Lonely Planet By the Seat of My Pants

Clark

INTRODUCTION

Travel is funny. Not always, of course, and often it’s funnier in retrospect, but you can be pretty sure that just about any journey is going to offer some moments of unadulterated hilarity or at least unanticipated irony. And usually at your own expense. That’s just the way of the road.

In thirty years of wandering the globe, I’ve learned that the one thing I can reliably expect when I travel is that something unexpected will happen. And when it does, I’ll be forced to call on all my grace, sensitivity, courage and wisdom. And when they don’t respond, I’ll be forced to call on my sense of humour.

That’s why my #1 rule of the road is this: if you don’t pack your sense of humour with your sunscreen, sooner or later you’ll get burned.

By the Seat of My Pants springs from this notion. These thirty-one tales of on-the-road adventures and encounters encompass the full comic spectrum, from the wryly ironic to the laugh-out-loudably absurd. While the stories vary widely in setting, subject and tone, they all remind us that some of travel’s greatest treasures are those unexpected, unimaginable situations that make us laugh – at the world and at ourselves.

That’s one reason for this book. Here’s the second. Thirty years ago, on a soaring spring day on the Princeton University campus, I made a momentous decision. I decided to forego the familiar paths most of my graduating friends were taking – grad school, med school, law school, jobs in long-established firms – and follow a different track: I would live in Paris for the summer on a work-abroad internship, move to Athens for the academic year on a teaching fellowship, and then… I had no idea.

I had absolutely no idea what I would do next. I just knew that something deep and irresistible was impelling me to go to Paris and Athens, and that if I ignored this urge, I would regret it for ever. The rest, I trusted, would take care of itself. So the week after graduation I packed up my life and set off for Europe, without any friends to meet me, with no place to stay and no coherent overall plan. I was making a grand leap into the unknown – flying by the seat of my pants.

That was the beginning of my life as a traveller, and the beginning of my resolution to trust the pants-seat and make the leap – a resolution that has conferred innumerable and life-changing gifts over the ensuing thirty years.

Flying by the seat of your pants is a quintessential part of the traveller’s act and art. You’ll be cruising along with everything seeming to be working out just fine, when suddenly reality tilts and teeters and you’re confronted with something entirely unexpected – a flat tyre, a missed train, a mystifying meal, a kindly but incomprehensible villager, an unmapped fork in the path. Time to put on the pants.

The tales in this book illustrate this principle and the wide variety of forms it can take. Sometimes the need arises in the middle of an otherwise uneventful trip, as Jan Morris discovers on her first trip aboard a vaporetto voyage in Venice, and Michelle Richmond learns in a hotel room at the end of the world in Ushuaia, Argentina. Sometimes entire trips can go horribly wrong, as on Pico Iyer’s wide-eyed, white-knuckle, four-wheel whirl through Ethiopia, Chris Cox’s decidedly not-as-advertised boat to Angkor Wat, and Danny Wallace’s assignment in Prague with an Uzi-toting kidnapper-cum-tour guide.

Sometimes travel thrusts us into unexpected encounters with locals. Jeff Greenwald peers into dusty Indian depths in a confrontation with a luggage wallah in Calcutta’s airport, Edwin Tucker gets much more than he bargained for when he unwittingly trades his last pen for a shepherd’s lamb in Tibet, Laura Resau befriends a Mexican village boy and receives an unforgettable lesson in traditional bathing rites from his mother, and Deborah Steg is treated to an award-worthy dinner performance by an unctuous new ami in Cannes, in southern France.

At other times our travelling companions are the challenge, whether it’s Tim Cahill’s exasperatingly annoyance-proof caving partner in Thailand, Judy Tierney’s wrangler-wannabe boyfriend on a boot-shopping spree in Texas, Sean Condon’s exhaustingly enthusiastic uncle in Vermont or the family from hell that Karl Taro Greenfeld lands among when his girlfriend introduces him to idyllic Ibiza. At other times we put on the pants of the fool ourselves, as Bill Fink discovers on a spontaneous expedition to climb Mount Fuji in Japan, Doug Lansky understands inside an exit-less Dutch toilet and Jeff Vize realises as a crowd-pleasing pedestrian in Bangladesh.

