Hola amigos: National Geographic Traveler-  April 2013- features a “Return to Your Roots”, a going home theme where readers “meet” five travelers, writers who return to their ancestral lands and explore five different ancestral places: Ireland, Taiwan, Sicily (Italy), Krakow (Poland), and Angola (also Portuguese Angola). Exploring the land of your beginnings is a new powerful trend in travel, it forces you to examine yourself understanding where you came from. ES

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Angola

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A duo dances by the beach on Ilha de Luanda in Angola.

Photograph by Alfredo D’Amato, Panos Pictures

Angola

By Joe Mozingo

We rolled down a sliver of red dirt road, weeds and sticks cracking under our tires, in search of an old slave port that long ago vanished in mangrove jungle. This out-of-the-way track made me nervous because it was exactly where the travel advisories warned visitors not to go in Angola, a country riddled with land mines after three decades of  civil war.

My guide and translator, a British expat named Paul, asked the two young boys showing us the way if they knew of any mines. I heard them say hesitantly, “No.”

“They say there aren’t any,” Paul confirmed.

This was not convincing.

We bumped along farther until the track fell away entirely into a gully, and we set down the path on foot. The sun was getting low, washing the tops of the palm trees in ocher light. A man harnessed high in the fronds tapping sap for palm wine looked at us curiously as we passed beneath.

We were just outside the town of Soyo, hiking to an estuary of the Congo River, about five miles from its mouth on the Atlantic. I had envisioned finding old stone docks and iron slave pens, perhaps strangled in roots like some ancient Khmer ruin. Even if I found that, I did not know what it would mean; there was no checklist to mark off, no tangible objective or end point.

I was on a quest that was more than anything an act of imagination—if not insanity, given the cost and time it took me to get here. I was looking for the man who gave me the surname Mozingo, an ancestor who landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1644. He was a “Negro” man who married a white Englishwoman during a brief period in colonial America when that could happen. More than 300 years later, his white descendants, including me, had long lost track of that history and were wondering where they got this funny name. Many insisted, sometimes vociferously, they were Italian or French or from anywhere but Africa, but the truth was here in Angola, this troubled country on the western coast of central Africa, which once sent torrents of slaves to America.

Variants of the name are common here even today, and the revered first Christian king of Kongo was named Mozinga. In the year Edward Mozinga likely journeyed across the Middle Passage, 4,336 slaves were documented as being taken from Angola, out of 6,529 from all of Africa. They went to Brazil and the Caribbean, and a tiny fraction ended up in Virginia.

I knew I couldn’t find records of my ancestor here as I could with my other forebears in Europe. I would not see the school he went to or the church he attended, or pore through baptismal records, or meet long-lost cousins with oral histories. But I needed to have a sense of where he came from, beyond the wild phantasms most of us in the West
harbor about sub-Saharan Africa. I needed to cross a breach in my mind that made it difficult to really fathom my family’s story, for Edward to be real.

We descended into the mangrove forest, where the path ended at a clear stream. Paul said he’d wait there. The boys and I trudged down the stream as it got deeper and joined more streams in a silty tidal swamp.

The boys laughed as they attempted to spear a crab with a stick near an old dugout canoe decaying in the mangrove roots. The forest seemed to be closing in, not leading us to a port where slave ships could have launched. We crossed a sulfurous mudflat that slurped at our feet and had the boys in hysterics. I thought about how children like these, their
parents somewhere waiting for them to return home, must have marched through here in shackles, never to see their families again.

“Onde porto?” I asked.

They all pointed down. “Here.”

The port can’t be here, I thought; no ship could get here. I started down the channel, the water rising above my knees.

The boys just stood there on the mudflat, studying the crazy white man.

“Porto aqui?” I yelled back again.

“Sim, sim, sim, aqui—Yes, yes, yes, here,” they said.

