By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  ‘Give me the bag’, she said in Linda Blair’s voice from The Exorcist. ‘This is our secret. I am changing your seat. You will sit back here and watch that no one else goes in that refrigerator.’

  Together we wordlessly picked up the cans and reorganised them. I took my new seat and pretended to sleep with one eye on Max.

  When we landed, I waited patiently in my seat until all the other passengers had disembarked. The stewardess handed me Max in his bag and said, ‘Good luck snaking your way through Italy.’ She snickered and walked away.

  I assumed a haughty, untouchable demeanour and wandered through Fiumicino Airport and the marvellously lax Italian security where one either walks through the green door for ‘Nothing to Declare’ or the red if you have something. I had so much to declare, but kept right on walking through the green door into Italy’s humid summer air, marvelling, as I always do, at the palm trees lining the street. I grabbed a cab to the train station and purchased my ticket to Spoleto. We arrived two hours later and I waited under the gigantic orange Calder sculpture in the lower piazza with my now very lively hand luggage wriggling on my back. Luckily, in Italy a dancing bag elicits no curiosity. It was all buon giorno and ciao – business as usual in a town full of theatre people and Italians.

  The stage manager apologised for being late and loaded us into a Fiat Cinquecento barely big enough for Max, let alone the three of us. He ground the car into first gear and began to wind down the hill to the Villa Redenta, where the actors were staying, and whose extensive grounds were to be the backdrop for the Trilogy, which was scheduled to open that evening.

  The tension was palpable. Musicians were tuning up, and actors were doing voice exercises that could only be described as simultaneously alluring and unsettling. People were wearing togas, torches were blazing and the director was sulking. I greeted him and in his thick Romanian accent, he asked, ‘And you have a snake, yes?’ No small talk, no thanks for coming so swiftly.

  I took Max out of his bag and the director sneered, ‘But he is so small.’

  I had jet lag; I was exhausted from finding, buying, transporting and smuggling a snake across international borders.

  I looked at him and calmly transferred Max to his arms. ‘Many actresses say the same about you and yet you seem to do a serviceable job.’ I turned and walked out.

  I caught a train to the airport, drank a cappuccino and flew home. The reviews glowed, the Trilogy was the toast of the festival and Max was taken to every chic party as an accessory worn on the neck of starlets or leading men. For a moment I considered that perhaps this presaged a successful career as a smuggler, but then I realised that only an emergency could contrive to create a scenario as implausible and wonderful as snaking my way across the sea.

  Shakespeare once wrote: ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’. But not if it was experimental theatre, where anything can happen.

  THE AFGHAN TOURIST OFFICE

  ALEXANDER LUDWICK

  Alexander Ludwick was born in Seattle, Washington, and lived for several years in Guatemala as a child. He supports his travels by working part-time on a fish-processing boat in Alaska, though he would like to go to university someday. He enjoys travelling to remote and isolated destinations, and especially likes visiting Islamic countries and meeting their hospitable people. His next trip is to Haiti. This is his first national publication.

  I rode in a yellow taxi towards Kabul International Airport, where I had been told the tourist office was located. It was November 2004, and I needed an extension on my Afghanistan visa. To get it I required a letter of support from the tourist office, which was well out of the centre of Kabul. On the way there the driver had to stop and ask directions at a shop, but finally we pulled to a stop in front of a run-down building that looked like an old schoolhouse. I paid the driver and walked through the gate.

  Inside the perimeter was a guard’s post full of teenage soldiers who jumped out and started gibbering at me, asking questions in Dari that I did my best to answer. One of them took my hand to shake it and refused to let go, no matter how hard I tried to pull away, all the while smiling and asking unintelligible questions. I kept repeating the word ‘tourist’, and finally he pointed to a man who was sitting at a desk in the middle of a patch of dirt in front of a building.

  I walked over and asked him where the tourist office was. He looked at me, slightly puzzled, then after a minute of thinking pointed around the shabby-looking building, indicating that I should walk behind it.