Finally, on some journeys it’s the destination itself that dissembles, as the alluring marble marvels of Italy’s Apuan Alps do for David Downie and a reputed Buddhist Shangri-La near the India–Tibet border does for Rolf Potts. Amanda Jones’s youthful escape to the United States becomes a nightmare when she discovers that her promised apartment isn’t available and she is suddenly homeless in San Francisco. Holly Erickson’s dream job as a live-in cook in a London apartment takes a tilt when she breezes in to find that the garden kitchen is literally so.

Ah, the rewards of the road!

When I first set out to compile this anthology, I knew from my own experiences and thirty years of conversations with friends and fellow travellers that the theme was resonant – but I had no idea we would end up with this rich repository of tales. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the numerous writers with whom I have worked in the past, who agreed to share their favourite on-the-road bungles, bumps and bounces. And I owe a second debt to all the writers who responded to the competition we sponsored on www.lonelyplanet.com, which elicited – much to our amazement and delight – more than six hundred submissions. Wonderfully, and fittingly, the compilation that resulted brings together stories from some of the world’s best-known travellers and storytellers side-by-side with works by writers who have never been published before.

Compiling this collection has been its own glorious seat-of-the-pants journey, but now that it is nearly over, I can look back and discern four fundamental and interwoven lessons revealed along the way.

The first is that the world offers an inexhaustible supply of surprises. We may think we know what’s around the next corner, but we never do. And this is precisely why travel continues to excite and delight.

The second lesson is that whatever surprises the world throws our way, we can cope with them gracefully and generously, as long as we maintain our sense of humour, which is compass and counsellor all in one.

The third lesson hearkens back to Plato, who famously wrote that necessity is the mother of invention. The tales in this collection amply illuminate the traveller’s corollary: adversity is the mother of invention. Travel thrusts us into all manner of unexpected situations, with all kinds of unimagined people, and in so doing, it challenges and stretches – and teaches – us in unexpected and unimagined ways. Adversity offers us irreplaceable lessons in humility, flexibility, open-mindedness, open-heartedness, resilience and resourcefulness. In this sense, our seat-of-the-pants adventures ultimately teach us not just about the people and places of the world that we didn’t know existed – but about the unknown, unexplored corners of ourselves.

And the fourth lesson springboards from this truth back to the principle I have followed countless times since that soaring spring day on the Princeton campus thirty years ago: trust your instinct. If you’re faced with a sticky situation or a daunting divide, listen to the small, still voice deep inside you– it will tell you what to do, which way to go.

Don’t be afraid to fly by the seat of your pants. Just enjoy the ride.

Don George

San Francisco, May 2005

THE SIGHTS OF PRAGUE

DANNY WALLACE

Danny Wallace is a comedy writer and producer. He has written two books, Join Me and Yes Man, both of which are currently being adapted for film. He recently wrote and starred in his own BBC2 TV series, and lives in London with a girl and no cats.

You can call it whatever you like.

You can call it a hunch. You can call it instinct. Some might call it a well-honed eye for detail, carved by experience and years on the road – while others might go so far as to call it some kind of secret sixth sense.

But let me tell you, I knew something wasn’t right about my trip to Prague when the stranger who picked me up at the airport reached under the front seat of the car and pulled out a semiautomatic machine gun.

‘It is Uzi 9mm!’ he said, grinning at me in that special way that only men holding Uzi 9mms so often do. ‘It is good, solid. But… dangerous.’

I nodded, and tried a vague smile. To be honest, I’d already guessed that an Uzi 9mm was probably a bit dangerous, despite the fact that I’d never seen one before, let alone been shown one by a bald Eastern European in a car. Maybe I do have a sixth sense, after all.

I had flown to Prague at the last minute to write a piece for a music magazine. An up-and-coming British band happened to be playing in town, and I’d been asked to cover the gig. I’d said yes straightaway – this would be my first chance to see Prague, and the trip would include several hours where I’d have nothing to do. I could see the sights, get a feel for the place, go to the gig and come home. I’d be meeting the photographer in a couple of hours, in the centre of Prague. But that was only if I made it that far.

