Does your talent lie in travel or in living abroad? Though some people are good at both and others not cut out for either, the skill sets involved are surprisingly different.

There’s a great passage about the difference between being a born traveler and a born expat in Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s sequel to her astonishingly successful travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.

Committed is a skeptic’s look at marriage from all angles, sparked by Gilbert’s decision to wed Felipe, the Brazilian man she meets in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love. (Javier Bardem plays Felipe in the upcoming movie, which almost makes up for Julia Roberts playing Gilbert.)

The eight chapters of Committed have titles like “Marriage and History,” “Marriage and Ceremony,’ and “Marriage and Subversion.” The event that started Gilbert’s exhaustive look at this hallowed and maligned institution was that she and her boyfriend Felipe were pushed into marriage because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suddenly decides that Felipe can no longer enter the U.S. Now if she were married to a U.S. citizen, suggests a friendly Homeland Security agent, things might be easier…

But the official hoops they have to jump through and the strains it puts in their relationship are anything but easy.

Gilbert’s experience mirrors some of what I’ve been through—marrying for immigration purposes to a foreign-born lover you’re already committed to, so hey, Why not make it legal so that your lives are easier in the face of capricious and punishing laws? And then the fun (aka trouble) begins, especially if you both have different ideas of just what marriage means.

Although the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of just that–what marriage means–I’m not finding what I was looking for in Committed. For my tastes, there’s not enough about cross-cultural relationships, or about how a relationship can change (and not always for the better) when you make it official. But of course that’s not the book Gilbert set out to write, so I can’t really fault her for not writing what I most want to read. As many writers have noted, when you don’t find what you want to read, well, then go write it yourself!

What I did find in Committed, on pages 216 – 221, was a sharply drawn description of the differences between a born traveler and a born live-abroader.

Here’s the background: Gilbert and Felipe, her Brazilian honey, are homeless, waiting to have his visa approved so they can both return to the U.S. and start building a life there together. They’re wandering through Southeast Asia, and after six months of such travel and of being with each other night and day, tempers are fraying. Gilbert has been hurrying them from one cheap hotel room to the next, trying to keep their anxiety at bay, when she realizes that that technique doesn’t seem to work for her partner. Gilbert writes:

“Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep in a moving car, I have always been comforted with the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle; since he was the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to enjoy any of this drifting.

…The reality about Felipe, as I was beginning to realize, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds—all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all.

But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South American to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.”

So how about you? Are you more of a traveler, like Gilbert, or a born expat, like Felipe?

Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous travel memoir, is now a movie starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert. If the trailer is any indication, the film emphasizes the glib aspects of a memoir that teeters between messy real life and staged epiphanies. In the film, our first glimpse of Roberts/Gilbert, reacting to the prophecy of the requisite toothless holy man, shows a flash of Robert’s patented self-satisfied smirk. This doesn’t bode well for the film, which opened August 13.

Here’s the trailer:

For those three or four people who’ve never heard of Eat, Pray, Love, suffice to say that it’s self-realization and travel porn for the thinking woman.

Despite my reservations, I won’t be able to resist seeing the film anymore than I could resist reading the book. Critics were less than kind. Maureen Callahan called the book “narcissistic New Age reading.” Lev Grossman said the author was “trying too hard to be liked.” Grace Lichtenstein said the only thing wrong with the book is that “it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.”

I agree with all of those critics, and yet I tore through Eat, Pray, Love, reveling in Gilbert’s incisive descriptions of far-flung locales and internal states, spouting select quotes to my friends, and giving the book as a gift to more than one (woman) friend. Gilbert is compulsively readable, and if afterwards I felt a little queasy about the fast food feast I’d just wolfed down, in the midst of the meal I thought I was absorbing valuable nutrients.

And the film? Well, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the Brazilian guy Gilbert falls for in Bali. I’ll go just to hear how a Spaniard tackles a Brazilian accent.

Sandra Shaw Homer, who has lived in Costa Rica for over 20 years, did something a little over a year ago that all writers will applaud and probably envy. She pared away from her life all but the essential, so that she might, for a year, concentrate on writing the book she knew she was meant to write.

She’d been very active in a few local nonprofits, and she scaled back her commitments, quitting boards and letting people know that she’d be putting her energies elsewhere for a time.

And dammit if she didn’t write that book! In a year. I’m beyond envious—I’m positively inspired. I keep looking at little huts on the side of the road or up on top of mountains, thinking, Now there’s a good place to hole up and write.

The book is Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica. It centers around a garden on her land on the shores of Lake Arenal, an organic garden a longtime friend, Evelio, tries to create out of nothing. Evelio is a local, born and bred in the Arenal area, and he has a natural talent for planting and tending. But trying to garden organically, and on a plot ravaged by the winds off the lake, turns out to be more than he–and Sandy, as his enabler/landlord/cheerleader–bargained for.