Maybe they were right. Maybe long ago, silt filled in the port. The sun was setting in the northwest, and the mosquitoes were swirling around me. I knew I had to stop. When you journey into the past, you always want to go further, and you’ll never get to your destination, and you’ll never be sated, just as you’ll never fully understand your
roots as they split into infinity. But you learn something in the glimpses.

Joe Mozingo is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of The Fiddler on Pantico Run.

Krakow

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Travelers take in the centuries-old Sukiennice (“cloth hall”) from a café in Krakow’s Market Square.

Photograph by Marcus Hoehn, laif/Redux

Krakow, Poland

By Nina Strochlic
A few times a year throughout my childhood, my mother and I sat around a tan suitcase. She’d pop open the single working hinge and pull out sepia-toned photographs and frayed papers—curfew extensions, identity cards, immigration forms. The suitcase held the remaining tangible links to my grandparents’ prewar lives.

In the late 1930s, my grandparents were forced from their homes in Poland into ghettos, and later into labor and concentration camps. On nights the suitcase came out, we’d watch videos of my jovial grandpa remembering the miles of frozen marches and how he won my grandmother’s affection by baking her a cake in a displaced persons camp. Soon after, they got married, boarded a ship for Cuba, and sneaked off in New York City. My grandmother died long before I was born, and my grandfather died when I was five, but I know their stories. I know that when my grandmother’s parents and brother returned to the rural house where they’d stored valuables, they were murdered by its postwar inhabitants. “Never forget” wasn’t just a phrase for my family; it was a mantra.

My grandfather swore he’d never return to his homeland, but my mom and I needed to go. I thought of it as time travel—Poland was a country of ghosts, a crowd of bearded men walking down cobblestoned streets and hastily evacuated shtetls. A country stuck in the loop of 1938. But the Krakow we encountered, with its soaring castle and café-lined medieval squares, was nothing like that. Virtually unscathed by the Germans, it had the charm of a young, modern city set amidst the mystery of an ancient one. Bursting with Jewish tours, museums, and shops, the city catered to tourists like us—pilgrims unearthing their heritage. Mom and I arrived with a jumble of addresses and
began a scavenger hunt in search of my grandparents’ past. On a corner in the center of old town we found the storefront site of the seasonally rotating ice cream parlor/fur shop my great-grandparents owned, and across a bridge a music school now occupied the ghetto building they were forced to live in. But our main goal was to see my grandmother’s apartment, to touch the childhood home of a woman I never knew.

Rising from the middle of Krakow, a Gothic castle keeps a watchful eye on its city. We found my grandmother’s building on a street encircling it, a classic limestone structure. Standing inside the dim hallway, my mother holding a note that explained our quest, we rapped on the wooden door of Number 2. A middle-aged woman cracked it open
and greeted us hesitantly. Her eyes flitted over the handwritten note, and confusion melted into warmth. She introduced herself as Marta and ushered us in. The apartment was beautiful, with ornate inlaid wood floors. “It hasn’t been remodeled, except for the bathroom, since my mother bought it in 1949,” she said. Mom’s expression mirrored
my own disbelief. I could almost imagine my great-grandparents stoking the green ceramic-tiled heater that stretched to the ceiling. We talked to Marta for an hour, lingering in the apartment that, save a war, could have been our home.

As my mother and I left, it was hard not to admit our unexpected love for Krakow. The city no longer conjured only fleeing Jews and ghetto walls. Along with them were pierogi festivals and imposing castles. I put mementoes of these in the suitcase where the old and new worlds could finally merge.

Nina Strochlic is an avid traveler and a reporter for Newsweek and the Daily Beast.

Ireland

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Slieve League Cliffs, County Donegal.

Photograph by Radius Images, Corbis

Ireland

By Liz Beatty
We find the emerald pastures of great-great-grandfather’s farm an hour and a half northwest of Dublin, just “beyond the Pale” in medieval Irish terms, near the rural market town of Cootehill in County Cavan, Ulster. Our road trip begins here, bound for the northerly shorelines of this region, composed of Northern Ireland plus three counties of the Irish Republic—a region at times divided by religion, but forever fused by deep roots in ancient Ireland.

