A Travel Junkie's Diary Read online

  We chose Patagonia and called our journey the Anti-Rally. After driving on our own across every tough road and crossing as many isolated borders as we could find between Chile and Argentina, the next decision needed barely a glance and a nod: time to leave the labor of route-finding and hotel-reserving to the professionals again. We joined a social rally to drive from the southernmost point of India to the foothills of the Himalayas roughly along the seventy-eighth parallel, a route tracking the Great Arc Survey of the first half of the nineteenth century, the one that brought a man named Sir George Everest to fame. (Yes, that Everest.) The only competition on this rally was how many gin and tonics one could imbibe and still fit the key in the ignition the next morning.

  And so it’s gone ever since, with us exploring the world’s out-of-the-way places, sometimes by ourselves, sometimes in the company of others, always by automobile. We stick as much as possible to small or unpaved roads used by locals, getting a view of life around us that would be impossible on a train or flying from place to place. In the years since embarking on the P2P our road trips have, to paraphrase Ibn Battuta, a great Moroccan traveler from the fourteenth century, left me speechless and turned me into a storyteller.

  Because roads and locations call to mind differing types of vehicles, we’ve driven quite a variety, some our own, some rented, all of which I’ve named. I like being on a first-name basis with cars. It’s chummy. It makes me feel like the car and I are in cahoots to get where we’re going in one piece and with a minimum of wrong turns. It all started with Roxanne, the 1940 LaSalle that carried us fearlessly forward in the P2P and was named for Alexander the Great’s wife Roxana. We’ve used our own stately Bentley Saloon, dubbed La Serenissima because on our first trip with her we were heading toward Venice. Avis in Santiago de Chile assigned us a Suzuki Grand Vitara I called Sprite for the way she could dodge unobtrusively through border posts despite a remarkable absence of appropriate paperwork. There’s even been a private loaner, the new-but-designed-to-look-old Mahindra Commando we drove, or rather tried to drive, on our first time in India. This sad sack of a car, with its soft top, half-doors, and Patton-esque mien, I named Sexy Beast, since it was. Sexy that is. Until it stalled for good, since salt water had been put in its radiator. Not by us of course. Because Bernard, the man I married when I was twenty-eight, with whom I built a successful software company, and next to whom I ran that isolated working hay and cattle ranch in the Colorado Rockies, has a particularly appropriate skill for the road trips we do. He’s the world’s best auto mechanic, a statement I say based on comparative analytical studies of the first-hand sort, and with not the slightest tinge of partiality from loving the man.

  When we choose a place for a road trip, I get to pore over maps and understand profoundly where a country is, what’s around it, and what it contains. Mountains here, sea over there, friendly or warring neighbors, borders that are violent no-man’s-lands versus borders as carefree as a sophomore on spring break. Like a Peeping Tom, headlines about that country suddenly stare at me from every magazine. Even more bizarre, newscasters can’t seem to stop talking about the place I’m going. It’s like a media conspiracy. Pick a country and suddenly it’s everywhere.

  In addition to a country’s location, I do my best to learn something special about it when I’m there, something not mentioned in guidebooks and blogs, something that, if I’m lucky, will help me avoid mortifying myself with a faux pas. By now I have a number of local habits to draw from, such as which hand to use when greeting someone in India, whether it’s okay for me to wander unbidden into a restaurant kitchen in China to see what’s cooking, and that it’s permissible for my headscarf to reveal my hair in Iran, but not in Afghanistan. Somehow, though, each new country finds a way to drive home how the more I think my tutelage is coming to an end, the less worldly I actually am.

  One of the unexpected pleasures of being in a car for hours is that it gives me a chance to observe what’s happening outside without intruding. I have puzzled about how important this is to me. I also occasionally berate myself for dodging what I think is the essence of travel, which is to engage fearlessly with the foreign place I’m in. Here’s a truth about me and travel: sometimes the strangeness of a country overwhelms me. I like being able to retreat inside the car, to watch and think, without always having to react.

