The Kindness of Dangers, the Companionship of Strangers

“I only travel to safe places,” Ernest told me. I wanted to ask what he meant by that, but he continued. “No Egypt, no Mexico, no Russia. Hell, I didn’t even feel safe here on the subway in Vancouver.”

I had recently met Ernest when I sat next to him in a Vancouver hotel lobby, waiting for my room to be cleaned so I could check in. Before I could ponder why he’d compare Vancouver to, say, Cairo or Cancun, he added, “Now China, there’s a place I wanted to go. But Berta here”—he nodded over to his wife—“she put the eighty-six on that one.”

Yep, I had stumbled upon a real-life Bert and Ernie. We were far from Sesame Street, though—especially if you asked Ernie, I mean, um, Ernest. I sighed and let Ernest, a “born-and-bred Virginian,” change the subject to Canada’s “communist” healthcare system.

The fears of Berta and Ernest seemed absurd to me at first, but when I eventually sat down in my now-clean hotel room and thought about it, I kind of understood. Traveling the world for leisure purposes can be a frightening ordeal. The angst of the unknown is real. The fear of trying to communicate in a land where you don’t know the language. The anxiety of unknowingly traipsing into a petty theft zone of the city. The dread of having to sit through an evening of traditional folk dancing.

I, too, get nervous when I’m going to a new place. Given my profession, I’m embarrassed to admit this, and hitherto I’ve kept it a secret. The day before a big trip abroad (especially when it’s to a place I’ve never been), I have to fight a feeling of dread in my stomach, a sudden emotional weight attached to me, dragging on my hardwood floors as I slump through my West Village apartment packing my bags, pushing that ominous feeling away from me like a beleaguered boxer in the 12th round. Once, while waiting to board a flight to Belarus for a magazine assignment, I kept reminding myself that I was headed to “Europe’s last dictatorship,” as it was branded, complete with the KGB and a mustached strongman leader-for-life who regularly jailed journalists. I reminded myself that I was going there to write an article on a tourist visa, not a journalist one, and I’d planned to hang out with provocative artists and political dissidents, all while the KGB would be apparently shadowing me. I was told, true or not, they regularly follow tourists, since, at the time, there were so few visitors to this Eastern European country. I stood thinking about all of this at the gate at JFK as they called boarding, the emotional weight still clinging to me, I nearly talked myself into walking away.

Traipsing through the Amazon. Photo by David Farley

So, I’m with Ernest on this. Travel isn’t always a walk in the park at the all-inclusive resort you’re booked at for a week. But since that accidental meeting, “Bert and Ernie,” as I will forever think of them in my mind, would occasionally pop into my head and I’d think: really, what are they afraid of? I could only conclude it was not just the unknown they feared, but otherness; people different from whom they encountered in Virginia. If only they’d met some of these people they were afraid of, I thought.

I once met a Buddhist nun—an Australian-born Tibetan Buddhist nun named Robina, to be exact—who told me about the concept of friend, stranger, enemy. “When we’re born,” she said, “everyone is a stranger.” Eventually, as life goes on, people move into the friend group and then the enemy group. And back into the stranger camp when your relations and/or emotions fade away. “A friend is the object of my attachment,” she said. “An enemy is the object of my revulsion and aversion. And a stranger is the object of my indifference.”

But then, as she explained, something interesting happens: as we go through life, that person you were once convinced was your enemy slides into your friend group again. Similarly, that person you thought was a stranger because you faded away from each other? Bam! Friend again. That friend//lover/spouse/soul mate you were certain was going to be devotedly by your side until death? One of you had a change of heart. And so: enemy—and then after enough passage of time: stranger. And who knows? Maybe friend again. (I’ve been fortunate enough to move a lot of erstwhile romantic partners back into the friend category.) Everything, including our relationships with other humans, is impermanent. Robina told me we have to be mindful of our attachments to cementing people into these categories because life will surprise us and that person will jump from one to the other to the other again.

Ever since meeting that nun, I’ve carried this wisdom with me in my travels all over the planet. Because not only does this apply to our close human relationships in this thing called life but also to the people we encounter on our figurative and literal journeys. Every stranger I encounter when I travel has the potential to move into the “friend” category.

I’d think back to when I randomly met people who changed my idea or pre-conceived vision of the place. Or when some stranger stopped to aid me when I needed help. I’m not happy in those times I’m leaning against my broken-down car on a highway outside of Rome, steam flowing heavenward from the hood, or when my flight is abruptly canceled in a small Vietnamese coastal town, stranding me with almost no money and almost no way to get my connecting flight back home in 12 hours. After all, the travel writer Paul Theroux once said, “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

It was the bad times on the road when I’ve gained the most trust in humanity, when I’ve realized that people outside the United States (and, yes, within the U.S., too) are generally good people. When people see another in need or distress, there’s a universal truth that kicks in, no matter what culture, religion, government or skin color appears to divide us. If we stayed home and only learned about the world from the news—at least in the rare times when the American news media disrobes its solipsistic cloak to report on something international—most Americans would never cross a border again.

