Hitchhiking after Halliburton
A State Department Geographer Went When the Going Was Good
Nyle Keith Walton
Most people join the Foreign Service for the promise it gives for world travel and adventure. I did it the other way. I traveled first, had my youthful adventures, and then as an afterthought earned two graduate degrees in geography. This background brought me into what was, and possibly still is, the best job in the U.S. government. In February, 1977, I became a "geographic specialist," a successor title to what were geographic attaches posted abroad during the cold-war period when there was a need for foreign maps that contained information of value to the intelligence community. For nine memorable years, my sole duties were to take four six-week-long trips a year anywhere in the world. When not traveling, I wrote reports about what I had learned on the previous trip and prepared for the next one. The government provided me with cameras to take pictures of anything of interest and when in Washington I would spend time captioning slides and sending them to an agency, which copied those of interest and then returned them to me for my personal collection. This was similar activity to what I had done as a private traveler for the previous quarter century. I was now in fact a well-subsidized tourist, self-supervised, with plenty of time to absorb the local cultures of a country and sightsee to my heart's content. My job employed all of those skills that I had learned on my own as a poor vagabond for twenty five years before I became a professional tourist.
I enjoyed almost nine years of this pleasant activity before black-suited strangers from that sinister agency up the river invaded the Office of Maps and Publications ostensibly of the State Department and decided that they wanted their own people to perform these tasks. I received a concocted letter from our new director stating that I was guilty of unspecified poor professional conduct. He sold me that unless I joined his organization that I would never take another map procurement mission. Knowing that his agency could fire me if I parted my hair on the wrong side, I had no option except to remain with the State Department and enjoy civil service protection. I was transferred to the main building in Foggy Bottom and into the Office of The Geographer in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. There I would languish for fifteen years, enduring outright favoritism to junior geographers and denial of any advancement but at least secure of any fear of losing my job.
My wanderlust began when I was fourteen years old and in hospital recovering from an appendectomy. My next-door neighbor innocently gave me a book to read. A picture of a biplane on its cover made me dismiss The Flying Carpet by Richard Halliburton as a juvenile adventure book. I put it aside, but later after I got home, I picked it up and devoured it in one long read. I was obsessively captivated with the author and his travel adventures. Its author, Richard Halliburton, was an American adventure traveler of the 1920s and 1930s that cast a spell on the homebound victims of the Great Depression with romantic tales of far-off places. Even in 1949 I was equally enchanted with Richard's accounts of his climbs of the Matterhorn, Fujiyama, Mount Olympus and Popocatepetl, dip in a pool before the moonlit Taj Mahal, a swim across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia and later through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Richard wrote five enthralling books. The first one was The Royal Road to Romance, which took his readers on a youthful vagabond journey around the world. In his second book, The Glorious Adventure, he retraced Homer's Odyssey around the Mediterranean. recreating the twenty-year tribulations of Ulysses. In 1927 with his father, he followed the tracks of Hernan Cortez from Veracruz to Mexico City and ascended the volcano of Popocatepetl twice, the second time with a photographer to photograph him and the crater. After swimming for fifty miles through the Panama Canal, he proceeded on to South America where he slept on the sundial at Macchu Picchu and acquired a monkey and became an organ grinder in Buenos Aires. He volunteered to be a prisoner in the notorious French prison of Devils Island. These adventures came out in 1928 as New Worlds to Conquer. Then came the Great Depression and it was not until 1932 that Halliburton recouped his resources enough to pilot the Flying Carpet over the Alps, across the Sahara to Timbuktu, through the Middle East to India where he made the first aerial approach to Mount Everest, climbing to nearly twenty thousand feet in an open cockpit biplane. On pontoons, he landed in Sarawak where he visited the last white rajah and the headhunting Iban Dyaks. Three years later Halliburton was given a carte blanche by his publishers to go to any far-flung part of the world to put together chapters of his fifth book, Seven League Boots. He visited Haile Selassie in Ethiopia just before the Italian invasion, then the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece where any female humans and animals are excluded. He interviewed the world's oldest man, purported to be 135 years old, in the Soviet Caucasus, and even more sensational, he went to Yekaterinburg in the Urals where he uncovered the mystery of the tragic fate of the last Romanovs and met their Bolshevik executioner. Toward the end of the book, he rode a circus elephant across the Alps a la Hannibal. His final book was directed toward children. In a two-volume work entitled The Book of Marvels, divided into two regions of the world, the Occident and the Orient, Halliburton describes many of the world's wonders he had written about plus some he had failed to experience.
Finally after six books and years on the lecture circuit, Halliburton tried one stunt too many. In 1939 at age thirty-nine, he prepared to sail across the Pacific Ocean in a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco in time for the opening of the World's Fair on Treasure Island. He spent several frustrating and agonizing months in Hong Kong, supervising the construction of a junk, which he name The Sea Dragon. With a motley crew and a diesel engine that gave the vessel a dangerously shallow beam, he set sail in early March of 1939. Like that of Amelia Earhart two years earlier, his ultimate fate remains a mystery. His last radio message, two weeks out of Hong Kong and somewhere near Midway Island, ended with the words, "decks awash, wish you were here instead of me."
Throughout my high school and college days, I daydreamed of emulating Halliburton's exploits. In 1950 at age fifteen, I climbed my first real mountain, the Grand Teton in Wyoming. This pyramid of rock is about as close to the Matterhorn as one can find inside the USA. A year later after a summer of work, I went to Mexico City and made attempts to climb the volcanoes of Popocatepetl and Orizaba, North America's fifth and third highest peaks. I successfully climbed Popo during the Christmas break in 1953 with my best friend, Ronald Davis, after we had hitchhiked to the border and taken a bus to Mexico City. Six months later I added Mount Rainier to my mountaineering laurels, guided to the crater by Jim Whittaker who nine years later would be the first American to reach the top of Mount Everest.
In the summer of 1954, facing another summer of work, I volunteered to be drafted into Uncle Sam's army, figuring it would be the easiest and quickest way to get away from home and see the world. Unfortunately after basic training at Fort Ord, California, I was assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, smack in Middle America. But undaunted after six months of serving as a draftsman in the Command and General Staff College where Ike's son, Major John Eisenhower was enrolled, I persuaded my boss, a WAC Major in personnel, to transfer me to Europe. Finally in May 1955, I debarked from a troop ship in Bremerhaven and reveled in finally reaching Europe.
At Zweibrucken in the Rhineland, I expected to be assigned to a combat company somewhere in Germany. You can imagine my joy when my name was put on a list of those going to France. My hopes of being posted in Paris were shattered when I was put on another train at the Gare Austerlitz and taken three hundred miles to the southwest on the Bay of Biscay. I joined Headquarters Company of a transportation battalion known as the 11th Transportation Terminal Command B. My barracks, La Touche Trevelle Caserne, was situated in the center of Rochefort-sur-Mer, a military town established by Vauban, Louis XIV's defense minister. This three-hundred-year-old building surrounded by cobble stone streets was old when Napoleon used it as stables. This quaint setting was to be my home for the next year.
Almost immediately I began to explore Europe. On weekends a service club bus took me to Cognac renown for its brandy, to Lourdes in the Pyrenees, famous for the miracles of St. Bernadette, to the beaches of Royanne at the mouth of the Garonne where I would lie in the sun and try to pick up half-naked mademoiselles. Three-day passes got me to Paris nearly every month.
