The Best American Travel Writing 2013

From Havana backstreets to Andean gold mines, nineteen unforgettable essays capture the raw wonder of modern travel.

Number-one New York Times best-selling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed: A Love Story, Elizabeth Gilbert transports readers to far-flung locales with this collection of the year’s lushest and most inspiring travel writing.

The anthology steers travelers across unpredictable terrain, following contributors into Cairo's crowded souqs and high Andean gold mines. Other dispatches record raw physical trials, recounting the chaos of Pamplona's bulls and a precarious cliff climb in Papua New Guinea.

Gilbert balances these journeys with wry domestic wanderings, pairing a humorist in a Paris dental chair with an essayist in South Texas who ponders the choice to leave an ambitious border trek untraveled.

• Travel Memoirs: Peter Jon Lindberg explores the quiet comfort of returning to the same Maine beach house every August, where coastal rituals and family traditions outshine the hunger for novelty.
• Literary Journalism: Sarah A. Topol journeys into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula to meet Bedouin tribesmen who orchestrate polite tourist kidnappings, complete with sweet tea and roasted lamb, to negotiate with the government.
• Culinary Travelogue: David Farley treks through Hoi An to track down the secret Ba Le well water and island wood ash that give Vietnam’s iconic cao lau noodles their irreplaceable texture.
• Cultural Essays: Christopher de Bellaigue enters a ruined Kabul tile factory where high-stakes gamblers wager thousands on fighting roosters in an underground battle of pride and survival.
• Also by This Author: The Best American Travel Writing 2012, The Best American Travel Writing 2008 and The Best American Travel Writing 2010.