Page 8 October 28, 2021
Travel from front page
the Tyrrhenian Sea and forced our evacuation.
Luzern:
After a few glasses of champagne, we realized
we’d never done the adult thing at the
presumably sharp tippy-top of an alp. We set
out into the moonless night and eventually
found ourselves winding up a steep country
road. Except it was more a cow path than an
More view than you’ll ever need, above the Vierwaldstättersee in Luzern. One hundred small steps (one giant leap?) for womankind at the East Jerusalem Gate.
Autobahn, and the gentle slope to our right soon
disappeared into a precipice to nowhere. With
inches to spare, we had no choice but to keep
going. And then, by pure luck, we came to a
barn built into the cliff. After a half-hour of
turning the car and catching our breath above
the glittering lights of the valley, we crawled
back to civilization and sanity.
East Jerusalem:
Two weeks after the Second Intifada insurrection,
it didn’t help that we were evacuated
from the bus station in Eilat for a bomb scare.
But we climbed aboard the Jerusalem bus
anyway and traveled with a full complement
of heavily armed IDF troopers (younger than
our children) into the city. We wanted to walk
the Twelve Stations of the Cross, but the entire
hike lay beyond a narrow gate down a steep,
crowded, overhung, chariot-sized alley in the
Arab enclave.
We’d managed a hundred meters or so, when
a blind panic seized both of us. At least we
didn’t run, but it was definitely one of the power
walks of our lives. Back in the Jewish quarter,
we glanced at each other and realized how silly
we must have looked. So, we turned back and
spent the rest of the afternoon wandering down
through the Arab quarter and chatting with all
manner of friendly Palestinians. They might not
care for some of their neighbors, but to our
surprise, couldn’t get enough of Americans.
Istanbul:
You can’t climb up to the towering Pera
District peak from the Galata Bridge, and
the funicular closes at 10pm. So, when we
showed up after dinner at 10:16, we were
stuck. I refused to take a taxi, so we ended up
wandering for three hours around to the back
of the mountain. Centuries ago, the Ottoman
Sultans carved this area into compact commercial
communities to keep tabs on their foreign
merchants. The alleys and arcades—none of
them bothered by a street light—had changed
little when we tiptoed through in the eerie,
silent dread of that January night.
Mexico City:
We only include this one because of the
sheer volume of knowledgeable advice we’d
received from gringos who had probably never
visited the city. Never take a bus or a green
taxi and, above all, stay away from the red
lights of the Zona Rosa. As it happened, our
hotel lay on the edge of the Zona, and from the
day we arrived, we took buses and green taxis
everywhere. But the high point was a political
demonstration that erupted on la Reforma. A
local news cameraman spotted Glinda taking
photographs and started a conversation. We
peppered him with questions, until he offered
to park his wife with me, while he guided
mine into the middle of the chaos. In case you
were wondering, our Glinda is no wallflower.
The point being…
Most travel risks fall into four broad categories:
Disease, crime, anger, and your own fear.
The first two exist everywhere and can be
contained with intelligent preparation and reasonable
precautions. Long before COVID-19,
there were yellow and dengue fevers, malaria,
rabies, grisly infections, and all manner of
hypothetical medical mishaps. And yet the
world continued to turn, human beings slept,
ate, and rode trains and buses—and toured the
world. Crime will probably be with us until
we’re uniformly poor and satisfied with a drab
equality. But criminals spend more time than
you think picking their targets. Your job is to
avoid gifting them with a nice, juicy target.
Anger, on the other hand, shifts with the
winds of religion and culture and the global
competition for resources, but mostly with the
leadership cycle in a given country. Right now,
is probably not the best time for an American
to go people watching in a bar in Kinshasa
or Caracas. Probably not the best time to try
out your new bikini on the beaches outside
Riyadh or Casablanca. Beirut was a paradise
in the 1950s and a catastrophe from the 1970s
onward—but who knows what will greet you in
another few decades? Vietnam has gone from
American bugaboo to the best kept vacation
secret in Asia.
In other words … When gossip and paranoia
edge out research and common sense, when
you pull back from true experience because
of the ugly thing that almost happened to
that friend of a friend of a second cousin,
you forfeit to the biggest risk of all—doing
nothing. In future articles, we’ll get into the
weeds of specific adventures, but for now, keep
this in mind: Risk is not binary. It lies on a
fascinating continuum between minimal and
foolhardy. And you have much more control
over where you land along that line than you
might want to think.
And no, there is no sharp point awaiting
you at the tippy-top of a Swiss Alp. But keep
trying—we certainly will.
Next up: How We Re-invented the Orient
Express and Found Dracula Along the Way.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise
and experience of their many world travels.
If you have any questions or interest in a
particular subject, please email them at
web@heraldpublications.com.•
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at 310-412-4330 or housingprotection@cityofinglewood.org.
Friendly fires on la Reforma in Mexico City.
Stromboli belches, a storm approaches—time to cut and run.