The following article was published in the July 23, 2000 Edition of The Boston Globe
By Gloria Negri
BOSTONGLOBE STAFF
As a longtime traveler, I have always observed a few rules: Travel alone, travel lightly - just a knapsack, if possible - and never plan ahead. The last is not necessarily part of the mantra but rather procrastination born of an irritating inability to decide where to go to fulfill a childhood dream to visit every place on the planet. The group tours that we know today, with package prices and knowing guides, were never for a free spirit such as myself. I would see the world alone and unfettered by tour buses and timetables.
Recently, however, I was converted, to a degree, after an all-inclusive group tour of Sicily proved to me that a woman traveling alone could have a good trip in the company of people she had never met. Though my past unplanned travels gave me no reason to be anywhere at any given time, thus relieving me of one kind of pressure, they presented another kind of pressure: worrying about where I would sleep each night.
My experiences have not all been pretty. On more occasions than I care to remember, I have arrived in foreign lands in the middle of the night with no hotel reservations. One was an unscheduled visit to Cairo. Traveling back to the states from South Africa, I had stopped in Nairobi and had a wonderful trip to Mombasa on the Indian Ocean squeezed into a speeding taxi with seven Kenyans.
Back at the airport in Nairobi, however, I was unaware that East African Airways required passengers to claim their luggage on the tarmac, so when I arrived in Cairo, my luggage was still in Nairobi and I decided to wait for it to catch up with me.
It was past midnight when my flight arrived in Cairo and hotels near the airport were booked. I asked a taxi driver to recommend a hotel and, though I didn't speak Arabic, nor he English, he grinned and nodded. As we sped out of the central area, it bothered me that the landscape seemed more isolated. But, true to his word, the driver deposited me at what I can only call an Egyptian bed-and-breakfast.
Though there was no lock on my room door and there were men in flowing garments, whom I presumed were guards, sleeping sitting-up in the hallways, I slept soundly, refreshed enough the next day to see the pyramids and ride a camel.
The year before, while I was arriving in South Africa to work on a newspaper in Johannesburg, my luggage was mistakenly offloaded in Monrovia, Liberia, and took six weeks to catch up with me. It also took all that time for me to have a cast removed from my leg - a fractured ankle just before leaving home - so I made do with the clothes on my back. That wasn't pretty, either.
On a trip to Oslo, I also arrived in the middle of the night without room reservations. I can't recall how, but I found a nice little room and slept for the first time under a cozy duvet after a scrumptious 3 a.m. breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs.
I have, also, arrived in the middle of the night in Saigon, Singapore, Taiwan and Bangkok, a forlorn, jet-lagged creature looking for a room. Perhaps for a compassionate concierge. I always found one.
Not all the hotels I have booked into without reservations rated mention in guidebooks. At some, I felt compelled to barricade the door with a bureau and sleep with my clothes on.
Spur-of-the-moment trips used to be my cachet. I was even more last-minute than those "last-minute" travel opportunities.
One year, covering a story at Logan Airport in the afternoon, I purchased a ticket to London for that evening. I flew away without having a place to stay but managed to get a room at the Brown Hotel, which, I learned only later, was one of London's best. I don't remember that it cost very much, but that was a long time ago.
Another time, a California couple I had met in Hong Kong invited me to join them the following year on a trip to Australia. Not wanting to be a "third wheel," and possibly ruin their vacation, I turned them down.
At the last minute, I relented, got a ticket in Boston to Australia one day and took off the next across the international dateline in pursuit of my California friends. I hadn't told them I was coming.
Though I followed exactly the itinerary they had sent, I always arrived at their hotel, in places like Samoa, Fiji, and Sydney, the day after they had checked-out. I never did catch up with them. I was beginning to feel abandoned until I went on to New Zealand and met a nice couple on the bus.
A spur-of-the moment trip from Miami to Guatemala landed me there one Christmas eve, causing the sweet maid who came in to turn down my bed covers to burst into tears at the sight of a single woman alone in a hotel room on such a night.
I thanked her for the offer to visit her home but, instead, made plans for Christmas day to fly on what turned out to be a very small plane on a very bumpy ride to the Mayan ruins at Tikal. I have a photo someone took of me after I had inched my way back down one of the ruins stretched out on the ground in exhaustion.
