Two Trips: Best American Travel Writing 2013

I'm enjoying vicarious travel this morning, first to Cuba:

"We landed under searingly vivid skies, something like what the blue tablet from a packet of Easter dye lets off.  The land right around the airport is farmed; we saw a man plowing with oxen.  The fertility of Cuba is the thing you can't put into words.  I've never stood on a piece of ground as throbbingly, even pornographically, generative.  Throw a used battery into a divot, and it will put out shoots--that's how it feels.  You could smell it, in the smoky, slightly putrid smell of turned fields.  More and more, as we drove, that odor mingled with the smell of the sea."

from the essay, A Prison, a Paradise, by John Jeremiah Sullivan--in The Best American Travel Writing 2013. 

Now I'm hiking through the jungles of New Guinea with Judy Copeland: The Way I've Come.

The small people she encounters on her dangerous hike consider her "very fat" and predict that she won't make it to her destination:

"By American standards," she writes, "I'm not that fat.  I think of my body as sturdy, a legacy of tall big-boned Appalachian forebears.  I wonder, though, if something in the way I carry myself gives that Jell-O-like vacant look of a body whose extremities aren't inhabited, whose occupant has long ago abandoned the front parlors to closet herself somewhere deep inside."

These are wonderfully well-written tales, the kind Liz Gilbert predicted in the introduction would make the reader feel she's "been there" with the writer.