The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting

IN THE LOBBY OF THE SPEKE HOTEL IN KAMPALA, Uganda, in 1967, I saw a bushy-haired man holding a stenographic notebook and smiling wolfishly at a diplomat, demanding to know why he was killing people in Biafra. That was my first encounter with the foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum. We were both covering the Nigeria-Biafra peace talks. I was a teacher at Makerere University but also moonlighting as the Time-Life stringer in Uganda. Mort was then the Associated Press bureau chief in Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), Congo. We have remained close friends ever since. I have marveled at his life as a traveler, writing home from the field.

A self-described "old guy from the road," he has had the longest, hardest, most successful career as a foreign correspondent of any I know. Fluent in Spanish, he was head of the AP bureau in Buenos Aires during a turbulent time there. He covered the Bangladesh war, and Southeast Asia, while he was based in Singapore. He was for a time editor in chief of the International Herald Tribune, and for many years was a special correspondent based in Paris. On his first day in Paris he interviewed President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, speaking in fluent French. He has been to virtually every country I can name, and many I have only trailed my fingers upon in atlases.

In addition, Mort has done what many journalists promise they will do but seldom succeed at — write books. His Olives: History of a Noble Fruit won the James Beard Award, and his Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light was a bestseller. He has also written books on journalism, ecology, and Africa, as well as (when he was living on a houseboat in Paris) a travel book, The Secret Life of the Seine. I asked him to provide me with some rules of the road that have served him well in over forty years of writing in distant places.

Always arrive at roadblocks before noon, because in the afternoon the soldiers manning them are invariably drunk and abusive.

Learn French and Spanish, and then some other foreign languages. And learn to say, "Don't shoot, I'm a reporter," in at least a dozen. This might help but is no guarantee of your safety.

Take lots of notes and reread them as soon as possible, before they're lost beyond any deciphering. Or maybe that's just me. Recorders are tiny and reliable now; carry one, and you'll be amazed at what you thought you didn't miss.

If you are left-handed, learn to eat with your right in Islamic and Hindu countries, especially when gathered around a common platter. The left hand is for postprandial hygiene, and you may lose it if you thrust it into someone's lunch.

Carry lots of cash, dollars and euros, but keep it somewhere sneak thieves, bandits, and customs officials are not likely to look. They know about socks and money belts. Get a tailor to sew secret pockets in pant legs or jackets.

It is often insulting to refuse someone's food or water. It can also be seriously painful to accept. If the proffered comestible is merely disgusting, suck it up; if not, find some tactful excuse not to partake. Do not make a face or say, "Eeeyeuw."

Despite certain novelists' do-it-the-hard-way approach, try to get a visa and cross at border posts. If you are a reporter or a spy or have overriding reasons to skip formalities, use your judgment. Just remember that some countries hang people.

Put together a medical kit, including a range of antibiotics, field dressings, and antiseptics. Take lots of Lomotil or Imodium; few miseries compete with a long plane or bus ride, rebellious bowels, and no WC.

Think carefully about your kit. Binoculars can be handy, but they suggest to authorities that you might be up to no good. Don't wear military khaki, designer camo, or anything bright that prevents your blending in. And forget weapons. You are unlikely to shoot your way out of trouble, especially the trouble you face when armed dudes find you are packing.

On arriving in any distant place, the first thing you should do is learn the quickest way out — times and frequency of buses, trains, or planes. You have to know in advance how to leave.

Travel of Wisdom claude LÉVI-STRAUSS

Lévi-Strauss memorably opened his travel book, Tristes Tropiques, with the line "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions." (An early translation of the book, with a variation of this opening, is A World on the Wane.) He was trained as a philosopher but was one of the great theorists of anthropology and linguistics, an explainer of mythologies, and a describer of structuralism. He began his travels in Brazil, made journeys in India and Pakistan, and taught in the United States. He was a member of the Académie Française and lived to over a hundred (he died in 2009). The following are excerpts from Tristes Tropiques.

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Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is in itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.

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There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit.

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Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.