One story about Indonesia: “Bewitched on Bali” by Pico Iyer

Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance
includes these forty-one scintillating and sizzling tales of serendipity:
“On the Amazon” by Isabel Allende
“Once Upon a Time in Italy” by Bill Barich
“Naxos Nights” by Laurie Gough
“Passionate and Penniless in Paris” by Maxine Rose Schur
“Sleeping with Elephants” by Don Meredith
“Romance in Romania” by Simon Winchester
“Looking for Abdelati” by Tanya Shaffer
“Special Delivery” by Lindsy van Gelder
“England’s Decadent Delights” by Douglas Cruickshank
“I Lost It at Club Med” by Po Bronson
“Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow” by Taras Grescoe
“Where the Hula Goddess Lives” by James D. Houston
“In a French Cave” by Beth Kephart
“How to Buy a Turkish Rug” by Laura Billings
“The Dangers of Provence” by Peter Mayle
“Hog Heaven: At the Memphis World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest” by David Kohn
“Philosophy Au Lait” by David Downie
“Your Money’s No Good Here” by Tim Cahill
“Embraced in Spain” by Barry Yeoman
“Italian Affair” by Laura Fraser
“Tampax Nightmares” by Susan Hack
“On Japanese Trains” by Sallie Tisdale
“Oscar Night in Angkor Wat” by Jeff Greenwald
“The Last Tourist in Mozambique” by Mary Roach
“Inside Colombia” by Dawn MacKeen
“Fade into Blue” by Amanda Jones
“Navigating Nairobi” by Alicia Rebensdorf
“Out of Africa” by Wendy Belcher
“The Man Who Loved Books in Turkey” by Lisa Michaels
“The Meaning of Gdańsk” by Jan Morris
“How Zurich Invented the Modern World” by Carlos Fuentes
“Storming The Beach” by Rolf Potts
“Conquering Half Dome” by Don George
“Looking for Mr. Watson” by Bill Belleville
“Bewitched on Bali” by Pico Iyer
“Lost in the Sahara” by Jeffrey Tayler
“Fear, Drugs, and Soccer in Asia” by Karl Taro Greenfield
“My Junior Year Abroad” by Edith Pearlman
“Expatriate, with Olives” by Lucy McCauley
“The Aussie Way of Wanderlust” by Tony Wheeler
“When We’re Going to Be There” by Chris Colin

http://pixxiefishbooks.blogspot.com/2...

Randal gave me this for my birthday last year. I started reading it over Christmas and then promptly forgot to bring it home from Winnipeg, where we were over the holidays. Thankfully, Randal's dad was nice enough to carefully wrap it up and pop it in the mail - I believe I got it back sometime in February.

And I was glad - it's a nice read. It's a series of stories of things that have happened to various travel writers, most (if not all) of whom have previously written for Salon.com's online literary travel journal. I took my time reading it once I got back, usually limiting myself to one story a night, since it was quite enjoyable for the most part.

Some of the stories are lovely and magical - like the woman who finds peace sleeping beach-side on a small Greek island. Others are funny, some are meant to provoke. The only one that I remember leaving a distinctly bad taste in my mouth was based on a southern Thailand beach - a promising start! - but focussed on the author's obsession with catching up with Leonardo diCaprio who was also in the south of Thailand filming, apparently, The Beach. It was really long, really shallow, and really dull. But by and large, the stories here captivated me or at least interested me enough to keep going. It's a nice way to 'travel' when you can afford neither time nor money to actually do so. ( )

As with any compilations, this book had some good ones and some less interesting ones, but what I really loved was the foreword by Pico Iyer where he talked a lot about who we are when we travel.
"And if travel is like love, that is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity, and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end."

In some senses that summed up a lot about the book and my thoughts on travel. Just because you check out of your hotel and fly home, or to a new destination, that doesn't mean the trip is over. You've just entered a new chapter.

Lisa Michaels' The Man Who Loved Books in Turkey was perhaps the best of the compilation in a BookCrossing sense when she said, "Perhaps it's a small courtesy to leave vacation reading in your wake, no matter what it costs you, to sail through a strange country, discarding books for those following or left behind, your bag getting lighter as you go"

Indeed, 100% agreed. ( )