August 22, 2004
ABOUT a year and a half ago, my college friend Flo Pesenti and I
finished first in the CBS-TV reality show ''The Amazing Race.'' The
show follows teams of two as they race around the world for a
million-dollar prize. During the race, we traveled 41,000 miles and
visited 13 countries in 30 days.
The show appears to have tapped into a vast national sense of
wanderlust: it recently began its fifth season, with ratings among the
top 10 prime-time shows, and has already outrun its reality-genre
competitors to an Emmy award.
Any trip that compresses so many airline flights, mad-dash cab rides
and rocky train trips into so short a time would seem to be a crash
course on how to deal with the vicissitudes of modern travel. For Flo
and me, that's exactly what it turned out to be.
Flo and I had a large degree of spontaneity forced on us by the nature
of the race, but even on a well-researched trip, it doesn't hurt to
assume everything you think you know is wrong. That wasn't hard, since
we usually didn't know much about our next destination.
Besides, we couldn't possibly carry all the necessary guides, even if
we knew in advance where we were headed. Instead, we came up with a
topographical solution: When in a new city without a clue where to go,
start walking uphill. When you feel you have reached the highest point
around, usually there will be a church or mosque or some other site
with an equally impressive view of the surrounding area. From this
vantage point, you can usually plot out the rest of your day.
Staying healthy is crucial to any vacation, but with us it was
especially so. Besides the typical bottled-water precautions (I was
usually lugging a gallon of it in my backpack), we learned to let the
locals be our guide when it came to cooked food. Near the finish line,
on a train in Vietnam, a wonderful smelling cart full of chicken
skewers and noodles passed by, and the Vietnamese passengers
immediately flocked to it for a helping of one of their traditional
dishes.
While our competitors passed up such delicacies, for fear of stomach
troubles, I dug in. Luckily, there were no gastric consequences to the
delicious, cheap fare. I now make it a point to follow the local crowd
when hungry in a foreign land, on the theory that where throngs
gather, there is good, clean food.
Airports were the scenes of the most stressful moments of the race,
since we never found out what our destination was until we began each
leg of the race. On one segment, we had to jet from Casablanca to
Munich, and a few days later made the leap from Zurich to Kuala
Lumpur, and most of the time we had no idea how to map out a trip
based solely on speed. This led to the next epiphany: the
knowledgeable airline ticket agent.
Initially, it didn't seem to make sense, given the archaic, mouseless
computers many agents were using, but they helped us to an
unfathomable degree. Naturally, they had the most up-to-date
information on flights, delays and weather conditions, but they also
seemed invariably to know the airport layout in our destination city.
When we explained that we were racing around the world, ticket agents
would always give us their full attention and -- the best part --
crucial information on all the other airlines' flights as well. And
agents can work incredibly quickly under absurd amounts of pressure,
although few may be as agile as the Mexicana ticket agent in Cancun
who booked our seats to London in 10 minutes while telling us the
precise departure, arrival and layover times of every other flight
going from Mexico to England that day.
In the air, flight crews become another information source if you
befriend them, as we took pains to do. They were particularly helpful
for driving directions to sites off the beaten path, which the TV
show's producers seemed to take a twisted delight in sending us to. On
our way back to the United States, we had to find ''The Big Kahuna''
on a rocky bluff somewhere on Oahu, and the attendants helped us find
our man.
What flight attendants did not know, some homeward-bound fellow
passenger usually did. On our way to Malaysia, a woman gave me some
critical time-saving advice about express-train service to our next
destination. Any reservations we had about striking up conversations
with complete strangers had evaporated by the end of the race.
Cabdrivers, too, were often a key support. Sometimes, it was
surprising -- even a little frightening -- to see how far cabbies
would go to satisfy our need for speed (and we were always demanding
that they go faster and faster, through some of the tightest, most
crowded streets in the world). Driving through the medina in
Marrakesh, packed with freely roaming cattle, assorted hawkers and the
occasional bewildered tourists, we pleaded with one cabdriver (and
tipped him generously) to cut around cars, and he obliged every one of
our requests without hesitation.
On average, though, taxis were about as much of a crapshoot as they
are in New York -- a different Moroccan cabby took two of our
competitors way off the route into a scary situation involving a local
government official and their being temporarily detained. They were so
shaken by the incident, they wound up being eliminated soon after.
My partner and I were traveling light in the linguistic department.
Together, we were fluent in just English, Italian and Spanish. But
communication in any tongue, I am now convinced, is as much about tone
and facial expression as it is about grammar and pronunciation.
Gesture, grunt and moan: you'll feel like an idiot, but most often get
what you want. The real universal language, however, remains a flash
of a smile and some cash -- it gets the lines of communication
humming, as it did with a Vietnamese train conductor, the only guy
standing between us and a place to sleep in an air-conditioned car on
the 24-hour trip from Saigon to Hue in 90-plus temperatures.
And when the cash runs out, just try asking. While driving through
Spain in the middle of the night on the way to a ferry that would take
us to Morocco, I mistakenly put regular unleaded gasoline into our
diesel car. I thought for sure I had put an end to the race for us.
Instead of giving up and going to a hotel for the night as another
team did (which got them eliminated), we trekked half a mile back to
the station, where I pleaded with the attendant to get help. He made a
phone call and woke up a mechanic friend; a few stressful hours later
we were back on the road.
In general, getting help was easy. Flo would walk up to strangers on
the street, wearing a look of desperation, and beg for directions or
some other form of assistance. Manage your finances properly, and you
won't have to walk into a Munich pizza shop and ask for a free slice,
as I did (the shop owner handed one over). But when you have no other
choice, you would be astonished by how generous people can be to total
strangers.
Flo and I didn't get along -- she was constantly threatening to quit.
And I wouldn't let us spend more than a few dollars on food, which I
somehow deemed unnecessary. In fact, the tension between us eventually
became one of the main subplots of the show that season. Yet
interpersonal dynamics, I have come to believe, are overrated. Our
friction-filled dynamic was perfect because it led us to victory. We
excelled because our roles were defined. I was the driver and
navigator and eternally optimistic one; Flo was in charge of creating
instant relationships with strangers and getting crucial bits of
information along the way, as well as doing much of the legwork at
airports. We focused on the journey, and not on each other, and what
we got out of ''The Amazing Race,'' besides the million-dollar prize
money, was this: Sometimes, you need to let the trip take you, instead
of the other way around.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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