The Way of Wanderlust

by Don George

  “Yes, I am. You have to be practical, realistic. I think this is a very charming tribute. It has a hometown feeling—”

  “An intimacy,” I said.

  “Bravo for the American! Yes, an intimacy, that I think distinguishes it from larger, more impersonal exhibits.”

  “I agree,” I said. “You feel closer to the soul of Matisse here.”

  “Voilà!” exclaimed woman number two.

  “The soul of Matisse?” the first woman said, eyeing me suspiciously. “Are all Americans so kind?” She paused and smiled slightly.

  “I still think I would be—how shall I say?—deceived, disappointed, if I flew all the way across the ocean to see this.”

  “Well,” I began expansively, “no one will fly all the way across the ocean just to see this. They will fly all the way across the ocean to see this!”—and I pointed grandly to the sunny seaside city outside the museum’s walls.

  “Ah!” all three women said.

  “So you like Nice?” asked woman number one.

  “Oh, I love Nice,” I said. “I love the winding alleyways in Old Nice, and the old shuttered buildings. I love the sidewalk cafés and the restaurants that have room for only four tables. I love the grand Promenade des Anglais and the fantastic hotels that look onto it.”

  “And the people of Nice?”

  “Oh, yes!” I began—“well, actually, you are the first Niçoises I’ve had the opportunity to talk at length with, but all the people I’ve encountered have been very friendly and courteous. One thing that amazes me is that people are so willing to speak English here. In Paris, even if they know some English, shopkeepers or waiters will often refuse to speak with foreign customers.”

  “We are not Parisians here, my dear,” said woman number two.

  “Gracious no!” added woman number one. “We have a temperament of the south, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Exactly,” said woman number three. “We are more relaxed, more passionate,”—did she smile discreetly at me?—“more. . . In Paris, they work now to enjoy life later. In Nice, we enjoy life now!”

  “Yes!” I said. “I’m sure that is exactly what Matisse felt!”

  I suddenly realized that the visitors in the salon were paying more attention to our little group than they were to the paintings and drawings on the walls.

  “So you like art?” woman number one asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “especially modern French art.”

  “Then you must go to Antibes to see the Picasso museum, and Cagnes-sur-Mer to see Renoir’s former residence.”

  “And of course you must go to the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul,” said woman number two.

  “And the Chagall museum down the street,” said woman number three, “and the Cocteau museum in Menton.”

  “Oh, and have you seen the Rosary Chapel in Vence?” asked woman number one. “It is Matisse’s triumph!”

  “And you must see the Cocteau chapel in Villefranche!” said woman number three.

  “Yes,” I lamented, “there is so much to see, and I have so little time.”

  I was waiting for the women to offer to take me in their Mercedes from museum to museum over the next few days. Barring that, I was waiting for them at least to invite me back to their homes for dinner or a drink.

  But life never follows a set script.

  “Oh!” said woman number two, looking at her watch. “I have to pick up the children!”

  And the other two women, as if on cue, looked at their watches and exclaimed, “The time!”

  “How quickly time passes with pleasant company,” said woman number one, and winked at me.

  “Well, our new American friend,” she continued with a broad smile, glancing at my still open notebook, “have you found something to write about now?”

  As they made for the exit, she turned one last time and said, “Au revoir! Enjoy your stay in our lovely Nice!”

  Then they were gone.

  I walked once more around the suddenly intimate and enchanting museum, looked again at the artist’s luminous, passion-filled pieces and thought: Ah, Matisse—now I understand even better what you loved about Nice.

  Treasures of Dubrovnik

  When I was writing a column for the Lonely Planet website, one of the subjects I tried to focus on was the special people we meet when we travel, people who come to embody and transfigure our understanding of a place. Usually these encounters are entirely unexpected, and often they become our most precious souvenirs from a trip. My meeting in 2000 with the woman I call T, in Dubrovnik, was one such experience. She brought the city’s glorious past and tumultuous present to life for me. And to this day, when I think of that poignant place, I remember the moment her eyes shone with an indomitable light as she recalled the Dubrovnik of old.