Take, for example, that time my Nha Trang-to-Saigon flight was abruptly canceled and I had to catch my flight home from Saigon 12 hours later. From the airport, I jumped in a taxi and headed for the railway station in central Nha Trang. The second I stepped inside the bustling hall and saw the snaking ticket lines, a concessionaire and her sidekick—a self-described “dwarf”—grabbed me by the arm and pushed and elbowed our way through the long line to the ticket window and translated for me. And when they didn’t get the answer they were looking for, they pulled me around to the back of the ticket office and demanded that I get on the next train to Saigon. This time she was more convincing to the people in the back of the ticket office. I suddenly had a ticket in my hand. Of course, no matter how much altruism the woman was filled with, I knew part of her motivation was economic: she wanted me to buy some snacks from her stand. Which, of course, I did, in ample amounts. (Who knew that shrimp-flavored chips and dried durian tasted so, um, good?) We sat there together waiting for me to board the train and she told me about her life, how her husband had died of alcoholism and how she’d love it if I’d come back and marry her dwarf friend. We took a photo together and then they waved goodbye to me as the train chugged out of the station.

Our relationship was one of mutual interest. I wanted to get home—one of the purest instincts in human nature—and she needed to make money to feed herself and her family, a fundamental human need. But also, a complete stranger had become something of a friend. If I’d ended up back in Nha Trang soon after that, I don’t think I would have married her sidekick but I certainly would have stopped by for a bag of shrimp-flavored chips and a chat.

And then there was that time I was close to talking myself out of going to Belarus while standing at the gate at JFK. I did get on that flight to Minsk, the Belarusian capital. I had to change planes at the Moscow airport. The passport control line was long and slow, and I kept watching minutes tick and tick and tick until I had only a dangerously small window of time to get my connecting flight. I finally got through and, on the curbside, frantically began asking people how to get to terminal B. I suddenly had a small cadre of aggressively mustached men and not-so-aggressively mustached babushkas trying to figure out how to get me to my next flight.

“Take autobus,” screamed a ponytailed man in a vest, pointing to a bus that had just pulled up. It was a city bus and I drifted toward it thinking I was going to make my flight. That is, before realizing I had no rubles on me. I went to the door of the bus and made eye contact with a woman about my age who was just getting on. I steepled my hands together and asked—nay, begged—her if she could pay my fare. She did, and we talked the entire way to my stop, exchanging stories about our lives. I made my flight with a few minutes to spare.

I’ll always be thankful to that mysterious and generous young woman. I hope her good karma has rewarded her in some way.

My survival didn’t depend on catching my connecting flight in Moscow that day, but it taught me something: the experience shattered my impression of Russians as a people who lived in a lawless land and just liked saying nyet nyet nyet all the time.

I could give a handful of other examples, but I think the point is clear: traveling, especially in places your mind deems “unsafe,” doesn’t always make for the smoothest days of our lives; yet, unless you’re traveling in, say, the erstwhile Islamic State or Somalia, we should let go of some of that fear. Let the notion evaporate that good travel always means safe, comfortable travel. It also says a lot about how easy it is to turn strangers into friends.

I’m not trying to preach here and suggest that everyone should welcome danger and disaster into their future travel itineraries. But misfortune will happen to us all. And so, for all of us, and not just the Ernests and Bertas of the world: leaving Sesame Street and wandering into uncharted territory with an open heart and an open mind, letting the world help us when we need help, is one of the best things we can do for ourselves.

When adversity crosses my path—both while on the road or at home—I try not to think of it as “bad” or “awful.” Instead, I use the word “interesting.” In the same way, I commonly referred to the year 2020: interesting. It keeps me from spiraling into a miasma of negative thoughts and self-pity. It allows me to ponder a different perspective. ‘They have taken so much,” said the Dalai Lama, referring to what the Chinese government has done to his homeland, Tibet. “They have destroyed temples, burned our texts, disrobed our monks and nuns, limited our culture and destroyed it in so many ways.” And then he added: “Why should I also let them take my joy and peace of mind?”

Happiness doesn’t necessarily come from getting the things we want in life. Instead, happiness comes from appreciating life, even when things don’t go the way we want it too. Happiness is enjoying the scenery while on an unexpected detour. “It’s not impermanence that makes us suffer,” said Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh. “What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent, when they are not.”

And so, with that in mind, along the way on that detour, we might just transform some strangers into friends. Or, as it happens, unfortunately, add a person or two to the “enemy” category. On my way back from Belarus I had to change planes again in Moscow. This time I took a taxi between terminals, one of the best $20 I’d ever spent. And because I had a couple of hours to kill, I did something I almost never do: I parked myself at a TGI Fridays in the terminal and ordered a salad. I hadn’t eaten a vegetable in a week. I paid with my debit card and, quite jubilant that I’d had such a fun and journalistically prosperous time (i.e. didn’t get arrested) in the capital, Minsk, I got on my JFK-bound flight and dozed off to sleep.

When I got home, there was a notification from my bank. Someone in Moscow had hacked into my bank account, via my debit card, and swiped every single cent. I had zero dollars. But I was home, a home I’d had to unglue myself from a week and a half earlier, and I was all the better for having done so.

So not all my stereotypes were washed away by spending time in the Moscow airport. As I had wished for the woman who paid my bus fare in Moscow, I hope the karma of the person who hacked into my bank account comes back to “reward” them, as well.

I hope, at least, they used my money to travel and turn strangers into friends.