Footloose Scot Page 2
After a long wait on a road with little traffic, a van pulling a trailer on which a motor bike was tied down stopped. The van was old with rusty body work, but the motor bike looked efficient. An older man was driving, and a teenager sat next to him. They were going to a motor bike race in the mountains at the border, and I was required as ballast to help the van gain traction. This was fine with me; anything was fine if it helped me to get into Yugoslavia. I sat on the floor in the back of the van, which proceeded up the steep and windy road. I recall to this day the youngster shouting "Hupen, Herr Rauer!" ("Blow the horn, Mr. Rauer!") over the noise of the screaming engine as we roared around tight corners, and finally made it to the summit at 4,485 feet.
This sort of travel was more vagabonding than tourism. Keeping to the budget was vital because it meant more days on the road. I didn't pause much, unless the weather was good or the town large enough. Large cities kept me for two or three days, visiting museums and people watching. What really drove me was the desire to cover the miles, to be on the move. I was restless to get as far south as possible, to warm weather. Getting a good long ride lifted the spirits. When there was no youth hostel, I slept rough, often climbing over a railing after dark into a public park and unrolling my sleeping bag under a tree, first having checked that there were no police or barking dogs around. If it was wet, I looked for a station waiting room.
Even fifty years later, certain memories come back. In Yugoslavia a car dropped me off in Ljubljana, a town with no hostel. I walked into the countryside, and asked a farmer by miming if I could sleep in his barn. His farm looked run down, and the local economy depressed. But, as often was to happen, the least likely chance turned good. He nodded, took me to the barn and showed me a pile of loose hay I could sleep under. The next morning he showed up with some coarse bread which served as breakfast.
Getting on the road again and heading towards the Adriatic Coast I saw a VW with German plates approaching, so I waved extra energetically. The car, driven by a single man, passed me then stopped. This should be a good one, I thought, probably a salesman heading down the coast. I opened the passenger door and asked "Rijeka?' the next town. He didn't reply, but said "English?" I nodded enthusiastically and prepared to climb in. Instead, he leaned across, slammed the door shut and roared off.
Surprisingly, a car with Austrian plates driven by a man with his wife stopped not long after. I say surprisingly since tourist couples seldom pick up hikers, and who can blame them. You never know who is getting in, and sitting behind you. But this couple was as charming as the German was abrupt. They apologized, saying they were only going as far as Rijeka, and complimented me on my German. Then, even though it was nowhere near lunch time, they opened up a picnic basket and offered me a ham-filled roll: "Mehr fleisch als semmel," he commented jovially ("More meat than roll" -a phrase I still remember).
In Italy, the difficulty of getting rides was more than compensated for by the variety of the everyday life: the colors, sounds and smells. The economy was in bad shape and the people were poor, but there was more life in the city streets than in Germany, for example. More of my time was spent people watching than in going to museums or art galleries, unless they were free. As I went further south the weather got steadily warmer, and the variety and beauty of the old buildings took me by surprise. It was easy to hang out for two or three days in a small town, amble around and watch street life. At night I would ask other hostellers about cheap local restaurants, or we would discuss where we had been.
Italy seemed to recover more slowly than Germany after the war. To a naïve newcomer there was even beauty in the poverty. The warmth of the colors in the buildings and the noise and gesticulations of the people, often poorly dressed, remain as memories more than any painting or sculpture. Memorable moments were not in a museum but watching street theater: an argument between a shopkeeper and a customer, the police intervening.
There were few tourists around, and seldom a line to enter a museum or gallery. Arthur Frommer's ground-breaking Europe on $5-a-Day, which would encourage generations of American tourists to travel cheap and be smart, would not come out until the following year. The millions of tourists from northern Europe buying package tour holidays to the Mediterranean countries were still to come. It was also out of season.
