THE BEST TRIPS, we’re often told, are never planned. I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I harbor doubts born of having booked many last-minute journeys whose exciting “spontaneity” devolved into the remorse particular to eight-hour layovers and airport dinners wrought by poor planning.
No trip, however, is so memorable as the impromptu leap that actually pans out. That’s true, anyway, of the one that brought me for the first time to a country I’d been aiming to visit for years but hadn’t—until I got a phone call asking if,...