TRAVEL TALES (2)
Iwas returning to Manila from my California graduate school and was about to get married. Unsure if I’d ever be able to afford to travel again, I decided to go home the long way—New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Versailles, Madrid plus El Escoriál, Rome and Florence, Cairo, Athens, Jerusalem,
New Delhi plus Agra, Calcutta, Bangkok, Singapore, and finally Manila—all in six weeks. I was 27 then and it was no sweat, but just thinking about it now makes me want to lie down.
I went around clutching See Europe on $35 a Day (room and meals included). It was okay and included tips such as how to see the “Son et Lumière” at the Roman Forum for free. I followed the directions and ended up backstage, as it were, with a crowd of other $35 travelers. We had the floodlights in our eyes and couldn’t hear a thing—no son and too much lumière.
YMCAs were my early lodgings of choice—$10/ night in New York’s. San Francisco’s was by the Embarcadero Freeway and my 5th floor room twenty feet from vehicles zooming on its upper level. Later views were better—Paris’ Eiffel Tower, Bangkok’s Wat Arun, and in magical Venice, an infinity of red tile roofs, San Marco’s domes, the Grand Canal, accompanied by a chorus of church bells.
Yosemite and the Grand Canyon are sui generis as are Beijing’s Forbidden City and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat. I had read and re-read a Versailles guidebook and when I finally got there, it was as if I’d been there before.
Government service has travel perks. I was part of an ASEAN delegation received by Japan’s Emperor
We were all in formal dress, lined up in a row and bowed before the Emperor one by one.
Hirohito.
I was also along when
called on Pope at the Vatican. His Holiness blessed the group in a reception room and then took Imelda Marcos in to his office. The rest of us waited, looking out the Palace window to the crowds below at Piazza di San Pietro.
The situation is surely different now, but one mid-morning while walking on Paris’ Rue de Rivoli by the Jardin des Tuileries, half a dozen teenagers crowded me, obviously interested in my wallet. I elbowed them off, grateful had that happened in another time and another place (like Manila), someone else would probably be writing this article.
I was in St. Petersburg
Romualdez-Marcos John Paul II Imelda
(still Leningrad then) in an ice-cold November 35 years ago. The Hotel de l’Europe’s bathroom was so high and the shower head way, way up. The hot water practically froze on the way down and felt like hailstones hitting my bare butt. It was a very brief and dry shower.
And that long-ago evening in Port Moresby. Floating in the night’s blackness were objects that turned out to be the eyes and teeth of the security guard—a small dark man in g-string bearing a bow-and-arrow taller than he.
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