The Turk Who Loved Apples (2 page)

I
n early 2005, after I'd finished an assignment for the
New York Times
in northern Thailand, I took a weekend trip to Myanmar. Myanmar, or Burma, as it's also known, was under exceedingly tight military rule back then, but Americans could, for reasons I didn't try to understand, cross the border without a prearranged visa, provided they stayed less than fourteen days and did not travel beyond eastern Shan State. Since I had just a couple of days free, and wanted only to see the unusual and fascinating hill tribes of the Golden Triangle, the famously lawless opium-and-gun-smuggling region, these were not onerous restrictions.

My friend Bonnie Yoon, a graphic designer who was visiting me from Los Angeles, and I arrived at the border post of Mae Sai just before 4 p.m. and began the process of changing countries. The Thai border guards stamped our passports good-bye with little ado, and we crossed a small bridge over a river and into Myanmar. At the entry point, an immigration officer, a polite young Burmese woman whose cheeks were dusted with yellow sunblocking powder made from the
thanaka
root, approached us and offered to help us through the process. First, she led us to a photo booth, where we paid several dollars to have our pictures taken. Then she brought us to an immigration kiosk, where another officer, a broad man in a pressed white shirt and embroidered sarong, handed us visa applications and the woman glued our pictures into what she described as “internal travel documents”—single sheets of rough purple construction paper, printed with a form in Burmese and folded in half, like a first-grader's
art project. These we'd use in place of our own U.S. passports, which, she informed us, the authorities would gladly hold for us here at the border until we returned.

“Is that okay?” she asked expectantly.

Bonnie and I looked at each other. Leaving our passports here did not seem like the wisest course of action, particularly in a country where journalists, foreigners as well as locals, were commonly arrested, deported, or worse. On the entry application, I'd written “video game consultant” as my occupation, and while I didn't expect we'd get busted, keeping at least some official identification on my person seemed like a good idea, just in case.

“Actually,” I told the woman, “I think we'd like to keep our passports with us, if that's okay with you. We'd feel safer that way.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “that's not possible.” She shook her head, looking down and smiling apologetically. Then she looked back up. “Is that okay?”

It was, we decided, okay. Was the Burmese
government
really going to steal
our
passports? We accepted our purple travel documents and entered Myanmar.

The difference between the two countries was instantly obvious. The Thai side of the border had hummed with energy and commerce, the signs electrified, the automobiles new and shiny, the streets well-paved. Here, in the town of Tachileik, it was as if we'd stepped back in time a couple of decades. The concrete was cracking, and the light-bulbs were feeble. Frankenstein cars, assembled from whatever parts were available, rumbled slowly down the streets. The only commonality between the two sides was the goods we saw for sale in markets or being loaded onto trucks: international-brand shampoos, diapers, soaps, melamine dishes, bottles of Johnny Walker Black and Red, acrylic blankets, and rice cookers. This was a border post, and goods passed through as often as people.

The gates of the town, we were told, were about to close, and we wouldn't have time to travel onward until the morning, so Bonnie
and I found a hotel for the night and set out to explore Tachileik. Tachileik turned out to be a very small town. A few old brick buildings in disrepair offered hints of the British colonial era, but architecturally Tachileik was dumpy—all concrete structures assembled without regard to aesthetics, as if everyone had arrived in a hurry and with little intention of sticking around. And why would they? It was a border town; it existed only because the border existed, and the diplomatic machinery of the border required certain support services: mechanics, food vendors, a market, hotels, a Buddhist temple or two, and somewhere to drink and sing karaoke.

