I had reached my limit. Larry was having fun on purpose. He obviously didn’t give a damn what happened to me. Larry, who would be spending his vacation at home doing crossword puzzles if it weren’t for me, had abandoned me. After all I’d done, he could have stayed by my side and kept me company.
Or at the very least he could have had the decency to remind me that I don’t know how to ride a horse.
Telling
Nobody wants to hear about your vacation unless you’ve had a terrible time. Then they’re all ears. Even people who like you can stand just so much of your gaseous descriptions of swimming in the warm Gulf of Mexico waters or strolling on the Île Saint-Louis. After a few minutes their eyes glaze over and their smiles become fixed, indicating that you’ve used up their allotted quotient of niceness.
Other people’s numbing recitatives are about as entertaining as listening to descriptions of a meal one didn’t eat, a dream one didn’t have, a book one didn’t read, or a marriage in which nobody cheated or argued, saw a therapist, or had anything other than missionary sex.
While I kind of like the annual Christmas photos some of our friends send us, assembled with their kids and dog in front of the hearth, I have yet to get through the accompanying two-page, single-spaced letter about how interesting their lives are, how achieving their children, and how golden their retriever.
There is in fact a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” rule of travel. The only exception to it is self-interest: if your friends happen to be going where you’ve just been, then they are desperate to know if you had a wonderful time—did you go on your own or did you take a tour, is it better to go for two weeks or is ten days enough, how was the food, and may they borrow your maps and travel guides, which they will not return.
Larry thinks this fondness for other people’s bad trips reflects poorly on early childhood education in America, particularly the time wasted on show-and-tell, but I don’t agree. I think what we’re dealing with here is nothing less than Schadenfreude—the dark side of human nature, the same post-Edenic state that compels us to pass up the local newspaper with the headline COUPLE CELEBRATES 60 YEARS OF WEDDED BLISS in favor of the tabloid news, BOY TRAPPED IN REFRIGERATOR EATS OWN FOOT. Actually, didn’t Tolstoy say it best in the opening lines of Anna Karenina when he nearly wrote, “Happy vacations are all alike; every unhappy vacation is unhappy in its own way”? This is why we never talk about our vacations unless we have something awful to say.
Larry and I are good at anecdotes, which is not surprising, since we’re both shamelessly outgoing, like a lot of attention, and are inclined to exaggerate—traits that give us a natural advantage when it comes to holding an audience. Besides, we use a lot of gestures.
There’s more to a good anecdote than a bad time. If you insist upon telling about your trip, you owe it to your reluctant audience to tell it well. Basically it’s an acting job. You’ve got to throw yourself into it. If you’re not willing to get out there in the middle of somebody’s living room and actually show how you tripped over the gondolier’s oar, fell into the canal, and came up with a bit of prosciutto caught behind your ear, then forget it.
Very often we take a tag-team approach. I tell stories about Larry that he would be too embarrassed or humble to reveal, and he does the same for me. For instance, Larry does me honking and flapping around a restaurant in Japan in an attempt to order duck because the menu was in Japanese and no one spoke English. He has recently added my attempt at sand-boarding to his repertoire.
One of our best-loved anecdotes involves a visit to an Egyptian gynecologist the summer of our protracted honeymoon. (On that trip alone we stockpiled enough hair-raising experiences to capture the conversational flag at a lifetime of social gatherings.)
We were in Greece and I was suffering from what I thought was morning sickness, attributable to that careless night in a tent on the Lido. (We don’t reenact that part of the story.)
Because the Greek phone book is in Greek, Larry had the good idea of calling the American Embassy to see if he could locate a gynecologist. This was going to be a cinch, we figured. After all, gynecologist was a Greek word; Athens must be full of them. In fact, the name we got from the marine on duty was that of an Egyptian doctor.
