PERILS OF TRAVEL
Emily Hiestand

First published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

I have owned up to an afternoon of rascally behavior in my childhood, but have I ever been naughty while traveling? No. I like to be especially mindful about courtesies when traveling in other territories and lands, feeling that when traveling we are all informal ambassadors.

Even that can go awry, however — for example, the too-deep bow I once made, unawares, to a Tokyo elevator operator, which compelled him to almost fall to the floor to re-establish the correct hierarchy between hotel staff member and a guest. (As I began to understand what had happened, I began to bow again, very slightly this time, to redress the first bow, which meant the operator needed to bow again, less slightly than I had; at which point, I stopped bowing and the two of us shared a very discreet, non-hierarchical laugh.) But what I have been, nearly always, while traveling is curious — and that has been enough several times to land me in hot water. Curiosity has drawn me times into situations in which it might appear that I was misbehaving. 

There is a difference, however, between curiosity-driven situations and misbehavior — as I tried to explain to the pair of New York State Troopers along Highway 145 west of Albany who had come to investigate and help excavate the small pickup truck Peter and I were traveling in from a interesting looking gravel-filled ramp that led off the highway. A ramp that I had encouraged Peter to turn onto, and which we soon discovered was meant to stop, for example, a massive, eighteen-wheeler truck with brake trouble by quickly sinking a runaway truck up to its wheel hubs in a deep bed of gravel. We were on the local news that night in a small town. The news team arrived with their cameras soon after the State Troopers, but mercifully did not consider it news-worthy that a fellow journalist (Pete) had turned into the ramp, out of curiosity.

I also needed to explain the difference, in halting French, to the Chanel-suited manager of Bon Marche in Paris. Upon spotting me photographing a creative display of papier mache masks in the shape of beets and other root vegetables, he rushed to interrogate me as a possible industrial spy for one of the competing Paris department stores. We sorted that out, happily. (Memo to self: the French think papier mache beet masks are worthy of espionage! Vive la France!)

And in Japan, our professor friends needed to explain the difference on the evening that they and Pete and I were nearly thrown out of the lobby of a Kyoto “love hotel” for being what the innkeeper misconstrued as what she called “a gaijin foursome.” I can explain. What happened was: our friends, two Western scholars of Japanese culture, were showing Pete and me around Kyoto, which included a brief stop to see the lobby display of one of Kyoto’s “love hotels” — the informal name for a respectable kind of inn for couples in privacy-scarce Japanese cities. The rooms in such hotels are highly-designed, imaginative sets with themes such as “Space Adventure,” “Picnic,” “Palace of Versaille,”etc., and photographs of each are shown on a large backlight display in the lobby. Happily, our friends speak fluent Japanese and were able to allay the innkeeper’s concern by explaining the non-romantic nature of our visit — to eventual merriment, followed by courtesy bows.

The crucial difference between misbehaviour and curiousity-driven scrapes, is of course, intention, which counts for something even in a legal trial. In practice, however, as we learned from the Curious George books, the line separating innocent curiosity and transgression can be a fine one — and for a traveler, it can sometimes vanish suddenly, unexpectedly, almost anywhere in the wide world. 

Video: The Subtle Art of Japanese Bowing

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance | Reviews