  The stories that follow are as fascinating and frightening, humorous and humiliating, poignant, pointed, and engrossing as I felt when I went through them. Because despite my pleasure in being comfortable, doing an easy drive doesn’t appeal to me. I’m like a baby bird shoved out of its nest, one minute nestled in cozy familiar security, the next flapping frantically as I tumble headlong into a new world. The whole point of these drives is to thrust me into a continual state of amazement, eyes startled wide open, heart pumping madly at the uncertainty of it all.

  Since completing the P2P in July 2007, we’ve logged tens of thousands of miles seeking out the bad roads, the forsaken border posts, and the odd encounters that transform a trip into an adventure. Bernard has twisted the steering wheel around thousands of hairpin turns through the Andes and wrestled it to stay straight over hundreds of washboarded miles across Tibet. We dodged the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka’s civil war by cleverly staying south of their DMZ. Red dust from Ethiopian roads became one with our skin and my hair, Bernard not having enough left to worry about. We’ve rambled through half of South America, skirting mudslides and crossing salt flats, despite knowing from that Mahindra experience that salt and cars don’t mix. Or shouldn’t. In a fit of madness, we left Istanbul on a nine-thousand-mile drive that brought us to Kolkata forty-five days later, having crossed Iran, all but one of the former Soviet republics, and half of China in the process. And then there’s Myanmar, where we started out being driven in someone else’s car, had to scrap that plan and complete three hundred fifty miles of the journey by riverboat instead, only to return three years later with our sturdy Land Rover, Brunhilde, a vehicle unfazed by even the most rutted oxcart tracks, to finish the road journey we’d imagined three years before.

  I’m a person who’s rarely satisfied with the way she is. Don’t think of me as whiny or difficult to please, though there have been instances of that. Many, in truth. It’s more that I see life as an evolving palette with me as the brush, colors, and canvas. I’m also the painter who’s continually recreating the image. This mindset isn’t a new thing. I imagine this trait stems partly from being the younger sibling, forever seeing ahead of me the competency of my older sister Vivienne, envious of the benefits conferred her, struggling to change myself so I could do what she did despite our age difference. And I’m sure it has a lot to do with my parents, who believed I could accomplish anything, making sure I had every opportunity to prove them right.

  Before each trip my mind glitters with possibilities: Will I get sick? Will I be more patient than last time? Will we break down or get lost because of me? Will we find a place to stay before dark? Will it have a sit-down toilet or will I have to aim into a suspect hole in the ground? Somehow, I never seem to grasp that the lessons of the open road will never be what I imagine, having little to do with guidebooks and maps, and everything to do with the ups and downs of long-distance travel. What happens to me on the road is by turns surprising, embarrassing, and more often than you’d imagine, mundane. It’s enough to make me wince, grumble, laugh. And cry.

  If it’s weird and someone’s eating or drinking it, I have to try it, whether it’s a pucker-worthy three-day injera in Mek’ele, Ethiopia, coca leaves in Potosí, Bolivia, or rancid yak butter tea in Nepal. Without fail, Bernard passes his portion to me in these situations, so his ability in Laos to chow down on a grilled rat that looked exactly like a grilled rat left me justifiably astonished. I have a habit of ignoring my better judgment, signing up for spa treatments in places where the word spa doesn’t exist in the local language. I’ve gone rogue on a secret visit to an Akhal-Teke horse training stable in Turkmenistan so I c
ould compare these mythic military steeds to my complacent quarterhorses at home, and I’ve used shameless flattery hoping to purchase the stiff peaked hat bristling with gold braid off a blushing Uzbeki customs officer even before she’d agreed to let us into the country. I’ve found myself in a bedroom standing knee to knee with an armed border guard, entered Iran bareheaded, been stoned by Indian village women, and let wild hyenas nibble raw meat from my fingertips.

  I’ve never stopped wanting to see if I can bring myself closer to what I imagine I could be. This is something I began to do consciously as early as seventh grade, when my parents shifted me from public to private school, as they had my sister two years before. Back then, reinvention seemed a necessity if I were to find a way to have any friends at all. Now that I can claim that I am, or should be, grown up, the excitement of reinventing myself has hardened into a habit at its best when I travel. Every trip is like early Christmas, with the old me as the wrapping paper and the new me as the gift.

  And so the road beckons. Crossing borders behind the veil of a visa has become my guilty pleasure, an addiction plain and simple. Like any addiction, sometimes I find it hard to believe that all this has happened to me. But I know it’s the truth. I was there.

