The Best American Travel Writing 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page A

fingers on a computer. In some respects, this is true. Distance is no longer a problem. You can nip over to Hong Kong or spend a weekend in Dubai or Rio. But as some countries open up, others shut down. Some countries have yet to earn their place on the traveler’s map, such as Turkmenistan and Sudan, but I’ve been to both, and although I was the only sightseer at the time, I found hospitality, marvels, and a sense of discovery.
    Distance was once the problem for the traveler to overcome. How to get to the Indies, or cross the Taklamakan Desert, or navigate the Sepik River? When Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin Island in 1887, it was as though he was heading for another planet. In my lifetime, Albania and Cuba were once forbidden and inaccessible countries, but these days you’ll find them full of tourists sunning themselves on the beaches and windsurfers offshore.
    The problem of distance has been solved. There are good trains through the Taklamakan Desert and tour boats up the Sepik. You can get yourself to the Highlands of New Guinea or the foothills of the Himalayas, or to Timbuktu, without much trouble. But access is still a problem in those, and in many other, places: in the fractured countries of Africa, in quarrelsome Pakistan, in the disputed parts of India, and in the nations that have emerged from the old Soviet Union—Dagestan, Chechnya, and now Ukraine. And there are the inner cities of the United States, many of which pose challenges to the curious visitor with probing questions. In writing this, I am betraying my love of reading about adventures and ordeals—the traveler’s baptism of fire. These places that defy many travelers are opportunities for those who are willing to take a risk, for the reward of making a discovery and then writing about it brilliantly.
    P AUL T HEROUX

ELIF BATUMAN
Poisoned Land
    FROM
The New Yorker
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    L AST SEPTEMBER , at a hospital in eastern Croatia, my father and I visited a collection of some 400 human kidneys. Most had belonged to the victims of a mysterious, fatal kidney disease, which occurs in agrarian communities on the Danube River and its tributaries. Some villages have it; others, seemingly identical in every way, do not. The onset of the disease, which is known as Balkan endemic nephropathy (often abbreviated as BEN ), takes place in middle to later life, after the patient has lived in an affected village for 15 or 20 years. The first symptoms include weakness, anemia, and a coppery skin discoloration. The kidneys begin to atrophy, and about half of patients also develop a rare cancer of the upper urinary tract. Without a kidney transplant or treatment by dialysis, death usually occurs within a year.
    At the kidney collection, a pathologist took several formalin-filled jars out of a cabinet and lined them up on the counter. Inside were kidneys riddled with holes, misshapen kidneys with visible tumors, biopsied kidneys sliced in half, and atrophied kidneys, ghostly pale, some as small as walnuts. My father, a nephrologist, says that he has never seen kidneys as tiny as those removed from BEN patients.
    BEN was first described in the 1950s. Over the years, many theories have been proposed to explain the disease, from cadmium poisoning and hantaviruses to toxic molds and chromosomal mutation. Uncertainty and controversy surround the most basic data, such as the number of people with the disease. One doctor I spoke to puts the figure at a hundred thousand. A recent Croatian study found that the incidence of the disease is declining, while a Serbian study found that it isn’t.
    Because BEN takes decades to develop, investigators are always following a cold trail, and this makes the disease a particularly intractable puzzle. Animals don’t live long enough to get it, and respond to toxic substances differently from humans, which limits the possibilities of experimental research. The villages affected are in a demographically fragmented region,