The Turk Who Loved Apples (4 page)

I did, however, have one true guidebook in my possession—though not, unfortunately, one by Lonely Planet, which I would later learn dominated the Southeast Asia guidebook world. No, mine—which I believe my mother bought me as a birthday gift—was a lesser guidebook, with lots of general historical and cultural information but no details about, say, acquiring a long-term tourist or business visa, opening a bank account, finding work, learning the language—all those survival-related things that, as the jet neared its destination, I suddenly realized I was going to have to do. I flipped back and forth through the guidebook with mounting anxiety, until at last I looked at the publisher's information page.

The book, I noticed, had been published in Slovenia. That did not seem to be a good sign. Thanks, Mom.

F
ourteen years later, nothing had changed—and everything had changed. After dozens of trips abroad, to sixty countries on five continents, having produced hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories, I was once again setting off on an adventure, utterly ill-informed—possibly even less informed than I'd been when I flew off to Vietnam. Because this time, as I waited for the A train to Kennedy Airport in the bowels of a Brooklyn subway station, I did not even know my precise destination. All I knew, on this Saturday in June of 2010, was that an Air France plane ticket had been purchased for me, and that I needed to get to JFK on this particular day and at roughly this time.

Knowing nothing more was the whole point. This journey to wherever was sponsored by
Afar
, a then-new travel magazine, based in California, that had assigned me a “Spin the Globe” story, in which the editors select a destination at random (supposedly by spinning a globe in their offices) and, without revealing it, buy the writer a plane ticket. Of course, certain details had to be worked out in advance—when I'd be available, whether I'd need
a visa or vaccinations, what the weather would be like—but the fact remained: I would be going off into the wild blue yonder, with no idea whatsoever of what awaited me. I was as excited as I'd ever been.

Still, if I wanted a clue, I had one right at my feet. On the damp platform sat the black leather weekend bag I'd bought in the late 1990s, and inside, atop four days' worth of warm-weather clothes, was a small package wrapped in brown paper. My wife, Jean Liu—whom the
Afar
editors had provided vital data like my departure time and destination—had put it there. “It's a hint about where you're going,” she'd said.

I wanted that hint, and badly, but just as badly I wanted to wait. The longer the mystery remained, the more I cherished it. Because who now truly gets sent off into the void? I was on the cusp of adventure—an adventure whose appeal lay almost entirely in my lack of knowledge of what the adventure would be. Right this second I was in a filthy Brooklyn subway station, but in a few hours I might be in Paris, or Dakar, or Dushanbe. Who in this borough, in this city, in this country, could say the same with equal (un)certainty?

Not knowing was key. Surely, there were thousands of people about to do crazy things in crazy places all over the globe. But how many had planned nothing at all? Who among the brave was willing to give up total control, to set forth blindly into unknown lands?

You had to be particularly brave to do this, I thought. So many hundreds of thousands of Americans stay home, refuse to travel, precisely because of a lack of knowledge—because they don't have time to fully plan trips, because they don't know their options, because they are afraid to confront the near-certainty that when they leave the confines of their homes,
something will happen
, something that could shake their fundamental understanding of the world and their place in it. Me, I wanted to be shaken, to be the ultimate blank slate on which the world would leave its marks.

And yet I also desperately wanted to know where I was going. At some point soon, of course, I would find out—like when I checked in at the Air France counter of Terminal 1. And at that point, I feared, my dreams would collapse. Just knowing I was flying Air France was dangerous; that meant, most likely, I was bound for the Caribbean, Canada, North Africa, or France itself. And perhaps it would turn out I already knew someone in the destination, or that it would be a country or city I'd read about extensively—maybe even written about without ever having visited. After traveling for decades and working in journalism for years, there were many such places. Even if it was somewhere brand new and unfamiliar, simply knowing the location might be a disappointment.
Moldova, seriously?
On that plane bound for somewhere, I'd be just another passenger who knew where he was supposed to disembark, and what he might do when he got there.

