Bombeck - When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, Its Time to Go Home

When You Look Like

Your Passport Photo,

It's Time To Go Home

Books by Erma Bombeck

At Wit's End

Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!

I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression

The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank

If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

Aunt Erma's Cope Book

Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession

Family: The Ties That Bind ... and Gag!

I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up,

I Want to Go to Boise

When You Look Like Your Passport Photo,

It's Time to Go Home

Erma Bombeck

When You Look Like

Your Passport Photo,

It's Time To Go Home

HarperCollinsPublishers

WHEN YOU LOOK LIKE YOUR PASSPORT PHOTO, IT'S TIME TO GO HOME. Copyright

1991 by Erma Bombeck. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by Karen Savary

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bombeck, Erma When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home/Erma Bombeck.

1st rd.

p.cm.

ISBN 0-06-018311-X

1. Bombeck, ErmaJourneys 2. Humorists, American20th century Journeys. 3. Voyages and travelsHumor. 4. Travel Humor 1. Title

PS3552.059Z47 1991 818'.5403dc20 [B] 91-055097

91 92 93 94 95 MAC/RRD 10 987654321

Contents

Papua New Guinea

Centerville, Ohio

Closing Down the House

Canada

Honey, I Just Ditched the Kids

Packing

Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

The Rental Car

Italy

Tipping

Cruising the Baltic

Shopping

South America

Flying for Peanuts

Language

Spain

Six Worst Arguments on Vacation

Death by Drivers

Indonesia

Slides

Africa

Picking a Date for the Family Trip

Rafting Down the Grand Canyon

Let Me Entertain You

Antiquity

Sick

Mexico

Traveling with Parents

Restrooms

Istanbul

Brochure Speak

Alaska

Working Vacations

Russia

A Jack Nicholson Wheat Toast Day

Montserrat

Great Barrier Reef

Time to Go Home

Jet Lag

Homecoming

Papua New Guinea

When You Look Like

Your Passport Photo,

It's Time To Go Home

Papua New Guinea

The gunshots started about two in the morning. They were followed closely by the sounds of broken bottles being thrown at the hotel and screams from the room next door. Lying next to me in bed was a lunatic who brought me to this place to shed the stress of kids, phones, and meal-planning anxiety.

This was the third week of our vacation in Papua New Guinea, and my husband and I were in the middle of a tribal war in a small village called Kundiawa.

In the lull, we both stared at the ceiling of the dark room, not daring to move. Call me crazy, I said, but I don't think these people have a handle on tourism.

My husband breathed deeply. I've told you before, the fighting has nothing to do with us. It's between two tribes.

You do have a way of turning gray skies into blue, I said flatly.

A dog barked. In the hallway outside our door, there were hurried footsteps and shouting that faded quickly.

Did you know there is no water in this hotel? I asked.

How many times do I have to tell you, this is a third-world country. You can't expect to have a mint on your pillow every night. You have to appreciate the primitive charm of this place.

Do you think it's safe to crawl across the floor to the bathroom?

No, he said and turned over to sleep.

I couldn't close my eyes. What was I doing here? I was a woman who washed her tennis shoes every week sleeping on a pillow without a case. A woman who hyperventilated when she found a roach in her grocery bag sharing a park restroom with a snake coiled just above the commode. A woman who brought one nice dress with her to wear to church on Sundays only to discover the natives went to Mass topless. God, I hated being overdressed!

Vacations always sound so great on paper. They are supposed to save your marriage, save your sanity, bring about understanding in the world, clear up your skin-all those things. The truth is if you do them right, they're hard work. They're like an Outward Bound experience with diarrhea. We pay a lot of money to sleep in airports, lug around suitcases twice our body weight, eat food we can't identify, and put our lives in the hands of people we have never met before.

In more than twenty years of traveling, I had to admit, Papua New Guinea was the most unusual culture I had ever witnessed. I know that because my husband told me so. He is like one of those talking cassettes where you hit a button and it spews out details of what you are seeing. Just push on his navel and you'll hear, On May 27, 1930, Papua New Guinea became the last inhabited region on the planet to be explored by Europeans. He will also tell you it is crucial to see all of this before civilization dumps its technology on it in the name of progress.

When he delivered that soliloquy, we were standing on a dirt street in the center of Goroko where people had their pigs on leashes. Somehow I didn't feel the threat was imminent.

Their driving laws weren't exactly out of an AAA manual. If you are involved in an accident in Papua New Guinea, don't stop. Keep going until you reach the nearest police station. There is a payback law by which the wronged person randomly selects the next person matching your skin color and kills him. If you hit a pig, don't even think of pausing to make restitution, but go to the police. And don't forget, my husband warned, if you see people walking with axes, knives, or bows and arrows, do not stop. Keep moving.

I remember staring at him and saying, You have just ruined my surprise.

Another gunshot cracked into the night. I shook my husband awake. Are you wearing your Mickey Mouse underwear today?

Yes, he said sleepily.

Then tomorrow must be Wednesday... Joe Palooka day.

Try to get some sleep, he said. He resumed snoring.

The underwear. It had all seemed so long ago since we arrived here. We were scheduled to stop off in Papeete in Tahiti for a couple of days to get over jet lag before pushing on to Port Moresby. I remember it was eleven o'clock at night when the luggage carousel ground to a sickening halt and we realized we were the last two people there. I had my luggage, but my husband had the look of a man who had just had his life-support system removed.

My luggage! It's not here, he gasped. It's probably still on the plane here in Tahiti. I'm going to check on it before the plane takes off.

I grabbed his arm. Grow up! It's not still on the plane. It's probably back in Phoenix.

Everything I own is in those suitcases. My binoculars, my film, all my clothes and toiletries.

Did I ever tell you about that grandmother from Fort Lauderdale?

Yes, he said miserably, looking for an agent.

She was going to her grandson's wedding in Pittsburgh and her luggage went to Canada?

You told me, he said.

The airline told her if she didn't receive her luggage in twenty-four hours, she would receive $35 for new underwear, but that was the least of her problems because all she had to wear to the wedding were the slack suit and sneakers she had traveled in. Are you sure I didn't tell you this?

Do you see a representative of the airline anywhere?

Anyway, I continued, the family tried to come to the rescue, but the mother of the bride was too short and too thin, so she finally ended up in something that fita blue maternity dress. They washed out the old spots and dried it with a hair dryer and she marched down the aisle between her two grandsons wearing a maternity dress and a pair of gold bedroom slippers.