A Travel Junkie's Diary Read online

  It was hot inside my keffiyeh, so when the breeze turned strong enough to whip the ends out of their securing knot, I didn’t mind. I dislike being sweaty, and with the keffiyeh pulled up over my nose to keep out the fine Sahara sand, I was becoming not only uncomfortably damp but claustrophobic. Unlike our guide, the last time I’d had my head swaddled, I’d been a baby.

  With images of my keffiyeh flying off and spooking my camel into a lunging gallop of the sort destined to make me more seasick than a cross-channel ferry bucking surging seas, I struggled to retie the scarf ends into a windproof knot. The wind would have none of it, untying each knot quicker than Houdini doing an underwater trick. It was pleasant, though, to have the cooling effect of this now stiff wind, and I enjoyed it. That is, up until the moment when Kamal insisted, “Look!” He stood on the crest of a dune, arm outstretched and pointing, white robes whipping around his legs, a miniature Sherif Ali in my personal version of Lawrence of Arabia. I expected to see more dunes, or better, a camel train making its regal way toward us. I didn’t. I saw a horizon obscured by an undulating wall, battleship gray, livid in its turmoil of wind and sand. It spanned the sky and moved so swiftly it was as if a massive hand behind it was impelling it toward us.

  “Run,” shouted Kamal, his voice small and seeming far away. With a sandstorm looming I had some concerns, though none of them involved my camel. He had two rows of eyelashes, plus the windshield wiper effect of a third eyelid which could move left to right. If any of us was equipped to weather this storm, it was he. I only had my fists to wipe sand out of my eyes, and right then both hands were occupied clinging to the saddle horn as we joggled across the dunes at such alarming speed that after my first glance down I dared not check the distance of a possible fall again.

  We got back in half the time it had taken us to venture into the dune-scape. By then, the ashen wall had covered half the distance it needed to reach us. I could distinguish roiling clouds of sand swirling within. The entire hulking mass seemed to gain in density and scope as it heaved down upon us. Camel touts sprinted after flying saddle pads, their feet seeming to skim above the surface of shifting sand. Tourists dithered about whether the torture of sitting out a sandstorm in the open would be worth the bragging rights afterward. Camels kneeled in the sand, blinking those windshield wiper eyelids and chewing their cud, in their element. Bernard and I slithered off the backs of our camels, not even noticing the absence of that helpful stirrup. I wished my beast luck, stuffed enough bills in Kamal’s hand to cover our fee, and dashed to the car, where I jumped into the passenger seat and slammed the door. Safe. Or so I thought.

  We had barely reached the track with the white-washed rocks when the sandstorm enveloped us like Dracula swirling his cloak, blotting out the sun and turning the smiling day into a dark, evil, yellow-gray dusk. Howling as if populated by tormented souls from the underworld, the storm invaded the car through every crack and crevice. It coated the dashboard, colonized my hair like an epidemic of nits, and in an instant brought home to me the vanity of wearing contact lenses. I was terrified, as my rankly perspiring armpits attested. Pulling my shirt tails over my mouth I yelled at Bernard, “What are we going to do?”

  In our many road trips since Morocco, I’ve learned if I have a solution in mind I should flat out say it, because Bernard is literal and confident when compared to my premonitory worrying. In this case, I longed to do what everyone else had done: sit in their cars at the camel rental agency, waiting things out. We were the only ones to leave, and now the road ahead and behind was covered with shifting sand. What I wanted to insist was, “Let’s hunker down right here, where we’ll be found after the storm,” leaving implied my unsportsmanlike expectation of “Let’s not get stuck somewhere in the miles of empty sandscape between here and our lodge.” But I didn’t want to hurt Bernard’s feelings by suggesting lack of confidence, so I left it to him, thinking with his gallantry he’d intuit what I wanted. Stupid me.

  Bernard being Bernard, he replied, “Let’s drive!”

  For a minute, he pursued that exercise by pressing his nose to the windshield. Too soon he shouted, “I have to open the window. I can’t see.”

  “No, no! Are you crazy? That’ll let all the sand in.” But then, of course, the sand already was in.

  “It’s the only way I can find the markers. We have to keep moving. If we stop, that’s it!” He ratcheted down the window, stuck his head into the blowing sand, ducked back in as he rammed the window shut. Neither of us spoke. There was too much sand whirling in the car to risk opening our mouths.