  The shabby building turned out to be the Ministry of Civil Aviation, and behind it there was a second, slightly shabbier building, with a sign in Dari over the door. About twenty metres to the left of the entrance, in an overgrown field littered with abandoned cars, broken-down tractors and the remains of military vehicles, a man was talking into a mobile phone. He was standing next to a hole full of garbage, and when he saw me he gestured emphatically for me to come over. Please don’t let this be the tourist office, I thought to myself.

  The man was wearing a worn checked blazer and wrinkled black trousers. He had unkempt wavy hair and a subtle, but definitely quite mad, gleam in his eye. He shook my hand violently and continued shouting into his mobile for another couple of minutes, while I waited patiently. He finally finished his conversation with a shout, and slipped the phone into his pocket.

  ‘What you want?’ he unceremoniously asked me.

  ‘I need an extension on my visa’, I replied.

  ‘Come’, he commanded, and walked towards the building. As I followed, he asked without turning to face me, ‘How long you want?’

  ‘One week should do it’, I said.

  He stopped abruptly, turned slowly to face me, looked me in the eye, and said in a low, threatening voice, ‘No. You want one month.’

  I didn’t want to disagree with him, so I just gulped and nodded. He kept the intense eye contact going for a few more seconds, then burst into thunderous laughter. He shook his head at me and walked into the building, still chuckling. I followed, now really perplexed by this man. I was beginning to wonder if he worked here at all, or if I had even come to the right place.

  He told me to wait in the hall and walked into another room, where he had a loud, rapid conversation with another man. The hall was decorated with signs in rainbow colours, obviously created using Microsoft Word and featuring titles such as ‘President of Afghan Tourist Organisation’. The signs were hung over the hall’s wooden doors, which were in dire need of a new coat of paint. The place looked like the inside of a poorly maintained Soviet-era schoolhouse.

  While I was looking around the hallway, the man I had met in the field quietly crept up behind me. I was inadvertently blocking the hallway, and he suddenly screamed at me, like a German drill sergeant, ‘MOOOVE!’

  I quickly scurried to the edge of the hall and pressed myself against the wall so he could pass. He looked at me as if I was the crazy one, and walked up the hall, shaking his head and laughing to himself. I followed him into what appeared to be his office, filled with worn leather furniture and a desk with a miniature red, green and black Afghan flag on it.

  He surprised me again by shouting at me, in his heavily accented English, ‘Geev me ten dollars!’

  I was beginning to become indignant at this treatment, and I even went so far as to say, ‘A please would be nice…’ as I reached into my pocket.

  ‘Hmmph,’ he huffed, and added, ‘you geev me money fast, I make you letter fast!’

  I promptly handed over a ten-dollar bill.

  He started to fill out the form for me when his mobile rang. He had set the ring tone to one of the latest Hindi pop songs. He looked at me and started humming along with it while bobbing his head, apparently expecting me to know the song and sing along. He then started singing along himself, and as he pulled the phone out of his pocket, he stood up and started dancing, swinging his hips rhythmically to the music and shaking his arms back and forth
while singing even louder. At first I was stunned, but as his jig became more and more ridiculous, I had to try hard to restrain a laugh. It seemed he was truly trying to impress me with his dancing and singing skills, which were comically bad, and I was afraid I might hurt his feelings.

  After what seemed like several minutes, he finally answered the call. The conversation that ensued sounded serious, and I could hear an authoritative voice speaking quickly in Dari. Then, while the speaker on the other end of the line was in the middle of a sentence, the man in front of me appeared to grow bored, and like an enthusiastic fan at a football game, he howled into the receiver, ‘Hooooooooo!’

  I looked at him in utter disbelief, and heard the person speaking in outrage on the phone. He yelped again, this time selecting a higher pitch, and holding the receiver close to his mouth, ‘Eeeeeeeeee!’

  He tried two other notes, one higher and one slightly lower than the first, before finally screaming, ‘Aaaaahhhhh!’ in a high-pitched falsetto, like a woman falling from a high building. Finally he hung up the phone while the speaker was in the middle of an outraged sentence. He laughed proudly to himself, and went back to writing.

