| One Great Thing |
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Early on, I’d heard rumors of a secret liquor store, where a foreign passport granted access to a backroom stock of booze. Locating this oasis became at first a casual interest and then an obsessive one, the forbidden drink all the more alluring because I couldn’t have it. The moment when I finally found the place—on a back alley near an overpass, masked as a legitimate business—was, I feel no shame in admitting, the pinnacle of my travels. The two glasses of vodka I shared with a few Bangladeshi colleagues were among the best drinks I’ve had in my life. The fact is, I’ve wound up in some lousy locales in my time. As a reporter, I often find myself flying solo to places low on the list of recommended vacation spots. I’ve also endured my share of disaster-plagued trips. These experiences have led me to the simple principle exercised in my liquor-store quest: The ultimate success of any travel event rests on the ability to experience just One Great Thing. It can be a single meal or a conversation. It can be a perfect nap on a patch of grass or a family’s invitation to join them for tea. This might sound a little heretical in the era of the e-mail travel dispatch and the trip blog, when countries and sights are collected like so many stickers on a suitcase. But the reality is that in places where you have no friends and a two-year-old’s grasp of the language, solo travel is inevitably laced with boredom, frustration, and logistical disasters. My bulwark against them all? Simplicity. One Great Thing is all I ever ask. In my pre-reporter life, I once spent a few winter days stuck in Helsinki, alone, engaged in the soul-killing work of recoding delivery software for the Finnish postal service. Know what I remember from that trip? The three middle-aged postal workers who helped me toast my birthday, in consonant-heavy song, with beer after Lapland beer in a dingy hotel bar. Such is the power of the One Great Thing. Naturally, finding the one thing is most critical when you are traveling alone. (Companions can at least share in any misery, or even make light of it. Misery when traveling alone is always a full dose.) But trying too hard to make it happen can also backfire. A couple of years ago, I found myself on a weeklong trip to Leeds, England. I persuaded a local acquaintance to accompany me to a professional soccer match. As an ardent soccer fan, this had true great-thing potential for me—right up until we were assaulted by a group of drunken, racist thugs and spent much of the day at police headquarters. The next day, however, the same acquaintance took me to a local fish-and-chips shop that served quite possibly the best grease-paper-wrapped haddock ever made on earth. I ate there every day for the rest of the trip. Variability is not, in and of itself, a virtue. The enduring hope of the One Great Thing is that the worse conditions get, the greater your chance at redemption. And so it was with a reporting trip I took to Cameroon last year, to research a story on monkey hunters. The unraveling of my journey began with my decision to defy the golden rule of developing-world travel: Do not eat street meat on a stick. Trusting my mythical “iron stomach,” I ate not one stick of meat (animal origin unknown) but ten, straight off the grill of a street stall in Yaounde. You can probably guess what came next, starting with projectile vomiting on a crowded sidewalk. I couldn’t ingest so much as a cracker for a full 48 hours without dire consequences. Unfortunately, the day after my meal, I had to ride into the country’s interior with a group of scientists on a prearranged trip. After a six- hour, intestine-churning trek over mud highways, we arrived in a remote village without running water—a less-than-ideal locale for someone with severe gastrointestinal problems. From there, I spent two days dehydrated and ant-bitten, running after a fleet-footed hunter through the rainforest on an empty stomach. I never did see a monkey. Bouncing back out of the jungle in the rear of a Land Rover, I felt like a complete failure. When we finally made it to the coast, we stopped at an empty black-sand beach. Nearby, a little thatch-roofed grill served fresh fish and tall bottles of beer, perfectly timed for my return to hunger. I went for a swim, cracked open a beer, and stretched out on the grass to listen to the surf. It was a wonderful trip. |
A few years ago, I found myself traveling alone in Bangladesh for the better part of six weeks. As a cultural experience, the trip was interesting and enriching. But it was not particularly fun, between the uncontrolled chaos of unfettered traffic (in which I suffered two accidents in taxis), the mass of humanity that made every sidewalk feel like a stadium exit after a football game, and my persistent failure to corral any decent interviews for my story. There were more than a few evenings when I just wanted to unwind with a cocktail or a cold beer. No such luck. In Bangladesh, alcohol is outlawed.
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