Another time, in Mexico City on my own, I suffered a sudden attack of stomach pains and the hotel doctor had to be called. I left in a hurry when my skimpy Spanish made out the words "gall bladder" and what seemed to be the doctor's eagerness to operate on the spot.
Driving in foreign countries has also begun to rattle me. Years ago, I was always fearless about driving on strange roads with different rules and trusted my Massachusetts license would cover me.
Left-side driving, or right, I could do it. Once in Dublin, I couldn't seem to get the small rental car out of the trolley tracks and backed up trolley traffic for miles. Lone travelers have more chance to meet the locals. When I finally got out of the trolley tracks and arrived in Killarney, I stopped at a grocery store to ask about the Ring of Kerry. A milkman who overheard me said he was making deliveries along that route and invited me to ride along with him and I did.
For years, I was so determined to travel alone that I steadfastly refused to go anywhere on a guided packaged group tour until friends invited me to join them on one to the former Soviet Union in 1977. At the time, it was the only way tourists could visit the country. I signed-on at the last minute and had a great time.
At age 18, many moons ago, I spent the summer biking around Europe with 10 other hostelers on a American Youth Hostel trip. Though our itinerary was planned in advance and we had a terrific leader, I was on my own a lot of the time, miles behind the rest, pushing my bike up the Alps.
One hot day in France, tired from pushing, I stopped at a café for water and was, instead, given a greenish substance I later surmised was absinthe. How else to explain that I took off my dirty socks and threw them in a brook, then pedaled like a Tour de France rider?
During the same trip, I got stung by an insect and had to be left at a hospital in Marseilles overnight where I slept fully clothed in my jeans and flannel shirt until a doctor ministered to my wound in the morning.
When I was released, the hospital would not take money because it turned out to be a mercy hospital for the needy. I caught up with the others by train on the French Riviera and we shampooed our hair in the ladies room of the Ritz.
I stayed on several weeks more after the other members of my group flew home, exchanging my airline ticket with a stranger I met in Amsterdam for a trip home on a freighter. While I waited for the ship to leave, I slept in hostels and other less-than-luxurious emporiums for wanderers like myself. I had several proposals. not always of
marriage.
During the two-week freighter trip, I found I was a passenger on a ship that was bringing Dutch immigrants to Canada. I had a lower bunk in steerage but never slept because children in wooden shoes kept clambering up and down the bunks around me. Along the way, my knapsack and sleeping bag were lost and only my bike and I arrived back in the States.
Now, suddenly, the opportunity has come for me to travel again. The same questions faced me. Where to go? How to get there? Do I, now, still want to take chances on finding a hotel room? Sleep in airports? (Not that I didn't recently almost do that.) Do I want to drive in countries where they drive on the left side? Do I want people to talk to and to exclaim over the sites I would see?
Unplanned as ever, I decided to try a group tour and to let someone else do the heavy lifting and thinking.
Several days before its nine-day, seven-night trip to Sicily was to leave, the Richard Durgan Travel Service of Stoneham informed me that there was a space for me in a group of 38, most of whom were friends, relatives, or neighbors who had traveled together before.
Once committed, I began to worry. What if no one talks to me or wants to eat with me? Can I spend hours on tour buses with total strangers? Can they do the same with me?
There was no need to worry. At Logan Airport, I was met by a friendly, smiling woman named Mary, the tour leader, who had already brought our tickets to the Alitalia counter. Seven hours later at Milan's Malpensa Airport, Mary saw to it that we all went to the right gate on time for the 1 ½-hour flight to Catania Airport in Sicily. Under her watchful eye, our luggage arrived the same time we did.
At Catania, we were met by Rosa Pizza, one of the local guides engaged by Durgan Travel and one of the finest. Rosa went to Sicily 23 years ago from her home in Plainville, Connecticut, to attend university. She married a Sicilian and now has two teenage boys.
Rosa saw to it that we and our luggage all got on the same bus for the hour's ride to the Hotel Ariston in Taormina, a resort high on the slopes of Mount Tauro overlooking Sicily's Ionian coast.
It was a relief for me not to have to run around trying to find a room. The three-star Ariston is a charming Mediterranean-style hotel constructed of white cement, with a red-tiled roof and wrought-iron balconies draped with wisteria and tropical flowers. After some of the hotels I had stayed at in my travels, it was paradise.
