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Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisherHumorous tales of travel and misadventure.Lonely Planet knows that some of life's funniest experiences happen on the road. Whether they take the form of unexpected detours, unintended adventures, unidentifiable dinners or unforgettable encounters, they can give birth to our most found travel lessons, and our most memorable - and hilarious - travel stories.These 31 globegirdling tales that run the gamut from close-encounter safaris to loss-of-face follies, hair-raising rides to culture-leaping brides, eccentric expats to mind-boggling repasts, wrong roads taken to agreements mistaken. The collection brings together some of the world's most renowned travellers and storytellers with previously unpublished writers.Includes stories by Wickam Boyle, Tim Cahill, Joshua Clark, Sean Condon, Chistopher R.Cox, David Downie, Holly Erikson, Bill Fink, Don George, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Jeff Grenwald, Pico Iyer, Amanda Jones, Kathie Kertesz, Doug Lansky, Alexander Ludwick, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Jan Morris, Brooke Neill, Rolf Potts, Laura Resau, Michelle Richmond, Alana Semuels, Deborah Steg, Judy Tierney, Edwin Tucker, Jeff Vize, Danny Wallace, Kelly Watton, Simon Wichester, Michelle WittonAbout Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places where they travel.TripAdvisor Travellers' Choice Awards 2012 and 2013 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves, it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia) *#1 in the world market share - source: Nielsen Bookscan. Australia, UK and USA. March 2012-January 2013

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Publié par	Lonely Planet
Date de parution	01 mai 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781760340414
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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BY THE SEAT OF MY PANTS
H UMOROUS T ALES OF T RAVEL AND M ISADVENTURE
EDITED BY D ON G EORGE
LONELY PLANET PUBLICATIONS Melbourne • Oakland • London
By the Seat of My Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel and Misadventure
Published by Lonely Planet Publications
Head Office:
90 Maribyrnong Street, Footscray, Vic 3011, Australia
Locked Bag 1, Footscray, Vic 3011, Australia
Branches:
150 Linden Street, Oakland CA 94607, USA
2nd floor, 186 City Rd, London, EC1V 2NT, UK
First published 2005
This edition published 2011
Printed in China
Copy edited by Janet Austin
Designed by Daniel New
Cover design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
By the seat of my pants : humorous tales of travel and misadventure / edited by Don George.
2nd ed.
eISBN 9781760340414
© Lonely Planet and contributors 2015.
LONELY PLANET and the Lonely Planet logo are trade marks of Lonely Planet Publications Pty. Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the written permission of the publisher.
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Sights of Prague – Danny Wallace
Blackout in Ushuaia – Michelle Richmond
The Snows of Carrara – David Downie
The Boat From Battambang – Christopher R Cox
On Safari, Only the Animals Sleep Through the Night – Kelly Watton
Something Approaching Enlightenment – Rolf Potts
A Special Kind of Fool – Bill Fink
Ignoring the Admiral – Jan Morris
Dutch Toilet – Doug Lansky
Walk of Fame – Jeff Vize
The Culinary Chaos Principle – Don George
Faeces Foot – Tim Cahill
Real Cowboys Wear Polka Dots – Judy Tierney
You Ain t Seen Nuthin Yet – Sean Condon
No Food, No Rest, No… – Pico Iyer
An Idyll in Ibiza – Karl Taro Greenfeld
Snake Karma – Linda Watanabe McFerrin
Snaking Through Italy – Wickham Boyle
The Afghan Tourist Office – Alexander Ludwick
Left Luggage – Jeff Greenwald
Let the Buyer Beware – Edwin Tucker
An Award-Winning Performance – Deborah Steg
Carpet-Rolling – Brooke Neill
A Matter of Trust – Michelle Witton
Naked in Oaxaca – Laura Resau
The Garden Kitchen – Holly Erickson
Coming to America – Amanda Jones
Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Alana Semuels
The Most Perfect Hotel in the World – Simon Winchester
The Prince and I – Kathie Kertesz
Wangara s Cross – Joshua Clark
INTRODUCTION
Travel is funny. Not always, of course, and often it s funnier in retrospect, but you can be pretty sure that just about any journey is going to offer some moments of unadulterated hilarity or at least unanticipated irony. And usually at your own expense. That s just the way of the road.
In thirty years of wandering the globe, I ve learned that the one thing I can reliably expect when I travel is that something unexpected will happen. And when it does, I ll be forced to call on all my grace, sensitivity, courage and wisdom. And when they don t respond, I ll be forced to call on my sense of humour.
That s why my #1 rule of the road is this: if you don t pack your sense of humour with your sunscreen, sooner or later you ll get burned.
By the Seat of My Pants springs from this notion. These thirty-one tales of on-the-road adventures and encounters encompass the full comic spectrum, from the wryly ironic to the laugh-out-loudably absurd. While the stories vary widely in setting, subject and tone, they all remind us that some of travel s greatest treasures are those unexpected, unimaginable situations that make us laugh – at the world and at ourselves.
That s one reason for this book. Here s the second. Thirty years ago, on a soaring spring day on the Princeton University campus, I made a momentous decision. I decided to forego the familiar paths most of my graduating friends were taking – grad school, med school, law school, jobs in long-established firms – and follow a different track: I would live in Paris for the summer on a work-abroad internship, move to Athens for the academic year on a teaching fellowship, and then… I had no idea.
I had absolutely no idea what I would do next. I just knew that something deep and irresistible was impelling me to go to Paris and Athens, and that if I ignored this urge, I would regret it for ever. The rest, I trusted, would take care of itself. So the week after graduation I packed up my life and set off for Europe, without any friends to meet me, with no place to stay and no coherent overall plan. I was making a grand leap into the unknown – flying by the seat of my pants.
That was the beginning of my life as a traveller, and the beginning of my resolution to trust the pants-seat and make the leap – a resolution that has conferred innumerable and life-changing gifts over the ensuing thirty years.

