All I remember from my first trip is that the stewardess gave me Black Jack gum on the DC-3 flight from Long Beach, Calif., to Catalina Island. It was the early 1950s, and I was 4. Since then, I’ve done a lot of traveling. These are just a few of the things I can’t forget:
Wonders of the world, man-made: The pyramids of Egypt; Petra, Jordan; Great Wall of China; Angkor Wat, Cambodia. No surprises here. That’s why they’re wonders.
Wonders of the world, natural: Nor here . . . The U.S./Canadian Rockies and the American West (including Yellowstone, Yosemite); Denali, Alaska; the island of Kauai, Hawaii; Guilin, China; Phang Nga Bay, Thailand; the Amazon, Brazil; Iguazu Falls, Brazil/Argentina; Galapagos Islands, Ecuador; Niagara Falls, U.S./Canada; the Alps of Europe; the fiords of Norway; the Amalfi Coast of Italy; New Zealand’s Southern Alps; the Great Barrier Reef, Australia; Ayers Rock, Australia; the island of Bora Bora, French Polynesia.
Embarrassing confession: I’ve seen the Grand Canyon only from the air.
Other big holes in my travels: Africa (except for Egypt); Great Britain (except for London) and Ireland; Argentina and Chile; Central America and most of Mexico; India; North and South Carolina; Door County.
Wonders of the world, man and nature: Machu Picchu, Peru; the island of Bali with its rice terraces, Indonesia; Venice; Rio de Janeiro; Hong Kong; San Francisco.
Wonders of the world, Midwest: Wisconsin. No mountains, but it’s pretty darn wonderful in its own way just about everywhere. (And can you guess where I’m from?)
Most exciting cities: New York, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok.
Most exasperating cities: New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Bangkok. If you have to ask why, you probably haven’t been there.
Favorite city: Paris. Despite it all. Because of it all.
City with most to offer travelers who speak only English: London. I may love Paris best, but here I can also understand (and enjoy) theater, local literature, casual conversations and even the graffiti.
Dullest cities I’d gladly transit again: Zurich; Auckland, New Zealand. They’re clean, attractive and efficient places that suffer by comparison to their “neighborhoods” — two of the most scenic countries on Earth.
Reputedly dullest city that I like anyway: Singapore. So you wouldn’t want to spend two weeks here. But for a few days, this island-state is a well-ordered oasis in frantic Southeast Asia. Great airport to get you to your next destination, great food — and you can drink the water.
Sin cities: Amsterdam; Hamburg, Germany; Bangkok; Las Vegas.
Holy cities: Rome; Jerusalem; Luxor, Egypt.
Most magical city at night: Copenhagen in mid-summer.
Best chills: After living through the Cold War and Vietnam War, actually being in Moscow, Beijing and Saigon is a shiver-inducing experience.
Worst advertisement for communism: A day trip into East Berlin, shortly before the Wall fell. Only our East German guide was able to ignore this elephant in our midst.
Best advertisement for freedom: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. They still have a long way to go, but after what they’ve been through, the optimism of their people is warranted.
Best little town in the world: Strahan, Australia. With fewer than 1,000 year-round residents, this is the only settlement on the entire southwestern coast of Tasmania. Getting here can be an experience; the last bus we took on the six-hour trip from Hobart doubled as a school bus for more than 20 raucous 7th to 12th graders who commute 25 miles each day to school. Downtown is a one-block postcard shot, and the only real nightlife is the spectacular sunset over Australia’s second largest bay. The only real game in town is adventure, from soft to hardy: cruises on the harbor, hikes into the wilderness, jet boat rides, walks on a nearby beach. A perfect away-from-it-all place for a few days.
Farthest great travel destination: Perth, Australia. If you dug a hole through the Earth from Chicago, you’d come out about 2,000 miles southwest of here in the Indian Ocean.
Nearest great travel destination: Chicago.
Easiest foreign trip: Canada. They may hate me for saying this, but Canada is sort of like America, only cleaner and greener, and Canadians are like Americans, only nicer and saner. The difference that counts now is in the dollar. They have one, too, but ours goes a lot farther up there.
Easiest really foreign experience: Quebec. Last I looked it was still part of Canada, but in places like Quebec City you’d never know, and that’s part of Quebec’s charm. Don’t let the controversy with English-speaking Canada put you off; they’re not mad at us.
Best living history lesson: Israel. It’s easier to understand the current problems — but no easier to see a solution — once you’ve seen the Golan Heights, Jerusalem and the occupied territories. And then there’s all that other history.
Favorite country: Thailand. Great food and hotels, grand sights and scenery. But it’s the gentle culture and people that make me come back. Don’t skip Bangkok, but don’t judge the whole country by its shortcomings (miserable climate, horrid traffic, eye-stinging pollution) either.
Most scenic country: New Zealand. Amazing, just amazing, and there doesn’t seem to be a boring vista anywhere. Switzerland is a close runner-up, but it’s a bit lacking in beaches.
Most dramatic dose of nothingness: The Indian-Pacific train across Australia from Perth to Sydney. Three days, four nights. Makes you realize how vast — and empty — this country/continent is. Once is fascinating — and enough.
