By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  I could feel the toilet with my shins, and thought it would be best to handle the most imminent threat first. After a few minutes, my eyes began to adjust to the darkness. There was a light on the wall, a minuscule ‘black’ micro-bulb that gave off less light than a digital watch. I thought it was a motion detector connected to the lights, so I waved my arms around for a while. When that didn’t work, I banged on the door.

  After fifteen minutes, I heard someone else enter the bathroom. ‘Help’, I said, in the most friendly and unalarmed voice I could muster. Apparently, it wasn’t good enough. The person left. As did the person after that. If there had only been enough light, I could have simply opened my Dutch phrasebook and learned how to say, ‘Excuse me, but there’s a dumb-ass American locked in this toilet.’

  After nearly an hour, I decided it was time to resort to banging and yelling. A few minutes later, I was rescued by a passing urinator.

  ‘Thanks’, I muttered, trying very hard to look natural while being rescued from a toilet stall in the men’s room.

  With the door open, I searched for a light. Nothing. I opened the other two stalls (keeping a firm grasp on the handle) and couldn’t find any lights there, either. I even checked the main bathroom switches. Nada. Maybe, I thought, I needed to get a light switch from the circulation desk.

  I consulted my favourite security guard on the way out. This only certified that I was the stupidest person he’d ever encountered in all his years of security work. He regarded me calmly, then said in a voice so condescending it would have been psychologically damaging to a three-year-old, ‘The light is already on.’ I assured him that it definitely was not.

  Well, it turned out that the tiny black light was the light. It prevents drug users – ‘Mostly Germans who come over the border’, the guard confided – from shooting up in the stall because they can’t find their veins.

  ‘Of course, you can’t find the toilet, either’, I pointed out.

  As I made my way to the exit, I considered pocketing the precious door part – it might come in handy in some future library emergency. But I couldn’t break my solemn pact with the librarian, and anyway, I’d be demeaning the valuable traveller’s lesson I’d just learned: I now knew how to handle Dutch toilets.

  WALK OF FAME

  JEFF VIZE

  Jeff Vize has trampled over wet cement, flower beds and innocent bystanders in at least forty countries. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Charlotte, and son, Loïc. He is currently at work on a travel memoir, Pigs in the Toilet (And Other Discoveries on the Road from Tokyo to Paris), from which this story is adapted.

  I’m not a movie star, but I’ve played one abroad. Not that I know anything about acting, dialogue or even comic timing. I just know what it’s like to be famous: I was a celebrity for five days in Bangladesh.

  If you’ve ever been to Bangladesh, you know what I’m talking about. In fact, if you’ve ever been to any developing nation you’ve no doubt had the same experience, particularly if your skin colour is a few shades darker or lighter than the locally prevailing hue. But ethnicity isn’t all that matters – it can be your clothes, your demeanour or your perpetually confused look. You don’t have to appear on TV either; you just need to step out of your hotel room.

  But the fame conferred upon foreign travellers in Bangladesh is unique for its intensity. This isn’t a nation on most round-the-world agendas. Visitors are rare, and a pale white tourist plodding around in Bermuda shorts is a sight to behold for average Bangladeshis. They stare.

  Of course, people stare everywhere, whether it’s polite Japan or rowdy India. Yet there is something slightly different about the Bangladeshi’s stare. It’s not the covertly stolen glance of a Tokyo train commuter, or even the leering gaze that a scantily clad Western woman might attract in India. It’s a look of absolute shock: a slack-jawed, eye-popping, dry-tongued stare that startles you as much as you’ve startled them. There is a foreigner on my street!

  And it doesn’t stop with the stare. A visiting foreigner here has the power to shut down an entire city block. Your presence causes traffic jams as rickshaw and truck drivers slam on their brakes to have a look. Shopkeepers shutter their stores and follow you down the street. Children abandon soccer games and huddle around, trying to touch you. At one point, I entered a small shop and turned to find the exit blocked by twenty curious Bangladeshis. Another day, I was ambushed by a group of a dozen children who led me by the hand to – voilà! – another foreigner whom their friends had found some two blocks away. He was the only other foreign visitor I saw in five days.

