Yesterday evening on the NBC Nightly News the head of the CDC was quoted as saying that people who care for Ebola patients should not "undergo travel."
"Do you 'undergo' travel?" Hania asked.
"Not really. You 'undergo' torture," I said, not immediately realizing the increased similarity between the two activities.
A recent article takes travel writers to task for not alerting their readers to ISIS. But how can you blame travel writers for their failure to identify a terrorist group when they've not given any indication that we've been in an economic crisis for the last seven years?
The wind nearly hardened my sweat-dampened hair. After several long minutes, I was able to climb into the backseat of a taxi. I gave the name of my motel. Nothing. I gave the old name of my motel. Now the driver was totally confused. I gave the address. In addition to English, he appeared to have no knowledge of the highway. We headed off at about 3 miles an hour.
I felt my world slowly unraveling. I envisioned myself spending the next hour on dark and empty highways looking for a sordid motel with a mute driver. I asked him to take me back to the taxi stand. This, thankfully, he understood.
There was now a parade of taxis. I got out in the middle of it and called to the taxi captain. He asked where I was going. He wasn’t impressed. “Two stars,” he said. He explained to my driver the route he needed to take. It sounded complicated to me; like Fulani to my driver. (Unless, of course, that was the language he spoke.) Eventually the captain told him to go home.
I asked the captain how to get to the Marriott, which we had passed on our fruitless loop. He directed me downstairs to a shabby, deserted, underground passageway that nicely continued the bad dream nature of the evening while cementing the suspicion that I had arrived in a surprisingly frigid developing country.
A train approached and with it my salvation. I got off at the first stop and took the escalator to the hotel lobby. A kind man at the reception desk told me there were no available rooms, which was a blessing, as at that point I would have seriously considered spending $289 for one. I asked if he had ever heard of the Knight’s Inn. He said it wasn’t in a very good area. Then he called a number of nearby lodgings. They all had familiar names, and I wondered why the service that United used hadn’t included them. One had rooms, the man told me, but no shuttle service, so he declined for me. (Had word already spread of my taxi disaster?) Eventually he found me a room at the Best Western. He pointed to the entrance and said that the shuttle would pick me up there in about five minutes.
Once in my warm room I called the Woodland Inn and told them that I would not be coming after all. Then, marveling at the ever-changing fates of the traveler, I turned on the TV and watched the end of the Oscars.
In the early '90s I spent a delightful week in Guanajuato and never made it down the road to San Miguel de Allende, thinking: "I'll visit it another time."
That time has finally come, as tomorrow I head off to the San Miguel Writers Conference. Will be back here on the 18th.
An editor recently asked me to write a series of articles about Miami geared for different types of travelers: first-time visitors, romantic couples, families, foodies and hipsters. I declined (it was a last-minute assignment, and I didn’t have time). But afterwards I thought it might have been fun to mix up the categories, and send foodies to the places for first-time visitors, and hipsters to the city’s best family destinations. I would have been performing a valuable service, making it possible for everyone to have the shockingly out-of-the-ordinary experience that real travel is.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times Travel section featured a Q&A with the author of Travels With Epicurus, a septuagenarian who, in his younger years, backpacked through Europe, as he said, “like an anthropologist with A.D.D.”
Now, older and wiser, he has discovered the pleasures and rewards of staying in one place, which is exactly how I traveled when I was young. (Summer in London, year in France, four months in Greece, two and a half years in Poland.) I never owned a backpack; I carried (with great effort) a large leather suitcase. Now I wonder: Will I, in my 70s, go chasing after all the sights I missed in my youth?