  After a minute, he put his fingers to his mouth and let out a high-pitched whistle that caused a sharp pain in my ears. A few seconds later, a teenage boy ran into the room with a rubber stamp and then ran quickly out again. In an exaggerated motion, the man lifted the rubber stamp high above his head and with a murderous look in his eye, he plunged it down on the ink pad. Then lifting it again, he stabbed it onto the letter requesting the visa extension. He tossed the stamp and the ink pad casually into an open drawer, slammed it shut, slid my letter and a receipt for the ten dollars over to me, and told me, ‘You go now!’ Then he walked out of the room and disappeared through one of the doors in the hallway.

  I was still somewhat in shock as I wandered outside. It wasn’t until minutes later, when I was in a taxi speeding back towards town, that the incredible strangeness of my encounter dawned on me. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing, causing the cab driver to look over at me, wondering about my sanity.

  LEFT LUGGAGE

  JEFF GREENWALD

  Oakland-based Jeff Greenwald is the author of five books, including Shopping for Buddhas, The Size of the World and Scratching the Surface: Impressions of Planet Earth from Hollywood to Shiraz. He is a contributing editor for Yoga Journal, Tricycle and Travel+Life magazines, and serves as Executive Director of Ethical Traveller, a global alliance of travellers dedicated to human rights and environmental protection (www.ethicaltraveller.org). In the course of his career, Jeff has celebrated Passover with Paul Bowles, circled Tibet’s Mt Kailash with a demoness and interviewed the Dalai Lama about Star Trek. He launched his stage career in 2003 with a one-man show, Strange Travel Suggestions. Visit his website at www.jeffgreenwald.com.

  Most travellers have learned the truth of semanticist Alfred Korzybski’s memorable maxim: ‘The map is not the territory’. And many of us, I think, have learned this through direct experience in India.

  Everyone has an image in their mind’s eye, an expectation of what India must be like. And each visitor, no matter their wealth or circumstance, is given the same lesson: no matter how many maps or guidebooks you study, you haven’t a clue what India is like until you physically step off the plane.

  It isn’t even necessary to get out onto the seething streets, to gawk at the heartbreaking slums lining the railroad tracks or wander through the marble-halled museums filled with Buddhas and daggers. My own education, for example, began at Calcutta’s airport.

  Granted, this was some time ago. I’m sure that by now Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International, formerly Dum Dum Airport, has come of age, redesigned around an architectural scheme filled with brightly lit food courts and duty-free boutiques selling Shiseido fragrances and iPod slipcases. At the time of my first visit, however, Dum Dum was a place that looked like it had seen its day, or perhaps five minutes of a day, at some long-forgotten moment between its ribbon-cutting ceremony and the arrival of the first British Overseas Airways Corporation flight. The floor was a collage of red betel juice stains, blue ticket stubs and green bidi butts. Above my head, bug-filled fixtures flickered a sickly yellow. Mosquitoes dined on the arriving passengers. As for the toilets – as they say, let’s not go there.

  All this, I had expected. It was when I found baggage claim that I realised something was terribly wrong. Wrong to the core. Westerners, you see, tend to take luggage carousels for granted. If airports around the world look more or less alike, their baggage carousels are pretty much cookie-cutter replicas: oval- or circle-shaped tracks of neatly overlapping metal fins, moving in a smooth, choreographed motion. The bags emerge from a point slightly above us, from behind a curtained duct. There is a momentary sense of suspense as they bow slightly, slide down a moving rubber ramp and halt with a thud against a hard rubber bumper that moves in synch with the polished fins. It’s a beautiful thing.

  At the Dum Dum baggage claim, the single carousel was nearly annihilated; it looked like a model, in miniature, of an Indian train derailment. The metal fins were bent, and forced their way ahead with a shrieking, grinding noise, like sheet metal being fed into a paper shredder. The little burlap curtain, where the luggage usually makes its entrance, had been torn off. Even the rubber rail had been removed, no doubt reincarnated as the jury-rigged bumper of a Calcutta taxi.

