A picture may be worth a thousand words, but to Chandler Burr, a smell—perfumed or putrid—is invaluable for recollecting travel memories

I went to sleep one evening last summer in New York City and awoke in Hong Kong. I'd left a window in my apartment at East 40th Street and Third Avenue wide open. The sky was crystalline blue, and there was a July breeze coming in from the Atlantic, sweeping the ocean up Manhattan, pushing in some car exhaust and some garbage odors from the trash cans on the curb. There was an air-conditioning smell from the skyscraper opposite and from the dry cleaners downstairs. The perfume of fresh flowers was coming from the Korean deli next to it, along with the aroma of vegetables from the Chinese place around the corner that had started prep. And it simply appeared in my bedroom: the essence of Hong Kong. The smell of the Star Ferry, roast duck, fish, traffic in Admiralty, sulfur from firecrackers—all of it.

The illusion lasted about a minute, and then some ingredient in the accidental olfactory recipe evaporated and the scent hologram vaporized. New York reemerged in the air. I got up and looked out the window. To the west I saw the Empire State Building; in the opposite direction the East River and, beyond it, Queens.

"Take a camera!" my father always says when I travel. I never do. I have never taken photographs of places. For memory, for me, there is really only smell. I am a traveler. I always have been, but not a visual one. Smell is my best, most reliable sensory trigger. While others may situate themselves by sight, marveling at vistas, taking photos, drawing pictures, recalling images, I have a brain that forms a record of time and place via remembered combinations of fragrances, a kind of smell track.

The process of travel is imbued with, drowned in, smell. The smell of my first passport, which was that of book (new paper, binding glue) and fresh plastic (the thick photo lamination). The smell of jet fuel and the synthetic carpet of the airport, the lonely nose of concrete-and-Formica of the train station, the scent of seawater and engine oil and metal of the ship. In between check-in and jet lag, there is smell. It tells us where we are. We may shuttle from airport to airport and stay in luxury hotels from Shanghai to Seattle, but local smells still reach us, marking these places as indelibly as light.

I once landed at Don Muang International, in Bangkok, was met by a driver with an air-conditioned Mercedes, and was swept to the Four Seasons. I was enveloped in the tang of tropical heat and coconut, car exhaust and red curry, and my body knew that I was back in Bangkok. I've stayed at the Sheraton in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Hotel Jerome in Aspen; the Metropole in Monte Carlo. The pungency of Bangladesh, the crisp freshness of the Rockies, and the thick Mediterranean and concrete of Monaco greeted me even inside these palaces of privilege. Smell is my landmark.

Don't worry about missing out on an assemblage of travel memories. You can collect smells of places. I promise you. Marjorie Langston Stewart lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the 1960s, two blocks from the Gulf of Mexico. While I remember her voice and crisp face, my maternal grandmother exists in my memory primarily as a fragrance: the perfume of fresh citrus and the poisonous sweet oleander that she warned me never to touch; the waft of hot wet breezes off the fishing boats; the clean, rich Victorian smells of the England she grew up in; and the scent of her immense white Pontiac's interior. My scent collection began with her.