Travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest has traveled the world on her own. She’s also drunk many beers with us. So visits with her are always full of great stories. We caught up with her recently in the middle of touring for her newest book, 100 Places Every Woman Should Go and found out what’s up with traveling, La Virgen and slutty women in China.

Guanabee: So Stephanie, you just wrote a book about how to
travel the world as a woman. What makes you an
authority and why do women need their own travel book?
Stephanie: Since 1996, I’ve mingled with the Russian Mafiya,
polished Chinese propaganda, belly danced with Cuban rumba queens, and rallied with Zapatistas. I even spent a year driving 45,000 miles across America in an ’88 Honda Hatchback. I’ve spent a lot of time observing the gente of the planet. And women really do travel differently than men. Not just in terms of packing and certain safety precautions, but motivations, itineraries, dreams.

Guanabee: So what kinds of motivations and dreams are we talking about? This doesn’t have anything to do with “The Secret” does it?

Stephanie: The book highlights places where women made history (the balcony where Evita Peron orated about social injustice), created works of art (Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul), and performed miracles (the fields of Fatima, Portugal, where La Virgen once ordered the sun to do a swan dive over the sky).

Guanabee: Interesting. How did you, a Tejana from South Texas, get into this line of work?
Stephanie: My senior year in high school, I attended a journalism convention where a rockstar CNN correspondent talked about covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and assorted riots, revolutions, and coups. I decided then and there that I wanted his job. I mean, the only thing people take to the streets and shake their fists about in Texas is football. So I studied Russian for four years and headed off to Moscow.

Guanabee: Does your family think you’re a crazy “huila” (loose woman) for running all over God’s green earth without a husband or guardian?
Stephanie: My relationship with my mother totally transformed when she visited me in Beijing. For the first time in our lives, she was dependent on me to translate. She also saw what I was doing out in the big wide world, and she respected it. Now, my mom is my favorite travel companion.

Guanabee: We know what you mean. Our mom totally gave us props that time we dragged her to Miami for P. Diddy’s White Party. But don’t you find a lot of Latinos and, more specifically, Latinas are unlikely to travel?
Stephanie: I almost never meet Latinos on the road, and it really saddens me. Certainly we possess the skill set to travel. Many of us descend from people who either escaped brutal regimes or crossed murderous deserts with everything they owned strapped to their back. Actually, that might be why so many of us stay home: Our sheer survival has been “adventurous” enough. When vacation time rolls around, we just want to be tranquilo.

La familia also prevents some of us from traveling. For better and worse, they are our backbone, and separation can be exceedingly painful, if not surgically impossible.

The cost of travel can also be prohibitive to many Latinos. Yet there are so many travel grants and fellowships out there, from the Henry Luce Scholarship to the Fulbright to the Rotary Club. And if you crash on people’s couches or in airports, eat street food, and avoid Western Europe, you’ll probably spend less than if you stayed home. For the past fourteen months, I’ve been living nomadically for this very reason: It’s cheaper than paying rent (and a hell of a lot more fun).

Guanabee: Cozy! But getting back to the book, are there really 100 places every woman should go? It seems like a lot of places.
Stephanie: My initial goal was to only include places where local women, indigenous people, and the environment are treated with kindness, but then I realized I’d have to axe most of the list. So, I tried to highlight the work of local community activists so that if you – like me – feel guilty sipping Pinot Noir in Napa Valley while undocumented farm workers are hunched over in the sun [Ed. Note: Whoops!], you know where to volunteer or send a check afterward.

Guanabee: So, you travel alone most of the time. If you did travel with a friend, would you rather travel with Frida Kahlo who you describe in your book as “A tequila-slamming, dirty joke-telling smoker,” or the Virgin Mary who’s, you know, La Virgen?
Stephanie: La Virgencita, of course! For starters, she’s highly mobile. (Sadly, Frida could only hobble after shattering her spine in that trolley car accident.) And if we ever ran low on funds, La Virgen could appear on another cloak or tortilla that we could sell for big bucks.

Guanabee: Yeah, and you’d never have to worry about her hooking up with some scrub in your bed. Speaking of which…you’ve traveled all over the globe and written everything down. You must have some pretty great stories. Can you share one our readers might like? (I.e. Sex sells, plus everyone who works here is super horny, so make it good.)
Stephanie: Once, in China, my married expat friend “Mariela” [Ed. Note: Names have been changed to protect the slutty.] met her Chinese lover for a rendezvous and – to her great dismay – her birth control sponge got stuck inside her. Her husband was on his way home from a business trip. Frantic, she gave me a call, asking for help. But what could I do? Pluck it out with chopsticks? I escorted her to the hospital and tried to explain what happened to the doctor in Mandarin. But when I looked up the word “sponge” in my dictionary, there were like twenty options, all written in characters. Hoping for the best, I pointed at the first one. The doctor looked horrified – and for good reason. The “sponge” I chose meant “sea anemone.” Which Chinese like to eat.

Imagine you aren’t feeling so horny any more, huh?

Guanabee: Yeah, thanks. So, what’s your next book about and where does your next adventure take you?
Stephanie:My next book documents the year I spent in Mexico, battling my bi-cultural identity crisis and hanging out with undocumented workers, gay activists, indigenous resistance fighters, Zapatistas, and a dominatrix. It’s called Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, and Atria/Simon & Schuster will publish in August 2008. Between now and then, I’ll be spending a month apiece in Mozambique, New Orleans, Spain, and Russia and days or weeks in Paris, Whidbey Island, Nebraska City, New York City, Beijing, and San Francisco.

Guanabee: Damn. You get around more than Derek Jeter’s herpes. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with us. Anything parting words for our readers?
Stephanie: At some point in life, return to your motherland—be it a neighborhood or a nation—to learn from the roots within you. Having grown up in South Texas in the seventies, when Mexican culture was mostly repressed, I only learned how to curse in Spanish (pinche pendejo!) and even then, I didn’t know what I was saying. The recent year I spent exploring Mexico gave me a profoundly deeper intimacy of my people, my culture, and ultimately of myself. So go for it. Take to Madre Camino. Travel far. Wide. Now.

If you feel like starting your journey next Thursday, Stephanie will be reading in New York City at KGB Bar at 85 East Fourth Street on Thursday, November 8 at 7 p.m.

News Bloc: STEPHANIE’S NEW GUIDEBOOK [Around the Bloc]