Sandy describes the ups and downs of the gardening project, but more than that, she details how the achingly beautiful land around the lake is at risk of devastation. Not incidentally, a portrait of expat life emerges, as we learn of Sandy’s neighbors from Europe and North America and Costa Rica and see how they all coexist, sometimes peaceably, sometimes contentiously.

It’s a book about how we live on the land, how it nourishes us and how we should nourish it. It’s beautifully written and has a strong sense of place. I’m honored that Sandy let me read it and that she’s allowing me to publish an excerpt here.

Excerpt from Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica, by Sandra Shaw Homer

All land has a history, and the history around here goes back a long way.  Satellite images have picked up old roads all over this canton, long grown over, made by the indigenous peoples of pre-Columbian times.  One of these roads runs along the south shore of the lake, uphill from the current road and downhill from the ridge that links Tilarán with the tiny villages of Silencio and Río Chiquito.  I have ridden my mare along one stretch of this old road that runs behind San Luís and Tronadora, much washed out and crowded with second-growth forest, and it took a man on horseback with a machete to cut open a way for us to pass.  Artifacts of the native people show up everywhere.  When the lake is low, you can go out in a kayak or canoe and explore along the naked shoreline for pottery shards.  In town, there’s hardly a house that doesn’t sport a metate, or corn-grinding stone, that turned up when the foundation was being dug.  It usually has a potted plant sitting on it.

Modern local history dates from the late nineteenth century, when there were gold mines south of here in Las Juntas and Líbano.  It was rough country then, virgin forest, and the only way in was by horse or mule.  The gold was shipped out in ox-carts.  (More recently it was taken out in helicopters!)  Gradually settlement drifted north, and people carved farms out of the ancient forests, establishing a fiercely independent, frontier life-style.  Even in the 1930s, it could take the better part of a week to get to San José – from Tilarán on horseback (oxcart took longer) to Cañas, where you waited days for a small boat to take you down the Bebedero to the Río Tempisque and the port of Puntarenas, then by all-day train up to the Central Valley.  The Inter-American highway wasn’t completed along its northern reaches until the sixties.  There was no paved road around the lake until the eighties.  (It’s still not finished.)  I have met retired school teachers in Tilarán who remember four-hour treks on horseback to get to their one-room school houses on the lake, sometimes in mud up to the horses’ knees.  The niece of one of these teachers told me that her grandparents owned our farm in those days, and that it was a much bigger property.  A lot of the farms around here were broken up when ICE acquired the land for the reservoir.  Since then, the process of development has been inexorable.  As long as there’s someone to buy, sooner or later a farmer will face the economic conditions that force him to sell, frequently just a small piece at a time, enough to give him ready cash to get along until beef prices go up, or the weather improves enough to let him get a good crop in.  There are still some fair-sized farms around the lake, but since the early nineties development has speeded up and been gringo-ized. (At least in Tilarán, the word gringo can refer to Europeans as well as to non-native-Spanish-speakers from north of the Río Grande. Our nearest neighbors are Germans.)

Earlier this year an 18-wheeler parked its trailer by the side of the road just uphill from Cinco Esquinas, smack in your face where the first grand view of the lake should be.  It was a mobile office with the name of an international real-estate company painted in large letters on its side.  This was beyond ugly, but it never opened.  Instead the world-wide recession brought local real estate sales almost to a halt.  Still the trailer sat there, month after month, until finally some locals couldn’t resist jacking the thing up to steal a pair of off-side tires, leaving it listing crazily on a slender pile of cement blocks.  Just the other day it finally disappeared.  How it was moved, nobody seems to know.  But nobody was sorry to see it go.  This little story – especially the part about getting that trailer out of there – is no doubt already brewing up into a local legend.

We’ve been here long enough to see people come and go.  Some can brave the remoteness, the vagaries of the weather and the strangeness of the culture, and some can’t.  Some people get attached to the land, and some don’t.

When I was growing up, my family never lived long enough in one place for me to become bound to the land.  We lived in some beautiful – and not so beautiful – places, both rural and suburban.  From my early twenties until I came to Costa Rica, I moved almost as frequently, living exclusively in cities.   It was a little shock to realize, when we started building this house five years ago, that I’ve lived on Lake Arenal, and on this particular plot of ground, longer than I’ve lived any place else in my entire life.

You can’t get attached to the earth in Philadelphia or New York.  How many millions of people never do?  It’s this attachment that fires my desire to protect it – but not just my attachment to this particular plot of ground, but to the whole thing, the planet.  It’s not such a giant leap of the imagination from the sight of a growing young forest to the image of a tiny blue speck in the vastness of the universe.  So, finally, it is the sense of place that has captured me and pinned me to the planet.

It is gratifying to be part of the history of the land, to be growing a farm instead of shrinking it, to be building a forest instead of cutting it down.  Here, in one tiny corner of the planet, the question becomes obvious:  do we add something by our tenancy of the earth, or do we take it away?

Funny that the best travel writers seem to be cranks, curmudgeons, or kvetchers. Paul Theroux is surely one of the great curmudgeons, but with his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar, his rough edges seem to have smoothed out a bit.  I’m not sure if that’s such a good thing.