Just after 6 p.m., night began to fall, as it does at virtually the same time every day in the tropics, and in the dark Bonnie and I began hunting around for somewhere to eat. On a street whose overgrown empty lots hinted at the wilderness that lay just outside the limits of town, we spotted a couple of bars, open-air platforms whose low tables were forested with tall glass bottles of Myanmar Beer. We hustled over and ordered two bottles, along with a tomato salad, its bright red slices scattered with fried shallots and briny dried shrimp. As we clinked glasses and started planning the next day, we noticed a man sitting at another table. He was tall and thin and dark-skinned, with a long straight nose, and his posture, his demeanor, and his outfit—loose white tracksuit, white baseball cap—made him look out of place among the other Burmese guys at his table. He couldn't be Burmese too, could he? Australian, I figured, or Singaporean.

The man noticed us watching him, nodded hello, and came over to join us. In perfect English, he introduced himself: “Slim—like Slim Shady,” he said. He smiled, and Bonnie and I knew: He liked Eminem; ergo we liked him. Over the course of a few more beers, we learned more of Slim's life. A physics graduate at Mandalay University, he'd been unable to find work in his hometown because, he said, jobs went to ethnic Burmese, while he, a Muslim with Indian roots, was denied. And so he'd moved his wife and young child out here, to the forgotten end of a forgotten country, where he hoped
to work as a tour guide. He spoke English and good French, and Western tourists such as ourselves occasionally passed through.

For a moment or two, I wondered if Slim was actually an intelligence agent, a member of Burma's legions of secret police come to check up on us foreigners. His story, though touching, seemed improbable. Who decided to become a tour guide by moving to one of the least-touristed corners of the country? Or was that just canny planning?

In the medieval dark of the Tachileik night, the stars were easily visible above, and as I looked at them I realized I didn't care if Slim was monitoring us. We were having such a nice time, Bonnie and I had no ill intentions, I wasn't even planning on writing about this side trip. Nothing could go wrong. Indeed, everything was right with the world. There we were: Slim, a Burmese-Indian Muslim; Bonnie, a Korean-American Christian; and myself, an American Jew—bonding over beers in the Golden Triangle. This was how it was supposed to be—this moment, however brief, was why I traveled. I was happy, and I told Bonnie and Slim why.

We all laughed and raised our glasses and drank, and then Slim said, “Hey, do you guys like Pink Floyd? How about the Scorpions?”

A
t the time, I was already a fairly well-traveled person. I'd made my way to Mexico, India, Western Europe, all over the United States, and through much of East Asia. But I was about to begin a period of intensive travel that would put those experiences to shame. The
New York Times
assignment that had me in northern Thailand was one of my very first, and over the next seven years that paper, and magazines such as
Saveur
and
Afar
, would send me to more than fifty countries, from the great capitals of Europe and the megacities of Asia to Turkish apple orchards and flyspeck Caribbean islands. I would spend months on the road at a time, and create hundreds of
articles, dozens of videos, and enough digital photos to bring several overpriced computers to a crawl.

That weekend in Burma marked a turning point for me in another way, however. It was so short, so sweet, so weird, and so perfect—and it had all taken place so far from any location of significance. Tachileik was the middle of nowhere, a town overlooked by everyone but those required to spend the night (or their lives), and yet there was Slim, and there we were. The connection, the moment, could happen, even there.

Until then, my travels had shrunk the world. I had crossed continents by every conveyance imaginable and was developing not only some mastery of the practicalities of travel but also, more important, a fundamental ease in the role of traveler, a sense that the discomforts and awkwardness of exploring the world were worthwhile because I was, at last, doing was what I was supposed to be doing.

Now, though, the world was starting to appear bigger than ever, a massively expanding network of tiny points where anything at all could happen, and within each point another infinite web of possibilities. Indeed, the very next day, as Bonnie and I took a group taxi north to the city of Kengtung, we stopped halfway, at a minuscule village whose one restaurant served, alongside some decent curries and stir-fries, incredible tomato-based salsas spiked with unfamiliar herbs and familiarly pungent fish sauce—a Mexican condiment by way of Southeast Asia. If Tachileik was the middle of nowhere, this was nowhere's very edge, and yet here too were treasures.