I do the description of the doctor’s waiting room. It is a seraglio. It is painted red. There are ferns everywhere. (I do “ferns everywhere” with gestures.) Then I do the doctor pushing aside the purple beaded curtain with great élan, bowing at the waist, and inviting me into his office. (Larry says my charade is more Boris Karloff than Egyptian gynecologist, but our friends seem to like it.) I also do Larry hastening after me, and the part where the doctor asks if it is customary in our country for the husband to accompany his wife into the examining room.
Then Larry takes over for the mortifying part. He does the doctor unhitching my bra, helping me step out of my underpants, and escorting me to an examination table on which I am to recline, as nude and undraped as Manet’s Olympia.
Larry skips telling about the actual examination, which was reassuringly professional, and concludes the story with the doctor ripping off his rubber gloves and announcing to an entirely clothed Larry and a totally nude me that I am pregnant. For the finale, Larry demonstrates how they both help me back into my clothes.
When telling travel anecdotes, we think it’s best to adhere to the Aristotelian rule of the three unities, which have given Greek tragedy its timeless appeal. All such dramas must offer the following: action (a single theme without episodes or nonessential subplots); place (no changes in setting, which would destroy the illusion); and time (all action to take place within a single twenty-four-hour period). We are also guided by his theories about the importance of hamartia (error); hubris (pride), our most persistent tragic flaw; and katharsis (emotional cleansing), the element that gives the satisfactory ending necessary to every tragedy. We find these dramatic principles hold up as well today as they did twenty-three hundred years ago in Thebes.
Our Moroccan adventure was a paradigm of the three unities. We set out from Marrakech in the spring of 1969. Our destination was Ouarzazate (pronounced something like “where’s it at”) an oasis town in the Sahara. The trip involved taking a road over the High Atlas Mountains, which, according to our map, was a distance of two inches or 124 kilometers. Allowing for the fact that the line on the map was extremely wiggly, we figured it would take us two to three hours (hamartia—a major error).
We paid no attention to the description of the drive in Fodor’s (big-time hubris): “The road clings for dear life to the side of the mountain. The mountain trails are not well maintained and numerous streams flow across them. Drive carefully and make sure your vehicle has enough clearance underneath.” If we’d gone on a tour, we would have known that the trip was longer than we’d expected, and we would have brought food and water, since there were no restaurants, never mind roadside stands, along the way where we might purchase food—not even a Berber King.
But we don’t go on tours. The idea of going on vacation with strangers to see fascinating sights selected for us by people who know the territory, and to be escorted from place to place by experts who speak the language and whose job it is to look out for our comfort, well-being, and happiness, has always struck me as very limiting. Can three meals a day, a hotel room each night, and an itinerary of well-planned events in between allow enough opportunity for the missed connections, bad meals, holiday closings, and alfresco sleeping that give a vacation texture? The tour is the enemy of the anecdote.
The people we passed as we clung for dear life to the side of the mountain might as well have been living in the Neolithic period. (This is, of course, an exaggeration. While their houses were made of mud bricks, most of the people were wearing plastic flipflops. Nor do we mention the telephone lines that ran along the roadway.)
After several hours we were hungry and thirsty. We spotted some robed men on their lunch break, squatting by the side of the road, eating from a pot
cooking over an open fire. Luckily their second language was the same as ours—rudimentary French. We asked if there was any place nearby to buy some food. They invited us to share theirs.
I had seen recipes for shepherd’s pie in cookbooks, but this was the real thing except that the sheep were goats and the shepherds were goatherds. There was the flock. Here was the stew. Here also was the spoon we shared. We dipped into the communal pot and ate our fill (hamartia number two). At this point in the narrative we hunker down and do a little pantomime of spoon sharing and stew eating.
If we had been on a tour, the guide would have warned us that by eating goat stew, no matter how good it looked and tasted, we were risking intestinal distress and possibly a lifelong appetite for tin cans. Until this point, either Larry or I have delivered the narrative, a role that in Aristotle’s time would have been handled by the Greek chorus. Now we become the dramatis personae and engage in a little dialogue.