Almost immediately I began to explore Europe. On weekends a service club bus took me to Cognac renown for its brandy, to Lourdes in the Pyrenees, famous for the miracles of St. Bernadette, to the beaches of Royanne at the mouth of the Garonne where I would lie in the sun and try to pick up half-naked mademoiselles. Three-day passes got me to Paris nearly every month.
The first night in Rochefort, I repaired to a corner cafe and drank my first glass of vin rouge ordinaire. With Leon Simon, a Jew from Augusta, Georgia, I discovered the notorious "South Forty," a red-light street for GIs near the Sun King's arsenal. In the Bar Eden, a voluptuous blond tried futilely to seduce me into going upstairs with her. Leon looked on wide-eyed and finally borrowed 1300 francs from me to follow her upstairs. He came back down a half hour later, looking rather sheepish. Finally at age 21, this Mormon boy was discovering the real world.
Rather than spend money on prostitutes, I had loftier goals. Two months of my arrival in Richefort, I took two weeks of leave and entrained for Zermatt.in southern Switzerland. In that center of alpine climbing, I engaged a guide, Emil Julen, for forty dollars and in two days climbed to the top of the Matterhorn. Having achieved the same summit that Richard had aspired to thirty-four years previously, I subsequently made half-hearted attempts to climb Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau. Both were frustrated by bad weather and a leg infection. I rested on my laurels and returned to Rochefort. After all, Richard never climbed those alpine peaks anyway.
The following February, I took three weeks of leave during the coldest winter in fifty years. On the Brevant ski run above Chamonix, I dined on snails in the open air with the glistening white bulk of Mont Blanc dominating the east side of the valley. I enjoyed the Fasching pre-Lent holiday inside the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. After two liters of beer, I dined on wienershnitzel on the second floor and then ascended to the third floor where I waltzed and the night away with a stunning dark-eyed fraulein. The weather was subzero in alpine Garmish, so I hurried south to Innsbruck and on to Venice where there were ice floes in the Grand Canal. In Rome, I threw snowballs inside the Coliseum and then caught a train to Naples. It was not much warmer there. Vesuvius to the south looked like an ice cream sundae. Eager to climb it, I bribed a taxi driver with a carton of PX cigarettes to drive me up the volcano as far as the road was open. I then trudge up the last thousand feet of snow and took a self-timed picture of me peering into the crater. The weather began to warm up along the Riviera where I took a bus tour to Monte Carlo and won the price of the tour back on the roulette table. I stopped to walk about the ramparts of the medieval cite of Carcassonne before returning to Rochefort.
Spain that April was sunny enchantment--San Sebastian, Segovia with its Roman aqueduct and fairytale castle, the walls of Avila and finally Francisco Franco and the Sultan of Morocco parading down the Gran Via in Madrid, flanked by mounted Moorish guards.
Back home and out of the army by the end of May 1956, my future looked promising with three years of veterans’ educational benefits. I enrolled that fall for my senior year of college in Mexico City. Mexico City College was a liberal arts school favored by veterans. It was located along the Toluca highway, high above the western side of the capital. The next academic year saw me more often at bullfights, on volcanoes or on Acapulco's beaches than in classrooms. Nevertheless I graduated with honors as my father and his two bothers watched me get an honors award at commencement in June of 1957. I was not that good a student except that my classmates were not much better.
I was now ready to see the rest of the world. In December 1957 with $600, I set out from Salt Lake City with a Mexico City College classmate to hitchhike to Cape Horn. On the white cloth lining of a Mexican rubber rain poncho, I fashioned two signs, one in Spanish that read--Norte America al Cabo de Hornos, Pedimos un Aventon--translated on the other half as "North America to Cape Horn, we ask for a ride."
This bilingual road sign stretched between us slowed traffic if not stopping it along the Pan American highway south through Mexico and Central America and then along the Andes from Bogotá to Bolivia and finally into northern Argentina as far as Cordoba. Among the free lifts were two planes and three trains. Not in any hurry, we made side trips into the Oriente jungles of Ecuador, explored the ruins of Chan Chan and Macchu Picchu in Peru, climbed to the 19,000-foot crater of El Misti and the 20,000-foot summit of Huayna Potosi in the Cordillera Real of Bolivia. Sadly, in Cordoba, I came down with infectious hepatitis and after the Argentine air force flew us to Mendoza, I wealthy landowner put me in a hospital. Meanwhile my companion, Karl Nelson, continued on to Chile before he got his draft notice and had to fly home to San Francisco to join the army. Out of the hospital at the beginning of a southern winter, I felt weak and alone and hardly in any mood to travel on by myself. Thus ended any ambition to thumb my way to Cape Horn. After having spent $300 in six months for all expenses of travel from Utah to Argentina, I splurged the other $300 I had planned to spend on the return trip via Brazil and the Amazon for plane fare to fly back to Mexico City. There I recovered my health on comidas corridas before busing my way back to Salt Lake City.
I avoided fried foods and alcohol during the rest of the summer of 1958. In September I paid $195 for passage on the Augustus, a sister ship of the ill-fated Andrea Doria that had sunk outside New York a month earlier. It was an eleven-day voyage from New York to Cannes via Naples. During this voyage I had a platonic romance with on attractive Viennese woman who had just graduated from Stanford University. Forlorn with love unrequited, I took a train from Cannes to Barcelona where I was prepared to enroll in a special course for foreigners at the University of Barcelona. Belatedly I then discovered that the Veterans Administration did not accredit the course of study. I closed out 1958 by hitchhiking around Spain and Morocco before proceeding north into France and across to England where I enrolled in the Ruskin School of Drawing and Painting in the Ash Olean Museum at Oxford. For two years, I sketched life models while enjoying the company of friendly English girls at student parties, in pubs and at times in bed. Between each nine-week term, I would head for the Continent. During the Spring break of 1959, I tried some bicycling through the Rhineland and the Low Countries, only to discover that hitchhiking was faster, less tiring and socially more enjoyable.
In the summer of 1959, I went to Spain, catching one long ride from Paris to Barcelona with an accommodating British-Patagonian sheep rancher. From there I hurried on to Zaragoza and north to Pamplona, arriving in that Navarese town on the first day of the festival of San Fermin. In the central square, Ernest Hemingway was holding court on what was to be the last good time of his life. For one week between July 7 and 14, I ran before the bulls every morning and then sat in celebrity's shadow at the Bar Xoco for much of the afternoon before the bullfights. The revels continued well into the night with drinking and dancing and frolicking women, one who accompanied me to my sleeping bag inside the sports stadium. On the last night, I joined Papa Hemingway to stagger around the central plaza, trying to catch rocket sticks falling from the midnight sky.
Hung over from a week of excitement, I joined an American schoolteacher who drove me in his car to Madrid and Lisbon. In Nazare, we parted company, my host heading south and I north to Oporto and Santiago de Compostela, then eastward across northern Spain to San Sebastian and the French border. In less than a week, I was in Chamonix in the French Alps. From the topmost station of an aerial tramway, I climbed solo to the refuge atop the Aiguille de Gouter whence the next morning I roped up between two members of the German Luftwaffe and four hours later stood on the snowing 4807-meter-high summit of Europe--Mont Blanc--with the highest Alps spread out below me like a relief map.
The rest of the summer of 1959 was a quiet bonus. I wondered around central Europe, crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass into Italy on the same road that Halliburton had covered atop an elephant Hannibal-style in 1935. From Breuil under the Italian side of the Matterhorn, I tramped across the St. Theodule Pass into Switzerland and the valley of Zermatt. In the small cemetery, I stood solemnly before the graves of two guideless climbers, an Englishman and an American, who had fallen from the "Tiger of the Alps two weeks after I climbed it in 1955.
