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- [00:00]
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Apple Representative
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- [01:32]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. We have two stories for you this week and both of them are on the theme of travel because, well, it is summer after all and everybody's traveling. Our first story is by Tony Wheeler and it was told live in Melbourne in 2013. The theme of the night was Guts. Here's Tony.
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Tony Wheeler
Hello. Travel has always been part of my life. I grew up in first of all Pakistan, then in the Bahamas and then the USA. I'd never finished more than two years in the same school. And then 42 years ago, my wife Maureen and I arrived in Australia and we were British passport holders at the time. We're both Australians now, but we didn't turn up here as 10 pound poms, which was something you could still do back in those days. And nor did we arrive on one of the last ocean liners that were still sailing out from the UK to Australia. We didn't fly into Telemarine Airport. Telemarine, I think had been open for about a year and a half at that time. No. We turned up on a sailing boat out of Indonesia. We landed on the beach in Exmouth on the Northwest Cape of Western Australia. We had a few times in the previous two weeks. We wondered if we were going to really make it down here. I guess, in a way, we were boat people a long time before the term had been invented. Well, we'd actually set out from London in an old car that we thought would just drive it as far east as it went, and if it broke down, we'd just walk away from it and leave it. But it got us all the way from London to Afghanistan, and we sold it in Kabul for a small profit. I was telling people for years it was probably Osama bin Laden's getaway vehicle. And if they could have tracked that car down, they would have saved a lot of trouble, wouldn't have had to make that movie. But then we carried on by every means of transport you could find. And eventually we went down through Southeast Asia, and we got down to Bali at a time when there weren't a lot of tourists. I'd been to Bali, too. T shirt hadn't been invented yet either. But we were hanging around on a little cafe one day, and we heard these New Zealanders say, we only need two more crew and we'll sail down to Australia. And we thought, well, that sounds like fun. Let's go. So we joined them and we did sail down to Australia and landed on that beach. And if you needed the perfect introduction to Australia, our first 24 hours was absolutely that. We stood at the side of town with our thumbs out hitching a ride, and we watched kangaroos bound off into the bush, and we got picked up by a Yugoslav truck driver, and we ended up at a pub. And then there were Aboriginals there. And then we hitched another ride, and we ended up our first night in Australia. We traveled 400 kilometers south to Carnarvon, and our first night we spent sleeping on a mattress in the back of a station wagon in a garage with an orphaned baby joey tumbling around in a burlap sack that was pinned up to the wall. I mean, what a perfect way to arrive in this country. And then a year later, we published the first Lonely Planet guide. And it was really the story of our travels getting out here. It was subtitled Complete Guide to the Overland Trip. And we'd gone through some weird places. We'd come down through. We'd come through Iran, we traveled around Afghanistan, we'd gone through Pakistan. And I really. I got a taste for those sort of weird places. And with those first books, we realized there were a lot of other people who also had a taste for traveling to weird places. They're interesting, they're challenging. You may sell more copies of books to the nice Safe places. And I love Italy, I love France, but there's a bit more of a challenge to the weirder places in the world. And I still keep going to them. In fact, in the last couple of years I've taken shelter in an embassy in Kabul in Afghanistan because there was a riot going on outside and bullets flying around. I've been stopped for speeding in Zimbabwe in the last 12 months. I've been arrested once in the Congo for taking photographs in a place I shouldn't have been taking photographs even. I've sneaked into Iraq without a visa. So I've been to some places where I guess in a little way you could call them adventures. But I've never been searching for danger. In fact, I'm a sort of faint hearted sort of soul. I get very concerned when I'm flying on tatty aircraft from third rate airlines. And I don't like dark alleys and violence prone cities. And soldiers with big guns always make me feel very uneasy. Taxi drivers in lots of places in the world, I sit there gripping the side of the seat and I don't like swimming in deep water if there might be sharks down below. I've got to admit I don't like big spiders either. But you keep on doing these things. And we kept on doing this weird travel and then children came along and by then, you know, this was no longer just something we did because we enjoyed it. I did enjoy it, but it was also business, it was also life, it was also how I made my living. And I thought for a while either the kids came along or Maureen and I were living separately. She was with the kids and I was on the road and we wanted to keep traveling together. So for a number of years our kids came with us every school holiday when they started school, they were traveling somewhere. They'd been around South America before they were three years old. For a three month trip when our son was less than a year and our daughter was still two, we were in Kathmandu doing a little trek into the Himalayas. So they'd done some traveling and shortly after that we were in or where were we? Actually by the time Kieran was six years old, he'd been to every continent except Antarctica. But I really didn't want that travel to just be ticking numbers off on a list. Yeah, there's another continent gone. Because today there's so much misunderstanding in the world. And it's really by traveling that you meet people and you learn to understand them. And I wanted my kids to get some of that understanding that travel would be A way of connecting them to the outside world and understanding things about it. We were in Sri Lanka when Tashi had just had her third birthday in a garden in Kathmandu, and Kiran was still a baby almost. And we'd stopped at a little place on the beach and I was doing forays around the country from there and Maureen would stay with the kids. And then one day I took Tashi and we just drove along the coast a little way to Gaul, the beautiful old walled town on the coast. And we were looking around and I went to this one hotel, a beautiful old hotel. It's a building that dated from the late 1600s. And I'd been there before, so I knew what the hotel was like. And all I really had to do was look at the changes. They'd added a swimming pool since the last time I was there. But