  The conveyor ramp leading from the luggage chute to the carousel was jammed, and stuttered in place like a disembodied frog’s leg being shocked, repeatedly, by school students. After an interminable wait the bags began to appear. Each suitcase emerged nakedly at the top, pausing as if terrified by the chaos below. Then, shoved by the bag behind it, the case tumbled end-over-end down the spastic belt towards the sharp silver fins, which shucked it like an oyster. The split bag would then smash against the naked metal rail and burst open, spewing its contents in a wide arc across the spittle-rimed floor. The metal track itself was covered with lingerie and earplugs, batteries and sneakers, aspirin and stuffed elephants. Panicked passengers rampaged through the jetsam, trying to recover their underwear and trousers.

  A few months earlier, I had been sitting in a long wooden tourist canoe, following another boat along Nepal’s Sunkosi River. Our boatmen were local boys. The rains had been late, and the boys were unskilled. Halfway through our journey, we came towards a patch of whitewater. The canoe ahead entered first. It flipped instantly, tossing its passengers, along with their highend binoculars and camera gear, into the muddy water. Our boatman was wide-eyed, and the passengers braced for disaster. All, that is, but one. A compact but muscular woman from Maine darted forward, expertly balanced. She seized our Nepali pilot by the hips, and tossed him aside. Grabbing the oars, she navigated the rapids without incident.

  The lesson had not been forgotten. I positioned myself directly in front of the chute. The moment my suitcase appeared I leaped onto the carousel and darted up the ramp, ignoring the shouts of the security guards and the cries of the other passengers, whose vests and panties clutched at my ankles like Sirens. The bag tipped forward; I grabbed it by the flanks and, with enormous effort, wrestled it past all obstacles and onto the floor.

  Many people imagine that, as a travel writer, I know how to pack. This is completely false. I have no idea what to take on a trip. If I’m going to Calcutta for a week, I figure, okay, I’ll be going for a walk in the morning and I’ll sweat through a shirt. I’m also going to walk during the afternoon and evening. So I’ll be needing three, maybe four fresh shirts a day, and figure it’s going to be four days before I can find the time to do a wash. By the time I’d finished my preparations, I was bound for Calcutta with a suitcase filled with sixteen shirts, eight pairs of pants, sandals, hiking boots, dress shoes (because you never know), socks, sketchbooks, two cameras, an inflatable mattress, copious toiletries and a vintage Scrabble game in an antique metal container.

  My suitcase weighed forty kilo
grams, and the moment I tried to carry it out of Dum Dum Airport the truth of the matter tapped upon my spine. There was no way I was going to haul this behemoth through the streets of India. The only solution was to extract the absolute essentials, put the thing in storage and reclaim it on my departure from Calcutta.

  My first thought was that I’d have to find a tourist hotel, and leave the bag in a storage room or behind a desk. But as I glanced around the baggage claim area, I spied a squarish, hand-lettered sign above an open door: LEFT LUGGAGE. A classic arrow pointed redundantly downward, towards the doorway itself. My suitcase had no wheels, so I pulled and hefted it, in stages, towards this specialised exit. Arriving at the doorway, I glanced through it. There was nothing but a huge, empty field: a lost world which seemed to go on for ever, in all directions, under the blinding Calcutta sun.

  It was a million degrees outside. A shimmering haze rippled above the ground. But in the distance – could it be? – stood a house of some kind, a tiny hut at least a kilometre away. There was no road to speak of, just a cracked and overgrown concrete pathway covered with spiky weeds and broken glass. Chipmunks ran to and fro. Emaciated cattle grazed on the horizon, and their dung – fresh, dried, and all stages in between – was piled everywhere. I could barely make out the faraway shack, but it did seem to have some kind of sign on the side, something that might have said ‘Left Luggage’, but which might just as easily have been an advertisement for car tyres, in Hindi.

  India’s infamous sun beat down on the field, and on my neck, as I dragged my impossible bag along the concrete track. Perspiration soaked through my clothing, and stung my eyes. The broken pathway scraped the corners of my suitcase, and the little plastic feet shredded like hard cheese. Shards of glass tore my sneakers. There was no avoiding the dung, and each time my feet or my case encountered the droppings of a sacred cow a foul brown track followed me along the path.