When the Romance of the Road Leads to Romance on the Road

Oysters, figs, asparagus, camel’s milk and blood from a bull’s testes--these are some of the aphrodisiacs described by Diane Ackerman in “A Natural History of Love” (Random House).

To this list I must add one thing: travel.

While I wouldn’t say that the possibility of meeting someone has motivated my wanderings, it’s always floated in the back of my mind, like moonlight on the Taj Mahal. And I know for a fact that it happens to some women, resulting in treasured memories, wedding bells and broken hearts. It’s thought that even the stalwart Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird, who journeyed by herself through Asia and the American West and was elected the first woman Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in 1892, had a brush with romance when she met Mountain Jim, her roughhewn but courtly guide in the Colorado Rockies.

Carol Rivendell, a psychotherapist who co-founded Wild Woman Adventures, a tour company for women based in Northern California, says that we feel braver, freer and more exuberant while traveling, which often translates into heightened sexual energy. Maybe this is why the personal ads at the back of travel newsletters such as Connecting and Travel Companions (men seeking women travel mates, women seeking men, women seeking women, etc.) seem so suggestive, why Erica Jong’s airborne sexual fantasies in “Fear of Flying” compel, and why even I sense that when I’m on the road alone men seem to find me more interesting than they ever would at home.

Rivendell believes that women are more likely to actually respond to romantic overtures when they travel in the relative safety of a group, and thus feel less guarded. In “Gutsy Women: Travel Tips and Wisdom for the Road” (Travelers’ Tales Inc., $7.95), Marybeth Bond offers practical advice about how women can spur romance: fly in first class, travel with a dog or go to Alaska (where men outnumber women by 10%).

Sharon B. Wingler, author of “Travel Alone & Love It” (Chicago Spectrum Press, $14.95) and a flight attendant with Delta for 29 years, told me she’s witnessed the in-flight budding of many relationships. And Judith Babcock Wylie, who considered about 750 essays for a collection called “Travelers’ Tales of Love and Romance” (Travelers’ Tales Inc., $17.95), says that in overwhelming numbers the male writers were most interested in finding a soul mate on the road, while the women were looking for flirtations.

All I’ve had are a couple of delicious close calls. By a campfire several years ago, at a log inn outside Fairbanks, Alaska, the ruggedly handsome owner asked if I’d move north and be his business partner, stimulating months of fantasies and a good deal of window shopping for parkas. Then last fall, while waiting for a long-delayed flight from Jaipur to New Delhi, I met a Dutch tour guide with whom I talked only briefly. But afterward the people I was with told me that even from a distance they’d seen the sparks fly.

Romances on the road can serve important purposes--for instance, helping you through a bad breakup or divorce.

They also can develop in unpredictable ways, as when a colleague of mine met an Englishman in the Yucatan. For the next three years, they took trips together often, until she realized that he was a better travel mate than lifelong companion. Another woman I know has a rule: Anything that happens in a different time zone does not have to be recorded in the history of your life. And if you’re traveling with a friend, he or she is sworn to secrecy!

Sometimes friends push you into dangerous situations, as one happily married woman I interviewed discovered on vacation with women friends in Tahiti, where she met a muscular and tattooed French Polynesian. Her buddies egged her on, but with great difficulty she resisted the temptation--a good thing, as it turned out, since she later learned (from another woman who’d fallen for him) that he had a history of alcohol abuse and violence.

Let’s face it: Travel is sexy. Which is why even women who strike off with absolutely no intention of dallying should pack--and if it comes to it, use--condoms. (Remember: Sometimes the ones you buy in foreign lands are of poor quality, and thus ineffective.) Furthermore, all of the women I talked to who made travel romances work say that you must keep your eyes wide open and approach liaisons with no expectations.

Can travel romances work in the long term? Marybeth Bond, who met her husband at the end of a trek in Nepal, would say yes. So would Rusty Brennan Dubbs, a guide for REI Adventures, who teamed up with his wife, Nancy, after leading her on a tour through the Himalayas, and Judy Wade--even though she viewed her relationship with one of the crew members on a yacht trip she took in the British Virgin Islands as a fling. But once she got home, he pursued her, eventually giving up his job to marry her. Now she says, “You’re never going to experience anything if you just stand by and watch.”

Especially striking are the stories of women who have fallen in love with their Sherpas and guides while trekking in the Himalayas. Toni Neubauer, founder of the Nevada-based tour company Myths and Mountains, calls it the Peter Pan syndrome: “Your Sherpa guide sprinkles gold dust on you and takes you to Never Never Land, leading you up trails and teaching you to fly.” If you stay on in Nepal, you find yourself isolated in a male-dominated society, with your Sherpa on the trail more often than truck drivers are on the road. If you bring your Sherpa home and marry, as Barbara Pijan Lama of Berkeley did, serious adjustment problems arise as immigrant husbands struggle to learn English and get jobs.

Barbara and her husband, Gyeljen, now have a son and are doing fine. But Kay Kirby’s love story is my favorite of all. Stricken with altitude sickness at the start of a trek in Bhutan, she was helped down the mountain by a Bhutanese guide. Romance blossomed, but she left it behind to return to her job in Washington, D.C. “I’m a very practical person,” she says. “How could I be in love with a guy I’d known for two weeks?”

Increasingly, though, she couldn’t focus on her work and did uncharacteristic things such as locking her keys in the car, until she finally decided to write to Tandin. The two spent almost a decade in a bi-continental relationship before she finally moved to Bhutan, where she works for the World Wildlife Fund. “Our success,” she says, “comes from truly caring, a willingness to compromise and a deep respect for the ways in which we’re different.”

Sounds like love to me, in any language.

Connecting, telephone/fax (604) 737-7791, is at P.O. Box 29088, 1996 W. Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 5C2, Canada. Travel Companions, tel. (516) 454-0880, is at P.O. Box 833, Amityville, NY 11701.