The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Part 16

HANNAH TENNANT-MOORE.

The s.e.xual Lives of Sri Lankans. World Hum, December 17.

GUY TREBAY.

Going Postal. Travel + Leisure, February.

CALVIN TRILLIN.

No Daily Specials. The New Yorker, November 22.

Some Like It Hot. Conde Nast Traveler, November.

JOHN WAs.h.i.+NGTON.

The Local to Mexico City. The Smart Set, October 7.

JOHN WRAY.

Acquired Taste. New York Times Magazine, February 28.

Footnotes

* Several other names have been changed with this same precaution in mind.

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* When the Turks began sh.e.l.ling the border-which happened on a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, family day, hence a paid holiday for the fixer-he roared off to photograph the damage for the newspapers, having declined to invite me. Perhaps he was jealous because I had accepted the interpreter's invitation to picnic with his family beside a river with lovely frogs that quacked like birds, ladies in bright, sparkling, many-layered gauzy skirts, willowlike trees, an ancient cave-cliff tomb dating perhaps to a.s.syrian times and now brought up-to-date with graffiti, and lamb guts floating in the water like balloons. Shortly after I left Iraq, the fixer was caught in a suicide bombing in downtown Kirkuk. He escaped injury but was attacked afterward by an angry mob who mistook him for a Turkmen and beat him so badly the doctors later thought the metal embedded in his face was shrapnel from the explosion.

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