  I WASN’T SURE WHAT TO EXPECT on my first visit to Dubrovnik in the fall of 2000. On the one hand, I knew that the city had long been considered the jewel of the Adriatic and was a UNESCO World Heritage site. On the other hand, I had heard that it had been largely destroyed by bombs in the early 1990s. Was I going to find rubble or restoration?

  Happily, the answer was the latter. While 68 percent of Old Dubrovnik’s 824 buildings were hit by bombs in an eight-month siege during the Yugoslavian civil war—leaving holes in two out of every three tiled roofs—the damage is hardly noticeable now. Most of the buildings have been meticulously repaired. And the old walled city is again truly an extraordinary jewel.

  But the tale of Dubrovnik does not have an unambiguously happy ending. While the city itself has been largely rebuilt, the tourism on which the city depends has not been restored. And in this sense, the damage done by the shelling remains.

  I happened to arrive on All Saints’ Day, 30 October, and people were walking through the streets with armfuls of flowers to be laid at their ancestors’ graves. This seemed a particularly appropriate introduction to a place where the past is such a powerful presence.

  I signed up for a guided tour, which began with a bus trip to the outskirts above the city. From that vantage, Dubrovnik’s Old Town seemed an exquisite labyrinth of honey-tinted stone buildings with terra-cotta roof tiles of red and orange, preserved within thick stone walls. It was an astonishing, almost fairy tale sight.

  Then we walked through those gates, and the tale darkened. One of the first sights greeting visitors to the Old Town is a map that shows the damage done by bombs and grenades from October 1991 to May 1992. It is thick with black dots and triangles. “The worst day of the siege,” the woman leading my group said, “was 12 December, 1991. On the day, 600 shells fell on the city.” Six hundred shells.

  “See up there?” she continued, pointing to a green hill within easy eyesight of the town, not far from where our bus had stopped. “That’s where the guns were set. For months and months they just kept sending bombs onto the town. In all, 200 people in Dubrovnik were killed during this time.” Nine years later, her voice still quavered.

  This woman—I’ll call her T—proved a passionate guide to Dubrovnik past and present. She explained how, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Dubrovnik had been a commercial and cultural center that rivaled Venice. Extraordinary treasures had been created and collected here; merchants from afar passed through and marveled at its splendors. Ships were sent to Syria, Egypt, France, and Spain.

  The city’s fall from these heights began in 1667, when an earthquake devastated the area. But despite that destruction, T said, the plan of the city itself is little changed from the Middle Ages. She pointed like a proud parent to the geometric precision of the city: the six-foot-wide alleys that rise off the main street; the steep stairways between age-blackened stone facades and freshly painted wooden shutters; the strings of bright laundry festooned against the sky.

  On one side street a shopkeeper was hastily stringing up an American flag. “This flag is to welcome the sailors from the USS George Washington,” T said. “We are so grateful to t
he U.S. Navy for stopping here. The sailors are good visitors; they enjoy our town and spend money. We need more tourists!”

  Later in the tour, she said that about 50,000 people live in greater Dubrovnik, but that in the Old City itself, there are only about 4,000 people. “I couldn’t live here!” she said. “Everyone knows everything—where you went last weekend, what you’re having for dinner, what you and your husband are fighting about.”

  The treasures of the town came to life through her descriptions—the beautifully detailed Franciscan monastery complex, and its 13th-century pharmacy, the third oldest pharmacy in Europe, where people still line up to get their medicines prepared; the 15th-century Onofrio Fountain, whose water is still drinkable; the 15th-century synagogue, the second oldest in Europe; and the 17th-century Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin. The treasury here houses Dubrovnik’s most precious works, T said, leading us into a room filled with a giddying array of golden artifacts. In the old days, she added, this room was impenetrable to foreign invaders; to open its doorway, three keys had to be used simultaneously.