In Vienna, I became bored after the opening act of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" and left the Statsoper Theater to experience a romantic interlude with a blond Fraulein from Hamburg whom I met at an open-air dance. The affair ended in time for me to return to the theater five hours later for the rumbling finale of the Wagnerian opera.
The next romantic episode occurred after I hitchhiked south to Maribor just across the Yugoslavian border. I found myself in the care of a pretty Slovenian girl called Marija who hosted me for several days. From Ljubljana, an American tourist in his Chevrolet give me a lift back to Vienna where he picked up a paying passenger, a Jewish woman from New York, and drove us both to Munich in time for Oktoberfest. Inside a big tent amidst the din of an ump-ah band, we got drunk on several liters of good Bavarian lager before driving out of Munich to find a place to bed down for the night. We pulled into what appeared to be a trailer park and spread our sleeping bags on the ground. Before dawn, the polizei aroused us with beaming flashlights in our faces and warned us that we were in a gypsy camp and should move on for our own safety.
Drowsily we drove into the dawn until a sign beckoned us to Dachau. Pausing to change film in my camera, I followed my companions into the grounds of the notorious concentration camp and caught up with them at the crematorium. The Jewish woman was leaning against the entrance quietly sobbing. The sight of the cremation ovens inside the shed haunts me to this day.
The year 1960 was my flegeljahre of European travel. During the Spring break from Oxford, I hitchhiked to Greece and back. In Salzburg, an American girl joined me and rides thus became more frequent. In Osejec, Yugoslavia, we were arrested for trying to bed down in a public park. We enjoyed Easter Sunday hitching rides between Delphi and Athens, feasting on barbecued lamb washed down in red retsina wine in nearly every village along the way. We spent a few idyllic days on the island of Hydra just off the Peloponnesus. We then took a ferry to the mainland and hitched our way from Argos to Mycenae and Corinth, then retraced our way to Thessalonica and back north through Yugoslavia. At the Austrian border, my female companion took a train to Venice while thumbed my way back to England.
That summer I hurried away from Oxford in early June and got to Berlin in successive vehicles, the final one in a furniture van through East Germany. It was the year before the notorious wall went up. With East German marks traded for dollars at sixteen to one, I enjoyed the good life in East Berlin. While lodging at the youth hostel in West Berlin, this poor hitchhiker would ride the strassenbahn into the Soviet Sector and dine and wine under gypsy violins in the swankiest and most expensive restaurants along Stalinallee. It was wonderful not to consider prices on the right side of the menu. I explored the city with two American college students in a VW Beatle and then rode with them back through East Germany and on to Hamburg. Several more lifts got me to Copenhagen and Oslo and the Sognefjord in Norway. From Christiansund, a ferry got me back into Denmark whence I hurried south to Spain as quickly as my luck permitted.
It was late July when I raised my thumb on the southern outskirts of Barcelona. A tiny Citroen Deux Chevaux pulled up and a pretty Parisienne apologized that she was going only a few kilometers to Sitges. However, as our relationship developed, the ride lasted for a month and took me all over southern Spain as we followed the bullfights. For a week, we shared a beach cottage in then undeveloped Torremolinos, room and board and plenty of vino tinto for one dollar a day each.
At bullfights, I searched for Hemingway sitting barrera sombra, and thought that I spotted him several times, only to discover an impostor. We caught up with the impostor at a roadside bar near Cordoba. Kenneth Vanderford, gray beard, bush jacket and baseball cap, enjoyed playing Papa. A retired petroleum geologist, he tooled around Spain in a Jaguar sports car. Over beers, he present his card that read: "Everybody in this world looks a little like somebody else and I can't blame you for thinking I am (signed) Ernest Hemingway." Vanderford, a bullfight aficionado, later appeared as a major character in Iberia, James Mitchener's great treatise on Spain six years later.
The last monthly GI-Bill check came in December, 1960, after my return from a hitchhike to Scotland where I climbed Britain's highest peak, Ben Nevis, rode along the shore of Loch Ness without spotting a monster, and carried a lump of coal to New Castle
with a madcap American heiress I met outside Edinburgh Castle on a rainy Sunday morning. After the attractive and high-spirited woman dropped me in Liverpool, I returned sadly to Oxford, mailed most of my belonging back to Utah, and then set out with one change of clothes in a rucksack and headed southeastward toward India.
In mid-December, 1960, I took the channel ferry to France and got an express ride to Paris where I spent a final week with my Parisian paramour of that summer. Then from the southernmost metro station, I caught a Triumph sport scar to Nice. Christmas day saw me peering up at Michelangelo's naked David in sunny Florence. On New Year's Eve, I celebrated with Maria in snowy Marlboro, Slovenia. At a nightclub with her parents, I got so drunk on white wine punch that when the lights went out at midnight, I grabbed Maria and gave her a big kiss. Only when the lights came bask on did I discover that "Marija" was actually her father. I fled outside and puked in the snow.
I bade goodbye to Marija in Ljubljana and got to Istanbul a week later via Belgrade, Skopje, Thessalonica and a succession of short rides across Thrace to Edirne. There on the Golden Horn, I met Michael Philip DeSemlyen, a young and rather brash Englishman who was destined to share my travels for the next six months. I first encountered him inside the youth hostel just after his pocket had been picked and his wallet lifted. He had just returned from a police station where he had witnessed the Turkish method of extracting a confession--bashing a suspect's knuckles with an iron bar.
In January of 1961, Istanbul had just become a gathering point for travelers about to undertake the great overland journey from Europe to India. We were pioneers, two of a few who preceded the throngs of hippies who later in the decade sought an escape from the social and cultural malaise of the 1960s. Shouldering our rucksacks, we caught a ferry across the Bosporus and made it through the snow to Ankara in two days. Mid-January conditions in central Anatolia were too frigid for hitchhiking; so we bought tickets at a student rate and rode to Horisan and then a bus to Dogubayazit in the shadow of Mount Ararat. Inside the walls of the Bazargan compound that straddles the border, we walked through a doorway into Iran, then waited two days begging for food until we bribed an official to give us a ride to Maku, the first town in Iran, with a packet of Yugoslav cigarettes we assured him were American. In Maku, we encountered xenophobic Islam for the first time. Natives pelted us with stones for taking pictures of a street and cliffs pocked with caves above the town. Fortunately resourceful Michael who spoke French got us an audience with the farmandar, the Shah's military governor, who ordered the local bus company to transport us free to Tabriz, capital of Iranian Azerbaijan.
We soon learned that there was no such thing as a free ride in Iran. It took us a week and successive letters of introduction from one police chief to the next to get us free bus rides across Iran. We tarried in Tehran only a couple of days, marveling at the Peacock Throne and other artifacts, which a 17th-century Shah had looted from Delhi. We then took a bus to Qum and Isfahan where I took pictures of camels in a snowstorm before azure-tiled mosques. Then we proceeded on another free bus ride to Yazd and Kerman where we joined an American oil exploration party to traverse the Dash e Lut desert. We arrived in Zahedan near the Pakistan border in time to catch a weekly train that took us eastward across the wilderness of Baluchistan to Quetta.
Here near the border of Afghanistan, we asked the stationmaster if we could take the train a few stops down the line where road traffic might be more favorable for hitchhiking. But, once on the train, we encountered a police official who, on hearing our story, suggested that we could remain on trains ticketless all the way to Lahore on the other side of Pakistan. Inside the whiskey-drinking official's first-class compartment, we were never challenged. Thus we began an odyssey of ticketless railway travel that ultimately would cover eight thousand miles of the Indian subcontinent during the next three months.