Flying by the seat of your pants is a quintessential part of the traveller s act and art. You ll be cruising along with everything seeming to be working out just fine, when suddenly reality tilts and teeters and you re confronted with something entirely unexpected – a flat tyre, a missed train, a mystifying meal, a kindly but incomprehensible villager, an unmapped fork in the path. Time to put on the pants.
The tales in this book illustrate this principle and the wide variety of forms it can take. Sometimes the need arises in the middle of an otherwise uneventful trip, as Jan Morris discovers on her first trip aboard a vaporetto voyage in Venice, and Michelle Richmond learns in a hotel room at the end of the world in Ushuaia, Argentina. Sometimes entire trips can go horribly wrong, as on Pico Iyer s wide-eyed, white-knuckle, four-wheel whirl through Ethiopia, Chris Cox s decidedly not-as-advertised boat to Angkor Wat, and Danny Wallace s assignment in Prague with an Uzi-toting kidnapper-cum-tour guide.
Sometimes travel thrusts us into unexpected encounters with locals. Jeff Greenwald peers into dusty Indian depths in a confrontation with a luggage wallah in Calcutta s airport, Edwin Tucker gets much more than he bargained for when he unwittingly trades his last pen for a shepherd s lamb in Tibet, Laura Resau befriends a Mexican village boy and receives an unforgettable lesson in traditional bathing rites from his mother, and Deborah Steg is treated to an award-worthy dinner performance by an unctuous new ami in Cannes, in southern France.
At other times our travelling companions are the challenge, whether it s Tim Cahill s exasperatingly annoyance-proof caving partner in Thailand, Judy Tierney s wrangler-wannabe boyfriend on a boot-shopping spree in Texas, Sean Condon s exhaustingly enthusiastic uncle in Vermont or the family from hell that Karl Taro Greenfeld lands among when his girlfriend introduces him to idyllic Ibiza. At other times we put on the pants of the fool ourselves, as Bill Fink discovers on a spontaneous expedition to climb Mount Fuji in Japan, Doug Lansky understands inside an exit-less Dutch toilet and Jeff Vize realises as a crowd-pleasing pedestrian in Bangladesh.
Finally, on some journeys it s the destination itself that dissembles, as the alluring marble marvels of Italy s Apuan Alps do for David Downie and a reputed Buddhist Shangri-La near the India–Tibet border does for Rolf Potts. Amanda Jones s youthful escape to the United States becomes a nightmare when she discovers that her promised apartment isn t available and she is suddenly homeless in San Francisco. Holly Erickson s dream job as a live-in cook in a London apartment takes a tilt when she breezes in to find that the garden kitchen is literally so.
Ah, the rewards of the road!

When I first set out to compile this anthology, I knew from my own experiences and thirty years of conversations with friends and fellow travellers that the theme was resonant – but I had no idea we would end up with this rich repository of tales. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the numerous writers with whom I have worked in the past, who agreed to share their favourite on-the-road bungles, bumps and bounces. And I owe a second debt to all the writers who responded to the competition we sponsored on www.lonelyplanet.com , which elicited – much to our amazement and delight – more than six hundred submissions. Wonderfully, and fittingly, the compilation that resulted brings together stories from some of the world s best-known travellers and storytellers side-by-side with works by writers who have never been published before.
Compiling this collection has been its own glorious seat-of-the-pants journey, but now that it is nearly over, I can look back and discern four fundamental and interwoven lessons revealed along the way.
The first is that the world offers an inexhaustible supply of surprises. We may think we know what s around the next corner, but we never do. And this is precisely why travel continues to excite and delight.
The second lesson is that whatever surprises the world throws our way, we can cope with them gracefully and generously, as long as we maintain our sense of humour, which is compass and counsellor all in one.
The third lesson hearkens back to Plato, who famously wrote that necessity is the mother of invention. The tales in this collection amply illuminate the traveller s corollary: adversity is the mother of invention. Travel thrusts us into all manner of unexpected situations, with all kinds of unimagined people, and in so doing, it challenges and stretches – and teaches – us in unexpected and unimagined ways. Adversity offers us irreplaceable lessons in humility, flexibility, open-mindedness, open-heartedness, resilience and resourcefulness. In this sense, our seat-of-the-pants adventures ultimately teach us not just about the people and places of the world that we didn t know existed – but about the unknown, unexplored corners of ourselves.
And the fourth lesson springboard