“Is it true,” says Larry, taking the part of a goatherd, “that the United States has landed a man on the Moon?”
“Bien sûr,” I answer.
“They refused to believe us,” says Larry, doing a good imitation of our hosts, alternately pointing to the sky, laughing out loud, and then slapping their thighs, making it clear that they knew we were only fooling. They might be Neolithic, but they weren’t born yesterday.
Our friends who have been on guided tours to Morocco like to tell about the Mamounia Hotel, the Casbah, the spice market, and what a deal they got on a living room rug, but they don’t stand a chance next to our narrative of our first night in Ouarzazate, competing for the only toilet in the hotel.
We are Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as we act out this, the climax of the story. We race down a pretend hall, our faces contorted into masks of anguish. Larry pushes me out of the way. I push him out of the way. I try to trip him; he tries to trip me. He pretend slams and locks the bathroom door. I pretend bang and kick it. Talk about emotional cleansing! It’s a katharsis Aristotle himself would have envied.
A Walk on the Wild Side
When we approached our sixties, we began to understand why the root meaning of the word travel is “travail.” China, a country we had meant to visit years ago, seemed to be slipping farther and farther out of range, becoming harder and harder to get to. So were Australia and New Zealand, two more on our well-intentioned list of future destinations. Friends our age were beginning to modify their travel plans and go on age-appropriate trips. Cruises were becoming a popular option.
“They have everything on board you could possibly want,” reported a couple who came back from what had been advertised as “the ultimate seven-day cruise.” The ship boasted a nine-hole miniature golf course, a theater, conference rooms, a library, eight different restaurants, including an all-night diner, a jogging track, three swimming pools, a mall, and a fully equipped gym with twenty treadmills—all with an ocean view. It was so ultimate a cruising experience, they said, that you would swear you were on dry land. It was Westport, Connecticut, floating. We couldn’t see the point.
Other friends whose taste in travel was more like our own were signing on for Elderhostel programs and loving them. “They plan everything for you,” they said. “They make all the reservations, and you don’t have to drive or carry your luggage.”
We weren’t ready for the vacation equivalent of assisted living, but we couldn’t help noticing that we were losing some of our youthful get-up-and-go. Ogden Nash was right: “Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.” We issued audible sighs of relief when we returned to our house at the end of each day. Our favorite destination was turning out to be in bed with a book, our legs intertwined. More and more we were tempted to stay in our own time zone, live in our own home, sleep in our own bed, and not trip over unfamiliar furniture and crack into walls when we needed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Nevertheless we were determined not to yield to entropy. Before it was too late, we would take our vacations in physically challenging environments and save the easy-to-get-to urban destinations for when we were really old. Afternoon concerts in Saint Martin-in-the-Fields could wait.
To celebrate my sixtieth birthday, we decided we would vacation in the Costa Rican rain forest. Until then, our experience with the jungle had been limited to monkeys at the zoo and toucans on the Froot Loops box. The real jungle, we suspected, wasn’t so tame. We decided against the trip that promised the opportunity to boil our own drinking water and sleep overnight in an open tree house. The boiling water part might have been tolerable. What queered it for me was the prospect of sleeping in an open tree house. Open to what? Monkeys? Snakes? Larry didn’t even bother to argue the point. Instead we chose to stay at a resort, described as “the most deluxe jungle and beach hideaway in Costa Rica.” The oxymoronic pairing of the adjective luxury with the noun jungle appealed to our bipolar travel style.
The resort was more than just a pretty place. It was a “model of sustainable ecotourism,” a demonstration of how to save the rain forest by enticing nature lovers to pay to see it. Could we qualify as ecotourists? We can’t identify anything beyond the generic—tree, rock, bird, bug, vine. We have never counted birds. We are, however, very good about recycling newspapers and anything plastic with a 1 or a 2 on the bottom.
