A bothy is a rural shelter, open to walkers, that affords the simplest of accommodations on a first-come, first-served basis. This one looked like it slept about 12, which was 11 possible roommates too many. I paid extra for a private cottage on the property. A very loud rooster with a poor sense of time crowed with equal fervor at five o’clock in the afternoon and at six in the morning, but otherwise my accommodations were quiet. Toward dusk, I found myself drawn, out of habit, to my phone. I went outside in search of a signal, but to no avail. Instead of checking e-mail, I settled into the cottage and read some of the guidebooks near the fireplace.

The books agreed there was a spectacular Munro (adorable Scottishism No. 2: Munro = mountain), the tallest on the Knoydart peninsula, several kilometers off the trail to Inverie. I had no intention of climbing it. I used to do a fair bit of hiking, but that was more than a decade ago, and it left me with enough respect for serious mountains that I wasn’t going to waltz up one on a lark. Besides, it would add extra miles to a walk that would already take me the better part of a day.

The next morning I slipped out of the estate without seeing another soul. In minutes, I came to a path that headed to the right and cut vertiginously uphill. I said a prayer of thanks that I didn’t have to tackle that ascent right out of the gate. Instead, I went left, where the trail climbed more gently. I thought of Lord Byron and those other Romantics who sought solitude in the woods. Time alone in nature felt restorative for them. And that was before the Internet. Solitude in the outdoors was surely all the more healing for those of us who had not only the physical and moral pollution of industrialized society to escape, but also the incessant chatter of everyone we have ever known running constantly across our screens and phones. It was a relief to turn off all those voices and focus on the path in front of me.

Soon the trail crossed a stream and became so vertical that it wasn’t long before I was playing little mental games with myself to keep moving: Walk to that boulder, then you can rest, I told myself. Walk 100 steps, then you can rest. The good thing about hiking alone, I decided, is that there is no one there to see you humiliate yourself.

After what seemed like hours but was probably only 45 minutes, the ascent plateaued. Behind me, Barisdale Bay sparkled through the folds of the mountains. Ahead, it was just as the guidebooks had described: I had come through the pass, sharp peaks soared around me, and down below I could see a lake, its cobalt waters rimmed with ribbons of sand.

I set off happily toward the distant lake. But the bone-jarring descent quickly tempered the relief I had felt when I’d reached the pass. Down I went, my toes slamming into my boots with each step. At times the trail disappeared altogether in bog, but the lake gradually got closer. From my reading the night before, I knew that once I reached it, the trail would turn into flat jeep track, and I’d be 4 kilometers from Inverie.

When I reached the lake at noon, I felt triumphant, even a bit smug, despite the ache in my feet. With plenty of time to make it to Inverie before dark, I took off my boots, ate a sandwich, and took a nap.

I awoke with a start.

Something—I couldn’t say what—made me think I needed to look at the map. The trail had been so clearly marked that it hadn’t occurred to me to take it out earlier. Now I spread the map and traced my path. There was the climb up from Barisdale, there was the pass, there was the descent to the—I stopped. The map had me coming up to the lake on its right shore. I had arrived on the left.

I tried turning the paper, to see if I had somehow gotten the orientation wrong. I walked back up the trail I had come in on, to make sure that it was indeed a trail. And here is the part that, even now, I can’t explain. Absurd as it sounds, instead of admitting I had made a mistake and turning around, I convinced myself that the map was mistaken.

I had no one to ask, no GPS to orient me. A stone path lay across the shallowest end of the lake and I took it, convinced it would lead to the jeep track, and hence to Inverie. And sure enough, I found a trail on the other side. I followed it until it disappeared at the edge of a fast-moving river, beyond which lay another loch. The prospect of going back seemed so horrible that I persuaded myself that if I just kept going, I would soon come across that track.

I followed what I took to be a trail, then lost it again amid the bog and grass and sheep droppings. I walked for another hour, trying to make sense of my location. Finally I came to the far shore of the loch. I saw no trail. It was after 3 p.m.

