Bright World Images
Travel Stories
by David Shwatal
The Doogie Times
God is my travel agent.
Travel Makes This Big World Seem Small
When I arrived in Germany in the summer of 1996 I went right to the Hauptbahnhof Hotel in the northern port town where I was staying with other company staff. We would be in the shipyard for the final prep work for Costa Cruise Line’s brand new flagship... the Mv Costa Victoria.
I went for a walk around the quaint old town section of Bremerhaven and to avoid getting myself lost on the curvy streets I noted the street name where our hotel was located. It was one of those long German names, of course, but I got the gist of it. I walked around town, enjoyed a few bakeries (two on each block it seemed), and saw whatever there might have been to see.
When it was time to head back I looked at the street name and noticed that, hey, its’ the same one our hotel is on... ‘Einbahnstrasse.’ ‘How could that be’ I thought. I sure walked a long way on many windy streets.
Using what little German I knew I thought for a moment and soon figured out that ‘Ein-Bahn-Strasse’ wasn’t the street name at all. It means ‘One-Way-Street !’
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The man with the machete standing up ahead on the path might have been guarding the hidden property of some secret cartel. After all, we had hiked up into the forest on this Caribbean island and it didn’t help that we’d heard a few frightening stories about situations like this.
Murders, we’d been warned, are unfortunately common in some areas of Jamaica. We were hot from from hiking a couple of hours in the tropical sun and we didn’t really know where we were exactly. But then this friendly farmer, as the man turned out to be, greeted us with a casual ‘hallo mon’ and a great big Caribbean smile.
We soon realized he was more concerned about tending to his goats than about anything insidious. After taking us on a detour to bring a bucket of water to the animals in his corral he guided us up to our mountain top destination... an amazing view... complete with a pool and a bar !
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A few members of the muslim community in the Buddhist country I was visiting were thrilled to have me, a westerner, visit their mosque. I won’t soon forget the smiles on their faces and how proud they were when I asked them to see the inside of their beautiful but comparatively modest house of worship. It didn’t seem to matter to them if I were white, black, Chinese, American, green, or pink or even that I was Christian. What mattered most was that I was interested in THEM. In learning about something central to their everyday existence... their faith.
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I’ve received bits of wisdom from cab drivers in Naples, gotten lost with a Russian-only speaking taxi driver in St. Petersburg, splashed around with kids on an Amazon river beach, been watched by inquisitive Balinese children while trying in vain to hook up to the internet with a laptop (this was way before WiFi). I’ve been offered mint tea 30 or so times in one day in Morocco. And shared a laugh with Egyptian souvenir hawkers.
I road in a rickshaw in Bangkok and in Saigon. Sang 1970s American pop songs with a club band in Yangon, Myanmar. Saw Venice from a gondola. Twice. Slid down through the streets in a wooden sled on the island of Madeira. Shopped for blue jeans in Turkey. Eaten wonderfully delicious and underpriced meals in the Czech Republic, Estonia, and on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. Drank cipriana in Brazil and Sangria in Barcelona.
I’ll never forget all of these things. Or the Jamaican woman named ‘Vai’ who runs a little roadside bar and fruit stand close to a bay where I’d been snorkling. She made an aloe vera concoction for my jellyfish sting. “Drink... good for the sea wasps” she said with half a laugh. “Yikes !” I thought as I gulped it with a grimace. It worked.
David
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