Forward by Tim Skeet, Editor
I attended my first TCC meeting in Newport Beach, CA in 2009 and Pam Barrus was one of my first introductions to this wonderful club. Full of energy, I gravitated to her passion for travel and I clung to every story she told — humbled.
When I “inherited” the editor role from Pam, I knew her story would be told one day and I know you will be entertained by how she has captured the essence of a TCC member and traveler!
Thank you, Pam, for 20 years of service on the board, your past presidency and crafting the cur- rent Centurian design.
Djibouti 2010
While lying naked flat on my back on a small bed in a cheap hotel room, I stare at the ceiling fan twirling over my head. Thwop, thwop, thwop. There’s definitely something wrong with me. Most women would be vacationing at some spa resort, but no, I’m flying into Mogadishu in the morning. And I don’t have a lot of confidence in tomorrow’s flight since the last plane was some derelict, post-Soviet piece of junk with brown leather seats cannibalized from an old Braniff plane.
Genesis of a Traveler
Some people discover travel from a job or a revelation later in life. For me, I was hard-wired into it from birth. Who knows why I’d push little planes and boats around a map on the “Wide World Game” or bawl out to my parents on a 1950s cross-country car trip: “Are we in Missouri yet?!” and then happily paste a license plate sticker in my 48 states coloring book.
Lucky me to grow up in a family that was inquisitive about everything and had books on the wall—a lot of them: history books, books on geopolitics, biographies. My treasures were books by Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell. Like many other travelers, the books of Richard Halliburton introduced the marvels of the world just waiting for me to explore; an atlas was an instrument of wonder, and most of all, the books of Harry Franck put the idea in my head to simply walk out the door and keep on going. In today’s labeling, I was a free-range kid “just come home before dark!” But for the big stuff I had to bide my time…
I Make My Escape
Who can forget that first step into travel freedom? Deliberately choosing a university more than a day’s driving distance from home, I plotted out my first foreign trip to Mexico. With no passport and being underage, Mexico required a notarized statement from one’s parents authorizing travel to get the tourist card. Not a problem. A guy in the dorm had an old notary stamp he bought in an antique store. I notarized my own permission, caught a flight to Phoenix, bummed a ride down to the border at Nogales, and caught a train going south. As the train rattled through the dark of night into my new, unknown world, I was deliriously happy. The morning revealed brilliant colors, the musty fruity smell of the tropics, and the din of a vibrant street life where people spoke a different language. This was heady stuff! I hauled back embroidered blouses, jewelry, blankets, and whatever and sold them in the dorm to finance the next trip.
Once Upon a Time…
There was no internet; there was no Lonely Planet. And it worked out. In 1972 I walked out the door and kept going east, circling the globe several months later. Nobody ever knew where I was. Maybe there would be a letter in the American Express office in Delhi. I came home with ten cents in my pocket. And then I saved up money for the next trip and the next and the next. While people were doing useful and productive things with their lives, I obsessed over obscure bits on maps that I felt compelled to check out. A career meant nothing to me. I loved to learn, but my own time was priceless. While doing graduate work in Middle East Studies at UCLA in the late 1970s, I decided I hated academia, turned my car around, and drove back home. Far more worthwhile to me was to take a series of public buses from California all the way to Argentina.
There was a time you could have Petra, Palmyra, Machu Picchu, and Ta Prohm all to yourself, undiscovered by the tourist hordes. What a state of bliss! It was the wonders inside a country that released the dopamine in my brain’s reward center and not ticking off some random border crossing. Traveling through Cold War countries in the 1970s and ’80s was an education I would not get in a classroom. A lifetime project, I’ve been traveling or thinking about traveling constantly for over 50 years now, and am very proud that every trip has been financed by my own efforts and nobody else’s.
You’ll Never Come Back Alive!
Almost all my travels have been alone. Groups and tours don’t work for me, unless it’s the only way to get a visa or provide security in dodgy places. Groups, in my opinion, tend to have their share of braggers and bitchers. For me, it’s the one-on-one conversations that go on for hours or days with locals on an 26-hour bus ride, with a driver, or with someone at the next seat in a café — something that doesn’t necessarily happen when traveling with others — that create the best memories for me. Conversely, I don’t think many people could stand traveling with me.
Traveling solo as a young female overlanding across continents — across Asia, across Central Asia, down Central America, down South America, down Africa — for sure has it stories! Even hitching into Afghanistan. But nothing horrible ever happened. I think growing up on the beaches of Southern California, every kind of pervert and nutter imaginable passes by at some point, so you get a sixth sense of who, what, and where to avoid. It does help being tall, thin, and with dark hair, which in some areas of the world is kind of a turnoff to the local lo- tharios — either that or feigning some horrific gastro-intestinal disorder always worked.
I did get mugged on a crowded street in Madrid once while going out to dinner with some friends. Somebody slammed his elbow into the side of my face and tried to yank my purse off. It didn’t work, and somehow, we ended up in the middle of the Calle de Atocha rolling around fighting over my purse. All hell broke out around me. One nasty black eye and a lot of bruises led to an icepack and a bottomless glass of wine and plates of tapas over on the Plaza Mayor. I was high entertainment value! As fortune would later have it, I wrote up the story for some travel anthology book on Spain, it was accepted, and a check came in the mail!
Enter the Travelers’ Century Club
The Travelers’ Century Club came into my life in 1987, and at that time it was the only place where you could talk about obscure spots on the planet without sounding pompous or embarrassing those friends who had no clue to what you were talking about. The TCC list at the time was more about possibilities that maybe you hadn’t thought about, rather than an end goal in itself. For me, travel is about the movement, the learning, and the sheer joy of it all. I still read every book I can get my hands on before going anywhere. What’s the hurry?
An Existential Crisis
I remember wandering around the settlement of Edinburgh on Tristan da Cunha in 1993. It was like a ghost town, because out of fear of catching some horrific virus, locals stayed inside their houses with the curtains drawn. I felt like a voyeur. Who wouldn’t be creeped out with a boatload of people suddenly prowling your streets, standing in your garden, and taking pictures of your house? I’m not a wannabe anthropologist. And sometimes I wonder about the motivation to fly 17 hours halfway around the world to gawk at a skinny guy wearing a gourd on his dick — and paying to take his picture for an Instagram page. Today I still go for the wonders inside a country. It could be a spot that’s historically significant or even the sound of a name like Ujiji, Samarkand, or Timbuktu that keeps me awake at night — that and simply chatting with ordinary people I just happen to meet.
Other Ways to Travel
Since 2012 I have volunteered as an international election observer for the OSCE — all in Ukraine and once in Russia. Aside from being enormously rewarding, the best part is being deployed out to the back of beyond, in places that never see tourists. You learn so much and people happily talk with you. And in 2006, after hiking the Camino de Santiago from France to Santiago de Compostela, I discovered that I really liked long-distance hiking. I’ve hiked about half of the sixteen National Trails in England and Wales, from the 88-mile Hadrian’s Wall Path to the 630-mile South West Coast Path. Not only is the scenery glorious, you feel almost like a traveler from another age. My kind of thing!
Meanwhile, I look forward to the next dumpy hotel room with an overhead fan going thwop, thwop, thwop in some ever more obscure part of the globe, but I’ve figured out that there’s nothing wrong with me at all. Happiness is that ticket in my hand.
