Travelogue – End of the Trip

By Temple Ligon

Friday morning, June 1, 2012, I surfaced from the Hay-Adams overlooking the White House with a little over another day in my ‘round-the-world-in-80-days trip. The Hay-Adams was a good place to start the end of the trip. In the movie The Election heroine Reese Witherspoon and her host the United States senator take a morning limousine from the front of the hotel onto 16^th Street much to the chagrin of the dumped former boyfriend played by Matthew Broderick.

My departure was not quite as dramatic, and I didn’t have Reese Witherspoon or even Passepartout #whatever, but at least I knew what I was doing.

With David Niven as Phileas Fogg, the movie version of Around the World in 80 Days put Fogg in his Savile Row townhouse – #3, if I have it right, just about where the Beatles occupied with their recording offices and their performance roof – one day late. Fogg saw no sense in going to the Reform Club to congratulate his card-playing buddies on winning their wager, 20,000 pounds, about 1 million dollars in today’s money. Fogg, as the story turned out, didn’t know what he was doing. He had crossed the International Date Line without taking note, repeating a day on the calendar without knowing it, thereby giving him another day to make it to the Reform Club ahead of the deadline.

Fogg’s valet Passepartout, running an errand on the street while Fogg was consoling himself over his loss, saw that day’s newspaper and saw the good news in the newspaper’s date, allowing just enough time for Fogg to make it to the Reform Club to claim his wager.

In my case, taking note of the International Date Line where I crossed onboard the Diamond Princess on May 10, I and Amtrak pulled into Columbia on time, something awfully early on Saturday, June 2. I walked my wheeled bag north on Pulaski to Gervais, left on Main and into #1502, the converted Kress Building and my idea of #3 Savile Row.

Exactly 80 days before, March 14 at six in the evening, we filled up the bar at the Capital City Club with Passpartout #3 and a couple dozen well-wishers. According to Jules Verne, predecessor Fogg came home from the Reform Club, having committed to the 80-day deadline, and said to Passepartout: Pack your bags we’re leaving in 10 minutes to go around the world. For my purposes, Passepartout #3 had already packed in anticipation of leaving the Capital City Club for my place, where I packed in 10 minutes. Of course, I had a good idea of what to pack and all that, but I did try to start the trip in the spirit Fogg set in the book and the movie. In short order we were off to Florence and the night train to New York City.

My return was well-planned by a few friends and the Capital City Club. We reserved the main ballroom for the deadline hour, six in the evening on June 2. With cocktail service and a full sit-down dinner, about 60 or 70 people, including most of the two dozen well-wishers who attended the bon voyage do at the club’s bar 80 days before, chose between the New York strip or the catch of the day and chose to sit through an hour’s PowerPoint presentation. Frankly, it couldn’t have been a whole lot more interesting than what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation kind of fare, so I really did appreciate the turnout. I personally hate sitting through just about anyone’s illustrated travelogue.

In my travelogue, however, I tried to offer some self-criticism, some reconsideration of how it should be done.

First was the discovery of how slow and incompetent the staffers could get at the Indian consulate in Rome when I applied for a travel visa. I should have taken care of all the travel visas, not just India, through a package deal offered by a D. C. outfit before I left. I expected problems with the communists in Vietnam and China, just to rub in our disagreements, so I took care of those two travel visas before I left Columbia. While I was at it, I easily could have cleared all the approvals for not only India but also for Bangladesh. To get what I needed in Bangladesh, I had to fly into Dhaka instead of following my earth-hugging policy. Fogg, after all, couldn’t fly, so I shouldn’t, I thought.

The visa application for Bangladesh and almost immediate approval was available at the Dhaka airport for about $50 but not anywhere on the railroad between Kolkata and Dhaka.

Then there was the matter of waiting on my flight out of Bangladesh, heading for Saigon. To catch up on the two weeks lost in Rome waiting on approval for my India visa, I had to fly to Mumbai, missing out on my Malta connection with a French freighter, but I still had some time to catch up on my schedule; so a flight into Saigon was necessary. Problem was, waiting at the Dhaka airport at dinnertime meant I had to have dinner at the airport. What was wrong with that? The airport restaurant was probably the pride of the country, an otherwise miserably dirty and disorganized place.

Sitting in a plush cushioned seat and resting my elbows on the pink linen tablecloth, I played it up and ordered the lobster. But before the lobster was the dinner salad. I was in the Third World, a garbage pit, and I forgot what I learned in Mexico: Don’t eat the salad because the lettuce was likely washed with tainted tap water.

Why should the Bangladesh tap water be any different? Hell, Mexico’s outback was relatively clean compared with downtown Dhaka. Somehow, though, the feel of the tablecloth and the matching napkin led me to imagine immunity from all that Third World paranoia.

Too bad I wasn’t paranoid. The salad was fine, and the lobster was delicious, but the water in the food prep was tainted. I landed in Saigon all right, and I went directly to the Caravelle, Saigon’s best hotel in 1969 and still in 2012. If you gotta get sick, get sick in the best hotel in town. I couldn’t get around town very much for the next couple days, but at least I was in class surroundings for my singularly unclassy command of the room’s plumbing.

Speaking of first-class hotels, I have no regrets there. Starting in New York’s Carlyle, called The World’s Most Glamorous Hotel by an article last year in the Wall Street Journal, and taking the Queen Victoria’s penthouse suite for the next eight days across the North Atlantic, Passepartout #3 and I adopted the policy of staying in the best in town just to remind myself I was on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. The Taj in Mumbia, to cite another glorious example, was so damn nice I probably lost a couple days on the schedule just because I was enjoying one building so much.

There was plenty of that, lots of great hotels on a great trip.

To recap, the Wren Institute for Urban Research will present a short history of the trip on Friday night, November 9, beginning at six at my place, 2225 Terrace Way.

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