At last, the A train arrived, and I boarded. My journey was beginning. I'd been patient long enough. I might as well open the package and reveal my hint. I untied the twine and shuffled off the brown paper.

Inside was a hardcover copy of
Fodor's Tunisia
—from 1973, the year before I was born. Jean and I had found it at a used-book store maybe a decade earlier, and without ever reading it I'd fantasized about someday using it to explore the country. Someday was apparently today.

As I started to flip through the book, I felt ambivalence build up inside me. First, there was a warmth, the delight of finally getting to visit a land I'd held in my imagination ever since, at the age of around three, I saw
Star Wars
, whose desert planet opening scenes had been filmed near the Tunisian town of Tataouine. And I appreciated the serendipity of simply having this guidebook in my possession, as if I'd secretly planned this very trip a decade in advance. Plus, there was the sweetness of Jean's having packed it in my bags.
I married well
, I thought.

At the same time, I could sense my travel writer's instincts—honed over countless professional trips for the
New York Times
and other publications—kicking in. At JFK, I knew, as soon as I'd passed through security I'd go online, scanning
CouchSurfing.org
and A Small World, a theoretically exclusive social network, for contacts. I'd hit Facebook and Twitter and let my friends and followers know where I was headed; maybe they'd have advice. Hadn't my old coworker Marie-France lived in Tunis as a child? She'd get a direct e-mail. And hadn't Jean herself once visited Tunis and flirted with a local guy from whom she'd later received postcards? Did she still have the postcards? Could I track down the man who'd once tried to woo her? Now, that would be a story!

And that was just my strategy for filling in the things I
didn't
already know. What I did already know was that Tunisia was a relatively small, comparatively secular Muslim Arab country, its beach towns popular with European vacationers, its government stable thanks to the police-state tactics (e.g., jailing bloggers) of its longtime president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. People there would speak French better than me, not to mention Arabic. I could search the markets for
harissa
, a spice-enriched chili paste, I could see how Tunisian
merguez
, a lamb sausage, stacked up against its Moroccan and Algerian counterparts, which I'd eaten elsewhere, and I'd absolutely have to try
brik
, a deep-fried packet of phyllo dough stuffed with shredded tuna, spices, and egg. Oh, and orange juice—lots and lots of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

By this point, the A train was maybe halfway to the airport, and I'd already mentally mapped out the next several days. I hadn't wanted to, honestly. I'd hoped to maintain that blissful feeling of not-knowing for as long as possible, but as long as possible wasn't very long at all. And now I had this guidebook, too, which would no doubt reveal to me even more secrets of Tunisia, the family taverns of bygone days, the tenth-generation artisans still weaving cottons and carving wood in sea-cliff caves. Why even bother going now?

Except that as I read deeper into the book, I realized something else:
Fodor's
was useless. Parts of it discussed Tunisian history, both recent and ancient, which I knew somewhat, while the rest dealt with “culture,” from Carthaginian art (“very little remains”) to contemporary carpet makers. Compared with guidebooks of today, which include copious listings of where to eat and sleep and what to do to keep yourself occupied,
Fodor's Tunisia
was sketchy. In the listings of “moderate” hotels, four hotels appeared, none of them with any identifying details or description other than address. Restaurants tended toward the touristic (“many tempting specialties . . . oriental dancers tempting too”). One section, however, was fanatically detailed—a two-page walk-through of every funerary stela and Roman sarcophagus worth seeing in the Bardo Museum, Tunisia's national repository of relics from antiquity. But somehow all that highly specific information felt tedious and unnecessary; who needs a guidebook
in
a museum?

This was, in a way, disappointing. I'd hoped I could use the book to track down some of the older businesses in Tunisia, or to uncover forgotten attractions, but in the span of 261 pages,
Fodor's Tunisia
didn't really get into such things. Instead, it was a gloss, a manual not for intrepid wanderers (as I imagined myself to be) but for those voyagers of the 1970s who'd float through the Maghreb in the care of a travel agent's time-honed itinerary.

