Archive for the 'Travel Memoir' Category

Travel Memoir Gold Winner: Herat, Oh Herat

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

by Stephan Morrow
Prologue - some thoughts on traveling. looking back:
They say that Lawrence Tierney (who played the original ‘Dillinger’) had T-Rex in his genes but he was always surprising me with the things that he knew. Like quoting from yes, Emily Dickenson poems. Or like the fact that he knew about ‘The Saragossa Manuscript’ [...]

Travel Memoir Silver Winner: True Stories

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

by Kathleen Spivack
For many years I was alone and I found that-but I am already putting it in past tense, please note.  So-for many years I’ve been alone and I find-what? Find that it doesn’t get any easier?  Find that I’m writing my way right into another cliché? Let’s try again. As follows: For many [...]

Travel Memoir Bronze Winner: Notes on an Andean Pilgrim

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

by Tom Miller
He came to my Quito residence for dinner that equatorial night in 1982 wearing blue jeans and a recently washed button-down work shirt. I had delayed meeting the amiable white-haired Moritz Thomsen until I’d finished reading Living Poor (1969) and The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978) , two books that had [...]

Travel Memoir—Gold: The Quest for Duende

Friday, February 27th, 2009

by Diane Caldwell
Mortification exploded over my friend’s face when I told her of my decision to visit what I thought was our mutual friend Iris in Andalucia. Eyes wide and ominous as flying saucers, mouth open in a soundless gaping hole of horror—she looked like a reenactment of “The Scream.”
I was living in Istanbul [...]

Travel Memoir—Silver: If He Cries, They Kill Him

Friday, February 27th, 2009

by Ken Lovering
It would be easy to blame my sweat on the mid-afternoon Tanzanian sun.
But there’s more to why my glands are working overtime: I am sitting in a tiny Maasai enkaji , a circular hut constructed of a mud-manure mix that these five beaded women, my hosts, likely slapped together with their bare hands. [...]

Travel Memoir—Bronze: She Loved to Rumba(le)

Friday, February 27th, 2009

by Miroslava Turk
When in Cuba, do not attempt to calibrate your expectations.
If you make that mistake, you may fail to notice the presence of irony all around you. If you expect only certain results, you will never see what actually does occur. Irony often leads us to mystery and the beyond. Away from sameness and [...]

Travel Memoir—Gold Winner: Crazy Diamond

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

by Adrian Cole
I couldn’t really ever tell you why I left home. I’d come up with some superficial reasons, of course, but just so that we could avoid an awkward and unhelpful silence. The deeper truth probably lies somewhere in the inherited murkiness of the human psyche, a monkey’s inclination to wander, always, one has [...]

Travel Memoir—Bronze Winner: A Bottle of Calvados

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

By Tom Cheche
***
Shade kept us from seeing the sign. The narrow country lane, devoid of traffic, meandered through farmland of the Cotinten bathed in glorious autumn sun, highlighting roadside fields of squat, manicured apple trees but intensifying darkness in the occasional stretch through a palisade of looming shade trees. It was a rough board nailed [...]

Travel Memoir—Silver Winner: Easter Island: Where the Roads Diverged

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

By Catherine Watson
I was in Ecuador, on my way to a folklore performance, sharing a ride with two other tourists – a middle-aged Canadian woman and a young computer guy from California. They started comparing notes on their Latin American travels. I didn’t join in. I’d seen the continent edge to edge over the previous [...]

Funny Travel—Gold Winner: Vampires from Venus

Sunday, March 2nd, 2008

By Zack Kushner
Lost in the swirling dust, the sun scalding our scalps and our pursuers gaining, we go for broke. In order to escape Ethiopia, we resort to madness.
High above the Ethiopian city of Gondar, 17th century castles square their shoulders and face the sun. It is as if one of the exuberant potholes on [...]

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