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

vanity part in a vast and complex theater of lost tribes. Like me, he suffered by choice—he had the power and the means to leave at any time. It occurred to me that he too had fallen in love with an idea, a dream that could never be fully realized in the flesh. Traveling can have that effect on people.
    He later reported, Kurtz-like, that he found the Khmu village a paradise: “A howling, snorting, crying, hacking, coughing, terrible-hard paradise.” At such close quarters, he could not continue to ignore their destitution, and so he gave away the
Salmon
’s inventory piece by piece. The Khmu carried away his pots and pans, buckets, utensils, food, bottled water, two new mattresses, a few tools, perhaps even some of his arrogant assumptions. The next day, a tourist boat towed him and the
Salmon
the last few miles to Nong Khiaw, where he sold her to a fisherman’s son for 20,000 kip (about $2 U.S.). With that, the old boat became another boy’s mechanically challenged dream, and returned to her rightful place in the world. Eventually, so did the Skipper, and so did I.

    Laurie Weed is a passionate traveler and hapless romantic whose stories have appeared in four of The Best Women’s Travel Writing books, in addition to magazines, guidebooks, newspapers, and on the web. She can always be found at www.laurieweed.com .

JOCELYN EDELSTEIN

    What We Do After Gunfire
    In Brazil, life goes on.
    J aque sits on the porch steps that lead from her tiny house down to the basement home of her uncle. Her three children, sunburned from Rio de Janeiro’s blazing February summer, hang like ornaments from her limbs and lap. I rest my elbows on the iron bar of the window and spread my fingers in the space between outside and in.
    The first blast sounds like an avalanche untangling itself from the mountain. The sudden and boundless rumble shakes in my belly, echoing above my head and below my feet. From the window I see Jaque stumble down the stairs with her baby clutched to her chest and her daughter and son grasping at the hem of her skirt. She glances my way for a second, and the look on her face makes my stomach tighten. I see the warning in her eyes, and I hit the floor. My cheek presses into the dirty blue rug, and I stare at the red flashing numbers on the digital clock beside the television. It’s 3:30 P.M. on a Sunday afternoon.
    When I first met Jaque, she was silent and smiling, and her third child was still in her belly, waiting to enter the battleground of Falet—one of Rio de Janeiro’s five hundred plus
favelas
, or slums. We pressed ice cubes against our foreheads to protest the sun that ferocious summer, and the neighborhood kids shouted “Teacher!” when they saw me on the street. Jaque’s mother called me her white daughter, but for the first two months I lived in her home, Jaque and I barely spoke to each other. She watched me, curious yet unmoved by the strange American dance teacher who had befriended her mother and become an unexpected guest in their tiny, tin-roofed house. She refused to let me help with dinner.
    But one night as I danced with her mother in the living room, overcome with the beat of my favorite Brazilian song, Jaque leapt from her seat with a wail and started shaking her hips in circles around my body, yelling, “
Eu nunca soube sobre seu coração maluco do brasileiro
!” “I never knew about your crazy Brazilian heart!”
    They called Jaque
favelada
, meaning someone with the real style of the
favela
. The
favelas
of Brazil were notorious for their tangle of colorful shacks, drug trafficking rings, violent encounters with the police, and Brazilian funk music. And oh, how the
favela
could be stylish. Stylish like AK-47s slipped between the hipbones and Bermuda shorts of twenty-two-year-old drug lords. Stylish like high-heeled women stomping their feet to the rat-a-tat percussion of funk songs blasting from hand-painted boom boxes