  All of this attention was charming at first, but I soon began to think twice about even leaving my hotel. So I developed some coping strategies. First, never – and I mean never – stop in the street to look at your guidebook. This would be like dropping a blob of honey in an ant farm. I found I’d be surrounded by literally hundreds of locals within seconds, and continuing my journey would require handshakes, ten conversations and possibly autographs. One time, I was forced to employ the services of a child bodyguard, who diligently ordered other voyeurs to back off. His only payment was the privilege of being my friend.

  The second rule I followed was to walk fast. People would still stare, but I’d pass them like a phantom – leaving them to discuss whether I actually existed or not.

  The third rule was to develop friendly yet slightly dismissive ways of acknowledging my fame. I had fun with this one. The easiest was the Princess Diana wave – a half turn of the hand at face level, punctuated by a slightly demure smile. On more energetic days, I resorted to the Richard Nixon victory pose – arms above my head, fingers held up to signify the letter ‘V’ – as I waded through the masses. The kids loved that one. When I found myself more or less surrounded, I turned local politician – hand extended for multiple handshakes and pats on the head. If that didn’t work, I turned the tables by pulling out my camera and snapping a photo of my admirers. Finally, there was the simple head-nod. This wasn’t as nice, but it worked when I was in a hurry, which was often.

  My techniques worked well for the first few days; then they backfired spectacularly. The problems began with my visit to the Pink Palace, one of Dhaka’s biggest tourist attractions. I arrived at the palace to find its gates locked. It was a Friday – mosque day. The positioning of the gate was not exactly advantageous, as I was essentially boxed into a corner. My only exit was via a street packed with Bangladeshis, all of them surely waiting to pounce.

  I took a cautious glance over my shoulder. People were already staring, and a few of them were taking cautious steps towards me. No matter, I’d just walk quickly.

  I slung my backpack over one shoulder and morphed into Princess Di. A hundred heads swivelled in my direction.

  ‘Hello!’ a group of labourers called out in unison.

  ‘Hello!’ I returned.

  ‘Hello!’ they repeated.

  ‘I’m from America’, I said, anticipating the usual ‘What is your country?’ interrogation.

  That didn’t satisfy them. Our dialogue continued as I passed them: ‘Hello!’ ‘America!’ ‘Hello!’ ‘America!’ Even for Bangladeshi standards, this was a bit bizarre. Then I heard footsteps. They were following me. A dozen or so children were converging ahead as well. I picked up my pace and prepared to turn Richard Nixon.

  The children reached me before the labourers did, and there were so many of them that I stopped. It wasn’t that they blocked my way; in fact, they stopped a metre away from me. But they were shouting and gesticulating so vigorously that something must have been wrong. Their cries came in Bengali as well as English – a cacophony of ‘hellos’ and ‘hey misters’ interspersed with instructions I couldn’t understand.

  Meanwhile, the footsteps were getting closer. I had to keep moving. I tried another hello and walked forward.

  ‘No!’ one of them finally shouted. The others were gesturing and pointing like a group of madmen.

  ‘Hello!’ I repe
ated.

  The children erupted into uncontrollable laughter; this was evidently the funniest thing they had ever heard. I was just plain confused. Then the footsteps arrived. It was one of the labourers.

  ‘Mister!’ he said, pointing at my feet. ‘No!’

  I looked down, and could hardly believe my eyes. I had spent the last hundred metres walking on wet cement. My footprints were visible all the way back to the gate.

  I guess I’m just not cut out for fame.

  THE CULINARY CHAOS PRINCIPLE

  DON GEORGE

  Don George is Lonely Planet’s Global Travel Editor and the editor of this anthology. His most recent book is Travel Writing. Don has edited four previous anthologies, including The Kindness of Strangers and A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad. Before becoming a travel writer and editor, he worked as a translator in Paris, where he subsisted happily on biftek-frites and house red wine; a teacher in Athens, where he was honoured to eat the sheep’s eyeballs at an Easter feast; and a TV talk show host in Tokyo, where he was treated to sashimi so fresh that the fish literally flipped off his plate.

