The Best Parts of Travel Are the Things You Don't Remember

Manson opens with a one-liner — "I have vomited in six different countries" — and follows it into a tour of the small, mostly-unphotographed encounters that have actually shaped his life: changing a flat tire as Indian villagers stare, arguing all night with a 9/11-truther English kid in a hostel, an old Ukrainian drunk telling him about a Soviet U-boat off Mississippi, meeting his future wife in a Brazilian nightclub. The piece argues that the postcard moments aren't the point of travel; the disorienting, in-between, half-forgotten ones are.