  We walked on for a couple of hours, past so many architectural and artistic glories that I began to feel almost drunk. The ancient walls of the city seemed like a jewel box, and the buildings, streets, and artworks its gems.

  But it was T herself who made the most lasting impression on me. She was probably in her mid-forties—though her sculpted face seemed older—with graying golden hair covered with a silk scarf. “We are poor,” she said at one point, “but we are proud.” And I noticed then how the hems of her meticulous suit were frayed and how the scuffed sides of her fashionable boots had been rigorously shined.

  When our tour ended, I asked if I could buy her a drink and she sank wearily into a chair at the Café Festival.

  She told me about her children and her husband, about her efforts to make ends meet—growing their own vegetables and fruit, sewing their own clothes, guiding when the tourists were in town. She told me how difficult it was to cope with the ravages of the war, how it had changed the atmosphere throughout the region. “Now the borders are open,” she said with a sigh, “but it’s not easy to get together again as neighbors after the war.”

  And she told me how it had changed the atmosphere within Dubrovnik itself. “I am tired of so much gloominess!” she exclaimed. “Before the war, everyone was so happy. There was music and dancing in the streets every night. And such laughter! We had the Mediterranean spirit. But now—bah!—everyone is so gloomy. I am tired of the complaining! We need to move on, you know?”

  I pictured how her life might have been before the war: lifting a glass of wine in a café, dancing on the cobbled streets. She was laughing, and the ancient buildings of Dubrovnik were glittering.

  When I looked at her again, she was staring at me. “Our women are famous for being very beautiful—perhaps you have noticed?” she said, and smiled. And for a moment the spirit of Old Dubrovnik shone again in her eyes.

  It is easy for us as travelers to take from the world. We go somewhere and we eat feasts, visit monuments and museums, snap pictures, meet people. Over and over, we replenish ourselves. The challenge, often, is to figure out how to give back to the places that nourish us. But in the case of Dubrovnik, this challenge is easily answered. Just go there. Do it as an homage to the treasures of the past. Do it as a testament to the idiocy of war and the resilience of the human spirit. And do it as a tribute to wonderful people like T, who deserve so much more—and who offer so much in return.

  Letters from Jordan

  I traveled to Jordan almost exactly one year after Sept. 11, 2001. I went mainly because I was tired of TV commentators telling me about “the word from the Arab street.” I wanted to walk the Arab street, and hear the word myself. And I believed firmly that human beings are bridges, and that in times of crisis, it is not only our opportunity but our duty to become the mortal bonds that bring the planet together again. So, against the well-meaning advice of virtually everyone I knew, I journeyed to Jordan. The ensuing encounters there created a complicated and compelling portrait of the place and the people that I would never otherwise have known. I gained—and I gave—more than I ever could have imagined from home. And the trip profoundly affirmed once again the incalculable value and essential importance of seeing the world on our own.

  Part One: Ancient Treasures, Modern Trials

  When I was preparing for this ten-day journey to Jordan, most of the people who heard about it responded with furrowed brows. “Do you think it’s safe to go there now? Aren’t you worried?”

  Their alarm was so intense that I partly succumbed to it, and boarded the plane for Amman on September 17, 2002, more apprehensive than I have been about any journey in decades.

  But five days later, as I sit on a fountain-fronted marble terrace in the southern resort town of Aqaba, flanked by graceful palm trees and overlooking the clear waters of the Red Sea, eating delicious yogurt and fresh black olives and steaming local bread and fanned by a just-warm-enough-breeze, those fears seem worlds away.

  In the past five days I have never once felt even a trace of hostility directed at me; I have not thought for even a moment that I was in danger. On the contrary, the Jordanian people I have met both in tourist places and off the beaten path have been remarkably generous, friendly, accommodating, and honest.

