I was reminded of the photo while reading, "Mungo Made Me Do It," Kira Salak's harrowing account of kayaking alone 600 miles up the Niger river to Timbuktu in northeast Mali. The writer's destination is another mosque, the Djinguereber, where there is a door that, according to local legend, can end the world if opened.

Salak's essay rightly belongs in "The Best American Travel Writing 2003," a superb collection of essays that takes armchair travelers along on unorthodox journeys to some of the world's most intriguing and dangerous destinations.

Salak's river journey from Old Ségou, in an inflatable kayak, is compelling and terrifying. Lightning storms strike as she paddles, hostile villagers give chase; she meets a Dogon sorceress with unexplained powers in her arm. There is depravity, fatigue and the inevitable dysentery, which just make her more determined. But among the shadows is the knowledge that Mungo Park, the 17th-century explorer, who made the same journey and is her inspiration, died on the Niger and was never found.

Guest editor Ian Frazier's selections range from Stephen Benz's lighthearted "A Cup of Cuban Coffee" concerning the quest for a demitasse of café cubano, to Tom Bissell's tragic "Eternal Winter," about the death of Uzbekistan's Aral Sea — "perhaps the single, largest man-made ecological catastrophe in history," writes Bissell. And one most of us know little about.

The best pieces, such as Scott Carrier's "Over There," about his travel and travails in Afghanistan, contain a wicked mixture of humor and misfortune. Carrier's grisly account of the siege of Qala Jungi (in which 400 foreign Taliban made a desperate stand holed up in a cellar, and only 85 survived, including American John Walker Lindh) is balanced by a humorous account of what happens if you wear the wrong color turban in Mazar-e-Sharif.

In the wonderfully written "I Am Fashion," first published in the New Yorker, Michael Specter travels with Sean "Puff Daddy" (P. Diddy) Combs to Paris for Fashion Week. The rap impresario, then facing a trial for a shooting, spent his evenings sketching designs for clothing that would make him a major player in the fashion world.

"Combs represented the ultimate expression of 1990s style: excessive, ironic and a tiny bit thuggish," writes Specter. "He wore fur and leather and draped himself in enough diamonds to rival Princess Caroline of Monaco. Combs made his first visits to the Louvre and to Versailles which he described to me as 'some awe-inspiring s---.' "

Specter follows Combs as he strives to look "ghetto fabulous" in the deliciously low world of runways, parties and extraordinary personalities. "(Karl) Lagerfied seemed pleased to have Puffy in the house — but wasn't quite sure what to do with him."

Closer to home, Hank Stuever's "Just One Word: Plastic," focuses on the town of Wilmington, Del., where he and millions of others send their interest payments every month. "Wilmington hinges on the the great lie that you can have it all." And in "The Ballad of Route 66," Christopher Hitchins becomes a road warrior in a red Corvette on America's most mythic highway.

This fourth entry in the series reflects editor Frazier's subversive definition of what constitutes travel writing. Frazier says in his introduction that he believes travel writing "is environmental by definition; the travel writer is unavoidably stuck with relating the sights and smells and general chaos he or she happens to find."

But the past two years also have challenged every kind of travel, and these essays reflect a world changed by suspicion, war, terrorism and the unexpected misfortune that visits travelers caught up in events beyond their control.