  Bernard inched us forward, white marker to white marker, for what seemed like hours as the sandstorm shrieked and moaned around us. My body didn’t know what to do with itself. The upper part of me sweated, my feet turned to ice, and my mouth outdid the Sahara in dryness. Yet I kept my terror to myself. Bernard was so obviously delighted I didn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm. Besides, I knew what awaited us if we stopped, and it wasn’t a chilled gin and tonic. The discomfort of slowly suffocating as sand filled my nose and mouth needed no elaboration.

  It took us four times as long to get back to the auberge as it had to reach the camels that afternoon. When the vague outline of our lodge appeared in the gloom, I nearly peed myself in relief. We scurried, bent double, into a hotel dining room filled with a brown haze of swirling sand, mini-dunes already shifting on the floor. The owner, being French, brought up bottles of wine, offering each guest a glass of gritty Beaujolais. Though the generator that might have provided fresh air would have benefited from his attention, I couldn’t quibble. The calming effect of the alcohol was sufficient proof he had his priorities straight. Thus soothed, and having eaten a cold snack of bread and goat cheese, we went to our sandy beds. Breathing in shallow pants to minimize sand in lungs, I drifted to sleep pretending I was spending the night on a tropical beach. Minus the rum punch. And the waves.

  Like a migrating camel, the sandstorm moved on in its own time. By next morning it was so gone it was as if it never existed. If I hadn’t been picking sand out of my ears since waking I would have doubted my sanity. The sky, scoured to a spotless bright blue, seemed to shrug its shoulders as if to say, “Sandstorm? What sandstorm?”

  Solutions

  KERALA, INDIA, 2009

  Back in the Cochin parking lot, everything that can be is stashed, stowed, and otherwise secured. Thinking back to Morocco, I find no excuse to offer in favor of staying put. I agree to leave. Besides, we’re blessed. Why should my future abound with anything other than good karma?

  Within two hours, Beast’s flaws appear. In the category of unpleasant but not a showstopper, we discover that the word hushed is not one of Beast’s attractions. What with being open to the elements and no soundproofing under the hood, the clamor of the engine envelops me in a mind-numbing din. Top that with a garnish of continuous honking and shouting in the streets, and it’s like three orchestras playing John Cage, Ligeti, and George Crumb over each other, at full blast. By the time we arrive at our hotel after the first day’s drive, my head is throbbing.

  Next morning, I climb into Sexy Beast, my box of French earplugs in hand. I’ve relied on them for years to guarantee slumber in hotel rooms with cardboard walls, tissue paper windows, and a wedding party of hundreds in the street below. Those little balls of pink wax swathed in a thin robe of cotton, looking all virginal, fill me with hope. Surely they will muffle Beast’s roar. When Bernard turns on the engine, I squash the plugs snugly into my ears and urge a pair on Bernard, too. I don’t have much hope he’ll use them.

  Bernard seems to believe use of any lotion or palliative unmanly. At the ranch, it took years before he began using hearing protection muffs around loud machinery, which is why I now talk a little louder than I used to. In terms of skin care, it’s nigh hopeless. We’ve lived at seven thousand to nine thousand feet our entire married life, so the sunscreen conversation is not new. It is, though, brief.

  Me: “I’m putting sunscreen o
n. Do you want some?”

  Him: “What did you say?”

  On road trips Bernard’s rationale as he swats away my tube of SPF 100 Neutrogena is, “I’ll be inside the car all day.”

  “Yes,” I reply, sarcasm leaking through the patience I don’t feel. “But the sun can penetrate the windshield, which is why you wear sunglasses. Right?”

  Bernard’s only concession to the rigors of the road is to wear driving gloves, those fingerless soft leather mitts that keep sweaty palms from slipping off the steering wheel. Still, he’s more than ten years my senior and I want to be sure he retains what hearing he has left. I shake the two plugs at him as if they were lucky dice. The charm works. He takes them. We head out the hotel driveway and I give Bernard the first direction of the day: “Turn left at the corner.”

  “What?” he says.

  “Turn left at the corner,” I say louder.

  “Speak up!” he shouts.

  “I am!” I shout back.

