An Accidental Tourist

Since I’m a tour guide, people ask me if I ever get tired of going back to the same places. Here’s my answer. The locations to which I take my groups are some of the most beautiful in the world; it’s pretty tough to become indifferent to beauty. Culturally, the places I visit are diverse – from Africa to Asia to South America. Every time I go back, I learn something new and experience the location in a different way. And returning to a country or city is almost like coming home as that location becomes familiar, comfortable, and more hospitable every time I renew the connections that have bonded us.

So a few days ago I started thinking about Cusco, slipping into a South American frame of mind for the next tour I’m guiding to this Andean city, base camp for tackling Machu Picchu and hiking the Inca Trail. As I sat on my deck in the damp coastal cool of a North Carolina evening sipping a homemade Pisco Sour and watching the last of the season’s fireflies, I transported myself to Cusco’s dry high-altitude air. Instead of a line of sea pines near the beach, I saw the rugged cordillera and a hunter’s moon dappling Inca monoliths. And instead of a Carolina train whistle and the rock music of Brother Henry wannabes playing the beach bar down the road, I heard the haunting strains of quenas and the mellow chords of a Charango.

My bags were packed and my girlfriend, Myra, was bracing for my departure and my absence from home for the next few weeks. By midday Friday I’d finished a proposal for a new India tour, thinking I would be out of internet commission for the next few weeks, except for checking email. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, I’d been at my computer for hours, and I craved a bike ride down to Wrightsville Beach, one of my new favorite places in Wilmington.

Initially, everything was going well on the ride, and my mind was clear and calm, the way it is whenever I’m outside doing something physical (well, maybe not mowing the lawn or chasing down the mole tunneling through our back yard). I really did register the pickup truck with the equipment trailer in a driveway, but it wasn’t moving, so I glanced down at my bike’s computer to check my speed. 22 mph. Good. I was on the beach road with its bike lane and light shoulder-season traffic. A couple of fellow cyclists were no more than 100 yards behind me.

Then, a millisecond later, the truck moved and the trailer lurched directly in front of me. I had no chance to slow down. No chance to swerve. I hit the trailer at full speed, an impact that shattered my bike frame and sent me flying over the trailer’s sides in a forward trajectory of at least thirty feet. It landed me face first on the pavement. My helmet and the fact that the trailer was only waist high (so I flew over it rather than into it with the force of my momentum), saved me from death. Sprawled on the street with blood gushing from my broken nose, cut mouth, and facial gashes, I believed that I had just taken a spill and could scramble up, get my bearings, and remount my bike. Fortunately, one of the cyclists behind me was a neurosurgeon who took charge of the accident scene and kept me from trying this. Still, in my mind I was sure I could get up. I’m in shape, I thought. I’m leaving for Peru in a few days. No problem.

No way. I’m paraphrasing the ER doc, who (while he was calmly stitching my face) told me he’d been to Peru with a medical team traveling to remote villages and Indians who would otherwise never see a doctor. Bluntly, he explained I wouldn’t be going anywhere in my condition, certainly not to Peru. I have to admit he’s right. Aside from my other injuries, I look like I’ve been on the receiving end of a few roundhouse punches. It’s not a face to inspire confidence in a tour group coming to South America for the first time. As a fresh air junkie, I’ve experimented with various headgear to keep my battered face protected from the sun and have settled on a hokey, but utilitarian, cap from my last ultra after first trying out an Arab keffiyeh that made me look like Elephant Man and a favorite African safari hat that sat like a beanie on top of my swollen head.

My girlfriend may have to venture down to Cusco in my place – she’s fluent in Spanish and still has family down in Peru. Plus her face looks great, a lot better than mine even at its best. The vagaries of chance have turned her into an accidental tourist, but maybe that’s good, because she won’t have time to build apprehensions or develop preconceptions. She’ll just go with the experience as it is, letting it imprint her sensibilities where it will start creating the bonds that make a strange place familiar and the word “home” resonate the way it does for me.

White Nights

The days are getting shorter here in Wilmington, North Carolina. After a summer of heat and humidity, the chill in the air feels strange -- even a little ominous, although there is no hard winter looming, not here anyway. Still, I feel a surge of my old Midwestern anxiety now that darkness descends without the ceremony of languorous Renaissance-tinted sunsets. The dusk that quickly bleeds lavender to indigo feels lonely, even a bit deathly. Already I miss (and romanticize) the insufferably hot summer days, my runs and bike rides done of necessity in primordial, pre-dawn mists or delayed until the evocative penumbra of late evening, summoning that old childhood feeling of timelessness that still makes me think I will live forever.

If saying goodbye to summer is hard for me, imagine what it must be like for people living in St. Petersburg, Russia, to let go of nearly three months of round-the-clock daylight, the famous and much celebrated White Nights. The winters in this city below the Arctic Circle are long and brutal – frozen rivers, bitter cold, a city held hostage by the underworld gods of snow, ice, and near darkness. But suffering is part of the Russian character, and from death and darkness come resurrection and light, the antipodal underpinnings of Christian faith and the theological turf of great Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoevsky.

This summer, when I take my first tour group to Russia, we’ll be in St. Petersburg during the season of White Nights. Granted, we’ll see them in Moscow, too. But the striking quality of light in Peter the Great’s northern city is supremely beautiful, perhaps owing to the city’s breathtaking location on the Neva River and its fretwork of canals and islands crisscrossed by more than three hundred bridges, some centuries old. In part it is also due to the enduring apotheosis of the city’s architecture, inspired by Western Europe and yet distinctly Russian – icons like the old Winter Palace (now the Hermitage), the Mariinsky Theater (former home of the Kirov), and the Kazan Cathedral (modeled after St. Peter’s in Rome).

Imagine a nearly three-month-long White Nights party, with celebrations along the riverfront just steps away from the Drunk Bridge where his assassins finally tossed the bleeding Rasputin into the frigid Neva. Imagine concerts, plays, galas, and ballets blooming throughout the city like the banks of flowers along Nevsky Prospect and people strolling, laughing, eating and drinking under midnight skies the violet blue of early dusk.

Picture the Neva shot with the rich gold of a Fabergé egg, the river a watery traffic jam of pleasure and working boats making the most of the White Nights’ seemingly unending light. Imagine bars like The Idiot, decorated in Dostoevsky-era style, overflowing with boisterous patrons, both Russian (some from as far away as Siberia) and foreign. After knocking back shots of ice-cold vodka until the wee hours, they spill out onto the summer-bright sidewalks like college revelers on a semester-long spring break.

Visualize me in St. Petersburg holding a vodka tonic and a shisha, maybe tipsily admiring the illuminated draw bridges and rags of denim-colored clouds gathering around a sickle (minus the hammer) moon. Vodka or not, I’m thinking that even three centuries ago, Peter the Great had to know he was onto a good thing. I’m really looking forward to getting to his beloved city in time for the coming season of White Nights and a party I won't soon forget.