My worst travel experience
Jan Morris
I AM a sanguine and innocent traveller. I expect nothing very terrible to happen to me, and so far nothing has — even in my foreign correspondent days, to my chagrin I was never once arrested like everyone else. Searching my memory for unhappy moments of travel (which it tends, I admit, to expunge) I have come up with only five disagreeable situations possibly worth re- cording: 1. Clinging in the middle of the night to the outside of the old Orient Express, unable to open the door, fast approaching a tunnel, while inside my two small sleep- ing children are whisked all unattended towards the east.
2. Venturing, for reasons purely banal and connected with faulty door locks, stark naked down a hotel corridor in Fiji praying that the jolly party of celebrants in front of me will not look round before I reach the sanctuary of my room. 3. Feeling, in the hot eerie twilight of Calcutta, as I ride in a rickshaw high above the tumultuous crowds of the Howrah Bridge, a ghostly step on the back of the vehicle, hearing a spectral kind of hiss and discovering nobody there, only a scalpel-slit in the bottom of my bag, where the money was. 4. Finding myself all alone in the bunker of the security chief of Panama, who has invited me there but sinisterly fails to arrive himself — surrounded by closed- circuit television sets and macho images, lapped in chrome and white leather, bug- ged without question, sealed in by succes- sive rings of steel doors, shuttered gates and barbed wire, alarmed rather than soothed as the hours pass by the music of an evangelical radio programme called Bright Sounds of Inspiration.
5. Slithering, as dusk falls, so uncontroll- ably down a snowy slope of Mount Everest that with miles still to go to Base Camp I break my big toe-nail agonisingly on an ice-block (to this day I lose the nail once every five years, an inconvenient memento of travel I share, like my birthday, with the Archbishop of Canterbury).
They don't sound much, I know, but remembered all together, and sup- plemented by 40 years' accumulation of lost luggage, stolen documents, cancelled flights, misdirected typescripts and miscel- laneous bureaucratic snarl-ups, perhaps even by the standards of wilder wanderers they might amount to a Bad Experience.
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