  BLASTOFF

  PREAMBLE

  Suitcases. I can base an entire life’s philosophy on my suitcase, both what it contains and what it doesn’t. It’s emotional baggage in the best sense, weighted with potent symbols of hope, joy and calamity, and, it’s no secret, dirty laundry. I know a lot about dirty laundry from life at home: a working cattle and hay ranch in Colorado.

  Even the shrewdest Ouija board would never have revealed that I would live on a ranch. And love it. At the end of sixth grade, when we made predictions on who would do what in life, I was a slam dunk to be a translator at the UN, because I already spoke French. No one would have guessed I’d be someone with barbed wire rips in her jeans. We didn’t even know what barbed wire was.

  For me, a child of suburban New York City, and Bernard, a Frenchman growing up in shorts and clogs in the French Alps, life on the ranch was enchanting and captivating. I was passionate about the flow of nature around me, the flocks of robins fluttering in sagebrush bent under a late blanket of snow, moose calving along our river, my horses cantering through fields of tall mountain grasses undulating in a hot summer breeze. Bernard engrossed himself in manual labor, secretly relishing the black grime under his nails and the torn jeans from fixing tractors and fences, as only a man who has spent his life as a software entrepreneur can do.

  But the winters at nine thousand feet in the Rockies are long and quiet. They’re also filled with snow removal of an amount and relentlessness that led Bernard, driver of the plows, front loaders, and snowblowers rivaling those used by the department of transportation, close to despair. Leaving the ranch to explore other parts of the world during the winter was a no-brainer, if only our brains had kicked into gear sooner.

  Despite my fondness for the ranch, packing my bag for a long trip filled me with a particular rapture that only the perpetually snowed-in can share. Getting my suitcase out of its storage closet let me give my imagination free rein, calling up all sorts of electrifying circumstances that could occur on the trip ahead. As with everything worthwhile, I have a system for this, one that can work for any type of trip and any sort of traveler.

  First, I fantasize about the wildest array of activities I might experience. Because I’m a pessimist, I begin with catastrophes. Fixing a flat in the torrential rain of Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka? Pack the slicker that rolls to the size of a toothpick. Awaiting rescue on the banks of Myanmar’s Chindwin River, our passage boat stranded on a sandbar in the fog? Stash wash-and-wear tops, preferably the kind light enough to rinse in a tiny pot and guaranteed to dry wrinkle-free in twenty minutes. Unable to do even that type of laundry in Ethiopia’s desiccated Omo River Valley? Pack the pants I can eat, sleep, and drive in for a week, which won’t vary in utilitarian perfection whether it’s the first day of a trip or the last.

  Having snarled myself into a tense ball of nerves by these reveries of discomfort, I switch gears. That I am bargaining with inanimate objects over matters of pure fantasy does not lessen my enthusiasm. Scrounged tickets for the Moscow Ballet? Nothing can match my flame orange Pashmina for glamour and warmth. Invited for tea by the begum of Jaipur’s long-deposed nawab? Add those gold strappy flats and subtract two pair of underwear in exchange. Dancing in the streets during the La Diablada festival in Oruro, Bolivia? Make my one skirt a swirly reversible sort, getting two garments in one.

  A week before departure, after I’ve given my imagination free rein, I start packing. I divvy up everything I could possibly want or use into logical piles: shoes on the floor, rugged wear on the bed next to the pillows, lingerie and swimsuit in the middle, specialty outfits for sports or evening by the foot of the bed. Though it’s mildly embarrassing to admit, I then communicate with my clothes. “Which of you really wants to go on this trip? You’re not all going to be able to fit in that suitcase, so some of you will have to make the ultimate sacrifice and stay home.” I am stern, because I absolutely want to know.

  Certain garments call attention to their unsuitability right away. Their wrinkled shapelessness after a few days of bedtop lounging unmasks them as prima donnas that need a breather in a closet every night, a closet I’m unlikely to have because of the tiny guesthouse where we’re sleeping. Others are too dull to be worth wearing for two straight months. Then there are those that make the cut purely because I don’t want to leave home without them. In my years as the senior female executive in our software services company, I developed a style that was voguish without being enslaved to fashion. When I entered a sales meeting, I wanted my green slingbacks and violet shirt to show I was someone to reckon with, so clients not only would agree to sign a contract, but have fun doing it. Make no mistake: I have earned my title as Countess of Coordinated Separates.

