Travel: The joys of a lifetime of exploring out-of-the-way locations.
The Wall Street Journal
26/8/2023
THE SILVER DOMES that dot El Oued’s rooflines shimmered in the spring sun as we wandered the old market at the heart of the oasis city in Algeria’s eastern desert.
We edged by men in loose robes and women with headscarves, threading our way among stalls piled with vegetables, dates and olives. A spice seller helped Karen pick from his bins of orange, red and green concoctions for a mix to flavor couscous.
We had anticipated the rush of colors and sounds and people in a city that our guidebook promised was “undoubtedly one of the nicest places to visit in the Sahara.”
We did not remotely anticipate what would happen that evening, when our day’s wanderings led us onto cushions around a low table, breaking the Ramadan fast with a young imam we’d just met in a mosque.
El Oued was our last stop in Algeria before crossing overland into Tunisia this year on a monthlong trip to fete our 44th anniversary.
That was a totally normal way to celebrate—for us. Ever since we honeymooned by hitchhiking around Japan all summer, we’ve been traveling in unusual places or at odd times, often on a shoestring, mostly on
public transportation and carrying only backpacks. Our travels together to more than three dozen countries have been a continuing source of unexpected delights, intimate glimpses into how other people in the world live, and an abundance of hospitality that renews our faith in humanity. “Welcome” is a familiar greeting from people who approach us on sidewalks and in bus stations to ask where we are from.
“Welcome to Turkey!”; “Welcome to Nicaragua!”; “Welcome to Tunisia!” “American? Welcome!” Independent travel in offbeat lands certainly has its miserable aspects, whether that be riding on a cramped bus for eight hours through the desert or getting off the train at 3 a.m. in a city and having to walk to a hotel. And no doubt there’s a level of risk as well. But the downsides have never stopped us. Or slowed us, for that matter.
Friends urged us not to travel to El Salvador in 2007—dangerous, they said—but we went with our three boys and found it hospitable. We took the train above the Arctic Circle in Sweden in late December when the sun never came up. One clincher in our decision to travel in Tunisia in 2018 was that the latest Lonely Planet country guide about it was eight years old.
“That’s crazy travel!” warned a travel agent in Belize when Steve described our family’s proposed route from Tikal in Guatemala by bus and riverboat to Livingston on the coast, then by sea to Punta Gorda, Belize. The route worked splendidly. Crazy travel. We like the sound of that.
Our parents’ fault
We credit our parents for our adventurous-travel penchant. When Karen was 13, her family piled into a red VW microbus and drove for six months from Luxembourg south and around the Mediterranean to North Africa. They camped and stayed with local aid workers. Among their stops in 1970 was El Oued.
Steve’s parents gave him broad freedom as a teenager to travel in Japan, where they were missionaries. In high school, he rode his motorcycle several days south from home to his Tokyo boarding school in the fall and later learned to hitchhike around the islands when he couldn’t afford gas money.
Our adventures together began before we were dating, when Steve in 1977 persuaded Karen to hitchhike with him to Iowa from our Indiana college. It was a glorious spring day of blue skies and short waits, including a rare lift from a semi driver. It was a mutual test, we agree now. Steve has kept our cardboard hitching sign from the trip.
It took another half year for Steve to win Karen’s affection when, on our first date, we rode his candy-gold ’72 Honda CB750 motorcycle on country roads into Michigan for a picnic. That evening in the college auditorium, we watched “Walkabout,” the 1971 adventure-survival film set in Australia and then, well, that’s none of your business.
In our early married years, we always set aside funds for travel. Our typical routine back then: Buy tickets, buy a guidebook, make no reservations, read the guidebook on the plane, hit the ground and wing it.
We took our firstborn, Luke, at age 4 months on a tour of Thailand involving trains, boats and a backpack half full of diapers. Restaurant staff would often spirit our baby away to the kitchen to pass around while we enjoyed our meal. When our second son, Isaac, was 5 weeks old, we rode buses around the Yucatan peninsula with him and Luke, then 2½.
