The Best American Travel Writing 2004

The Best American Travel Writing 2004 anthology, which was guest edited this year by Pico Iyer, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin. Notable writers chosen for this year’s main selections include John McPhee, Tim Cahill, Adam Gopnik, Joan Didion, Peter Hessler, Thomas Swick, Mark Jenkins, and Patrick Symmes (who landed two essays in the anthology this year). As is tradition for Houghton Mifflin’s “Best American” anthologies, the series editor (Jason Wilson) selected 50-100 outstanding articles from hundreds of periodicals, and the guest editor (Iyer) narrowed it down to the twenty or so best selections.

In this year’s introduction, Iyer writes that his counterintuitive selection criterion “was to find travel pieces that would be interesting to people who have no interest in travel.” One big benefactor of Iyer’s tastes was World Hum, which had two stories among the main selections this year (including a Tanzania tale by Frank Bures).

For the fifth year running, I had a story short-listed for the anthology: The Hidden Valley, a Laos adventure tale that ran in Cond