For a brief time when he was short on funds, Halliburton had done something similar in 1922. He gave up after having to ride all night hiding under coal in the engine tender and emerging at his destination covered with soot. We were far more successful. Many a morning I would awaken under a train seat to see dirty sandaled feet in front of my nose. When third-class compartments were too crowded, we would move into second or first class and dodge ticket collectors by changing cars at station stops. We learned early that ticket collectors never bothered sahib passengers who were asleep. If we were caught while awake, a hole in the pocket of my bush jacket provided a plausible excuse for "lost tickets." We paid fare only once, a pittance from the final station before Udaipur in Rajasthan. South of Madras, an irate conductor refused to believe my lost ticket story and Michael and I were ejected from the train. On an adjoining road, we flipped a coin and Mike won the only vacant truck seat to stop on its way to Madurai. I simply returned to the station and boarded the next express train to Madurai, arriving long before Michael did.
Since I had to wait for an India visa for a week in Lahore, Mike preceded me to Delhi. At the Qutub Minar youth hostel, he befriended other travelers and conceived of the idea of bicycling to Bombay. For publicity, the Pearl Bicycle Company gave each of us a bicycle and photographed the five of us on the Government Mall in front of India Gate. The next morning we set out south toward Agra and points southwest. Once on the road, we realized that March at the onset of the pre-monsoon season was not the coolest time of the year for such activity. We managed to peddle along for a week, stopping to guzzle tall glasses of hot tea. Beyond Jaipur, we discovered that putting our bikes on passing trucks or shipping them as baggage on trains was a far more comfortable way to see India. When we reached Bombay, we sold the bikes and used the proceeds to feed ourselves for the next month as we reverted to ticketless railway travel.
On the third night out of Delhi, Mike and I found ourselves inside the gardens of the Taj Mahal after the gates were locked. At midnight in the light of a full moon, we disrobed and slipped into the pool on a marble platform midway between the front gate and the shimmering pale mausoleum. The experience was Halliburton at his best. I managed to take some self-timed photographs of me in the water. One taken at sunrise was enlarged to poster-size and still hangs in my den.
Two months later we returned to Agra and spent another night sleeping inside the gardens of the Taj. This time our slumber was interrupted around midnight by female voices with American accents. Hiding behind some shrubbery, we overheard one woman express doubt that an American writer whose name escaped her had taken a dip in the pool many years ago. To rescue Richard's reputation, Mike and I burst out of the bushes and dove into the pool. The women screamed, then giggled with high hilarity until their Indian host announced that he was Agra's chief of police who expressed doubt that what we had done was legal. We could be a deep trouble. However when his female guests implored him to be tolerant of the experience that would make them remember him when they got home, he relented and joined in the party.
From the first of March until the end of May, we toured India, first to Agra, then Fatipur Sikri, the pink city Jaipur and the white palace on the lake at Udaipur. In the Gir Forest on the Kathiawar peninsula, we observed in car lights at night the only lions in Asia feasting on a young bullock. We then climbed to the mountaintop Jain necropolis of Palitana under the intense midday heat. From Bombay we headed north to the temples of Ellora and caves of Ajanta, paused to see the ancient Buddhist stupa of Sanchi and walk the cliff-top battlements of Gwalior. Then it was back to Delhi and north to the Vale of Kashmir where on Dal Lake in Srinagar I haggled down the rent of a luxurious houseboat, full board with a personal book and boatman to one dollar a day!
We avoided hotels by sleeping free in first class waiting rooms of railway stations. Railway stations often provided the least expensive meals: either Indian style, a plate of rice covered with a dark brown curry sauce for one rupee or a blander "English" meal with white bread and any meat but pork for two and a half rupees. Outside the big centers in pre-Green Revolution India, food options were often very sparse. I remember scavenging through a village in Gujarat for breakfast and finding only two fly-covered hard-boiled eggs.
In the Hindu-holy city of Varanasi (Benares), I joined the faithful by taking a swim amidst the teeming bathers in the holy Ganges before the cremation ghats. We then headed north and entered Nepal on its only railroad, nineteen miles along. A toy locomotive pulled one freight car and a passenger car partitioned into two classes. The next day we reached Katmandu by bus. Katmandu in 1961 had just been opened to foreigners less than a decade and still had the quiet atmosphere of a medieval city with little motor traffic. For a week, we explored the palaces and temples of Katmandu valley before enplaning on the only flight I took while going around the world. A DC-3 flew 150 miles east to the border town of Baratnagar. Flying parallel to the mighty Himalayas rising in the north, I was disappointed by haze from catching a glimpse of Mount Everest. After landing, a Pedi cab took Michael and me to the railway station just inside India. An overnight train trip connected us with the toy train that carries passengers uphill in winding loops to the hill station of Darjeeling. Before three successive dawns, we tramped up Tiger Hill, only to be frustrated by clouds from any view northward. Finally on the fourth morning, the clouds opened up to reveal the shining bulk of Kangchenjunga, the world's third highest mountain, shimmering pale orange against the sunrise as it rose ridge upon ridge to over 28,000 feet.
In steaming and teeming Calcutta, we dug deep into our capital to purchase sea passage from Colombo to Japan, then proceeded south by rail along India's east coast to Madras, pausing only to visit the ancient Hindu temples at Puri and Konarak. Other trains took us ticketless to explore more Hindu temples in Madurai and Ramashwaram before we took a ferry across Adam's Bridge onto the serendipity island then called Ceylon and now Sri Lanka.
Deck passage on to Singapore on Messageries Maritimes, the French line that regularly plaid between Marseilles and the Far East, was the antithesis of luxury. For five more dollars, we upgraded our accommodations to third class and dined with the crew on good and ample French cuisine that included a bottle of vin rouge ordinaire on every checkered red-and-white table cloth, a welcome relief from our long famine and drought of travel through Muslim and Hindu lands.
Singapore in 1961 was still the old colonial entrepot filled with Chinese shops on narrow crowded streets, far more colorful and fascinating than the sterile concrete and glass world city Singapore has yet become. Though we had paid for passage on to Saigon, the next port of call, we chose to foresake the ship so we could hitchhike up the Malay Peninsula to Bangkok. Mike and I made this journey separately but reassembled in Saigon. I thumbed rides to Melaka, Kuala Lumpur and Penang. From Alor Setar just below the Thai border, I took a train through jungle-clad Karst topography to the Isthmus of Kra and the fishing village of Chumpon. From there, my upraised thumb got me to Bangkok in two days.
In 1961, Bangkok was a peaceful and unspoiled city compared to the congested and polluted metropolis it has since become. For a week, I rested as a guest in the Wat Mahatad, a Buddhist temple, where I subsisted on the simple fare of the yellow-robed monks who left a bowl of rice, some vegetables and a Coca-Cola at my bedside. Then, rather reluctantly, I took to the road again and made it to Siem Reap inside Cambodia in two days. My final ride was in a motorcade of forestry officials. That night I sat on the floor of the forestry commissioner's bungalow and dined on fried crickets and frogs’ legs, the same creatures that flew around the lights and croaked in the garden. The dinner wine to my host was a tall glass of Hennessey VSOP cognac. I cannot remember how I ever found my bed that night.
On the following morning with a heavy head, I borrowed a bicycle from my host and peddled ten miles through rain forest to the world's largest religious building, Angkor Wat, which remained hidden and overgrown in the jungle for five centuries until a French butterfly collector chanced upon it in the 1880s. For several days, I explored and photographed every root-strangled ruin of the fourteenth-century Khmer temple complex that remains today one of the wonders of the middle ages.