En route to Naples, a large black limousine with a British flag on the front stopped as I flapped my hand. It contained an official from the British Embassy in Rome and his wife, who were taking diplomatic papers to the consulate in Naples. They questioned me with interest about my itinerary and bought me lunch at a small seaside restaurant. I said that I was travelling as far and as cheaply as I could, and described it as an adventure before going to Oxford. Too polite to ask, they must have wondered how this travel-worn hitchhiker had gained entrance to Oxford. I had spent the previous night sleeping in a vineyard after drinking half a liter of red wine, and had had little opportunity to clean up.
In the Naples youth hostel a German girl gave me a rail ticket to Palermo in Sicily. She had to go home suddenly due to family illness. So, after one long train ride, I found myself at my ideal destination: a small hostel near the small resort town of Taormina fronting onto the Mediterranean. I stayed for 8 days, basking in the warm sun and doing very little. I washed my clothes with the village women at the public washing place. I swam sometimes and most evenings cooked pasta in the hostel kitchen. I took trips on local buses just to see how far they would go. Each day there would be a new intake of hostellers with whom to exchange information, spend time on the beach or share cooking. This was the lifestyle which I had come for.
I found out that I could get back to Naples by a regular ferry service which left Palermo and stopped at the Aeolian Islands before making a straight run to Naples. I booked deck passage, and went on board. The boat, which had cabins and a bar and restaurant, was almost empty. A young Italian fellow got into conversation with me in the bar and sometime later, seeing I was about to stretch out on one of the seats, suggested I take one of the empty bunks in his cabin, where there was only one other occupant.
I took him up on his suggestion, relishing a comfortable berth. The trouble was that I woke up to find the cabin steward staring at me from the door. From his gestures and speech, he seemed to be asking for my ticket or some money. I got up quickly, brushed past him and through the door, and went up on deck. We were right in Naples harbor and about to dock. I ducked behind a lifeboat, then nipped down a stairway as I heard his voice shouting at me. Coming up at another part of the ship, I found the gangway right in front of me, just on the point of being secured, so I jumped onto it and was first off the ship.
I was soon absorbed into the dockside crowds and felt free from pursuit. Looking for a place to eat, I saw a tiny hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, an eating place for the locals I assumed. Inside, the aroma of the cooking cheese and the warmth from a wood-fired oven filled the small space. I ordered the smallest pizza on the menu and soon had a crisp pie crust with sizzling tomato sauce and some sardines on top in front of me. Straight from the oven, rich, tasty and simple, I ate it, my first ever pizza. Then I ordered another. Thirty years later, mindful of my experience in Naples, I opened a pizza restaurant in Oxford which turned out to be very popular.Thirty years later, mindful of my experience in Naples, I opened a pizza restaurant in Oxford which turned out to be very popular.
Heading north up the Mediterranean coast of Italy towards Florence I stopped in Piombino and took a short ferry ride to Elba, where Napoleon was exiled in 1814. I like small islands; they give a nice feeling of separateness. On Elba I planned to visit the villa, now a museum, where Napoleon spent 300 days. I had a fanciful plan to remain in the museum after closing and sleep in his bed. But it was out of season and I was all too visible among a handful of visitors. The guardian ushered us all out at closing time. I wandered on and found a cafe in a seafront village, and ate a bowl of pasta. The question now was: where to sleep?
Leaving the village I notic
ed a dirt road leading to a farmhouse, now showing lights as it grew dark. More promisingly, on one side of this track was a pile of loose hay, thrown down from a haystack adjacent and meant for the next day's meal for the farmer's cow. Delighted, I burrowed under the hay so I was completely covered, except for an air passage. I prepared for a sound and safe sleep.
I had hardly nodded off when I heard voice approaching, a man and a woman. Then they stopped, right next to the pile of hay. Next, a large weight landed on top of me, waking me from my half sleep. I pushed upwards against some smooth material covering a flabby mass. From above I heard a shriek, and saw the terrified face of a woman and realized I had grabbed a buttock. She scrambled off the hay pile, and I stood up. Two shocked faces, a young man standing behind the now upright woman, told me I had interrupted something private and spoiled their tryst. They didn't say anything, I didn't say anything. They moved off down the lane. I settled back into the hay but it was a long time until I fell asleep.
