Lost and Found

Baseball player Yogi Berra, the maestro of misquotes and muddled thinking once said “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.”

I have a terrible sense of direction. It’s embarrassing. I’ve been lost in parking lots, department stores and hotels. I can get lost in a crowd of two. I’m an avid scuba diver with more than 100 dives under my belt, but I’m always completely astounded when the dive master guides us effortlessly back to the boat. Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t be able to navigate my way around a city block in Atlantis. Kind of ironic for a guy who’s traveling the world, don’tcha think?

I was in downtown Christchurch, New Zealand, and because of all the street closings as a result of September’s big earthquake, I had to park some distance from my destination. Because I’ve had so many experiences getting helplessly, hopelessly lost, I had recently downloaded a really cool app to my iPhone made by TomTom which includes every street and alley in the entire country of New Zealand, as well as a GPS device.

I typed in “Christchurch Art Center”, and magically the directions popped up on the screen, including a little blue arrow indicating where I was. I’m a guy who is still amazed by a fax machine, so this technology is nothing sort of magic to me. In my excitement, I failed to take note of any of my surroundings, including the fact that I was parked next to a meter with a maximum time of one hour.

I dutifully followed the directions on my screen, and was so immersed in doing so, that by the time I arrived at the museum, I realized that while en route I had not been watching for any recognizable landmarks or committing any of the street names to memory. Not only that, but I had failed to mark the position of my car on the screen, so I had no way to retrace my steps. And I was absolutely clueless as to where I had parked my car.

This fact was in the forefront of my mind as I toured the exhibit, and kept nagging at me as I wondered how I’d find my way back to my car through the busy downtown city center. One of the sculptures in the exhibit was a self-portrait of the artist, about 20 times life size, and as I walked around behind the face, the head was completely empty. How fitting.

When I left the museum, I feebly retraced my steps as far as I was able. By the time I got to the general vicinity where I had parked (and by “vicinity”, I mean an area measuring approximately 1 square mile) I had absolutely no effing clue as to where my vehicle might be. I imagined myself calling the car rental company and saying “I’ve lost your car somewhere in downtown Christchurch, and I have absolutely no idea where it is. How much does it cost to rent the car for the rest of my life?”

Whenever I feel that level of panic start to rise, I take a deep breath and try to convince myself that I have no evidence to support the premise that things don’t work out. One way or another, they always do. And there’s usually a lesson to be learned and/or a funny story to tell afterwards. So I pictured myself finding my car…or not, and laughing about it later.

Suddenly it dawned on me that on my way to the Art Center, I had momentarily stopped into a store in search of a watch band. What was the name of that store? Something exotic and far away. Kinda like my car.

Kathmandu! Yeah, that was the name of the store…Kathmandu! And I had about as much chance of finding it as Timbuktu. I stopped a passerby and asked him if he knew where the store was located, and he pointed me in the right direction (which I had passed a few blocks back), but when I got there, nothing looked familiar. I wasn’t even sure it was the right Kathmandu.

So I decided to try Zen navigation, which I invented on the spot. I also invented Zen Portuguese, Zen Caricature Drawing and Zen Limbo. In each case, you simply pretend you know how to do the task at hand, and as if by magic, you can! This method is unreliable at best, and works much better when you’re relaxed and in a party atmosphere, instead of standing on a street corner in an unfamiliar city, hyper-ventilating and wondering how many hours of daylight you have left.

I walked straight to my car, which had been parked in a metered spot for 3 hours and had not been ticketed. On the up side, getting lost is a great way to get plenty of exercise, fill your bloodstream with adrenaline, meet new people and explore the unexpected!

Footnote: A couple of days later I was hiking in a fairly remote area with a guy I had met at the guest house where I was staying. We were in an overgrown creek bed, the daylight was beginning to fade, and neither of us had any idea where the trail was. Thankfully he was the German equivalent of an Eagle Scout, and managed to get us back on track. But not before he said to me “You don’t have a very good sense of direction do you?”

Nope...I don’t. But I’m good at other stuff.

Top 10 Unusual Amenities

The following is a partial list of unusual amenities I've run across in the various places I've stayed during the last 3 months:

1. A coin-operated air conditioner. $1 bought you 3 hours of cold air. Which was about the length of time it took to get the room below oven temperature. At midnight I put in $2 and used my sweat as an alarm clock.

2. A room that had the fragrance of pine-scented disinfectant and cat urine. Try as I might, I never did get used to it.

3. Air conditioners that make as much noise as an idling tractor.

4. Rooms with no windows. And rooms with windows but no glass or screens.

5. Rooms which, during a rain storm, sound like a fire-cracker factory because of all the debris falling on the tin roof.

6. Towels that smelled like they’d been used to wrap a corpse. When I requested clean towels, the new ones smelled like they’d been used to wrap a corpse that had been buried for 3 years and then exhumed.

7. Pillow cases with fresh blood stains on them.

8. A room with a nest of highly venomous sea snakes under it. I almost stepped on one about 3 feet long one night.

9. The room with sea snakes under it had a door that wouldn’t close. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep.

10. Showers that worked only occasionally, with no predictable pattern or schedule. Showers that produced only a trickle of cold, rusty water. Showers with so much mildew growing in them that they looked like a biology experiment gone waaaay wrong. Showers where you had to bathe in the dark while standing ankle deep in stagnant water. No shower at all…so I bathed where everyone else did...in the river where the drinking water came from.