I’d been told I’d be picked up by a local driver called Honza, a friend-of-a-friend of the man who usually picked people up – and here he was, holding his Uzi 9mm with a grin. I grinned back. Now we were just two men in a small white car, grinning at each other – one of them armed.

‘You want Uzi 9mm?’ he asked.

‘I’m fine for Uzi 9mms’, I said, quite honestly. I could only hope that by offering me an Uzi 9mm, Honza wasn’t also challenging me to a duel.

‘I mean, to hold?’ he said. ‘You want hold gun?’

He was looking at me with what seemed to be real hope in his eyes. I didn’t quite know what to say. I didn’t really want to hold the gun, but being British, I didn’t want to not hold it either, in case by not holding this man’s gun I made him feel uncomfortable or offended him in any way. As a well-raised Briton, I find it difficult to refuse anybody anything they might want whatsoever. This is also, incidentally, why I tend to avoid the gay nightclub scene.

‘Okay then,’ I said, slowly, ‘I will hold the gun.’

He passed the weapon to me, his face aglow, and I held it for a moment. It was heavy and metal. That’s all I can tell you. I was, it seems, never destined to be a reviewer for Guns ‘n’ Ammo.

‘You like?’ asked Honza, eagerly.

‘It is brilliant’, I replied, handing it back almost immediately.

‘Okay!’ said Honza. ‘Now we go!’

Honza tucked the Uzi under his seat, and reached into his pocket for something. I figured so long as it wasn’t a hand grenade, I’d be happy.

It was a knife.

A knife that he then jammed, with some considerable speed and force, into the ignition of the car. He twisted it once, and the car roared into life. We sped out of the airport car park so quickly that for a moment I wished for the safe old days, when we were just two strangers, in a foreign country, playing with guns.

‘So, um, why exactly do you have a gun under your seat?’ I asked, after a silent ten minutes or so.

‘Ah’, said Honza, sadly. ‘To protect. Local gangs, mafia people. Some bad gypsy people, too. They look for tourist, or foreigner. They steal list of people flying into Czech, and then they make a small sign with name on, and stand at airport and wait for you. They bribe real driver away. And then they take you out of city, to country, and rob you with gun.’

‘Oh’, I said, slightly relieved.

Until I realised that Honza had met me at the airport with a small sign with ‘Mr Wallace’ written on it, and that Honza had a gun, and that outside the window of the car, the grey of the city was instead becoming the green of the countryside…

It turned out, of course, that Honza was not about to rob me. He just had a few errands to run before he could drop me off in town. I mean, of course he did. When else would you run errands but when you’ve been asked to pick up a British journalist from the airport? You certainly don’t do them before you’ve picked him up, as that would be a waste of valuable time, and you don’t do them afterwards, do you, because then you’d get home late. No, no. You wait until you’ve picked him up, and then you spend nearly an hour and a half driving around the Czech Republic picking up bags of plant pots from women in floral dresses and getting your windscreen washed by a dusty minor. Then, and only then, do you take the journalist to his destination, which, in this case, was a pub. Still, I didn’t mind too much. So I wasn’t going to see Prague straightaway. I could see it later – after I’d met the photographer or after the gig.

The photographer who was supposed to be waiting for me in the pub was not, of course, waiting for me in the pub.

At first, I didn’t mind too much. Surely he’d be along in a minute or two. Perhaps he was off buying film. Maybe one of his flashbulbs had broken. There was still time. The gig didn’t start for a few hours, and he was only a little bit late.

Honza had decided to park the car and come inside with me. He even said he was going to come along with me to the gig. So together we sat, awaiting the arrival of the photographer, and nursing two inordinately cheap pints of beer. I’d hoped that at least our rendezvous point would be an example of proper, old-fashioned Czechoslovakia. It wasn’t. The main clue was its name: Mulligans. There were other clues, too – the bicycle bolted to the wall and the giant plastic bearded leprechaun being just two of them. It appeared that we were sitting in an Irish theme pub designed by someone who had never actually been to Ireland. This was back in the late nineties, when Prague seemed on the cusp of huge commercial change – that is, it was gracelessly changing from a priceless fairy-tale village to a city entirely sponsored by McDonald’s.

