Marco and Elisa, the Dutch couple with whom I'd shared a taxi ride to this
point, glanced at each other in horror over the predicament. Hanging palm
fronds brushed softly against the bright yellow and white paint of the
pleasant, tiny, eight-unit hotel. A young girl with a straw broom lingered
under the cool shade of the porch and awaited our decision while
straightening a hammock. Marco and Elisa composed themselves and Elisa
said to me, "If you really, really want to stay here, I guess we can find
somewhere else." Her eyes, however, begged me to go away.

I humbly insisted that Marco and Elisa take the room, then continued by
taxi along bumpy roads with deep puddles that had been gouged by
tremendous downpours and dried quickly in the hot sun. We drove from hotel to hotel, but there were no rooms at any of the other seven inns. "Too
many people in town for the fiesta," said the innkeeper of the 26-unit
Bayside Inn, the island's grandest accommodations. At most destinations,
"no vacancy" wouldn't necessarily mean a crisis. But here
on Corn Island, 45 miles off Nicaragua's eastern coast in the middle
of the Caribbean, it presented a special dilemma.

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After I went through the semester's syllabus and briefly discussed the reading and writing expected of my students, I asked them what notions of travel writing they were bringing to class. The students began speaking about guidebooks and glossy magazines, and I quickly learned that few of my students had read much of the literature of travel -- no Graham Greene, no D.H. Lawrence and no Paul Theroux. That wasn't a big surprise and I could hardly blame them. For years, travel writing has been treated within English departments like the redheaded stepchild of literature, and rarely does a travel book garner a mention on a course syllabus.

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