For a full list of today's Salon Travel stories, go to the Travel home page. A woman confronts her painful past on an Outward Bound pilgrimage into the heart of fear. Wanderlust Sexual charades in Seoul To save face, I had to pretend to rape my Korean girlfriend, and she had to pretend to resist. The most difficult aspect of being a travel writer has little to do with the threat of violence or theft or even disease. The worst part of travel writing is that you have to write.
Writing is a solitary activity that requires a controlled environment of concentration.
In practice, trying to synthesize these two activities can be like trying to combine a disco with a monastery. Invariably, enjoying one activity will compromise the other. Since I had a lot of writing to do when I left Russia, I headed straight for Latvia. Riga, I'd hoped, would provide me with the perfect degree of comfort and anonymity for my writing tasks. Unfortunately, my writer's discipline has never been that strong.