It was this aspect of Prague that I was rather pompously contemplating (I do, after all, live in London – a city that proudly claims as one of its main tourist attractions a big neon sign with the word ‘Fuji’ written on it), when a stranger sat down next to us.

He was scruffy, unkempt and reeked strongly of whisky. In other words, he looked like he was probably the photographer.

‘This is Jiri’, said Honza. ‘He is butcher.’

It wasn’t the photographer.

I raised my hand in greeting, and would have said hello had I not then immediately remembered my encounter with the Uzi. I found myself hoping that ‘Butcher’ was this man’s occupation, as opposed to his nickname.

Jiri looked at me and smiled, then uttered a sentence which impressed me as much for its speed and confidence as it did for its total and utter lack of any discernible vowels. Not able to speak Czech, I blinked at the man a couple of times, and said, ‘Um…’

‘American?’ he said. ‘British?’

‘British’, said Honza.

‘What you are doing here? Holidays?’

‘No’, I said. ‘I’m just waiting for someone.’

‘Who you are waiting for?’ said Jiri. ‘Tony Blair?’

And then he laughed and laughed and laughed, smacking the table with the palm of his hand, and turned to Honza, who was also laughing. Then they both stopped laughing and looked at me.

‘No’, I said, quite calmly. ‘I am not waiting for Tony Blair. That would be ludicrous. I am waiting for a photographer.’

Jiri brought his hand to his chest.

‘I am photographer’, he said.

I blinked again.

‘Are you?’ I queried.

‘No’, he said. ‘I am not photographer. I am butcher.’

‘Oh.’

I couldn’t help but wonder what had prompted Jiri to play such an elaborate hoax on me.

‘But!’ he said. ‘I have camera!’

At this, Honza and Jiri started to talk very excitedly in Czech. And then Honza got out of his seat and said, ‘I come back soon.’

I looked at my watch. There was still no sign of the photographer. Perhaps he wanted me to meet him at the gig. I reached into my pocket and tried to find the piece of paper on which I’d written the name of the venue. Jiri watched me do this, then leaned forward, conspiratorially.

‘What do you want, my friend?’ he whispered, his eyes darting nervously around the room.

‘How do you mean?’ I asked, confused.

‘Anything you want, I can get you. You are friend of Honza, you are friend of my. What do you want?’

I thought about it, and shrugged. Perhaps he thought I wanted a tour guide, which, come to think of it, wasn’t such a bad idea.

‘You want to smoke something? I can get you something. Anything I can get you, in Praha it is all possible. You want class A, I get you class A.’

Oh good God. The Butcher was trying to sell me illegal substances, when all I wanted was an hour to myself and someone to tell me where all the pretty buildings were. First I’m picked up by an armed stranger, and now I’m sitting underneath a bright-green leprechaun with a criminal butcher who wants to find something he can sell me.

‘A girl? You want a girl? I get you girls. Anything you want, my friend, it is possible.’

‘To be honest, I’m okay at the moment…’

‘A gun?’

‘No!’ I said. ‘No, I don’t want a gun. Or a girl. Or any Class A’s…’

Jiri leaned back in his chair, cast his eyes round the room, and then leaned forward again. ‘Anti-tank missile?’

Anti-tank missile?!

‘Whatever it is,’ he said, ‘it all can happen. It can take time, yes, but…’

‘Um, look…’

‘Ah!’ he said, suddenly, pointing a finger in the air. ‘You want Chicago Bull? I can get you Chicago Bull!’

‘Chicago Bull? What’s a Chicago Bull?’

But the truth was, I didn’t want to know. I had a hunch he was referring to something illicit and dodgy, but to be honest, even if he was referring to the basketball team itself, I wouldn’t have been interested. There is a time and a place for illegally purchasing massive, millionaire basketball players, and the corner table of an Irish pub in Prague isn’t it.

‘Really’, I said. ‘I am absolutely fine for all the things you have mentioned. Even the anti-tank missile and the Chicago Bull, whatever that is. I am simply waiting for the photographer to arrive and then we are going to go and see some music.’

Honza walked back into the pub just then, and Jiri put his finger to his lips, willing me not to let on about his minor indiscretions, such as drug dealing, pimping and the potential kidnap of some nine-foot