Over the course of my subsequent travels, the world grew and grew. I found fascinating halfway points between two larger points, and then halfway points between those halfway points. Big cities ballooned as I focused on neighborhoods and then subneighborhoods and then single blocks. Highways splintered into fractal root systems of possibility. It seemed I would never be able to claim the entire world, and yet I kept trying.

As far as I traveled, and as many breakthrough moments as I experienced in some of the most and least renowned locales on Earth, I could never get entirely out of my own head. I may have learned how to snag cheap plane tickets, how to cross borders on foot, how to show up in a strange land and find a welcoming bed, a fine meal, and eager new friends, but I was still plagued by the same anxieties: that I didn't know what I was doing, that I was going to fall ill, that I was spending far more than I could afford, that I would succumb to loneliness and never really penetrate or understand the places I was being paid to penetrate and understand. These anxieties weren't entirely imaginary. I had evidence of my failures—nights spent in crummy motels or in the way back of my station wagon, memories of three-day stretches in which I hardly spoke, a collection of perforated foil packets of antibiotics.

This is not to say I wasn't enjoying myself. Every time I boarded a long-haul flight, I marveled at the opportunity I'd been given to roam the world on someone else's dime. On those trips, I found close friends, discovered new foods, and stumbled into unfathomably joyous experiences—the time a clan of mountain goats surrounded me at midnight in the mountains of Montana, the gentle way a carful of Chinese railroad passengers took care of me on a forty-eight-hour trip from Urumqi to Beijing.

Still, the sad side of travel continued to occupy me, in part because it always seemed to lurk so close beneath the surface. One minute I could be sipping espresso with a Carthaginian playboy and the next I'd be friendless and adrift. (Vice versa, too.)

But the real reason, I think, was that mastering the psychic challenges of travel felt more important than mastering the practical challenges. As I tried to convey in “The Frugal Traveler,” the
New York Times
column I wrote from 2006 to 2010, anyone could learn to travel both well and on a budget. There were Web sites to make use of, smart tricks and tips to employ, and an open attitude to adopt.
You didn't need to be a well-known “New
York Times
travel writer” to do this stuff, and indeed I traveled anonymously, and wrote as an Everyman, to prove it.

That approach, however, often left out the intangibles, for which there are no universal solutions. I could teach anyone how to minimize credit card surcharges overseas, or how pick up enough Indonesian to roam around Java for a week, but could I offer a one-size-fits-all cure for loneliness? Or explain how to confront, ethically and emotionally, the reality of Third World poverty? No matter how deeply you understand the vagaries of booking cheap flights—on a Tuesday afternoon, or via a foreign carrier's home-country Web site, or whatever—you may still be saddled with inexplicable feelings of depression and inadequacy when you venture out into the world. No need to feel guilty about those persistent problems, though. They're simply the Advanced Placement test for frequent travelers—they mean you're graduating to the next level.

The Turk Who Loved Apples
, then, chronicles my ongoing attempts to come to terms with those psychic challenges. I've tried to arrange the chapters in an order that represents what many travelers go through. We begin with ignorance and naïveté—the biggest stumbling blocks for the novice—then delve into the twin issues of eating well and getting sick, the similarly paired problems of being alone and making friends, and then traveling frugally and turning a profit from travel. Ethical dilemmas are followed by the quirks of getting lost, and the ultimate, unavoidable horror of traveling with family. After addressing the eternal debate of tourist versus traveler, I finish with one of the heaviest burdens: homecoming.

Throughout, I refer back frequently to the postcollegiate year I spent in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Though that trip took place long ago, in 1996 and 1997, it was my first major solo adventure abroad and brought me face to face with the epiphanies and anxieties I would encounter again and again for decades to come. Whenever
I am lonely, or ill, or guilt-ridden, I think back to the model that year provided me. It doesn't always give me answers, but it does remind me that I survived once before and can do so again.