  Which is not to suggest that they are either ignorant about or happy with the current condition of the world. The Jordanians I have spoken with would like UN inspectors to return to Iraq and to monitor the country closely, but their greatest fear is not of Saddam Hussein.

  “We do not think Saddam has the kind of weapons of mass destruction that your president insists he has,” a shopkeeper told me, “but even if he does, we do not think he will use them unless he is backed into a corner. That is what we really fear—that your country will provoke him to act.”

  And as they ask for international forces to monitor Iraq, Jordanians also ask for the U.S. to recognize and renounce its own double standard. If the U.S. wants Iraq to comply with UN resolutions, the reasoning goes, then it should demand that Israel comply with such resolutions as well.

  But the reality for Jordanians is that they are subject to forces far beyond their control. As a Jordanian tour guide said to me, “What can we do? We are not a big player. We can’t call the shots. We have to try to get along with everyone.”

  Getting along with everyone seems to be an art the Jordanians have mastered on the personal level as well. Exploring the country from north to south, I have found the people to be exceptionally warm and welcoming, gracious and hospitable. So it is especially heartbreaking to see how geography has affected tourism here. Officials say that since last September, visitor arrivals have dropped by 60 to 80 percent. While tourism accounts for only 12 percent of the economy, a few days of stopping at virtually empty hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops makes the loss seem far greater.

  And this is a huge loss for travelers as well. In just four quick days of touring, I have had at least two magical experiences that I will never forget.

  The first was visiting Petra. To reach this site, you have to walk for twenty minutes along a sinuous slit sliced between whorling sandstone walls. Your footsteps echo on stones laid two millennia ago, twisting in and out of sunlight, until you turn a bend and suddenly the rose-colored columns of the Treasury soar before you, carved in exquisite designs out of the red rock. You step into a broad plaza and the façade appears in full, heart-stopping grandeur, the intricate columns and statues still awe-inspiring in their artistry twenty-one centuries after Nabatean hands carved them.

  And Petra is much more than its Treasury. I spent a too-short day wandering its ancient streets and marveling at its elaborate temples and tombs—and then returned at night for the candlelit “Petra by Night” program. Straggling behind as the tour group walked to the Treasury, I stopped alone in the siq that leads to the site. Candle shadows danced on the sandst
one walls, then the strains of a sole flute player drifted through the air and swirled around me in the Nabatean moonlight.

  The second was two nights ago when I slept under the stars in the southern desert of Wadi Rum. I was staying in a Bedouin-style campsite-cum-resort called the Captain’s Camp. Guests stay in goat-hair houses—the tents that the nomadic Bedouin have sewn and lived in for centuries—and eat in an open-air pavilion or around a campfire listening to traditional Bedouin songs. When the manager of the camp asked if I would like to sleep under the stars, I imagined dragging a blanket onto the sand. Oh no, sir, he said, we will bring your bed outside.

  And so it was that I slept on a mattress on a wooden pallet set into the rose-colored earth, between cool sheets, with two palm trees framing the stars in front of me and the full moon overhead, and in the distance, far beyond flickering torchlights, the slumbering silhouettes of the desert crags of Wadi Rum.

  Waking in the middle of the night, I walked beyond the campsite and into the desert. There I looked at the stars and absorbed the silence and thought of all the rich and conflicting cultures around me—Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, Israel and Egypt to the west. And for one brief and precious moment, peace reigned in the Middle East.

  Part Two: Exhilarating Encounters, Enduring Lessons

  On the tenth and final day of my Jordanian adventure, I am back where I began, in Amman—only the place looks entirely different to me. On my first arrival, I had been struck by the capital’s architectural monotony of hill after hill of beige blocks, and by the exoticism of neon signs in flowing Arabic script, blue-lit minaret spires, the heart-tugging calls of the muezzin, and the occasional sight of women covered in black burqa from head to toe and men in flowing white robes and traditional red-and-white or black-and-white kefiya head-covers. Now all these have become so familiar that I hardly notice them.