CALL YOU WHEN I LAND

A travel writer describes how her adventures around the world have shaped her professional and romantic life.

“I don’t want to get married!” When Fodor’s Travel senior editor Vargas, who was born in Bogotá and lives in New York City, screamed these words into the waterfalls of Iguazú National Park in Argentina, she had no idea how much they would change her life. After ending her engagement with her partner, the author felt abandoned by her support system and guilty about her decision. She told herself, “I promise I’ll earn this,” implying that, for the rest of her life, she would start making choices that justified her “twentysomething” decision. What follows is a chronicle of a series of global wanderings that helped Vargas establish a career as a travel writer and meet the new love of her life. In Colombia, while working as a travel editor for the London-based publication The Global Journey, she interviewed a former guerrilla soldier while also uncovering the truth behind the murder of one of her relatives. While on a government-sponsored trip to Indonesia, Vargas got lost in the jungle while generating content for her blog, The Pin the Map Project. In a moment of poetic justice, she writes about how her boyfriend proposed to her at Iguazú in the same place where she decided to end her first relationship. “Looking at the photo now, my expression says it all: pure, unbridled joy and triumph,” she writes. Although the author’s sincere and passionate voice render the book supremely readable, her approach to memoir is largely descriptive, recounting events with a minimum of self-reflection. Occasional glimmers of deeper thinking—such as a trenchant reflection on whether her love of travel is helpful or destructive—suggest that Vargas may find more profundity in future work.

An entertaining memoir by a globe-trotting writer with a promising career still ahead of her.