Upon our arrival we were instructed in the ways of living in harmony with the jungle. One rule made a particular impression on me: Don’t kill or scream at anything. This meant that if I were soaping up in the outdoor shower and I looked up and saw a monkey hanging from the shower rod, grinning at me, I should smile back. Or if I were to find a beetle the size of a hamburger with many, many legs in my room, I should scoop it up gently and place it outdoors. Actually, I did find such a beetle making his way strenuously across the bedroom floor, and I did ask Larry to “take it out.” Unfortunately he watches a lot of Clint Eastwood movies and almost “took it out” by squashing it under his sneaker. I reminded him just in time that we were ecotourists.
A guided tour of the jungle has much to teach the neoecotourist. First of all, it really is a jungle out there. People actually do hack their way through the underbrush with machetes, sleep under mosquito netting, and get bitten by scorpions. The jungle truly is unimaginably hot and humid. Remember how Sidney Greenstreet and Ava Gardner used to sweat in spite of the overhead fans? Even Tarzan had problems acclimating to jungle life. Had I given the matter sufficient thought, I might have realized that eight degrees from the equator in the middle of a Costa Rican rain forest might not be the optimum vacation destination for a redheaded Caucasian, especially one whose ancestors actually did come from the Caucasus, just outside of Kiev. I might also have figured out that every day is a bad hair day in Costa Rica unless you’re Costa Rican.
I learned many lessons from the jungle. For instance, it is very unlikely that Tarzan could have swung from vines, since most are only looped over branches. Also, it is difficult to tell a root from a snake until you’ve tripped over it, and howler monkeys sound like hound dogs. A butterfly seldom lives longer than three months, and unless you want to further shorten its life, don’t pick it up by its wings. Better you should grab it out of thin air by the thorax. And lastly, it is very muddy underfoot and quite humiliating to slide on your butt past the other eco-tourists on the trail—hearty honeymooners Robin and Hal from Denver, a holistic optometrist from Park Slope, and Larry.
Another important lesson I learned from the jungle is that it’s very nice to be at the top of the food chain. For instance, I am glad that I am not a leaf cutter ant, the insect that gets my vote for the lower species most in need of an intellectual, evolutionary upgrade. Stop to mop your brow at almost any step along the jungle trail, look down, and you will notice what appears to be an endless, slow-moving line of small ants, each bearing a hunk of leaf many times the size of its body. We followed one such line of tiny trudgers for at least a kilometer th
rough the jungle to their destination—a hole in the ground. We observed each of the bearer ants disappearing into the same hole in the ground to deposit its bit of leaf and then heading back in the opposite direction to get another. While my ecotourist companions marveled at the sheer determination of these tiny creatures, I indulged in ecologically incorrect fantasies, such as imagining what would happen if I pushed a stick into the hole. I also wondered as I stood there watching this labor of lug, why, after all these eons, the ants hadn’t realized that if they reorganized as a bucket brigade they could deliver more leaf bits faster, thereby freeing up some leisure time in which they could go to the gym, rent a video, or contemplate the meaning of life.
After three hours in the jungle, I had seen, in addition to lots of ants, two black widow spiders, one set of jaguar prints, a gang of spider monkeys swinging high above, and the bottom half of a three-toed mother sloth hanging in a tree—all through binoculars. Another thing ecotourists should know is that any species you see in the jungle you can see much closer up on TV. Of course, you won’t be seeing them in their natural habitat. On the other hand, you will be in yours.
My natural habitat turned out to be my bungalow, where I would lie in bed reading, sipping a mango daiquiri, cooled by a ceiling fan, under a canopy of mosquito netting. When I wasn’t in bed, I was cooling off in the pool or eating well in the dining room. After day one, I opted out of the eco part of ecotourism. Me no Jane.
Larry of the Jungle—formerly Sir Lawrence of Suburbia—was too alpha-male to give up so quickly. He plunged back into the jungle the next day for the medicine walk, led by the local shaman. Larry staggered out three hours later, and after emptying his boots, showering, and taking three ibuprofen, he crawled in alongside me, under the mosquito netting.
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