  I can’t be so ruthless as to whittle down my wardrobe on practicality alone. There has to be some joie de vivre in my bag, a few items that make me smile. One such is a white shirt. I always pack a white shirt or four. Nothing brightens my mood more than daring the day to do its dirty worst by donning a white anything. It makes me feel dashing and bold. It says I have the courage to buy my cake and eat it too, even if the cake squirts raspberry filling down my front.

  As the piles shrink, I do trial packings, hefting the result onto my shoulder as a reality check for lugging it up four flights of stairs. In between whittling and hefting, I keep an eye on what Bernard’s packing, noting what I can borrow, freeing up room in my bag for something else. Finally, I stuff nooks and crannies with the chargers, adapters, and spare batteries that are de rigueur these days. They will add bulky pounds to my bag, but until every gadget maker in the world agrees to use the same size and shape of plug, I have no other option. Then everything comes flying back out of the suitcase as I discover I’ve forgotten to wedge in the big first aid kit, a rectangular, football-sized object rattling with spare narcotics accumulated from surgeries of yore, antibiotics galore, even my dead dog’s morphine. (Yes, literally, my dog. His name was Toby.)

  By the time I’m finished, whatever I think I’ll need for weeks of unpredictable events is folded, rolled, heaped, and otherwise squashed within my soft-sided duffel. That includes items that I forget about as soon as they’re squirreled away in those handy pockets in which modern suitcases abound, only to rediscover them weeks later, after spending a whole day in a strange city trying to buy the very same object. If I’ve done a good job, my bag will arrive on the other end looking like a dented blue sausage, and I won’t need a Schwarzenegger to carry it to my room each night.

  It’s perplexing then, that no matter how much thought I put into the packing routine, once I’m away I reach a point where I’m dissatisfied with much of what I’ve brought with me. This happens without fail, about halfway through every trip, usually when I’m looking at my pa
ltry selection of clothes in the cold, clear light of a second-rate hotel room. If I’ve packed colorful T-shirts, inevitably my taste abroad shifts to a penchant for cool grays and blacks. If I’ve overindulged my fetish for white, I rue not having brought something vermilion or aqua.

  A few weeks into any trip I don’t even have to unpack. Like trout rising to the first hatch, the only clothes I’m interested in wearing have migrated to the top of the suitcase. The rest might as well stay below, bottom feeders, till I get home. Yet even though half my clothes will remain crumpled in my duffel, it reassures me to know those garments are there. Amid all the strange customs, unexpected tastes, and odd sounds that assault me on a trip, my clothes are my toast and marmalade, comfort food when I can’t face more chapatis and dal. What I put on in the morning is not just a garment. It’s a talisman connecting me to home, a wrinkled, short-sleeved, multi-pocketed remembrance of things past.

  Blessings

  COCHIN, INDIA, 2009

  On the first day of any long road trip I’m full of bustle and nerves. The nerves part comes from the unknowability of the future. It clamps me in a vise, squeezing the breath out of me like my seat belt when Bernard slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a wobbly rickshaw. That’s why I need the bustle part. The busier I am, the more capable I feel and the less I dwell on my anguish about being able to manage what’s coming. My first-day emotions are a toxic mix, one that leaves me walking slightly hunched, so ready am I to apologize for things that haven’t yet happened. This conflicted approach to life on the road has been part of me ever since I can remember.

  I have character traits, lovable flaws as I like to call them, with which I have made my peace. There’s my expectation that I’m right, which can be annoying, but sometimes results in such brilliant insights that I can coast on the outcome for days, despite otherwise egregious behavior. In my twenties and thirties, I could turn from bright laughing companion to grim taciturn drudge without provocation. Thankfully, this was revealed as not a personality quirk at all, but a symptom of hypoglycemia, brought about by not eating frequently enough. Now, when I say to Bernard, “I have to eat soon,” he pays attention, on pain of suffering the joys of driving next to an evil changeling for hours.