When I got to Phnom Penh, an American consular officer warned me of the risks of traveling by road into Viet Nam, citing instances of Americans captured by the Viet Cong being buried alive. Nevertheless I took a bus to the Cambodian side of the border where I heard gunfire during the night. I awoke the next morning, walked past a barbed wire barrier and caught a small pickup truck into Saigon. From the city's outskirts, a pedicab took me into the city center where a small boy pushed a newspaper into my hands. The headlines announced that Ernest Hemingway had killed himself. It was July 3, 1961. Along the Avenue Tu Do, thronged with Americans preparing for the Viet Nam War, I found Mike, ready to board the MMS Laos for Hong Kong and Kobe.
In Hong Kong, we dined and slept on the ship and only went ashore to sightsee, take pictures and exchange dollars for yen at four hundred to one, nearly four times what a dollar is worth today. Three days later, we debarked at Kobe. I arrived in Japan with fifty dollars to my name, wondering how I would get home across the Pacific, a prospect that ultimately I would not face for another two years.
From Kobe, Michael and I went to Kyoto where we witnessed the colorful Gion Festival and to Nara where we fed tame deer in front of the world's largest wooden temple. Then we tried to hitchhike to Tokyo, only to be foiled by an uncomprehending but sympathetic Japanese businessman who drove us to the railway station and bought us tickets to the capital.
We cut the train trip twice, one in Gifu where we watched tame cormorants dive for fish, and then on to Gotemba, a small town under Mount Fuji, whence we ascended overnight to the crater of the symmetrical 12,300-foot volcanic cone sacred to the Japanese. During the summer season, thousands of white-clad Japanese line the zigzag trails to its top. From the crater rim above a sea of clouds, the sunrise through a torii was spectacular. In 1923, Richard Halliburton had done us one better, climbing the venerable symbol of Japan alone in mid-winter.
For the next two years, I enjoyed life to the fullest, sometimes working as an extra in Japanese movies, either as the enemy in the battle of Okinawa or as a sinister Soviet officer who launched an ICBM that destroyed Tokyo. Less glamorous was my real job that of teaching conversational English to eager but naive Japanese. Until 1964, ordinary Japanese were denied the pleasure of foreign travel. For them English lessons acted as a window to the outside world, a kind of substitute for foreign travel. They willingly paid premium rates to sit for one hour and be entertained by a furyo gaijin (good-for-nothing foreigner).
Holding English classes about twenty hours a week brought me an income equivalent to that of a mid-level manager in a Japanese company--around $300 a month. Compare this with the salary of Japanese typist--$35 a month. Just before Christmas of 1961, one such typist was the only company employee of the Meiji Life Insurance Company to show up for my group class. As the secretary of the English Speaking Society, she felt obligated to do so in order to give me one-thousand-yen fee for the lesson. In turn, I felt obligated to spend an hour chatting with her. Her English was so charmingly unrestrained that after the hour was up I suggested that we spend the contents of the envelop on dinner. She led me to the original Benihana restaurant in Shimbashi where one could dine very well on what amounted to thirty cents US. This date was the first of countless meals we had together over the next eighteen months. Six years later in Oakland California, I married the typist.
My two-year stay in Tokyo was a peaceful postponement from having to decide what to do for the rest of my life. It was punctuated by my having to leave Japan every six to eight months to renew my tourist visa so I could return to work illegally and play legally in Tokyo. The first exit took me on the Cambodge back to Hong Kong, Saigon, and Singapore whence a Chinese freighter carried me to Borneo and up the Rejang River in Sarawak. For several days with two other Americans, I enjoyed the hospitality of an Iban Dyak longhouse, lying on a reed mat and peering up at clusters of human skulls, which these ex-head hunters had taken from enemies a few decades before.
The next exit from Japan was shorter and less interesting. It took me to Kagoshima at the southern end of Kyushu whence I took a ship to Naha on Okinawa, then American territory. There I explored sea cliffs from which, toward the end of World War II, Japanese schoolgirls, known as "white lilies," had jumped to their deaths rather than fall into the hands of the invading Americans. The previous year I had appeared in a movie on the same subject.
Finally in May 1963, with a sizable nest egg, I set sail for home on the President Wilson. With all that travel under my belt, the most natural thing to do was to pursue a graduate degree in geography. During the next decade, I was a career graduate student, first at the University of Utah, then at the University of California at Berkeley, and finally at the University of Georgia. I arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1965 just after the Free Speech Movement and at the beginning of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. Every fashion and fad seemed to begin and develop around the San Francisco Bay area and subsequently spread across the country, e.g., the sexual revolution in the form of topless dancing at North Beach, hippies, flower children and drugs in Haight-Ashbury, and anti-war demonstrations and bombing at Berkeley. Berkeley was the place to be in the late 1960s.
Meanwhile my Japanese typist had reached San Francisco by marrying another American. She subsequently separated from him and renewed her romance with me. In September of 1967 we got married and drove to Mexico on a honeymoon. I had a small grant to do field research the origins of tequila. I already knew that neither the technology of alcoholic distillation were known in pre-Colombian Mexico nor were the conquering Spaniards willing to reveal it to natives in order to protect their brandy trade. My research disclosed that the technology probably sneaked in through Mexico's backdoor. On the Pacific side, stranded Filipino sailors from the Manila Galleon used a peculiar pot still of Asian origin to manufacture brandy from coconuts. In the late sixteenth century, the technology of distillation crept northward from Colima into present day Jalisco and applied to various native concoctions, one being the fermented mash of baked agave hearts in the vicinity of the town of Tequila. Thus tequila began as a kind of native moonshine liquor, which only became legal after the colonial controls were lifted with Mexican independence from Spain. The history of tequila became my master’s thesis.
When financial support ran out at Berkeley in 1968, we moved on to the University of Georgia to work on my Ph.D. Compared to activist Berkeley, Georgia was a time warp, a journey back in time to the 1950s where football, letter sweaters, fraternities and sororities were all that mattered. Even my recently grown beard was regarded with deep suspicion. When I checked into the Geography Department, its chairman peered at me through a half-open door and muttered, "Just what I expected from Berkeley."
Nevertheless my Berkeley education and broad travels advanced me rapidly through the graduate program and on to the oral examination. For dissertation research, I obtained a modest grant of $1800 from the National Science Foundation to do field work in a part of the world that had always fascinated me--the highest range of tropical mountains in the world, the Cordillera Blanca of Peru. However my journey there was delayed for three months when a member of the oral exam committee, resentful of my Berkeley background, voted against passing me. This occurred on a Friday. Two days later, Nature struck back. That Sunday, May 31, 1970, the most destructive earthquake ever to hit the Western Hemisphere destroyed my prospective study area, killed 70,000 people and left half a million people homeless. Thirty-thousand inhabitants of the Callejon de Huaylas beneath my mountains died that day, two-thirds of them from an avalanche of rock and ice dislodged from the north peak of Peru's highest mountain, Huascaran, which scoured away the town of Yungay, the second most populous city in the valley.
My ulterior motive for selecting this study area for my doctoral dissertation was to do some climbing in the high Andes. The destructive earthquake now provided me with a new dimension of study, that of disaster relief and recovery. I was re-examined in September and by the first of October, Shigeko and I had flown to Lima and proceeded by taxi north into the Callejon de Huaylas. Since all the hotels had been leveled by the quake, we had to live in tents that had been erected by aid givers to shelter the damnificados (earthquake victims). Above us to the east rose a chain of twenty-thousand-foot peaks that rival the Himalayas. Though they beckoned me, we spent November and December exploring the valley and doing archival research in Lima. Around Christmas, Shigeko came down with infectious hepatitis and was hospitalized for a week.