For seven days, we were able to eat three scrumptious meals a day from a buffet table laden with in-season vegetables, local fish, meat, poultry, and homemade breads, including panetonne.
In my lone travels, most of my meals have been of mysterious content from street stalls, usually eaten standing on the spot. Now, the Ariston's chef, Carmeio Catania, told me he prepares eggplant, my favorite food, twenty-three ways. I hoped to sample them all.
For seven days, Rosa, Mary, and several other tour guides made life easy for us. I could always trust that Mary would sit with me at meals, just as she was there for the others in the group. When one of us felt nauseous on the bus, Mary was there with the wastebasket. When another was buffeted by winds walking to a historic "duomo" (cathedral) on a cliff, Mary commandeered a private car to take her down to the bus.
When I had to change dollars to lira, Mary took me to a bank, told me how to check my camera in a cubicle outside, as required, and then pass, one at a time, through a glass enclosure as a guard watched our movements.
Our seven days in Sicily were filled with activity. When we weren't riding along spectacular mountain roads with hairpin turns in Mercedes buses navigated by drivers named Angelo, Giovanni, Mauricio, and Dino - all with nerves of steel - we were walking up cobbled streets and steps for another breathtaking site.
We walked a lot, mostly uphill, but what we found was always worth it. Being a mountain goat would have helped, but I never saw an overweight Sicilian.
One day, I went on my own on an optional bus tour to Agrigento to see the stunning Greek ruins at the Valley of the Temples and I missed my regular tour buddies. The strangers I had met the week before at Logan Airport had become friends.
Several days later, we said our good-byes when Mary and the group went to Rome and I headed for five days in Malta, a 25-minute flight from Catania. I had thought there was a ferry running between Sicily and Malta but I would have had to go far south to Pozzallo to catch one and that depended on the weather.
I began to feel lonely as I watched my group leave. I can't wait to see the photo the men took of us women out front of the church at Forza d'Agro where some of the scenes in "The Godfather" had been shot.
As I waved goodbye to Mary, I suddenly felt like a child who had lost its mother in a department store.
Malta, I told myself, would prove that I could still travel on my own. It did, but it wasn't so much fun.
I began to feel back in my "loner" groove on Air Malta's flight back to Catania to connect to Milan and, then, home.
I passed up Air Malta's 4 a.m. flight to Catania. Maltese use it for a day's shopping trip. I opted for the 5:25 p.m. flight, happy it would get me back to Catania, a city I didn't know, before darkness.
Two hours later, we were still on the ground in Malta. The plane was waiting for in-transit baggage from Casablanca; the owners of the baggage were already on board.
A reservation had been made for me at a hotel in Catania. "A three-star," I had been told, unaware how varied that rating can be.
Finally off the ground in Malta, it was 9 p.m. before I finally cleared customs in Catania, too late, I decided, to be driven through the streets of a big, strange city only to have to return the next morning for the flight to Milan.
A Mr. Alloni, a kindly Alitalia employee at the airport, told a cab driver the hotel I wanted and asked the fare: 35,000 lira, or about $18.
The ride through Catania to the outskirts seemed a lot longer than the 15 minutes I was told to expect. And the hotel was dismal. It reminded me of the places I stayed in my pre-tour days.
The hotel's feisty proprietress and I did not hit it off. The room with breakfast was priced at 170,000 lira, or $97, she told me. "Big bed, big bed," she said, touting its double bed.
Too tired to quibble, I took the rickety elevator to the fourth-floor room to find the "big bed" was two cots pushed together, a phone that didn't work, and a hand-held shower.
I put my coat on over my pajamas, my shoes on bare feet and went to the lobby.
"This is a dump," I said, trying to imitate the line made famous by Bette Davis in the 1949 film, "Beyond the Forest." "Not worth $97.
(Right now, the easiest way to convert lira to dollars is to halve the amount, so 170,000 was closer to $85. What Miss Davis actually said was, "What a dump!").
The proprietress stood firm. "I am going to report you to the polizia," said I. A paper and pencil appeared on the counter. "120,000 lira" was written down, now $60 instead of $97. I left for the airport at dawn the next morning, arriving four hours early. I skipped the "breakfast included" at the hotel.