Year-end ritual
We made travel abroad a yearend ritual with the children, choosing countries almost on a whim. When we were living in Tokyo in 1997—by then we had three boys ages 2 to 9—a fellow travel fanatic told us Vietnam and Laos were a budget backpacker’s delight, so we flew to Ho Chi Minh City, rode trains up the coast to Hanoi and flew into Vientiane. Each boy carried his own backpack.
In 2000, Steve declared he had waited long enough to visit Nicaragua, where he had planned to spend a college term in 1978 until the brewing revolution intervened. On Christmas morning, we woke to cattle lowing next to our cottage on Ometepe island in Lake Nicaragua, where we had watched the locals celebrate with a Christmas procession and ate a traditional roast chicken stuffed with olives, garlic and squash.
We then spent Christmas vacations visiting every other country in Central America. On Christmas Eve 2007, we were in the courtyard of a guesthouse in Juayúa, El Salvador, feasting with the owners’ extended family. They later refused to let us pay for the dinner, saying, “You are part of our family.”
One fall, Isaac demanded: “Why do we always go to hot countries? Can’t we go someplace cold?” So we looked at a globe and homed in on northern Scandinavia. We enjoyed the Christmas markets in Stockholm and then took the sleeper train north to Kiruna during the weeks when the sun never rose above the horizon, sleeping in an ice hotel one night, dogsledding in Abisko National Park and taking the train to Narvik, Norway, before heading south to Oslo. It broke our budget-travel norm but the adventure paid us back.
We let each son pick our Christmas destination his highschool senior year. Luke chose Japan, where he was born. Isaac opted for Slovakia because his research showed it to be a lowcost country. Levi selected Colombia, as we hadn’t yet been to South America.
Six-month trek
We refined our protocol over the years, making firmer plans and more reservations, splurging more often and occasionally hiring travel guides. We traveled hard but added in chill time, for snorkeling, desert camping, skiing or lying on a beach. Steve’s vagabonding alter ego got the better of him in 2011, when he finagled a leave of absence and took our son Levi, then 15, out of high school for a six-month overland trek from Uganda to Istanbul, including Somalia’s Somaliland, Sudan and Iraqi Kurdistan. In Sudan, the two ate goat meat with their fingers, camped by ancient Nubian pyramids north of Khartoum and crossed into Egypt on the weekly ferry, sleeping above deck under a lifeboat. In nearly every town, someone would invite them to tea. “Welcome to Sudan!” was the greeting everywhere.
Perhaps we’re travel snobs by insisting we’re exploring as much as sightseeing. But as Robert Pirsig writes in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a fictionalized account of his motorcycle ride with his son across America: “Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.”
We stuck to our ways when the children were gone, looking for countries that promised adventure for independent travelers. One fall, we took out a map, scanned the Mediterranean coastline and pointed to Tunisia, knowing almost nothing about it. Many foreigners were staying away from the country after a 2015 terrorist attack on tourists, but backpacking travelers online were reporting it was safe, friendly and inexpensive. They were right, we found, as we traveled around easily for two weeks in 2018.
When Covid halted travel abroad, we hit the road in America, packing our tandem bicycle with camping gear in 2021 and pedaling from our San Francisco home to Virginia, tenting in forests and town parks and sleeping on the floors of churches and fire stations.
We did it again last year, heading south on the tandem to San Diego and then east to Florida. We didn’t do much sightseeing, but we saw sights of American beauty everywhere and were awed by the hospitality of fellow Americans along the road.
A disheveled aging man approached us in a rural-Louisiana convenience store, asked about our trip and urged us to be careful. As we were walking out, we looked back to see him with head bowed, hand raised in a blessing and softly asking Jesus to protect us.
The little store was no sort of destination, but it has stayed with us.