Which meant there would remain at least some holes in my pre-arrival knowledge—and thank goodness. Because for a long time now, such holes had become harder and harder to find, or to create. As the
New York Times
' “Frugal Traveler” columnist from 2006 to 2010, I'd had to become an expert at researching every aspect of my trips. I'd mastered Google, and could, with a few clicks, dig up brand-new boutique hotels in Puerto Rico and little-known bed-and-breakfasts in far-flung corners of New Mexico. Through Facebook and CouchSurfing and A Small World, I reached out to strangers from Bucharest to Chennai, ensuring myself friendly local guides to
strange, new cultures. I scoured food blogs and
Chowhound.com
and
eGullet.org
so I'd know what to put in my mouth in Seoul and Budapest. I set up bank accounts and credit cards to maximize frequent-flier miles and minimize fees. I figured out how to store high-resolution Google maps on my iPhone so that I could reference them abroad without incurring roaming charges.

For one Frugal Traveler column, I wrote about my system for getting the best possible deals on airfares. It was, I thought, a highly rational system, consisting of a dozen steps—or maybe twenty—that spanned the gamut of airline Web sites and third-party online travel agents and fare forecasters and seat recommenders (which is better,
SeatGuru.com
or
SeatExpert.com
?), and I didn't even get around to discussing the whole business of international-flight consolidators.

Perhaps predictably, this column got a lot of responses: 217 people wrote in, many of them thanking me for the advice and some offering their own tips. Others, however, were more critical. One compared my method to “herding cats”; another said it made her head spin. Someone called “Buddy” from Houston, Texas, wrote, “So, you spent how many hours and saved how much for all that effort? Exactly how much is your time worth to you?”

As it happens, this was a question I'd already begun to ask myself, in a slightly different form: What was the point of all this preparation?

It's not that I was utterly dissatisfied with how I was traveling. I never felt like I'd
over
-researched a trip, to the point where I was merely executing a set of pre-planned maneuvers through Paris or Bratislava. There were always moments of randomness, spontaneity, and serendipity. There was the bistro owner on the French Riviera who offered me a free meal if I'd send him video footage of his restaurant. There was the afternoon I walked into a Slovakian village, my feet blistered, my legs collapsing, and met a family who invited me in for fresh-baked pastries, homemade wine, and a place to spend the
night, out of the rain and safe from the Gypsies. Once, in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, I was walking down a rocky beach when I somehow caught the attention of a quartet of hip locals in their early twenties; within minutes, we'd all stripped off our clothes and were skinny-dipping in the freezing surf. Although they later told me this was the “nudie beach,” I could find no reference to it on the Internet. You try it—Google “nudie beach” and see what you come up with.

These episodes made me wonder if I needed the research part at all—they happened so naturally and beautifully they overshadowed the quotidian parts of the trip: checking into hotels, taking buses or trains from one spot to another, dutifully seeing sites considered historically or culturally important. More frustrating, when I'd sit down to write my articles, I'd find that including the quotidian stuff—which publications generally require, since they're in the business of telling readers how to travel—left little room for the serendipitous moments that made the trips special to me.

But if you're going to be a professional travel writer, you can't exactly stop researching your destinations or give up advising readers on how to travel. The business doesn't work that way. You don't call up an editor, tell them you want to go to Morocco or Ireland for a couple of weeks, and have them cut you a big check. And you don't generally head off on your own dime to one of these places, hoping you'll be able to turn your adventures into a salable story afterward. That's how you go broke.

No, if you want to go to, say, Tokyo, first you come up with an angle: some subset of activities or specific thematic bent. For example, ramen. Hugely popular in America, both the inexpensive, dried, college-food form and the fresh, high-end New York restaurant style, ramen is, in Japan, a full-blown cultural phenomenon. There are ramen magazines, ramen TV shows, ramen bloggers, a ramen museum, and five thousand ramen shops in Tokyo alone. So: seeing and understanding Tokyo by trying to make sense of its ramen shops and ramen aficionados—Tokyo through a noodly lens—that's the angle.