Travel for me has always been a part of my life – with parents from different countries (England and Austria) and growing up in a third (first New York, then California) frequent visits to relatives in Europe and trips around the American West are strong childhood memories.
The problem was, I never wanted to go home. Wherever we went, whether it was London or Montana or Big Sur, I always wanted to know what was around the next corner and down the road – and it was torture when we reached the farthest part of each journey, and began heading home.
It wasn’t until I was 19 that I set out on my own – a three-month trip to Asia that was meant to be an exploration of a new continent, a way to see what was really down the road.
It did not go as planned.
Starting off with a strip search at Japanese customs, and continuing with one disaster after another that included cultural blunders and expired travel documents, it ended with an attempted religious conversion during turbulence at 30,000 feet. When I told friends about my misadventures, everyone said I must be glad to be home, and urged me to never set out on another journey like it again.
But I was hooked.
Next up was Southeast Asia. In the early 1990’s, Vietnam was just opening itself up to travelers and Cambodia was emerging from years of isolation after the Pol Pot regime. If I thought the disasters that plagued me on my first trip were ancient history, I was wrong. I had a machete thrown at me in Saigon by an angry sandwich vendor, a wheel snapped off a speeding taxi in Hue, and I ended up being felled by a nasty virus in Hanoi for four days.
The stories I brought back caused friends to swear off their own travels, but more than one or two asked when my book was coming out. I never dreamed of being a published author, but it wasn’t until 2004 when I was caught up in the Indian Ocean tsunami that the critical mass of stories forced me to pick up a pen and write them down.
The result was Sandwiches Should NEVER Taste Like Cow Crap, published by Manta Press in 2008, a collection adventures told to a best friend in the form of letters and emails. Travel has always been my passion, and no matter what happened to me, I kept on going. That is the premise of the book – accidental adventures that taught me volumes about life and my limits and much, much more than any classroom could have taught me.
I’m grateful to travel for these lessons, many of them hard earned, but all of them delivered via a cast of characters I could have only run into on the road.
In my next installment: Why one should never lie to a travel agent – because you may end up running into them in the middle of nowhere….in my case, it was Africa’s Masai Mara.
Dave Lowe’s website is www.theloweroad.com. His book, Sandwiches Should NEVER Taste Like Cow Crap is available at www.amazon.com.
PART 2
Africa had always loomed large in my travel dreams, and in early 2002, I set out on a seven country trip to the Middle East and Africa – including the United Arab Emirates (Dubai), Oman, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania. My budget was tight, and I cut out a lot of creature comforts in order to afford what I had wanted to do ever since, as a child, I saw my first Mutual of Omaha documentary: go on a safari.
Near the end of my trip I booked one to the Masai Mara for a week in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, leaving the next day in a van that was packed with ten people from eight different countries.
Bumping along the rutted roads that crisscrossed the wide Rift Valley, I watched blood red dust devils come down from the sky that looked otherworldly. I had roamed far from home before, but this landscape made me feel farther from home than ever.
Then I heard a piercing voice from the front seat. My ears pricked up: where had I heard that voice before? I wondered. For almost an hour it rang in my ears, as it carried on a conversation with a woman sitting next to her.
And then I heard my name. Not my first name, but my full name.
“Dave Lowe was the reason I came to Africa,’ said the other woman.
‘He was too expensive,’ whined the annoyingly familiar voice.
And then it hit me. It was Melanie. The client from hell. The client who had driven me up the wall for months demanding I give her the lowest price because she was a student and her husband was unemployed. The client that had hung on the phone while other clients needs were more pressing, clients who were buying, not complaining. Eventually I told her to call an agency in Canada, the exchange rate between the US and Canada at the time was 2:1, and no ticket purchased in the US was going to be cheaper than in Edmonton, where she lived. Finally, I had gotten rid of her.
As the van bumped along, I smirked, half out of humor, half out of rage. How many opportunities do we get to come face to face with a client we hated and let them have it?
I didn’t need to wait long. The van pulled over and we took a lunch break, standing in a circle as we introduced ourselves. I deliberately went last, and when I announced my name, and the company I worked for, Melanie’s face went absolutely pale. Having just told the group that she was a specialized nurse, and that her husband was a pilot for Air Canada, she bragged how they lived on one salary and managed to sock away the other for travel.
But out there, in the middle of the hot, dusty, middle of nowhere place we had stopped, her lies came crashing down on her head. When we piled into the cab to keep on moving to reach the camp before darkness, I tapped Melanie on her shoulder and with a calm, open expression on my face, asked her: ‘Where did you buy your tickets in the end? I’m surprised to see you here, I remember you saying you were a student and your husband had no job.’
Melanie’s face stiffened. Clearly she didn’t want her new travel mates to hear how she had lied half a world away, especially after she had explained how the police in Canada weren’t corrupt, even showing them a Maple Leaf pendant she wore around her neck to show her fervent devotion to all things Canadian. (She also had the flag stitched onto her bags.)
Through the rest of the safari, Melanie and her husband avoided all contact, speaking in low voices and retiring early after dinner. No one could understand it until I explained what had happened around the campfire one night. Everyone roared with laughter.
On the final morning of their safari, I heard footsteps approaching my tent. Throughout the night I had heard lions roaring in the distance. But lions don’t call out your name in the early morning chill, as Melanie did. I unzipped my tent and found the couple crouched down in the damp grass, where they dumped a hurried bunch of ‘I’m sorry’s’ before slinking off like jackals to their waiting bus.
The incident is detailed in more depth in my book, Sandwiches Should NEVER Taste Like Cow Crap. After each episode in the book, there is a lesson. The incident with Melanie was no exception:
If you lie to someone in the travel industry, be prepared to run into them in the middle of nowhere.
So if you have a problem client, remind them that one day you might run into them in the middle of nowhere!
Dave Lowe’s website is www.theloweroad.com. His book, Sandwiches Should NEVER Taste Like Cow Crap is available at www.amazon.com.