Back to Algeria
When Covid receded, we chose a return trip to Algeria as our next trip abroad. We were first lured
to Algeria in 2019 by traveler chatter online suggesting it offered the charms of Tunisia with even fewer tourists. Promisingly, the newest major Algeria guidebooks we could find in English were the 2008 Bradt guide (the publisher says another edition is in the works) and the 2007 Lonely Planet.
We reveled in all that Africa’s largest country offers: the green coast and golden Sahara; Roman ruins, labyrinthine old city centers and Parisian avenues; Arab, Berber and French cultures and their food; low prices and good public transportation; few foreign tourists and perhaps the most hospitable people anywhere.
This year Algiers felt comfortingly familiar. We landed as the sun set and checked in for the night at our colonial-era hotel. It was down a darkened alley on the edge of the Casbah, the maze of narrow roads and walkways that climb the hill from the blocks of French colonial facades that stretch along the Mediterranean waterfront.
We woke to the cacophony of the market in the alley outside our hotel, and then later walked to Port Said square for espresso and pastries in a sidewalk cafe looking out over the plaza and the sea beyond.
We left Algiers four days later on the early-morning train east to the city of Béjaïa and then took the bus along the Mediterranean coast to the port city of Annaba, where our room looked out over the tree-lined boulevard. In historic Constantine, we crossed the suspension footbridge over the gorge that splits the city and took a day trip to the ancient Roman city of Timgad.
We then flew south about 850 miles to the Djanet oasis for a weeklong camping safari deep in the Sahara. Our Tuareg guide Habib became our guru, teaching us that we still had more to learn about travel. “Slowly, slowly,” he would intone as we explored Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, climbing over rocks to see ancient pictographs, stepping over an oasis stream or hiking into a canyon.
We set up camp each night among dunes or next to cliff walls. After dinner, Habib stoked a fire with a few sticks to heat tea, pouring it between two pots—one held high—until it foamed. “Slowly, slowly,” he would say as we waited.
It became our mantra the rest of the trip and beyond. Slowly, slowly. Get used to waiting. Don’t rush to the next destination. Have another cup of tea.
‘City of 1,000 domes’
Our last stop in Algeria, El Oued, promised to be a special endnote. Our Bradt guidebook lauded the market as the untouristy highlight of “the city of 1,000 domes.” That appeared to be still true 15 years later, when we arrived after our sleepertrain ride from Algiers. Late in the afternoon, when shopkeepers had closed to prepare to break their Ramadan fast, we walked until we found a mosque with open doors. Karen donned her headscarf, we took off our sandals, and we stepped into the quiet coolness of the main hall, our eyes drawn up into the domed ceiling with its turquoise, brown and white detailing.
Smiling faces gathered around us. “Welcome,” said a young bearded man in a blue robe. He was an imam at the mosque and in careful English asked about us, talked of the importance of the Ramadan month and then suddenly insisted: “You must eat with me tonight.”
And so, as the dozens of minarets around El Oued sang out their calls to signal sundown, we found ourselves across a low table from a smiling young imam preparing to break fast with us over tea and dates and then to dine on soup and chicken his mother had prepared.
“This is it,” Steve whispered to Karen, our code phrase for the transcending moments that happen on almost every trip.
As the evening progressed, the imam led Steve out to another mosque to observe the hourlong evening prayers, and then to another to sit in a circle with a half-dozen congregants and imams who wanted to discuss the meaning of Islam. The imam’s mother shepherded Karen off to gatherings with tea, sweets and couscous served with the extended family’s women and children.
It was near midnight when we got back to our hotel, feeling blessed beyond measure. We looked at each other and laughed. We’d just lived an adventure we hadn’t remotely anticipated—precisely the kind we hope for.
As author Rolf Potts writes in “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel,” his 2002 classic on independent travel: “The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.”
Our last evening in El Oued, as we restuffed our backpacks to head toward Tunisia, our young imam—he had begun calling us “Aunt Karen” and “Uncle Steve”—came to see us off, bearing gifts and dinner his mother had made for us. “Don’t forget me,” he said.
The Yoders write the monthly Retirement Rookies column for the Journal. They live in San Francisco and can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
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