After five months of travel around nine countries, I'd had enough. The novelty had worn off, and each day no longer seemed special. I'd enjoyed the sights and sounds, the art treasures, the different foods and the changing countryside. Getting a ride seemed to take longer now. Previously I had loved the carefree, vagabond type of travel. Now my funds were depleted, and I was getting tired of the constant economy. I was likewise getting bored of hostellers boasting how little they had spent, and how far they could travel without regard to sights unseen and meals uneaten.
I turned tracks towards England, and enjoyed the novelty of spending a night in a French country jail—at my own request. It was getting dark and the weather was cold and wet. I was in a small town near Amiens in northern France which had no hostel. I thought to ask the local gendarmerie if I could spend the night in an empty cell. The elderly gendarme on duty though nothing of it, and tossed an extra blanket onto the bunk. "Mais pas de petit dejeuner," ("No breakfast here,") he warned me with a wink.I was mightily pleased as well as grateful, and somewhat surprised. And I had saved an overnight hostel fee. This was an unexpected gesture in an unlikely place and a good note on which to end my first foreign travel adventure.
Little did I know as I hitch-hiked and youth hostelled around Europe that international tourism was about to explode. Pre World War II, Americans going to Europe or Brits visiting Africa tended to be well-heeled travelers, some scholarly and literary, others simply adventurous. The explorer Wilfrid Thesiger (Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter 1933), writer Freya Stark (Baghdad Sketches 1930) and adventurer Peter Fleming (China1937) are examples. Many of them took notes and left a record. Paul Fussell's British Travel Writers between the Wars details some of the British travel writers.
Once Europe had rebuilt, and increased wages allowed for foreign travel, it was simply a matter of waiting for the tourism and transportation tools to arrive for visitor numbers to increase dramatically. The catalyst might be a guidebook like Arthur Frommer's Europe on $5 a Day, a super cheap inclusive tour package providing air fare and hotel, or an 853-seat jumbo jet—or more recently, a 6,000-passenger cruise ship. The age of mass tourism was about to arrive.
In 2010 I sat in a floating restaurant at the entrance to a national park in Malaysia. Sharing the table and the little information which his limited English permitted was a Chinese man in his late twenties. Soon more of his compatriots, now earning enough wages to permit foreign travel, are going to start travelling abroad in serious numbers. International tourist arrivals are due to reach 1 billion in 2012, a 15-fold increase since 1960. What will happen when 1.3 billion Chinese start to take vacations abroad?
There are travelers and there are tourists. For the travelers among us, these figures are not so alarming. Consider that most of the current and future overseas visitors will be tourists and not travelers. These are the inclusive tour participants, the cruise passengers, and those who insist on taxis and staying only at Hilton Hotels, who want pampered, planned trips with no adventure and little cultural experience when travelling abroad. For the traveler there will still be remote rivers to run, mountains to climb and trails to hike; he will just have to go further or off-season to enjoy them. Freya Stark commented: "One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own, and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism."
PART I, CHAPTER 2
SOLO TRAVELER
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1986
HIKE THROUGH OREGON
In 1981 I opened an import shop and tea room in Houston, Texas called Glendinning's of Scotland. I couldn't have chosen a worse time. The concept was fine, the location, staffing and stock were all good, but the timing was terrible. Oil prices had plummeted and the local economy was in a nose dive.
I kept the shop going for 5 years, even moving to the prestigious River Oaks Shopping Center as space became available. This did not help much and I was running out of money. I had a closing down sale in 1986 and looked for something new.
I felt like taking a break before looking for a job or trying out another business venture, and fortunately I still had some money left over from the shop experience. I decided a summer hike on a long distance trail would clear my mind and test my health.