With southern summer rains making work in the Andes unrewarding, I decided to give Shigeko time to recuperate by taking her on a slow boat down the Amazon River. A DC-3 took us to Iquitos and on to Leticia where Colombia touched the upper Amazon. We then proceeded by riverboat for one week to Manaus and switched to a larger boat that took another week to reach Belem at the broad mouth of the world's biggest river. We then took a coastal steamer to Recife on Brazil's northeastern coast where we caroused for a week celebrating Carnival. We then regressed to my grand old manner of travel, that of hitchhiking. With short Shigeko standing in front of me, we stopped cars and trucks and proceeded rapidly in successive vehicles to Pernambico de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Iguazzu Falls, Asuncion, Rosario and Buenos Aires. By April we had thumbed our way across Patagonia to Puerto Montt in southern Chile. From there we stopped economizing and took a train north to Santiago, a bus to Arica, and an overnight autocarril uphill to La Paz in Bolivia. An old English-built steamer carried us across Lake Titicaca whence we took trains to Cuzco and Macchu Picchu. A bus retraced the route I had hitchhiked thirteen years previously back to Lima. Thus we completed a tour around South America in four months, essentially closing the loop I had failed to do thirteen years previously.
By early June of 1971, we were back in the Callejon de Huaylas. Under clear sunny skies, I prepared for the climbing season. Among the hundreds of aid workers in the valley were several teams of climbers. I first made a conditioning climb of a 19,000-foot pyramid above Huaraz known as Vallunaraju with a six-foot, six inches tall Alaskan known as "Senor Dos Metros." A week later I joined three Outward Bound instructors and a Catholic priest to make an assault on Huascaran, Peru's highest peak and the highest mountain between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It took the five of us six days and three camps to reach its 22,205-feet-high summit. The day was perfect with all of the central Andes at our feet. Before descending we waited while the priest, Tom Samway, said a memorial Mass on the snowy summit dome for all of the victims who had died in the earthquake. This climb was the crowning achievement of my mountaineering career. At age 38, I realized that climbing above 15,000 feet was more pain than gain. I have not climbed anything since except a long staircase on Adams Peak in Sri Lanka and up and down footpaths in the Himalayas to Mount Everest and Annapurna.
In December 1973, I took a break from writing my dissertation to transport Shigeko in a new Honda Civic from Georgia down the east coast of Mexico and around the Yucatan peninsula. We then proceeded south along the Caribbean coast to Belize and Guatemala before heading back north through Mexico. We saved hotel expenses by removing the back seat of the Honda, thus allowing the front seats to recline to horizontally into sleep worthy cots. Only one night in three was spent in a hotel room, mainly to get a shower. Usually I was first to awaken and raise the driver's seat before dawn and cover a hundred miles of road before Shigeko woke up. We car-camped on beaches, under a rainforest canopy at the Mayan ruins of Tikal, and along the shore of Lake Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands. South of Texas, Hondas were still only motorcycles. A breakdown would have meant months of waiting for parts. Fortunately the worst mishap we suffered was one flat tire in the Guatemalan Peten on a road that resembled a streambed.
To celebrate the award of my doctorate degree in the summer of 1974, Shigeko and I traveled back around the world, east to west. We drove my orange Honda to San Francisco and left it with a friend, then flew to Japan for a reunion with my Japanese in-laws whom Shigeko had not seen in ten years. We then took a Soviet ship, the Baikal, from Yokohama to Nahodka near Vladivostok where we boarded the Trans-Siberian train. For one week nonstop, we covered over five thousand miles across the Soviet Union. The experience was a microcosm of the daily demands of living in the Soviet Union. The dining car had an elaborate menu in five languages. However nearly everything on it was not available. The usual meal consisted of a chopped piece of leather called a rump steak. We were compelled to supplement this Spartan diet at station stops by scurrying about the platform, grabbing anything edible from local vendors eager to sell us bread, sausage and vodka.
This was our introduction to the economy of scarcity that characterized the Soviet Union even at its prime. For the first three days on the train that skirted the Chinese border, first north and then westward, no beer was available. On the third morning, as we pulled out of Irkutsk beyond Lake Baikal, bottles of beer (pivo) miraculously appeared in the dining car. We hoarded the six bottles on our table as word spread rapidly through the train. Within minutes, every bottle disappeared and none reappeared until we reached Moscow four days later.
On our last night in Moscow, inside the fin de siecle ballroom of the Hotel Metropol, I futilely tried to get the waiter's attention for a bottle of beer. Suddenly a waiter appeared with an ice bucket and a bottle of Georgian champagne. When I tried to make him understand that I only wanted a bottle of beer, the waiter indicated that the champagne was a gift from a man sitting two tables away. The man joined us and introduced himself as a lonely Armenian gentleman who hated Moscow and Russians and spoke little English. We communicated in sign language and with sketches on napkins. For two hours, he ordered caviar, vodka and brandy. Shigeko and I demonstrated the tango as an orchestra played in the palm court. We felt like we were back in czarist times. By eleven PM, we were fast friends very warm on alcohol when our Intourist taxi arrived and we were scooted off to the railway station for the Red Arrow Express to Leningrad.
For three white nights of July in Leningrad, we marveled at the Hermitage and took excursions to the czars' palaces at Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo) and Petrovoretz on the Baltic. Reluctantly we then boarded a train for Helsinki. At two am, we were awakened at the Finnish border where our luggage was meticulously inspected. Our Polish compartment mates were forced to turn over their remaining rubles that could not be exported from the Soviet Union. They were given a receipt to redeem their money if they ever returned to Russia.
After a day of dodging drunks in the parks of Helsinki, we took a ferry to Stockholm.
From the Swedish capital, we turned to hitchhiking, first to Oslo, then to Copenhagen and south to Hamburg, Cologne, Basel and Bern. In Basel we learned that Nixon had resigned. We then took a train through the Oberland and up the Visp Valley to Zermatt where we hiked to the base of the Matterhorn. Since leaving Russia, we had subsisted on one hot meal a day. Food was very expensive until we reached Annecy in the French Alps. A kindly woman from that picturesque town had picked us up outside Geneva and dropped us at the ancient auberge de la jeunesse (youth hostel) in the middle of the medieval town.
In travel memories, one tends to magnify the good times and tries to forget the bad times. A sumptuous meal that night inside the Annecy youth hostel was one such memorable time. At the top of a spiral staircase worn from centuries of use, a fat friendly mere d'auberge greeted us warmly and sat us down at a special table. She first brought a large tureen of green potage from we filled our bows three times. Next came a platter of tomato-and-onion vinaigrette, which we cleaned off. The third course was a plate of roast beef, which we consumed ravenously. For dessert, we had a choice of fruit, fromage or pudding and got all three. Together with two baskets of French bread and three bottles of burgundy, the sumptuous meal cost us about a dollar fifty each. I had to be helped to bed. We tarried the next day beside Lake Annecy, anticipating an encore of the feast of the previous night. For lunch, we picnicked on huge Rhone valley peaches and pears and an array of cheeses purchased in the market adjacent to the youth hostel. You can imagine our disappointment when the main course that night turned out to be tripe!