I gazed at the sun, trying to determine where it would set, but the days were so long in July that it was still straight overhead. Without a mobile connection, I knew the compass on my phone wouldn’t work, but I pulled it out and clicked the compass anyway. Amazingly, the needle began to spin. I lay the compass on the map and watched as it hit north—exactly opposite of where I thought it should be.

In that moment, with horrible clarity, I realized that I had taken a wrong turn at the beginning of the trail that morning. The right-hand path I had judged to be the one that led off to the highest mountain was, in fact, the path to Inverie. My current location wasn’t even on the map.

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway famously describes how fear, real fear, eradicates your ability to spit. It turns out to be true. In that moment, as I realized that I was lost, I felt a physical terror I hadn’t known before, and my mouth went bone-dry. No one knew where I was. This is how people die in the wilderness, I thought: out of reach, ill prepared, and utterly alone.

I considered my options, and slowly I accepted that I had to quickly retrace my steps, all 10 miles of them, to make it to Barisdale before dark. I managed to overcome my panic enough to hustle back up the devilish incline, my feet again mud-soaked, my muscles aching. I found myself propelled by the thought that each step erased a small piece of my mistake, and I hiked with tunnel vision. I made it to Barisdale just as the sun was going down and knocked on the estate manager’s door, embarrassed, but perhaps never in my life so glad to see another person. In the cottage, as I cleaned my bleeding, blistered feet, I wondered whether I could catch a boat to Inverie.

But, motivated mainly by shame, I had my feet bandaged and my pack on at seven the next morning. I walked out along the same trail I had the day before, but this time stayed to the right. The trail turned steeper than the previous day’s. I didn’t even try for 100 steps; I barely managed 20 at a time. The climb seemed endless. If I hadn’t just learned that I could get myself out of a bad situation—even if it meant trekking 20 miles out of my way—I might well have given up. But I kept going.

Finally I reached the summit. There, as promised, was the pass, and down below, on the other side, a loch. I nearly ran down the hill. Sure enough, the trail came in at the right side. Sure enough, it turned into a wide, flat track. Ninety minutes later, I faced another bay surrounded by peaks. To the right, the white houses of Inverie hugged the shore.

I went first to the Gathering, a bed-and-breakfast where the owner, Cara Gray, welcomed me with a glass of wine. This, I remembered as I sank into her sofa, was one of the benefits of humans: frequently they will give you alcohol. Gray told me a bit of the town’s tragic history. It was never an easy place to live. People used to bleed their animals and mix the blood with oatmeal for protein, then sew them back up, Gray said. During the Highland Clearances in the nineteenth century, Knoydart’s population was obliterated. Landowners decided it was more profitable to turn the land over to grazing sheep than to let crofters (tenant farmers) continue to work on it. All of the peninsula’s nearly 1,000 residents were evicted; some were sent to Canada, and others were left to fend for themselves.

Gray, like most of today’s 100 or so Inverie residents, was drawn to the spectacular scenery and found the town’s remoteness a lure, not a disadvantage. She saw the lack of cell-phone towers as a good thing.

There isn’t a grocery store or a doctor in Inverie. To get to those requires a trip by ferry. But Gray can depend on a hundred other souls when the cupboard gets low. It’s ironic, though, isn’t it? she said. Here I was drawn to the isolation, and I end up getting a stronger community than I would have had in the city.

Her words resonated with me. Maybe, I thought, what I had been craving wasn’t escape from all human contact—only from certain types. I went into town, such as it was, to test the theory.

The center of Inverie, both physically and metaphorically, is the Old Forge pub. J. P. Robinet recently bought the place, having first come to Inverie on a stalking holiday, as a hunting trip is called in these parts.

Determined to maintain the pub’s reputation for sociability, he turns off the Wi-Fi every night. I want people to talk to each other, he says. And talk they do. I spent the early part