Best sights from the air: Lightning over the volcanoes of Java, on a sunset flight from Bali to Singapore; the coastal fiords and interior icecap of Greenland, on one of the rare flights from Europe to Chicago when the vast island wasn’t covered by clouds.
Best cruise experience: Turning around on a dime at the end of a Norwegian fiord while Edvard Grieg played over a loudspeaker on the Royal Viking Sun.
Nicest people, English-speaking: New Zealanders. Never heard so many “lovelys” in my life. And they seem to mean it. Runner-up: Australians.
Only place I’ve ever been insulted by a stranger for being an American: Sydney, Australia. Which just goes to show you that every country has its jerks.
Nicest people, non-English-speaking: The Thais, the Laos, the Balinese. It’s not what they say; it’s the smiles.
Brusquest people: Israelis. But don’t take it personally; they’re that way with each other too.
Most Bulls puns, outside Chicago: Bulls, New Zealand. Every place — even the bank — in this small town has a bullish name. I’d repeat some, but you’ve already heard them.
Best hotel: The Regent, Hong Kong. Harbor-view rooms look down (not out) on the water with one of the world’s great skylines as a backdrop. For an al fresco version of this view, visit the most dramatic urban pool/Jacuzzi complex anywhere. Also: A spectacular lobby bar, terrific restaurants and astounding service (once, on departing, I reported a malfunctioning bathroom scale — and the next day got a fax at my next hotel apologizing for the problem and informing me that they’d immediately checked the scales in the other 601 rooms).
On second thought . . .: I could also easily be talked into picking the Peninsula, Hong Kong. Or the Oriental, Bangkok. Or the Ritz, Paris.
Best resort: Any of the Aman resorts in Asia. I’ve stayed at four — Amanpuri in Thailand and Amandari, Amankila and Amanusa in Bali — and they’re all great. And expensive.
Best English in a non-English-speaking country: Denmark. Norway. Sweden. The Netherlands. Take your pick.
Worst English in an English-speaking country: The United States. We’re always picking on the Brits or the Kiwis or the Aussies for their accents, but nobody speaks worse English than we do. It’s not our accents; it’s our grammar.
Worst translation (Or: Was it something I said?): After I called to have a room-service tray removed from my room at the Shangri-La Golden Flower in Xian, China, a waiter showed up at my door with a bar-sized jar of maraschino cherries.
Best movie on a bus: “Kramer vs. Kramer,” during a trip from Pattaya to Bangkok. Dustin Hoffman’s and Meryl Streep’s mastery of Thai was impressive.
Wettest destination: Chiang Mai, Thailand, during Songkrahn every April. From a gentle, Buddhist-inspired sprinkling of water, this celebration of Thai New Year has turned into a three-day (or longer) water fight free-for-all. From dawn to dusk, you’ll be soaked — but it sure beats the heat. Bring an underwater camera.
Most depressing urban sight: All the limbless beggars in Phnom Penh, Cambodia — victims of the millions of mines left over from the Khmer Rouge “killing fields” days.
Best bargaining: Vientiane, Laos, where a handicraft vendor lowered her price — twice — after I attempted to pay her initial offer.
Best meal: Chantecler at the Negresco Hotel in Nice. A degustation with too many perfect little courses to count at the grandest old hotel on the Riviera. And, yes (see Bob Cross’ list), this is where I last ate in France.
Worst meal (not eaten): Splayed rats at a market in Laos.
How I got turista in prison: The old Brazilian sugar plantation turned into a minimum-security prison was just a stop on a day tour out of Recife, and the sugar cane juice offered for sale (along with carved, anatomically correct dolls of Portuguese missionaries) would have been safe enough — if I’d just skipped the translucent ice cubes. Three days of chicken soup.
Toni Stroud is right, Bob Cross is wrong: Hawaii.
Best thing about foreign travel: Realizing that despite all our cultural differences, people — and tourists — everywhere really are an awful lot alike. For instance, on Koh Samui, a small resort island in southern Thailand, a group of giggling, orange-robed, non-English-speaking Buddhist monks on tour beckoned me — the only non-Asian in sight — to pose for a picture with them.
Strangest destination (and routing) to explain: The United Arab Emirates, via China. Why go the long way around to get to a place hardly any Americans ever visit? Blame the weird routing on a frequent flier award, but the Emirates (they’re on the Persian Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Iran), though hardly a prime destination, were well worth the five-day free detour. The highlight was an afternoon of sliding down sand dunes in four-wheel-drive vehicles followed by an “authentic” Bedouin feast at a desert camp, complete with flush toilets and dance floor where we did the Macarena in several languages.
Single greatest experience in 48 years of traveling: Being gummed by a fur seal in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. I was putting on a snorkel mask with my feet dangling in the water when one of these inquisitive creatures darted forward and took my whole foot in its mouth. The same seal later provided my closest view of wildlife when it went nose-to-nose with me in the water.
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Meet the staff
Randy Curwen has visited 46 states and more than 75 countries and territories. Although he has been Travel editor since 1992, he leaves most of the writing to Robert Cross, Alan Solomon and Toni Stroud. He and the Tribune have won the Gold for best newspaper travel section in North America (over 500,000 circulation) two of the last three years in the Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers. Prior to turning his hobby of travel into a career, Curwen was editor of the Tribune’s Tempo and Friday sections. His e-mail address is rcurwen@tribune.com