Pushing on toward Spain, we thumbed in bumper-to-bumper traffic of French August vacations. It seemed that everyone was heading for the Mediterranean beaches. Campgrounds were so crowded that there was hardly any room on the ground for a sleeping bag. Our final ride into Spain was with a perverted French doctor who claimed to work for the United Nations. He installed us in an expensive hotel on the Costa Brava at his own expense and then disappeared. When management told us we would have to pay for the room, we departed and tried to get some sleep on the beach. The next day a bus took us wearily into Barcelona where found lodging in the same Gothic Quarter digs I had enjoyed in 1958. For a week, we visited my old haunts. We dined on paella in the San Jose restaurant, drank beer on the Plaza Real and saw a bullfight before we boarded a train for Madrid. On the outskirts of Madrid I found my old Popocatepetl friend, Ronald Davis, taking care of his two infant sons while his hippie wife was away in Portugal enjoying the hospitality of his landlord. After another week of bullfights, museums and meals, we got a cheap student flight to New York. The three-month-long string of adventures around the world cost us each less than one thousand dollars.
W resided in Gainesville, Florida for two years where Shigeko had a position teaching ceramics in the Art Department. Meanwhile I sent our resumes and learned to play tennis. Finally in early 1976, I received a notice from my ex-graduate adviser of a job vacancy in the Department of State. The job description was tailor-made for me. It called for a geographic specialist whose specific duties were to take four six-week trips a year anywhere in the world to collect maps and report on foreign mapping activities. It was an once-in-a-lifetime match for a person with my background and interests. I responded immediately and arranged an interview with Douglas D. Dickson at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City during the March 1976 meetings of the Association of American Geographers. Two months later, Dickson came to Gainesville for a final interview. An exhaustive security clearance and change in status of the position from Foreign Service to civil service delayed my appointment for another nine months. Finally on February 22, 1977, I reported for duty in Washington, D.C.
During the following nine years I fulfilled thirty two map procurement missions, which if put end to end would total nearly four years of continuous world travel to over fifty countries. My job was essentially that of a well-subsidized tourist. It sent me repeatedly to such countries as Japan, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, Denmark, and Iceland and most frequently to the Indian Subcontinent. The job afforded opportunities to visit such untouristed regions as the Arabian Peninsula and West Africa. The trips were so structured that I could enjoy evenings and weekends on my own. I would climb Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka, fly to Bali in Indonesia or Angel Falls in Venezuela or Gilgit in northern Pakistan over a weekend. I managed to take most of my annual leave overseas. This way I got to explore Bali and the South Island of New Zealand and drive across France from Italy to visit my old army hangouts in southwestern France before continuing south to Pamplona in Spain for the running of the bulls. The biggest travel rewards of this dream job were two hiking treks in the Nepalese Himalayas.
In 1982 I flew east from Kathmandu in a STOL Twin Otter to Lukla, an up sloping landing field perched on a terrace above the Dodh Kosi River in eastern Nepal. Immediately upon deplaning, I recruited a Sherpa porter-guide waiting for a client. From Lukla, it took me two weeks to make the fifty-mile round trip on foot to the base camp of Mount Everest. I rested for a day at Namche Bazar (12,000 feet) and another day at Periche (14,000 feet) to acclimatize to the altitude before I reached Gorak Shep, the 1953 British camp at 17,300 feet above the sea. I remained there for three days while my Sherpa guide descended to sleep at lower altitude. I pitched my pup tent inside a rock shelter where a one-legged Sherpa woman prepared meals for me. This long stay at such high altitude was unwise. It so scrambled my brain that when I made a solo attempt to proceed higher to the icefall where the Russians were encamped, I became so disoriented amidst the towering seracs that my faithful Sherpa found me sitting listlessly on a rock, staring vacantly up at the peaks above me. He led me down to lower altitude where I recovered.
Returning to Katmandu in 1984, I wrapped up official business before taking a plane to Pokhara, the second city of Nepal one hundred miles to the west. This town lies in an enchanting valley below three thousand feet of altitude with the most awe-inspiring backdrop of the Annapurna Himal rearing up twenty-three thousand feet to the north. The Kali Gandaki River has carved a gorge four miles deep between two eight-thousand-meter peaks, Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. To save time and energy I paid $35 to fly in another Twin Otter north between these two Himalayan giants to Jomosom six thousand feet higher in the rain shadow of the great range. From this airfield I carried my backpack to Kagbeni, a Tibetan village where I slept two nights between a hike up to Muktinath, a shrine sacred to Buddhists and Hindus above twelve thousand feet. Returning to Jomosom, I managed to pull a young Sherpa away from an Australian trekking party and hired him to carry my heavy backpack. Together we proceeded down the Kali Gandaki gorge. The next day I arose early to gaze directly up at the summit and icefall of Dhaulagiri rising twenty thousand vertical feet above me. The following day we reached Tatopani where we could bathe in a natural hot spring and drink cold beer. The trail then led upwards for five thousand vertical feet to the nine-thousand-foot Ghorapani Pass, which affords great views north at the Kali Gandaki and the white bulk of Dhaulagiri. We then struck eastward across several ridges and descended into the Modi valley. The track then led back northward between Annapurna South and the spectacular peak of Maccha Pucchare. A day's march back north brought us to the Annapurna Base Camp inside a huge glacial amphitheater above fourteen thousand feet. All around us rose forbidding walls of glistening white peaks from twenty-three to twenty six thousand feet. Soaring immensely to the north was south face of Annapurna. Close to the south soared Macchapuchari, the "fishtail" peak renown as one of the Matterhorns of the Himalayas.
In 1986 after the CIA took over the function of my job, I was compelled to join the Office of the Geographer as an analyst. Before this happened, I flew to Rio de Janeiro in December to spend some weeks with an attractive Brazilian damsel I had romanced in Mexico City during my final map procurement mission. No longer required to travel, I languished for fifteen years writing analyses for senior policy makers. The boring desk job made me get fat and lazy. In 1988 I was chosen to take one last map procurement mission for the Defense Mapping Agency. I went to ten African countries on special assignment. Later that same year I used five weeks of annual leave to fly to Hong Kong and tour China and spend my fifty-third birthday in Taiwan.
On July 21, 1989, I met a stunningly beautiful woman called Phyllis McDonald. This fortunate encounter at a singles dance in suburban Maryland improved my life to an extent that to quote Voltaire's Candide I was in the best of all possible worlds. It was infatuation at first sight. Within a month we were cohabiting in her fabulous apartment and driving around the countryside in her Lincoln Mark VII.
Just after Christmas in 1989, we set out west in Phyllis's Lincoln and arrived in Salt Lake City on New Year's Eve. We tarried a week among my relatives before continuing south to Zion's Park and the Grand Canyon, then Phoenix and Tucson and finally into Mexico at Nogales. For a week we motored leisurely south along Mexico's west coast to Hermosillo, Guaymas, Mazatlan, Manzanillo, Zihuatenejo and finally Acapulco. In Acapulco we took a room at the famous Hotel El Mirador overlooking the Quebrada cliffs. While watching divers plunge a hundred feet into the Pacific surf, Phyllis ordered a cocktail with ice in it. This was a big mistake. The ice came from unpurified water. Two days later after we had driven north to Mexico City, Phyllis came down with an intestinal ailment known by every gringo as Montezuma’s revenge, tourist trots or simply the turistas. She endured a drive half way up Popocatepetl and a performance of the Ballet Foklorico at the Bellas Artes opera house before Montezuma’s revenge attacked her in earnest and we had to hail a taxi and rush back to the hotel. She barely made it to the bathroom and remained confined to the room for three days. She did not fully recover from the intestinal infection until we got to Veracruz on the east coast where a Mexican army doctor examined her and loaded her with medicines. From then on, her only thoughts were to get back to the USA as soon as possible. The drive back home took us a week. Once back north of the border, Phyllis took the wheel and averaged eighty-five miles an hour on the interstate highways getting back to Washington. Phyllis still adamantly refuses to return to Mexico. It is a pity since, along with Spain, Mexico is my favorite country where I am perfectly at home, enjoying the food, the drink, the fiestas and the bullfights.