  As a traveller, I am a fervent follower of the Culinary Chaos Principle. This principle is based on the theory that the universe is like an all-you-can-eat buffet that is proceeding ever so slowly but ineluctably past the prime rib, the tandoori chicken and the kung pao shrimp towards the baked Alaska. Our goal in this smorgasbord is to sample as much as we can before closing time. The best way to achieve this goal is to leave your menu selection in the good hands of chance – a mysterious force you might best imagine as a dapper figure in a tuxedo saying, ‘Hi, I’m Chance, and I’ll be your waitperson this evening.’

  Life on the road affords many excellent opportunities to cultivate the Culinary Chaos Principle. You enter a smoky six-table den at the end of the world. The grizzled proprietor wipes his hands on his Jackson Pollack apron and leads you to a crumb-covered table, then presses a tattered menu into your hand. This is the Special Guest Menu and features a kind of English you’ve never seen before. But never mind! You decide to start with Shoo Race Soap, proceed to Mixt Intestine Bean Luck, tuck into a Rusted Ship Chup and end with Frooty Coostard Frayed Kek. Yum.

  Of course, if you’re really lucky, the proprietor will simply wag his grizzled head to indicate that they don’t have any English-language menu at all. Ah, then the potentials of the Culinary Chaos Principle positively shine!

  I have been graced with the gifts of this principle all around the world, but the meal that lives most memorably in my mind took place in Naples. My wife and I were wandering along the waterfront on a half-day excursion from a cruise ship and had decided to look for a good place to eat. There were some touristy places right near the water, but we eschewed those and ventured further inland, into a warren of dank, dark alleys and vaguely illicit-looking shops. Laundry was festooned along the balconies, and pedestrians and bicycles and motorcycles swarmed by.

  We spied a tiny restaurant that was full of people and walked in. The owner greeted us warmly in Italian and bade us sit down. The other diners all looked at us, and a few smiled kindly and then returned to the platefuls of delicious-looking food in front of them.

  The owner raised an imaginary glass to his mouth – ‘Vino?’ – and returned with two glasses of strong red wine and a menu that was entirely in Italian. I looked around. The owner and his wife and a young assistant, their daughter we later learned, were preparing and cooking the food in full view of the diners. All the ingredients were on display – strings of garlic and shiny tomatoes and clumps of basil, little white balls of mozzarella, golden coils of pasta and a few fish in a pan. The menu seemed to be extremely limited – a salad, a few pastas, a fish dish. That was it.

  The owner brought a plate of rough thick bread. I broke off a chunk and it was delicious. We looked at every single dish on the menu but couldn’t recognise even one. Still, it would have been too easy – and fundamentally antagonistic to the Culinary Chaos Principle – to simply point at someone else’s plate and say, ‘I’ll have what he’s having.’ So after some deliberation we bravely pointed to a dish in the pasta section. I imagined this would bring us the wonderfully aromatic dish that our neighbour was savouring – a glorious heap of spaghetti twirled in a thick sauce, with hints of herbs wafting towards us.

  As we sipped our wine and watched the other patrons laughing and calling out to each other – it was lunch time and they all seemed to be workers from neighbourhood offices – I could almost taste that mouth-watering pasta. We waited and waited, watching the wife place handfuls of pasta into a large boiling pot and pour them out a few minutes later, perfectly al dente, we were sure. Other diners who came in after us got their plates of pasta, but still we waited. Finally, the owner emerged from a closed-off section of the kitchen, proudly looking our way.

  We watched expectantly as he manoeuvred two heaping platters through the tables, subtly showing them off to other patrons as he passed, and placed them before us with a theatrical thump.

  Oh no! On each of our plates was a tiny pedestal of pasta. And crowning each pedestal, overwhelming the plate so that it slithered off the sides, was a huge octopus, lightly doused in a brown sauce, staring dolefully at the famished, flummoxed foreigners who had proposed to eat it.

  These octopi were mountainous, the biggest ever served in the city of Naples, I’m sure. There was no avoiding them, no pushing them to the side of the plate, no covering them with bread. The pasta was merely a warm-up act; these puckering prehistoric protuberances were the stars.

  What to do? I can stomach a little octopus, but this was more octopus than I would normally eat in a year.