  “What?”

  The odd thing about earplugs is that, inside my muffled world, I sound as clear and loud as a cow bell. That’s not the case outside my plugged ears, where trying to convey driving directions is an exercise in futility. By the end of the day, my throat is raw from constant yelling.

  When I remove the balls from my ears, they are, predictably, as dirty as the rest of me. Ordinarily I would throw them out, but my one box is meant to last me for an entire trip’s worth of nights. I didn’t anticipate having to use them during the day as well. With some reluctance and much disgust, I pinch the balls into filthy squares and replace them in their box. Bernard hands me his, rolled into perfect, if grimy, globes to distinguish them from mine. Putting grime-crusted hands into the snack sack is fine, but it seems neither of us wants to squash the other’s used plugs in our ears.

  Through Days 3 and 4 we wear earplugs, shouting until we’re hoarse and frustrated. By Day 5, we accept it is our lot to have our hearing permanently damaged on this trip. I return the earplug box to my suitcase. By then I am further deflated by the knowledge that driving in a car designed to blow out my ear drums is the least of our problems. I have discovered that Sexy Beast being open to the elements is not an unadulterated pleasure. At first it strikes us as dandy. We get the benefit of every breeze. We hop in and out with a jaunty sense of daring-do, like Patton inspecting the troops of his Third Army. The drawback is that everything wafting on that breeze settles on us. We notice this at the end of Day 1 when we arrive at our night’s hotel. Relieved to have navigated our first encounter with Indian city traffic without creating an international incident, we unbuckle our seat belts and heave ourselves outside. My sweaty back and thighs are so glued to Beast’s suffocating vinyl that it feels my skin is being ripped off as my legs struggle to part company with the seat.

  Meeting Bernard around the back of the car to get our bags, I notice a black stripe emblazoned across the front of his shirt, like a pageant banner in mourning. “How’d you get that?” I ask, jabbing at his chest. He peers down at his shirt, rubs the charcoal stripe, which smudges it worse. Declaring he’ll take my insult and raise me one, he says, “You’ve got one, too,” and jabs me back. It dawns on us that this is a souvenir from the seatbelt strap that’s cinched us in our seats for the past seven hours. If there’s that much dirt in the belts, it’s unsettling to imagine what must be residing on my exposed skin, my clothes, my hair.

  The hotel manager, as disturbed by our dirty appearance as we are, volunteers one of his staff to clean our car. That he doesn’t volunteer another to hose us down before entering his establishment is vaguely disappointing. We’re the last to arrive, a point driven home by the waves of laughter undulating from the open terrace.

  At the start of every drive, I still battle the fragile ego that undertook the P2P; although this isn’t a competition, there’s still an “us” and “them” thing I can’t seem to shake. Have we left early enough? Have I packed the right clothes? How could others dispense with border formalities faster than we? There’s even an “us” versus “us” element, such as: why is Bernard always able to be so much more cheerful than me? This first evening I suppress my qualms by blaming it on the one who can’t fight back—Beast—and attribute our late arrival to the car’s overall sluggishness, rather than any particular failing on our part or success on anyone else’s.

  Throughout the evening, we eye the young car cleaner with his small bucket and meager rag, scrubbing, rinsing, and changing the grimy water over and over again. He’s still at it when we turn in for the night. By morning, Sexy Beast is cleaner than he’s ever been in his hard life. By midday, when we stop for fuel, the black stripes are back. And for the stretch of days in which we are burdened by Beast, they become our personal banners of foolhardiness. Oh, to be back in Roxanne, a car with doors, with windows that close. A car we know inside out, which has faithfully transported us over some of the toughest roads we’ve ever driven.

  Noise and dirt are mere distractions in light of Beast’s third liability, which is also revealed within hours of our departure on the first morning of the road trip. The cool breeze blowing through the open car in the early hours of the day lulls us into believing that as the day heats up we’ll have a pleasantly refreshing time of it. By midday, Beast is hotter than a pizza oven. This is because he is painted black, a bad color to be when the sun beats ceaselessly from its perch in a cloudless sky. It is also because Beast lacks anything but the most rudimentary firewall between the engine bay and the car interior. Two hours into a day’s drive and the floorboards are sizzling. As their temperature climbs, my ankles balloon like a startled blowfish. To cool them, I alternate squeezing my knees to my chest so I can prop my feet on the dashboard eighteen inches in front of me and hanging my feet through the space where the door should be, hoping they won’t be amputated by a truck cutting it close.

