Travel Can Be Passive or Personal

Before she left for Bosnia, my friend Zelda checked the warnings from the State Department. The official website included an admonition to stay on well-traveled roads to avoid a possible encounter with an unexploded land mine. “Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you,” our government cautioned.

I did more than caution her. I believe my exact words were, “Bosnia? Are you freaking kidding me?”

Zelda calls Redwood City home base but sometimes she’s only home long enough to re-pack her suitcase. As I wrote in a previous column, Zelda retired from her job on a Friday and the next Monday, she was on a plane to China to teach business to university students.

I thought of Zelda on Saturday, while listening to a speech given by Cynthia Reed, a travel pro who encourages Americans to go to exotic places. Her talk included a riveting account of her close-up encounter with a gorilla in Uganda, a silverback who stood up and thumped his chest just for her.

Cynthia mentioned in her talk that only 25 percent of Americans have a passport. A much smaller percentage actually use their passports, she said.

Zelda makes up for us homebodies. When she gets back from Bosnia, where she is teaching management at a university, she will see if she can get hired to teach in one or more of the other countries to which she has applied, including Kazakhstan and several spots in the Arabian Gulf.

Cynthia’s push to get Americans to travel to out-of-the-ordinary locations that provide life-changing experiences–like coming within spitting distance of a large, hairy primate—would resonate with Zelda.

In her first e-mail from Bosnia, however, she was decidedly unimpressed. She reported that people were brusque, the architecture along the highway to Sarajevo was cinderblock, and there was graffiti everywhere. “This may cure me of my wanderlust,” she wrote, a comment none of her friends really believed.

Zelda’s Bosnian students are proving to be the opposite of their counterparts in China. There, Zelda struggled the entire term to get the students to offer their opinions. Their respect for her authority was absolute. In Bosnia, however, her students won’t STOP talking—even while she’s teaching—and they don’t hesitate to ask personal questions. For example, a female student said, “Your teeth are so white and straight, are they your own or artificial?”

For the record, they are indeed dazzling, and they are her very own, thanks to good genes and fluoride.

Now, I don’t especially want to travel in the Balkans, and I have no desire to get up close and personal with anything fiercer than Corky, my French Bulldog. But thanks to adventurers like Cynthia and Zelda, I can live vicariously from the comfort of my living room. I’ve decided, however, that I might apply for a passport. You know, just in case I want to go to Canada or something.