With their 85-year-old grandmother, my sons, Mack, 11, and James, 18, pick small cut stones from the ruins of a well, the last vestige of our Beatty homestead. Mom is humming “Irish Eyes,” as the three huddle from a steady drizzle under her red drugstore umbrella. Standing at the farm gate, I picture William Senior setting off from here with his
young family, bound for timber reaches in far-off Upper Canada in 1835, ten years before the start of the potato famine. I knew coming here would feel this way, as if we are their emissaries, making the return journey that they knew they never would. If there’s such a thing as shared genetic memory, the idea of three generations summoning it together just seemed important. From County Cavan, we head west and then north, soaking in the primal vibe of the Donegal coast. At Slieve League, we brace against 55-mile-an-hour gusts to glimpse some of Europe’s highest ocean cliffs, dropping nearly 2,000 feet to an angry sea. We then wind through a wild, deserted mountain bog to the top of Glengesh Pass—breathtaking and bleak. The road hairpins out of sight. I’ve completely misjudged our travel time to the northern village of Dunfanaghy. This long day isn’t over. The skies blacken, and the heavens open. Mother hums “Stormy Weather,” and, with 30 miles left, all the road signs turn Gaelic.

At Dunfanaghy, a rising tide fills the wide shallow harbor just outside Arnold’s Hotel. Inside, Mack presses for another family story before bed. He’s our lore guy, for years collecting tads of our history the way a robin gathers bits of twigs. Tonight it’s great-grandfather’s cousin Sir Edward, the grandson of a Cootehill farm boy who became head
of a global transportation empire, the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mack recalls the picture of him in our living room. He is standing beside the Prince of Wales in 1930 on the maiden voyage of the Empress of Britain—an ocean liner sunk by a German U-boat in 1940, just miles off Dunfanaghy’s shores. We vow to find a good lookout tomorrow to see
what we can see.

By morning, everything has changed. The sun shines. The breeze is warm and gentle. We hike to Tramore Beach’s vast empty expanse; the boys race down its massive dunes, formed in the great storm of 1839; we ride big-boned Irish ponies across the Dunfanaghy tidal flats. And in one brilliant, no-granny-left-behind mission, James insists that he
and his dad half-carry my mom up a steep, craggy path to the highest, most westerly lookout of Horn Head peninsula.

As they reach the summit, I see in James’s eyes a satisfaction born out of wisdom far beyond his 18 years. His grandmother’s joy is palpable, infectious, as together they survey what feels like the northwest corner of the universe—the Atlantic and bloomin’ heather as far as the eye can see.

Three hundred miles later—including one golf game with two slices into the North Atlantic—we ponder how best to kill seven hours before flying home. Sleep? Pshaw. Like any self-respecting Irish progeny, we go to the pub.

Mack tosses five euros in an open guitar case to seal the deal. The bandleader introduces Mom. She’s surprised but doesn’t hesitate, squeezing up to the mic through a cheek-by-jowl throng of Gaelic football fans at Dublin’s Oliver St. John Gogarty pub. This Temple Bar hub pulsates with revelers, their beloved “Dubs” having just recaptured the
championship after a 16-year drought.

“If you don’t know the words, you can’t sing the song,” yells the banjo player as Mom taps the mic for a sound check.

“Just say the words here,” she instructs as she points to her right hearing aid. Eyes roll as the band proffers a few bars of a familiar lead-in. The song: “Danny Boy.”

What follows is transcendent. As she leans into her audience, lyrics flowing seamlessly in one ear and out her mouth, her classically trained, freakishly youthful voice sends this Celtic gem soaring. At the end, band members hug her and locals line up to shake her hand. “Imagine what she could do if she knew the feckin words!” shouts the banjo guy
over deafening applause.

