The Best Women's Travel Writing by Lavinia Spalding Page A

golden wheat fields that had sung to us on our way to Chinon. I now knew that on a bike I could see places the way I love to, close enough to notice the odds and ends that gave it texture, at a pace that made me feel like I was truly in it—part of it—and not just passing through.

    Susan Orlean is the bestselling author of eight books, including
My Kind of Place; The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers
. In 1999, she published
The Orchid Thief
, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Oscar-wining movie
Adaptation
, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze.
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend
, a sweeping account of Rin Tin Tin’s journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon published in 2011, was a
New York Times
bestseller and a Notable book of 2011. Orlean has written for
Vogue, Esquire, Rolling Stone,
and
Smithsonian
, and has been a staff writer for the
New Yorker
since 1992. She has covered a wide range of subjects—from umbrella inventors to origami artists to skater Tonya Harding—and she has often written about animals, including show dogs, racing pigeons, animal actors, oxen, donkeys, mules, and backyard chickens. She lives in upstate New York and Los Angeles with one dog, three cats, eight chickens, four turkeys, four guinea fowl, twelve Black Angus cattle, three ducks, and her husband and son.

LAURIE WEED

    Riverdance
    Up a creek on a love boat in Laos.
    I dling our boat in the deep, silty waters of the Mekong, we contemplated the mouth of the Nam Ou. It curved along a sheer limestone wall in a tight smile of translucent green, its shallow, hairpin entrance forbidding all but the smallest and lightest boats. Our riverboat, a traditional teak-hulled model with a four-cylinder Toyota engine strapped to its rear, was as long as a city bus but only four feet wide, drawing less than eighteen inches. Slightly fish-shaped and floppy with age, her tapered ends often moved independently of each other, creating a clumsy, snaking motion against the current. Flint and I had dubbed her the
Spawning Salmon
and, for better or worse, we owned her now. Planning a voyage of several days, we had just motored her gently up the Mekong, departing Luang Prabang at sunrise to avoid playing chicken with the midday barge traffic. An hour into our journey, the
Salmon
was already acting flighty. Her cooling mechanism kept seizing up, and the engine had the vapors.
    Two weeks earlier, we’d hitched a ride on an empty passenger boat to explore the Nam Ou for the first time. After a few idyllic days of paddling in clear water and trekking to isolated Khmu villages in the upper valley, Flint wanted to follow the pretty river to its highest navigable point, a Chinese trading post called Hat Sa. I wanted a backstage pass to the real Laos, the land beyond the “tourist triangle.” When separated from an entire culture by language, economics, and geography, local transportation often provides the quickest route through the gap—if not from A to B. An open-air river journey, surrounded by dramatic karsts and a fringe of jungle, sounded far more enticing than riding a crowded bus or dull tour van up Highway 13. We’d asked around in Luang Prabang and found it was “not possible” to hire a boat to Hat Sa—something to do with fuel costs and territory disputes among the drivers. Naturally, Flint solved this problem by purchasing his own boat.
    The idea wasn’t as insane as it may sound: Flint was practically born on a boat. He had built two of his own from junkyard scrap, and he could sail anything from a harbor dory to an English clipper in high seas. In fact, he had wooed me with a boat adventure when we first met in Burma, the previous year, and in spite of our many differences since then, I still told myself that any man who would buy an illegal fishing pirogue and paddle me down the Irrawaddy