  The general discomfort of driving in Sexy Beast is something I have to put up with. It’s disagreeable but not dreadful. What is dreadful is that Beast was decidedly neglected in his early life. If there were an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cars, I would have no choice but to report Beast’s owners for abuse, and demand they never be allowed to own a car again.

  The full extent of Beast’s failings would have been apparent to anyone who knows cars and who cared to spend an hour checking this one over. That would include us. Except on this trip, we’ve decided to change our customary MO. Instead of at least eyeballing every last item as we did before the P2P, we have been uncharacteristically karmic. This is India, after all, even though Bernard’s acquaintance with the lotus position ended as a one-year-old, when he could still cross his legs. Though we’re deeply unsettled when we first meet Sexy Beast a day before departure, we suppress our premonitions in the face of protestations from the car’s mechanics. “Yes, sir, the car she has been gone over thoroughly, sir. Yes, we have checked her exceptionally for you. She is in fighting trim!” We want to believe them, because on this trip we are relaxed and happy-go-lucky. Or trying to be. And of course there’s the puja, meant to cure any lingering maladies of the vehicular sort.

  That they refer to Beast as “she” should have been a clue to her condition, since even today there are articles every month about the deplorable treatment of women in India. If there’s one incontrovertible sign that no one has given much thought to how Beast will survive traversing 3,500 miles of India, it’s the tires. Yet the mechanics who prepared Sexy Beast look at us in astonishment when we point out that Beast’s tires are as slick as old gums awaiting new dentures.

  “Do not worry, sir,” one mechanic says. “In India, these are considered very good tires.”

  “I see,” Bernard replies, startled nearly speechless. “Pardon me if this is not so, but I would have thought even in India these tires would not be used if one could help it.”

  “Unless perhaps as a playground swing,” I can’t help but chime in.

  “Actually, sir, we recently drove over fifte
en thousand kilometers in a different car and your tires look much better than the ones we had.”

  “Really? And did you get any flat tires?”

  “Oh yes, sir. We had a flat tire nearly every other day. But we never needed new tires.”

  Which is how we notice that an essential bit of equipment is missing from Beast’s modest toolkit: a serviceable jack. In a land where the retread rules, jacks should be a popular item, available anywhere. The only jack we can find must have been meant for one of the millions of Indian vehicles that look like a Mini Cooper made out of cardboard. It is so short, it barely raises Sexy Beast a few inches. Two blocks of wood under the jack solve that problem, boosting the jack like a short lecturer at a high podium. Now we are equipped not just for fixing a flat, but also for starting a campfire. My relief knows no bounds.

  Two days in and we arrive at our hotel, a dashed line of gasoline streaking the road behind us. Lots of Indians smoke and the street is their ashtray. Being trailed by gasoline could lead to a confluence of events with potentially fiery results. Repairing the hole in Beast’s fuel tank strikes us as not only prudent, but the new top of the list. The three Indian rally mechanics agree, then vanish for their eagerly anticipated night on the town.

  Morning dawns sunny and warm, a perfect day for car repairs. Everyone else leaves by eight o’clock. We wait. We pace. We phone, leave a message, wait some more. The mechanics drag in around ten o’clock, shirttails loose, eyes bleary, clearly on the wrong side of some dedicated carousing. They begin draining the tank. Fuel slowly fills a gallon bucket, dripping in slow plops like a metronome with a low battery. The full bucket is hauled, sploshing, up a hill behind our hotel, where it is dumped somewhere top secret—probably the local water supply.

  Once the gas tank is emptied and removed, the mechanics squeeze a special sealant from a tiny tube onto the offending hole. The tube’s instructions, the size of flea footprints, say give it four hours to dry. But the call of the road is strong, as is the need to arrive at the evening’s camp before dark. Once night falls, smoke from village fires lays a dense aromatic fog over the land. At this witching hour, Indian villagers emerge to use the roads as their pathway, moving animals and themselves down the middle in perfect obscurity. Driving in India at night is an idea only for the desperate or the demented. As yet, we are neither.