Later, in that quiet descent to slumber, I replay this moment. Yes, her voice, but more her pluck, her fearless embrace of the moment.

It’s a delightful end to a journey that has revealed so much—for sure, illuminating bonds with those long gone, but mostly, reconnecting us to the very best in us here and now.

Canadian writer Liz Beatty wrote about Ontario’s War of 1812 events in the October 2012 issue.

Sicily

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The Temple of Concordia lies in the archaeological area of Agrigento, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Photograph by Johanna Huber, SIME

Sicily

By Renée Restivo
I’ve heard my grandfather’s stories about the Restivo family farm near the village of Castrofilippo all my life. “It’s right down the block from the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento,” he bragged.

Over a decade ago, I made my first trip to that village in southern Sicily to meet my relatives and to see the ancient Greek temples.

Located on the coast, Agrigento’s sand-colored Greek temples and ruins stand by knotted trunks of ancient olive trees. Thirteen miles northeast of the temples is Castrofilippo, known as il paese della cipolla, “the town of the onion.”

The small village is surrounded by fruit orchards and groves kissed by the sun, and the countryside is ripe with fig and almond trees. My cousins grow succulent table grapes and are known for the quality and variety of their sweet white onions and garlics. I arrive representing my father and grandfather and great-grandfather Calogero (who left the island in the late 1800s to save our family farm, but never returned, to his mother’s disappointment). Some homes in the historic center were former stables; others are crumbling to the ground, abandoned by those who left Sicily for America. The village has a town square, a church, a cemetery, a statue of St. Pio, a bar, and a couple of pizzerias, but one of my aunts, Zia Carmela, forbids me to eat anything at a town restaurant.

My family’s Sicilian dinner feast—in honor of my arrival—looks like a set for a Fellini film. Dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins—Concetta, Maria, Carmela, Angela, Calogera, Angelo, Diego, Lillo, Lilla, Luca, Giuseppe, Andrea, Gioacchino, and others—shepherd me to the family table, which extends through every room of the house, even the bedroom. My aunts are dressed identically: black sweater, skirt, tights, and a knotted scarf wrapped around the head.

Zia Carmela is at the wood-burning stove, emptying her copper kettle of pasta into an enormous bowl, which she cradles in her arms. Sicilian-size portions of ziti with ragù are piled on each plate—especially mine. Vino rustico is poured. Carmela orchestrates the meal and is the last to sit down and eat. In her flowered apron she is authoritative,
warm, and gentle.

Between bites of sausage, roasted potatoes flavored with rosemary, salad that tastes of the earth, and homemade bread, I get lost in a blur of conversation and gestures. Zia Lilla tells me how she balanced a terra-cotta jug on her head to carry water from the well to the kitchen in her village each day when she was a young girl, and that leads to more family stories.

After dinner, my cousin Lillo, a 29-year-old farmer, drives me to the Valley of the Temples to see the Greek ruins by moonlight. In his Alfa Romeo, we whirl along winding roads and speed past the Temple of Concordia, its elegant Doric columns illuminated by a sliver of the moon above the hills. Lillo calls me amore. He is irresistible and charming
as Sicilian men are known to be. There’s a sense that we’ve known one another for years, despite the fact that we have just met.

The next day Lillo and his father, Zio Gioacchino, pick six varieties of heirloom grapes from the family vines. My favorites are regina, which means “queen,” and lacrima, which means “teardrop.” This farm, thousands of miles away from where I was born in New Jersey, renews my spirit and nourishes my soul. To me, this ancestral land is a blessing.

I leave the farm with onions and garlic, a bottle of Lillo’s Nero d’Avola wine, and homemade tomato sauce to bring to my grandfather in New Jersey, so that he can taste flavors of our ancestors. Whenever I am far from the farm and longing for it, I recall the words of a Sicilian man whom I met while traveling. When I told him how I returned to Sicily and began my quest in search of my roots, he smiled and said: “Ricordati che questa é sempre la tua terra. Remember that this is always your land.”

