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 WASHINGTON.

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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