  Now this is where the ineffable glory of the Culinary Chaos Principle kicks in. What to do? Eat it, of course! We couldn’t lose face by asking the owner to bring something else. We had ordered it, he had made it – with considerable pride and pleasure, it seemed, from the way he continued to beam at us from a corner, waiting for our first appreciative bites. There was nothing to do but eat.

  Why, I thought, hadn’t I just pointed at my neighbour’s pasta – he who was even now folding his napkin and rising to his feet with a most satisfied smile? Or why hadn’t I walked back to the kitchen and told the cook with a gesture and a smile that I coveted the pasta she was devotedly plopping into a pot?

  Well, what would I have learned from that?

  So I broke off a handful of bread, took a big gulp of wine, and cut into the octopus. It was astonishingly tender, and the brown gravy was unexpectedly delicious. In fact, it was so ethereally exquisite that… Well, no. It was not an edible epiphany – it was still octopus.

  By alternating pasta, bread and wine with bites of octopus, I managed to get down about a dozen forkfuls. We nodded and smiled broadly at the owner and at each other, and tried to express our admiration for this singular speciality of the house. But finally I gave up the pretence and pushed and prodded the octopus around on my plate until I had uncovered and devoured all the strands of pasta I could find. That left me with a half-full stomach and a half-eaten octopus.

  It was time to raise the white napkin of surrender.

  The owner came solicitously over and we indicated that we were full ‘up to here’. Then, as he began to gather up our plates, we served the sentences we had concocted. We praised the restaurant’s intimate atmosphere and its friendly diners who seemed to know each other so well; we exulted in the open kitchen where we could watch him and his wife and daughter work; we marvelled at how they seemed to use only very fresh ingredients and how their limited menu meant that everything they did, they did very well.

  He listened to our English intently, if quizzically, and nodded and smiled until we were done. And when we rose to leave, he rushed from the back of the restaurant to guide us to the door, pumped our hands vigorously, then pressed his hands to his heart and said, I think, that when we returned to his city, we should consider his humble restaurant our Neapolitan home away from home.

&
nbsp; We walked into the garlic-bright street that lilted with the cries of vendors and children, flapping laundry and honking horns. We held hands and smiled into each other’s eyes. The Culinary Chaos Principle was alive and well; the proof was right inside.

  FAECES FOOT

  TIM CAHILL

  Tim Cahill is the author of nine books, including Hold the Enlightenment, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and Lost in My Own Backyard. He writes for many national magazines and is the co-writer of three IMAX films, including Everest. Tim lives in Montana with his wife, Linnea, two dogs and two cats.

  On expeditions to remote and difficult areas, when conditions can become uncomfortable, if not to say actually agonising, it is customary to restructure the pain by irritating and annoying one’s companions. In such situations, a person fully expects to be taunted, mocked, ragged and generally made the butt of some profoundly grating ongoing jibe. Those of us who do this sort of thing for a living assume that giving the other girl or guy a daily ration of humiliation raises their tolerance level and helps them endure physical pain. We get our poop in a pile and fling it in the faces of our companions for their own good. No one derives any pleasure out of this. (Okay, I lied. It’s really fun – unless, of course, you are the person becoming exasperated beyond measure.) Expedition members generally take turns at being the brunt of the joke.

  That’s why it’s very easy to hate my friend Will Gadd. I hate him because he is impossible to annoy. He can do any outdoor athletic activity better than I can – and, in fact, he can do many of them better than anyone else in the world. Will, for instance, placed first at almost every major ice climbing competition in the world in 1998 and ‘99, and won the 2000 Ice World Cup. He is the current world record holder in distance paragliding (423.5 kilometres/263 miles), and the first to make a one-day ascent of Mount Robson, Canada’s highest peak. He is the three-time Canadian National Sport Climbing Champion and has climbed walls rated 5.13d, which, for those not familiar with rock-climbing ratings, probably means that Spiderman hates him, too. And oh yeah, he writes well, and has been published in many of the leading outdoor magazines. He produces outdoor action films, and does stunt work – kayaking, mountaineering, that sort of thing – in various commercials. Even more detestable, Will is almost intolerably modest about his accomplishments. He’s a nice guy, and a great travelling companion. You just want to punch him in the head.