Renée Restivo is a food writer who runs a cooking school in the town of Noto, Sicily.

Taiwan

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A vendor sells an assortment of grilled items at the Shilin night market.

Photograph by Michael Wolf, laif/Redux

Taipei,  Taiwan

By Mei-Ling Hopgood
I pass through the turnstile at the exit of the Jiantan elevated train stop and follow a throng of thousands down the stairs and into Shilin, one of Taiwan’s most famous night markets across the Keelung River, near the heart of Taipei.

Above me, Chinese characters scrawled on brightly lit red, white, and yellow signs pierce the Taipei sky. Floodlights swing above women stirring noodles in cast-iron woks and flipping oyster omelets on sizzling grills. I can understand a small set of random, only moderately useful words—“I,” “good,” “beer,” “eat”—in the steady pulse of Mandarin and
Taiwanese shouted by vendors and passersby.

It is my first visit to the land where I was born, where most people have hair and eyes like mine, where I’m about as tall (or as short) as everyone else. Still, I am a foreigner, laowai. I left Taiwan in 1974, when I was an eight-month-old infant, to be raised by an American family in Detroit, a place that could not be more different from this. Taipei, located
about one hundred miles from the southeast coast of China, is a crowded landscape of skyscrapers, Buddhist temples, and weaving traffic. The market feels like a riotous blend of foreign sensations.

Fortunately, my Chinese sisters guide me. I discover I have six in Taiwan and one in Switzerland. A couple of days after our reunion, four of them lead me through the jungle of people at the night market, buying me shaved ice dripping with fruit and juices, and popping barbecued quail eggs into my mouth.

My sisters are ready to purchase anything for me. They want to show me their native hospitality. They want to make up for 23 years lost.

One of my older sisters holds up a pair of earrings.

“You like? Pretty!”

Dolphins. I’m grateful, but it’s not exactly my style. And their generosity is humbling, overwhelming. I smile and say, in my suddenly broken English, “Too much. Not necessary.”

She ignores me and bargains with the shopkeepers. They bark prices at each other and throw their arms into the air. But then they laugh, a deal is struck, and the merchandise thrust toward me.

We dodge the women selling neon T-shirts illegally from a rack in the middle of the street. Young girls with their hair dyed blond and pink try on sunglasses. Boys nose their mopeds through the fray.

I wander, puzzling over another menu I can’t understand. I’m a soggy noodle in the humidity of a Taiwan spring night. The growing mob pushes in, close.

“Xiaojie! Miss!” A woman calls to me and grabs my sleeve. She wants to sell me something. I shrug the universal sign for “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

My younger sister slips her hand into mine. The feeling of our intertwined fingers sends a jolt through my body.

In Taiwan, women commonly hold hands. As awkward as this intimacy feels to me, the American, I let her lead me away. The combination of this closeness, the dizzying smell of fried dumplings, and the screaming singsong of men selling fabric scissors leaves me breathless.

I’d never wanted to visit Taiwan or my biological family before, but here I am, feeling as if I never want to leave, magically assimilating to a place and people I’d never known. Later, I’ll look back and wonder if this intense sense of belonging was a dream, an illusion of desire. But during this first visit to Shilin, I could not feel more at home. I let the
night market absorb me. I’m a rainbow sign promising the best bargain, a shrimp in a neon tank, a piece of tofu sweltering in soup. The colorful Chinese characters stacked high above us leave a brilliant stamp in my memory.

My sisters and I meander through the damp streets and alleys, stopping here and there to inspect a pair of platform sandals. We shake our hips to the Mandarin pop blaring from shop speakers. My heart feels so open it bleeds as we hold tightly to one another’s hands and slide through the crowd like a snake.

Mei-Ling Hopgood is the author of Lucky Girl and How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm.