Wickham Boyle - By the Seat of My Pants

LONELY PLANET PUBLICATIONS
Melbourne Oakland London

By the Seat of My Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel and Misadventure

Published by Lonely Planet Publications

Head Office:

90 Maribyrnong Street, Footscray, Vic 3011, Australia

Locked Bag 1, Footscray, Vic 3011, Australia

Branches:

150 Linden Street, Oakland CA 94607, USA

2nd floor, 186 City Rd, London, EC1V 2NT, UK

First published 2005

This edition published 2011

Printed in China

Copy edited by Janet Austin

Designed by Daniel New

Cover design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

By the seat of my pants : humorous tales of travel and misadventure / edited by Don George.

2nd ed.

eISBN 9781760340414

Lonely Planet and contributors 2015.

LONELY PLANET and the Lonely Planet logo are trade marks of Lonely Planet Publications Pty. Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the written permission of the publisher.

Travel is funny. Not always, of course, and often its funnier in retrospect, but you can be pretty sure that just about any journey is going to offer some moments of unadulterated hilarity or at least unanticipated irony. And usually at your own expense. Thats just the way of the road.

In thirty years of wandering the globe, Ive learned that the one thing I can reliably expect when I travel is that something unexpected will happen. And when it does, Ill be forced to call on all my grace, sensitivity, courage and wisdom. And when they dont respond, Ill be forced to call on my sense of humour.

Thats why my #1 rule of the road is this: if you dont pack your sense of humour with your sunscreen, sooner or later youll get burned.

By the Seat of My Pants springs from this notion. These thirty-one tales of on-the-road adventures and encounters encompass the full comic spectrum, from the wryly ironic to the laugh-out-loudably absurd. While the stories vary widely in setting, subject and tone, they all remind us that some of travels greatest treasures are those unexpected, unimaginable situations that make us laugh at the world and at ourselves.

Thats one reason for this book. Heres the second. Thirty years ago, on a soaring spring day on the Princeton University campus, I made a momentous decision. I decided to forego the familiar paths most of my graduating friends were taking grad school, med school, law school, jobs in long-established firms and follow a different track: I would live in Paris for the summer on a work-abroad internship, move to Athens for the academic year on a teaching fellowship, and then I had no idea.

I had absolutely no idea what I would do next. I just knew that something deep and irresistible was impelling me to go to Paris and Athens, and that if I ignored this urge, I would regret it for ever. The rest, I trusted, would take care of itself. So the week after graduation I packed up my life and set off for Europe, without any friends to meet me, with no place to stay and no coherent overall plan. I was making a grand leap into the unknown flying by the seat of my pants.

That was the beginning of my life as a traveller, and the beginning of my resolution to trust the pants-seat and make the leap a resolution that has conferred innumerable and life-changing gifts over the ensuing thirty years.

Flying by the seat of your pants is a quintessential part of the travellers act and art. Youll be cruising along with everything seeming to be working out just fine, when suddenly reality tilts and teeters and youre confronted with something entirely unexpected a flat tyre, a missed train, a mystifying meal, a kindly but incomprehensible villager, an unmapped fork in the path. Time to put on the pants.

The tales in this book illustrate this principle and the wide variety of forms it can take. Sometimes the need arises in the middle of an otherwise uneventful trip, as Jan Morris discovers on her first trip aboard a vaporetto voyage in Venice, and Michelle Richmond learns in a hotel room at the end of the world in Ushuaia, Argentina. Sometimes entire trips can go horribly wrong, as on Pico Iyers wide-eyed, white-knuckle, four-wheel whirl through Ethiopia, Chris Coxs decidedly not-as-advertised boat to Angkor Wat, and Danny Wallaces assignment in Prague with an Uzi-toting kidnapper-cum-tour guide.

Sometimes travel thrusts us into unexpected encounters with locals. Jeff Greenwald peers into dusty Indian depths in a confrontation with a luggage wallah in Calcuttas airport, Edwin Tucker gets much more than he bargained for when he unwittingly trades his last pen for a shepherds lamb in Tibet, Laura Resau befriends a Mexican village boy and receives an unforgettable lesson in traditional bathing rites from his mother, and Deborah Steg is treated to an award-worthy dinner performance by an unctuous new ami in Cannes, in southern France.

At other times our travelling companions are the challenge, whether its Tim Cahills exasperatingly annoyance-proof caving partner in Thailand, Judy Tierneys wrangler-wannabe boyfriend on a boot-shopping spree in Texas, Sean Condons exhaustingly enthusiastic uncle in Vermont or the family from hell that Karl Taro Greenfeld lands among when his girlfriend introduces him to idyllic Ibiza. At other times we put on the pants of the fool ourselves, as Bill Fink discovers on a spontaneous expedition to climb Mount Fuji in Japan, Doug Lansky understands inside an exit-less Dutch toilet and Jeff Vize realises as a crowd-pleasing pedestrian in Bangladesh.

Finally, on some journeys its the destination itself that dissembles, as the alluring marble marvels of Italys Apuan Alps do for David Downie and a reputed Buddhist Shangri-La near the IndiaTibet border does for Rolf Potts. Amanda Joness youthful escape to the United States becomes a nightmare when she discovers that her promised apartment isnt available and she is suddenly homeless in San Francisco. Holly Ericksons dream job as a live-in cook in a London apartment takes a tilt when she breezes in to find that the garden kitchen is literally so.

Ah, the rewards of the road!

When I first set out to compile this anthology, I knew from my own experiences and thirty years of conversations with friends and fellow travellers that the theme was resonant but I had no idea we would end up with this rich repository of tales. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the numerous writers with whom I have worked in the past, who agreed to share their favourite on-the-road bungles, bumps and bounces. And I owe a second debt to all the writers who responded to the competition we sponsored on www.lonelyplanet.com , which elicited much to our amazement and delight more than six hundred submissions. Wonderfully, and fittingly, the compilation that resulted brings together stories from some of the worlds best-known travellers and storytellers side-by-side with works by writers who have never been published before.