There are three long distance trails in the United States. The best known and most written about is the Appalachian Trail, which stretches 2,18l miles from Maine south west to Georgia. The least traveled and longest (3,100 miles) is the Continental Divide Trail, which is largely at high elevation and follows the line of the Rockies from the Mexican border to Canada. The third one, the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is on the West Coast, and also runs from the Mexican Border north to Canada, 2,663 miles along the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges. This was the one I chose.
I aimed to spend six weeks on the trail, and decided to start at the California/Oregon state line and head north through Oregon for six weeks or until I tired, or had an accident. Heading north seemed a good idea since the sun would be mainly behind me. First I had to buy equipment, do some reading, and plan for food supplies.
Buying equipment from one of Houston's outfitters was simple. I bought a two-man tent, sleeping bag, camping stove, boots, a guidebook and maps of the trail, and an external frame backpack. In one of the outfitters stores I heard a couple who were planning a long hike discuss in some detail with the store's sales personnel what freeze dried foods to carry, and how many calories a day would be required to fuel the body. I had no time for that, believing that a menu of tea, oatmeal, and some cookies, plus fresh vegetables and fruits purchased on the route, would be sufficient.
From my map I saw that Ashland, Oregon was the closest town to my starting point. I took a Greyhound bus from Houston, changing buses in Los Angeles, and arrived 60 hours later in the pleasant art town of Ashland, which had a youth hostel. The next morning I hitched a ride for about an hour to where the Pacific Crest Trail crossed into Oregon. The driver who picked me up told me he was heading off shortly for an adventure of his own - to the Amazon jungle.
August 2, 1986 found me (aged 49, weight 150 lbs) on the Pacific Crest Trail, carrying anywhere from 25 to 45 pounds of gear, food and water. Along the route I picked up parcels of food, which I had mailed in advance from Houston to places along the trail which I got from the guidebook. I wanted to avoid spending time having to come down off the trail, which is usually at 5,000 to 6,000 feet elevation, to visit nearby towns for provisions. When I had just picked up a food parcel, and when I stocked up on water because of a dry stretch ahead, then I would be at my maximum 45 pounds omit parentheses of weight. The guidebook gave specific details of water sources along the route.
With a spring in my step and an adventure ahead of me, I started north on a well-trod and easy to follow trail ascending gently in a comfortable temperature through a forest. After three hours I reached a ridge, came out of the forest and had my first glimpse of the route ahead: pine trees as far as
the eye could see, with some lakes in the foreground and in the far distance the vague outline of some peaks. The lakes were pretty to look at and by early evening I was ready for my first campsite. But I had reckoned without mosquitoes, which appeared to be waiting just for me. They were huge, and they were everywhere. Their attacks were so persistent that I retreated to my tent and didn't even light a fire or cook supper. I spent a frustrated night in a stifling, airless tent snacking on cold food.
By the third day I was glad to leave the mosquito zone and was untroubled by mosquitoes again. I love the outdoors; I enjoy sleeping out and cooking on open campfires. Following the trail was usually not a problem, it was wide and clear, and at any intersection there was often a sign. I could have managed without the guidebook except for its advice on water sources.
Crater Lake was the first major attraction: a caldera filled with blue, clear water surrounded by sheer cliffs. The surface area was only five by six miles, but the color and the symmetry made a pretty picture. I camped at a designated site in Crater Lake National Park.
The trees thinned out and the route headed due north, passing a string of volcanic mountains such as Mt. Thielsen (9,184 feet), Three Sisters, Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson and, just before the Columbia River, Mt. Hood, Oregon's highest peak (11,249 feet). I climbed the first peak, Mt.Thielsen, and looked north along the route I would follow. I passed by the subsequent peaks in order to get some mileage under my belt. The trail was always on public land, National Park, State Park, National Forest or Bureau of Land Management.