This guy travels to risky spots and lives to tell about it
This inspiration hits me, and it involves ... you.
At that price, I buy 15 of them as the young sales clerk gives her seal of approval. "My boyfriend really liked it," she informs me. Well, there you go.
As I flip through the book, and read about all the close scrapes that the author, Robert Young Pelton, had in his travels, I keep thinking that we've all had encounters that put big sweat marks on our collective shirts.
Of course, Pelton's encounters happen in places such as Uganda where a bomb blew off just seconds after he had left the hotel patio where he had been drinking a beer. Maybe yours took place with a particularly nasty waiter in Orlando.
Those are the travel moments that stay long with you. The moments when you weren't in that typical tourist cocoon, and things got a bit dicey. Well, you send me your stories, and maybe you'll get one of these 15 travel books.
I've had a chance to travel to various parts of the world, and I've got my recollections of when things got dicey. I remember being in Riga, Latvia, in Eastern Europe, as the old Soviet Union was breaking up in 1990. The Russians still had plenty of soldiers and tanks in the city to show their force.
On one night, as I was heading to the press-center building, I found that the Black Berets had taken it over. They were the shock troops — thuggy young guys wearing paratrooper boots and packing plenty of firepower — whose reputation was one of sadism. They enjoyed pointing their weapons at somebody whose looks they didn't like, telling them to hit the ground, and if they didn't do it fast enough, pummeling them with a rifle butt.
There I was, in a darkened building, with fidgety 19-year-old Black Berets tapping at their pistols, edging closer to me. It was as if they were trying to decide: To pummel or not, that is the question. Then they got orders on their walkie-talkies about something else and left. It's an evening I haven't forgotten.
You don't travel overseas to have a nerve-racking experience. A few years ago, I was driving a group of people across the mountain pass from Truckee, Calif., to Reno. The worst thunderstorm I've ever experienced hit us. Even with the windshield wipers going at full speed, I was barely able to see a foot or so ahead of me, and then only for a second. There was heavy traffic, probably equally blind. I couldn't see a place to pull over, but I could hear the hydraulics of the truck tailing me as he tried to maneuver his rig. Finally, the storm cleared. Afterward, I remembered nobody in the car had said anything. I think everybody had been praying silently.
From you, it's not as if I'm expecting harrowing stories of a trip to Tajikistan. Let's leave that to Robert Young Pelton, as he tells in his book about hiring a car and driver in wintertime in that country to go into the mountains. The clutch has given out; the snow chains are slicing into the exposed cords of the bald tires. Pelton has to push the car up the mountain.
"As our car slithers and screams on the slick ice, the chains fly off and hit me on the knees," he writes. "I am dripping with sweat ... we are nowhere near the summit. ... As if to finalize our predicament ... our battery is dead." They have to sleep that night in the car, in subzero temperatures.
He gives his gloves and hat to fellow passengers. "I end up wearing socks on my hands and pulling my watch cap down over my face ... I wake up to find my extremities heading toward frostbite ... By 5:30, I couldn't just sit and freeze to death ... I was going to walk over the pass. ... "
Slipping and sliding on the ice-covered road, Pelton manages to make it to the summit. He eventually hitches a ride on a potato truck. In the village below, the locals had never met a Westerner. They slaughtered a large sheep in his honor.
That's one of the milder anecdotes in the book.
I call Pelton at his home in Los Angeles. I tell him about the compliment the bookstore clerk had for his book. He isn't surprised. Used to be, he told me, that a Lonely Planet guidebook — with its listings of cheap places to eat and stay — was considered essential by a student on that trip to Thailand.
"But how many times in Thailand are you seeing 50 people in front of the same temple, all looking at the same Lonely Planet book?" he tells me. "Those books had their moment in the early '70s. Now it's 500 tourists staying at the same hotel, going to the same sites."
In Pelton's guidebook, there are no hotels listed. No restaurants. No "must-see" tourist attractions. Want a hotel? Try a taxi driver. It's true, that driver might try to rip you off. The most dangerous time for someone on an international flight, he says, is right after you land.
"You're confused, you're carrying everything with you — money, possessions," Pelton says.
But you can try and "create a little bubble of protection" around you. Basically, you befriend that taxi driver. You introduce yourself. If you can't speak the language, you take out your language guide and at least try to say, "How are you." You smile. You ask him questions. At the hotel that the cabbie recommends, you befriend the manager — saying what a great room you have been given, what a good restaurant it has.
Pelton doesn't tip them. "Giving them money would be an insult. I'm their friend," he says. That's how he books a hotel, not by going through Priceline.
By the way, Pelton is 46, married for 25 years to Linda, a very, very understanding wife. They have twin daughters, age 18. He goes alone on most trips, but his daughters have traveled around the world with him. Pelton's idea of a great family vacation is a trip to Iraq. He figures that in a few months, that country will be overrun by invading U.S. forces.
See what it's like to live under Saddam Hussein! "It'd be a profound tourist experience," Pelton says.
If you want to know more about Pelton's travel philosophy, click on www.comebackalive.com.
For you armchair-travel types, he'll even sell you a $25 "World's Most Dangerous Places" polo shirt, because this is the U.S. of A., where everything gets marketed.
That's the setup. I await your anecdotes, although I certainly don't expect them to be about the kind of travel experience Pelton is getting in August.
He's traveling to Colombia to hang out with right-wing paramilitary death squads, just to see what they're all about. In case you were still trying to decide your last-minute summer-vacation plans.
Erik Lacitis' columns run Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday in Northwest Life. You can e-mail him at elacitis@seattletimes.com or call 206-464-2237.