Guidebooks Miss Color

No doubt the Taj Mahal in moonlight looks like a picture out of a fairy tale and the view across the roofs of Paris from the top of the Eiffel tower takes your breath away. No doubt, either, that the wines of the Rhineland are gentle but treacherous. It’s all in your guidebook and probably the reason why you bought your airline ticket.

But the book usually doesn’t warn you to be prepared for the unexpected, particularly in the unpredictable manifestations of human nature. Yet the experienced traveler will tell you that it is exactly the unpredictable that gives spice to travel. Without it even the best-planned itinerary can fall flat on its face.

Taxi Conspiracy

A good guideebook will tell you how to get from the airport to the city and how much to pay for the taxi. But the book fails to mention that there is such a thing as a worldwide conspiracy of taxi drivers. Cabbies everywhere--Paris, Bangkok, Vienna, Hong Kong or Madrid--suffer from a chronic shortage of change. You, just arrived and not yet familiar with the coins and small bank notes of the land, and probably also unfamiliar with his lingo, will give him a bill bigger than the amount of the fare to be on the safe side.

You expect change, but he invariably indicates that he hasn’t any. Not wanting to look like a cheapskate in a foreign country, you tell him to keep the difference, although it’s a good guess that his pockets are bulging with coins. As a stranger you are lucky anyway if he takes you straight from point A to point B.

On my first train trip to Barcelona it took the cabbie more than half an hour to find my hotel and he charged me accordingly. When, after checking in, I looked down from my window, I saw the railway station below me just across the street, hardly 500 feet away.

Avoid Hassles

You can avoid such hassles by having a few one-dollar bills in your pocket. Every cab driver anywhere in the world knows how much the U.S. dollar is worth in his currency, and because he assumes that you know too, he’ll think twice before trying to cheat you. A few dollar bills not only save arguments but may come in handy at other times, too. You can’t rent a camel in the desert with your American Express Card, for example.

On my roster of unpredictable encounters, the case of the topless mailman definitely ranks high. The setting was the beach of a Club Med village on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, 2,000 miles from my hometown.

As I was going in for a swim, a pretty, blonde woman, topless, of course, came out of the water and stopped cold in front of me.

“Hello,” she said, and I, although slightly surprised, said “hello” too with remarkable presence of mind.

She continued. “Don’t you recognize me?”

I said something about the face being familiar.

“I am your mailman,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”

Then I did remember. During the previous winter our regular mailman had to go to the hospital for surgery and she had taken over for him. I didn’t recognize her without her uniform.

Foreign exchange transactions could also be tricky at times. My plane to Leningrad was delayed and when I arrived at my hotel, the Astoria, a relic from pre-revolution days, the dining room was already closed for the night, but room service was still available. The waiter delivered the food and handed me a bill for 21 rubles. As I hadn’t had time yet to get Russian money, I told him to charge it to my hotel bill, but he shook his head sadly.

“We don’t do that,” he said in passable English. “If you don’t have rubles, you can pay in dollars. You do have U.S. dollars, don’t you?” He figured out that 21 rubles would come to 33 U.S. dollars and I paid him.

It was only much later that people in the know explained to me that the waiter, on the way from my room to the cashier’s office, had replaced my U.S. dollars with 21 rubles, keeping the dollars for himself, for which he presumably got three or four times their official ruble value on the black market. I’ll bet you won’t find that in your guidebook.

Nor would you find “The Case of the Vanished Reservation.” The typical locale is the airport of a Latin American capital that shall remain unnamed. The time is usually Christmas, when millions of natives joined by millions of tourists create a seasonal pandemonium that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Airline space is at a premium but you have no reason to worry, you think, because you have a ticket and a confirmed reservation in your pocket. So you walk briskly up to the check-in counter. The clerk looks up, quickly assessing you, and then looks at his flight manifest and says: “Sorry, senor , but you have no reservation.”

Now you have two choices. You can raise Cain, which will get you nowhere, and the plane leaves without you, or you can surreptitiously slip the clerk a $20 bill--it will prompt him to scan the manifest once more and this time, miraculously, he finds your name.

“My deepest apologies, senor ,” he says with a broad smile. “I found your reservation. Your name was misspelled.” You get on the plane, but now there is somewhere a hapless traveler, also with a ticket and a confirmed reservation, who is bound to be bumped, no matter how many $20 bills he is willing to produce. The plane, in all probability, was overbooked to start with.

And then there are the tour guides, the natural extension of guidebooks. Just as with a guidebook, a tour guide can add sparkle to your trip or bore you to death.

In Israel I was blessed with a tour guide who was one of the most remarkable specimens I have ever met. A man in his 60s, he knew everything. You pushed a button and out gushed the information in beautiful, lilting prose.

Union Rivalry

He was in love with his country. You could hear it in every word and he had the knack for getting it across to his flock. In Nazareth, however, he had to stay in the background because of union rivalry, of all things. A local guide took over who said his name was Mohamed. A full-blooded Arab in flowing burnoose, with burning, deep-set eyes in a dark ascetic face, he looked as if he had just stepped from a movie. Notwithstanding his fierce looks, the man had several Oxford degrees and spoke eight languages fluently.

He took us through the crowded Church of the Annunciation, one of the holiest shrines of Israel, where, according to the New Testament, the Virgin Mary was told by the Archangel Gabriel that she was to become the mother of Jesus.

I asked Mohamed if it wasn’t incongruous for a Muslim to work for a Jewish state guiding people through a Catholic Church. “What’s so incongruous?” he asked in turn. “It’s a business. I have seven kids and another coming!”

These are the people who give zip and color to traveling. They are catalysts. Without them, everything you saw would, in time, fade into a jumble of hazy memory frames. But because of their presence on the scene and because of what they said and what they did, the recall of places and things and sounds becomes permanent. It’s worth a thousand times the baksheesh you slip into their hands at the end of the day.

In Hong Kong my official guide was a lovely, young and graceful Chinese girl, knowledgeable and intelligent and fluent in English. On the first day she confided in me that she had one great, dominant weakness--she was crazy about hamburgers. She craved them, she said, much to the chagrin of a stern, conservative and old-fashioned father who disapproved of such alien frivolities.

When she picked us up at the hotel on our last morning in Hong Kong, she looked especially radiant and animated. Her face glowed with happiness. I couldn’t help it. I had to ask the reason. She said she had had the most beautiful night ever. Her boyfriend had taken her to the local McDonald’s and treated her to a dinner of Big Macs.

It was pure ecstasy, she said. Mind you, that happened in the same Hong Kong that considers itself the undisputed world center of Chinese culinary art and tradition. You won’t find that in your guidebook, either.

All the world’s sights are beautiful in their own right. The guidebook tells you what you ought to know and that’s how it should be. But it doesn’t say anything about the human element that supplies the tang and the color that makes your journey worthwhile.