The extraordinary popularity of books and magazines dedicated to travel comes as no surprise, given that more and more Americans are traveling each year for business, pleasure, and especially adventure. Our fascination with travel has never been so well represented as in this new addition to the Best American series: a wide-ranging compendium of the best travel writing published in 1999, culled from more than three hundred magazines, newspapers, and Web sites. This first collection of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING reads like a good novel. Best-selling author Bill Bryson and series editor Jason Wilson have put together a book that will surprise knowledgeable travelers and entrance newcomers with the glories of new worlds. Articles by such well-loved writers as Bill Buford and Ryszard Kapuscinski are included, as are those by exciting new voices. Ranging across myriad landscapes, from Central Park in New York City to the Ouadane oasis in Saharan Mauritania, THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2000 showcases the diversity and creative power of travel writing today. "[Best American Travel Writing] touches all the bases, and does it with panache." The San Francisco Chronicle JASON WILSON,  series editor, is the author of Godforsaken Grapes, Boozehound, and The Cider Revival. He is the creator of the newsletter and podcast Everyday Drinking. Wilson has been the series editor of The Best American Travel Writing since its inception in 2000. His work can be found at jasonwilson.com. BILL BRYSON is the best-selling author of A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything and numerous other books. Introduction Travel writing, as I once observed elsewhere, is the most accommodating - one might almost say the most promiscuous - of genres. Write a book or essay that might otherwise be catalogued under memoir, humor, anthropology, or natural history, and as long as you leave the property at some point, you can call it travel writing. With luck or persistence, you might even find a publisher willing to underwrite the cost of the trip. I remember the moment it occurred to me that this was an unusually agreeable way to make a living. It was in the early 1980s, when I was living in London. In those days I had a desk job for the London Times, but to supplement my income I began in my spare time to write small articles for newspapers and magazines. Usually these were features on some aspect of British life or culture, but once, more or less out of the blue, I was asked by an editor of the in-flight magazine of Trans World Airlines if I would go to Copenhagen, where the airline was about to inaugurate flights, and write of its attractions. Well, Copenhagen is a splendid city, and I had the most marvelous time. It was while dawdling over a coffee on Strrget, the city's principal pedestrian thoroughfare, that the giddy if somewhat tardy realization dawned on me that I was spending five days in a European capital at someone else's expense, having an awfully good time, and that all that was required of me in return was to write down a thousand words or so of observation on what I saw and did. And for this I was to be paid real money - pretty good money, as I recall. It was then it occurred to me that this was a pretty well unbeatable way to make a living. So I began to write travel books. The problem was that in the 1980s there wasn't any real market for them in the United States. Travel books at that time meant guidebooks and almost nothing more. Occasionally someone would write a travel narrative that would attract critical attention and sell well - Paul Theroux with The Great Railway Bazaar, William Least Heat-Moon with Blue Highways - but for some reason they weren't allowed into the travel section. Once a travel narrative was published and had finished its time on the 'New Releases' shelves (which in my case seemed to be something in the region of three or four hours), there wasn't any place to put it. On those occasions when I dropped into bookstores to visit my old titles and helpfully move them to positions where they might catch the eye of someone less than eight feet tall or not lying supine in the aisle, I would generally find them in the oddest places, shelved under current affairs or social commentary or geography - anywhere, in short, but near the travel section, where Fodor, Frommer, and Let's Go reigned supreme. How happy I am to report that all that has changed, though it took an amazingly long time when you consider how big the travel literature market has been in other countries for years. The first time I can recall seeing travel books (by which I mean real books with chapters and a story to tell) gathered together in their own section anywhere in the United States was only in about 1990, in San Francisco. But little by little the practice has spread until now it is customary, if not quite universal, for bookstores to offer an assortment of literary travel titles among the more conventional gu