Phyllis is more than a decade older than I am, but she preserves the looks and spirit of a twenty-year-old. Nevertheless she demands her creature comforts. With her as my patient and enduring traveling companion for the past fifteen years, I have become less the adventurer-traveler and more the vacationer and package tourist.
Since the Mexican trip, we have driven across the USA five times. In August 1991, we drove to Salt Lake City for the fortieth anniversary my finishing high school. It was an eye-opener of me wondering who were all of those old people. One week after we returned to Washington, I had to fly back flew there for my mother's funeral.
In December 1991, we flew on Pan American Airlines to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, before the airline went belly up in bankruptcy and we had to buy another ticket to get back home. However I did manage to reach Cape Horn, the destination of the Pan American hitchhike in 1958.
In 1992 a divorce judgment forced me to turn over more than $100,000 to my estranged wife, Shriek, who had skipped our marriage to live with a lawyer. This painful misfortune hospitalized me with depression. I did not fully recover from this mental illness until we took a tour of Russia. It was in mid-March and still winter in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The weather did not improve until a train took us south to Kiev. The Russian economy had collapsed and while we pitied the poor Russians forced to peddle their possessions on the street to survive, we enjoyed ballets, concerts and circuses at rock-bottom prices and gained much respect for the long-suffering Russian people.
Next to the drive around Mexico in 1990, our longest trip by car took us from Washington to the Canadian Rockies and Vancouver in 1995. A year later we returned to Salt Lake City for my forty-fifth high school reunion. We followed Route 66 in New Mexico and returned via Zion's Canyon and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before the transmission of our Lincoln Continental gave out just short of Socorro, New Mexico. Fortunately the car was still under warrantee. While the transmission was replaced in Albuquerque, the Ford dealer provided us with a Jeep Cherokee, which we drove to El Paso and Carlsbad Caverns before returning to pick up the Lincoln.
In addition to the South American Odyssey and two Caribbean cruises, Phyllis and I have done five other foreign trips together. These include two inexpensive package tours of Russia, the first one during a snowy spring in 1994 when we did Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Kiev, and the second one in July of 1996 when we cruised the Volga canal and river system from Moscow to St. Petersburg and celebrated the Fourth of July with fireworks and a rendition of the Soviet National Anthem on the Volga near Yugoslav.
In December 1997, we flew to Spain and enjoyed the beach resort of Torremolinos. This all-inclusive package included excursions to Gibraltar, Ronda and other villages and resorts along the Costa del Sol. For the third week, we rented a car for a speedy circuit to Granada, Cordoba and Seville. In mid-May of 1998, we flew to Madrid for two weeks where I endeavored to get Phyllis interested in bullfights during the annual festival of San Isidro. Every afternoon for a week, we sat high in the Las Ventas bullring next to the band and witnessed six bulls being killed. With none of them very memorable, we were soon sated with taurimaquia. We rented a small car and drove to Segovia. This was Phyllis's first visit to fabulous town that I had seen twice before with its fantastic castle-in-Spain Alcazar and two-thousand-year-old Roman aqueduct. We then proceeded to Avila and Salamanca and finally southeast of Madrid to Cadence, an amazing town that I had missed during my previous Spanish travels.
Since then, various medical crises made us cancel trips to Spain and China. Finally in May of 2001, we took off from Newark and climbed above the World Trade Center. The flight to Hong Kong in a Boeing 767 non-stop over the North Pole took eighteen hours and exemplifies how travel has progress technologically since I began my travels a half century ago. Four months later the whole world changed when the twin towers disappeared along with the romance and pleasure that travel once represented.
On November 2, 2001, I retired from the State Department and now have a closet full of suits that I rarely wear. My passport expired that same month and I have not bothered to renew it. I have lost my desire for foreign travel. Why should I bother to get on a plane and be "shot down a tube" to some other airport where one must struggle with other tourists and officials? We share twenty-seven-story condominium building with four hundred other residential units inhabited by practically every nationality and culture on the planet. Why should I bother to travel the world when the whole world has come to me? Restaurants and supermarkets cater to every immigrant group and feature their cuisine. Why go to Paris when I can dine on Paris here?
I can gloat smugly that I travel when I did and how I did. I saw the world from the ground up. I would not exchange those many thousands of miles of chasing the ghost of Richard Halliburton for all the luxury travel on the Orient Express, the Concorde or the QE II. There is no substitute for the down-to-earth experience of a carefree hitchhiker with ambitious goals, little money, but plenty of time to walk to the edge of town, thumb down a ride, never knowing were and with whom he would spend the next night. Like Halliburton, I realized my youth while I had it. Unlike Halliburton who carried his luck too far and succumbed to fate at age 39, I remain very much alive and well at age 71, still hoping to strive, to seek and, as long as my health permits, not to yield.
The wide wonderful world I dreamed of as a youth and subsequently experienced as a carefree traveler has lost most of its novelty and mystery. Since the mid-century, our planet has changed enormously, almost tripling in population and shrinking in size with jet travel and instantaneous global telecommunications and the Internet. Travel that once took days and even weeks now takes only hours or in the case of television and the Internet in a flick of the eye. The lure of far-off places and variety of cultural diversity have all paled and been replaced by a monotonous homogeneity of airports, expressways and chain hotels that vary little from place to place. Many countries have lost their ethnic souls to American fast food and pop culture. Now one can travel vicariously and be transported instantaneously to any part of the globe via satellite telecasts or surfing the web without leaving one's living room.
The years from the 1920s when Halliburton traveled to the 1950s when I began my peregrinations were relatively innocent times compared to the present. Distance and isolation could sustain the illusions of romance and adventure. Nowadays these illusions have been dispelled and transformed by the grim realities of environmental degradation, mass poverty and political instability. More recently political terrorism threatens the very survival of human kind on this planet. Once cities such as Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Singapore and Bangkok were fascinating and exotic places, full of color and mystery. Forty years later, they have grown into huge urban agglomerations that are remarkably similar except for the languages on their signs.
At present, I get my travel buzz by watching such television shows as Globetrekker or The Amazing Race and vicariously enjoy the youthful backpacker’s style of travel I once knew. It is fun to see how people one-third my age wander about a familiar country with a rucksack much as I did forty years ago. Now that I am past seventy, I can sit back and congratulate myself that I went when few people were doing it and the going was good.
Addendum. My biggest regret is not having written about my adventures soon after I had them. As a teenager I published two articles on mountaineering: “Feet on the Teton,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 16, 1950, and “To the Crater of Popocatepetl,” Travel Magazine, November 1953, pp. 28-31. Then there was a twenty-four year hiatus until 1977 when I published my tequila research in two widely circulated periodicals: “Tequila,” Americas (OAS); Vol. 29 (1), January, 1977; pp. 15-18; and “The Evolution and Localization of the Mescal and Tequila Industry in Mexico,” Revista Geografica (the journal of the Inter-American Institute of History and Geography), 1977, pp. 113-132. The Travel article on Popocatepetl and both tequila articles are cited in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Since 1977 all of my creative efforts have been devoted to writing reports and analyses on foreign affairs for official government publications. Now that my working career is over I can catch up on writing about my youthful travels that began over a half century ago by consulting my diaries and recreating the best and worst of times of my youth.