He’s been writing for decades, novels and essays as well as travel books, and I encourage you to dive deep into his work. His latest book (which came out in paperback this summer) retraces the trip he recounts in his first book, The Great Railway Bazaar, about a 1973 journey by train across Asia. The author was in his early thirties, and it was the book that made his reputation.

This time around, he’s in his late sixties, and more thoughtful and reflective. He’s a little less apt to skewer an entire country with one well-turned and often thrillingly offensive phrase (Salvadorans, he claimed in the Old Patagonia Express, suffer from “little-country loyalty and violent nationalism”), and it seems on this trip he’s more cognizant that what he brings along in terms of psychic baggage is at least as important as what he sees out the train window. In other words, he has learned that we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

Then why do I like The Great Railway Bazaar better than Ghost Train? Well, of course there’s joy in the apt insult and in well-expressed misery–he did seem prodigiously unhappy in The Great Railway Bazaar, and in later interviews Theroux confirmed that indeed he was.  But my preference for the young crank over the older and kinder writer also makes me wonder if middle-aged spread affects not only the body but the mind as well. Do we become wider but also shallower and less tumultuous, like an old river? Tumult can be pretty exciting.

And maybe only the young can get away with grand (but revealing) generalizations such as are expressed in this passage from The Great Railway Bazaar:

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive. And on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.

Even more than The Great Railway Bazaar, I loved The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas, maybe because I know the Americas better than Asia and have visited (and lived in) many of the countries he travels through. In this book, he starts in Massachusetts and ends at the tip of the South American continent, traveling by train all the way.  Each of the 22 chapters is named for a train line, from Boston’s Lake  Shore Limited, through the 7:30 to Guatemala City and the Passenger Train to Machu Pichu, all the way to Tierra del Fuego’s Old Patagonia Express.

Besides the telling detail and the history lessons, I like when he ruminates on solo travel:

Travel at its best is a solitary experience: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with Oh look, it’s raining. And You see a lot of tress here. Traveling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican buttercups, tend to say things like Where is the rest of your team?).

But whatever the order of my preferences, Theroux is the real thing, a travel writer who makes you proud to be one. Bottom line: his books elevate the whole genre. Find them. Read them.

The Second Journey: The Road Back to Yourself
by Joan Anderson

The good:

–While not strictly about travel, Anderson’s book uses the metaphor of the journey to good effect in her discussion of midlife women ready to “navigate the rapids of change” in their lives.

–The book is small and fits nicely in your hand (in this world of digitized everything, I like to remind myself of why I love actual books).

–The tone is casual, personal, and the book is a fast read.

–There’s an abundance of good travel and personal growth quotes, like Jean Shinoda Bolen’s: ‘When a woman is at a crossroads, the heroine wants to make her own decision, while the nonheroine wants it made for her.’

The not-so-good:

–The writing often seems formulaic, with the author trying too hard to make insignificant things highly significant. For example, in Chapter 7, “Unfamiliar Territory,” Anderson hires a local fisherman to take her out to the beach that, years before, prompted her to write her best-known book, A Year By the Sea. The fisherman mentions that they’ll have to work with the tides, and that the tide cycle sets his whole week. “How coincidental,” writes Anderson. “His days are controlled by the tide cycles and my thoughts have been about life cycles.” Is it just me, or does this not seem so very coincidental? All of life is about cycles, especially if your work involves nature.

–I often felt excluded from her generalizations about women and their life cycles. She is a white, heterosexual, 60-something woman who has kids and sees her own life in mythic terms. If you are pretty much the same, what she says will speak to you. If not, well, you’ll have to be content with the odd insight that applies to everyone, not just to people like her.

–Another formula that didn’t work for me was her “ten phases of a woman’s life” chart, which she introduces by intoning (I can almost hear Linda Hunt doing the voice-over): Since the beginning of time, women’s lives have been divided into phases…. The since-the-beginning-of-time phases purportedly include:
–Ages 21- 28: Being affirmed by a man—the desire to procreate
–Ages 28-25: Birthing, mothering, caretaking, putting others first
–Ages 25-42: Leaving self out but occasionally looking beyond
There are, of course, millions of women in the world leading lives on schedules very different from what this chart describes. Anderson does her readers a disservice, assuming that we all share the same basic life story. We don’t.

–Some of the book seems like an advertisement for her business of leading women on retreat. Walking the beach in Chapter 8, Anderson reflects on “all the weekend women I have brought out here”– the stutterer who returned from her weekend “bold enough to sing about herself.” The widow and mother of three boys who “released her grief in order to rejoin the human race.” And the anorexic who “buried her scales and stopped measuring her worth by lack of weight.”

For my tastes, these thumbnail case studies claim too much credit, and ring untrue if only because the transformations all supposedly took place within two days. And the hubris of the claims makes me think back on other parts of the book and wonder if they, too, were inflated in some way.