REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : From Icy Fiords to African Towns, Life Is an Open Road for the Pope

If there was any lingering doubt, it was plain to all Wednesday as Pope John Paul II traipsed through provincial towns in southern Chad that he likes being on the road.

Rich nations and poor, north and south, city or town--the most-traveled pontiff in history apparently wants to see them all.

He has few rivals for the title of most-traveled world leader of the century, according to Vatican officials who keep track of his travels with the painstaking precision of medieval manuscript illuminators.

The places the Pope visits are as different as Arctic fiords and the back-country villages where he found himself Wednesday, but by now the logistics of papal travel are as constant and as familiar as his calls for peace and justice.

Extensive preparation is as much a preoccupation for the people who received the Pope in Cape Verde and Chad as it was a couple of years ago for people in California.

Even though many of the countries John Paul visits are poor and remote, his travels are usually smooth, if exhausting. Still, despite all the planning, there are inevitably surprises--for the Pope and for those who travel with him.

In one of the West African lands on the current visit, a rookie U.S. ambassador searched the embassy library for the correct way to address a Pope. Not Your Excellency, not Your Eminence, not even Your Holiness, the book said, but Holy Father.

Thus prepared, the ambassador took his place in the receiving line, silently rehearsing, “Welcome, Holy Father.” When the Pope grasped his hand and looked him straight in the eye, the ambassador recounted later, he lost his cool.

“United States!” he blurted.

John Paul, who makes his own protocol, smiled and responded: “Ah, how wonderful.”

It is customary for John Paul to kiss the ground when he first sets foot in a country, and he doesn’t do so on subsequent visits. In 1980, he visited Upper Volta, and in keeping with custom he kissed the ground. Since then, a new government has changed the country’s name to Burkina Faso. The other day, as the Pope descended from his plane in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital, he looked quizzically at an aide, who looked quizzically back.

With what seemed a mental shrug, the Pope knelt and kissed the ground. Later, a papal spokesman assured reporters that there had been a missed signal: Countries that change name between visits cannot in future expect a second kiss.

Sometimes, countries that expect a future papal visit send observers to learn what to expect. In 1988, for example, Scandinavian diplomats shadowed the papal party in France, advancing John Paul’s visit to Scandinavia last spring.

In Africa, Vatican watchers were intrigued to note that for the first time a Soviet reporter traveled with the papal press corps. John Paul and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev are both promoting a papal visit to the Soviet Union.

Whatever report the reporter sends back to Moscow, his trip to Africa will be remembered for his ringing defense of the Pope in dinner table debate with American correspondents, who argued that the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on artificial birth control is an impediment to development.

As John Paul flies home today, the papal trackers can add four new countries, another eight days, and 8,600 miles to his remarkable travel log. Completing his 45th foreign trip, the 54th abroad by a modern Pope, John Paul has now visited 91 of the world’s 172 countries, delivering 1,559 speeches along the way. Since his election in 1978, he has been abroad for 319 days, about 8% of his time as Pope, on journeys that covered enough miles to circle the Earth 17 times, or almost to the moon and back.

And there is more to come: Czechoslovakia in April, Mexico in early May, Malta in late May, East Africa in the fall.

In the Sahel of Africa, where misery is a way of life for most people, amenities are few. Faced with a papal visit, most people did their best. A hotel in Guinea-Bissau, aghast at the discovery that the city was not pumping water at dawn as the papal party prepared to leave, sent a messenger to ask for help. It came, alas. Within half an hour, water gushing from taps left open by disgruntled reporters was trickling through hotel ceilings.

Some people along the African way never heard the Pope’s appeals for charity and brotherhood. A hotel in Mali charged journalists traveling with the Pope up to $20 a minute for international phone calls.

On the other hand, it was in Mali where a heart-of-darkness dirt track winds its way finally to a splendid restaurant where you can eat the lettuce. It is a Vietnamese restaurant.

Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, a former French colony, also had its surprises. Somehow, from somewhere in the dusty streets there, comes some of the finest French bread south of Paris.

Ouagadougou also has a railroad, another colonial legacy, which carries exports of cotton--and workers--to the Atlantic coast.

As the Pope prayed for peace and plenty in a part of the world that has never known much of either, it was somehow nice to realize that when Burkina Faso’s expatriates return from abroad, it is the Ouagadougou Choo-Choo that carries them home.