then as we were leaving, Tashi walking towards the car, Tashi took my hand and pulled at it and she said, daddy, we haven't checked the bathrooms. And I realized she knew what my job, part of what my job was all about. She knew that was part of what I had to do. And then when they were six and nine, by this time they'd learned to take perfectly good nouns and turned them into verbs. There were things like, we are templed out. We have seen all the temples we need to see, or we have done too much museuming today. We don't want to do any more of that. Well, we were in Luxor, down in the south of Egypt, and we'd been looking at the tombs. We'd just come out of Tutankhamun's tomb and they both announced they'd had quite enough tombing for today and they wanted to go back to the hotel. But heartless parents that we were, we were going on from the Valley of the Kings to the Valley of the Nobles. And we said, we're not only going to just go there, we're going to walk there over the hill that goes in between them. Nowadays, nowadays you're not going to Egypt at all, but nowadays you're not allowed to do that. You have to take the road by a taxi or a bus. But we were going to walk up the hill and down the other side. And our kids said, no, they were on strike, they were not going anywhere at all. And they sat down by the path. Well, Maureen and I walked up the hill expecting them to follow us very shortly. And we got about halfway up the hill and stopped to wait for them and looked down the hill and there were our two kids coming up the hill riding donkeys. And they came by us. And our son said, oh, we just saw this guy coming down the hill with his donkeys. And we said, how much to take your donkeys over to the Valley of the Nobles? Don't worry, dad, he said, I got him down from four Egyptian pounds to three. And I realized that they'd learned some things without even being taught it. I hadn't taught them how to bargain, they just learned it by themselves. And then when they were teenagers, Tashi was 17, we were in Guatemala, and we'd been up to the Mayan town of Tikal, up in the. Shrouded by the jungle, up in the mist shrouded areas. And then we'd come back by bus down to a town called Flores on a lake. And we were going on from there to Belize. And we were just getting towards the end of that bus trip, and Tashi said, oh, I'm not feeling very well. And then in the afternoon, she threw up. And when it was time for dinner, she said, look, I'm really not feeling well. I'll just stay home. You guys go out and have dinner. And we went out and had dinner, and when we came back, she'd thrown up some more, and then she threw up again and again and again and again. And she was just looking terrible. And she'd got. By now she'd got diarrhea and her hands were starting to cramp and her feet were cramping, which is a sign of dehydration. And I was getting really frightened. You know, you do things by yourself and, you know, that's looking after yourself. But you. You're not supposed to get other people into trouble. Particularly, you're not supposed to get your kids into trouble. Well, we did what you can do. And what you should do in this situation is you just pour liquid down them. The fact that they throw it up again doesn't make any difference. You just keep pouring liquid in flat. Coca Cola is a good thing to do. But it went on and on, and she just didn't get any worse. She was limp, she could barely respond to us. She could hardly answer questions. And it was getting dark by this time, and we were thinking, what on earth are we going to do? And I finally said, look, I've got to go out and get some medical attention. We can't do this. So I went downstairs and I went out in the street and it was completely dark and there was nobody around. But one of those miracles, a doctor, lived next door. And I went to him and I Explained what had happened, what was happening. And he, even though my Spanish is terrible, you know, I just dragged out the best, the best my Spanish could do. And he came back to the hotel and he diagnosed food poisoning and went back to his place and came back and gave her an injection of an antispasmodic to stop her throwing up, but it just didn't work. And then he said, I work in a hospital near the town. I'll get my car and I'll drive there. And he drove there and 45 minutes or an hour later he came back and he set up a drip. He turned hotel room into a little clinic and plugged the drip into Tashi and started putting medication in through the drip. And she gradually started to quieten down and finally she went peacefully to sleep and he left. And we took turns staying up all night keeping an eye on her. And he came back at dawn and she, a day or so she'd recovered. And I thought afterwards, you know, well, this is one of those things that you're very lucky that there's a doctor living next door and you talk about the kindness of strangers and when you're traveling you often do encounter that kindness of strangers. And definitely I'd encountered it at that time and what had I done? I just been brave enough to inflict my terrible Spanish on somebody, but that was just about all I'd done. But then I thought, you know, well, is there anything more to this? You know, have I just put her off travel forever? I've sort. We pulled her back from the edge because we were really frightened. But you know, is there any more to this? But you know, a decade and a half passes and kids grow up and we sell Lonely Planet. And a lot of the money we got from Lonely Planet we put into a foundation which we call Planet Wheeler. And we've got 70 odd projects around the world and somebody has to go out and check these projects. We checking a water project in Ethiopia or a school in Tanzania or a children's hospital that we helped to fund in Cambodia. And who goes to do it? My daughter. Thank you.
- [14:44]
Dan Kennedy
Tony Wheeler, along with his wife, is the founder of the Lonely Planet Guidebook company. He's also the author of Tony Wheeler's Badlands.
- [14:53]
Great Courses Representative
The Moth is supported by the Great Courses. Moth listeners love to learn about new things. That's why they love the great Courses plus Video learning service. You can learn from award winning professors about anything that interests you anytime you want with the great Courses plus you can stream video lectures on thousands of fascinating topics including the lecture series the Fundamentals of Photography. Learn from a National Geographic photographer how to capture your memories through photos with techniques like framing, lighting, and composition. If you haven't signed up yet, do it now and you'll immediately get a free month of unlimited access to all of the great courses, plus lectures. Start your free month today. Go to thegreatcoursesplus.com moth remember, it's thegreatcoursesplus.com.
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Dan Kennedy
Moth next up, we have a story from Aaron Wolf. And he told this story at the Highline Ballroom here in New York City. The theme of the night was into the Wild. Here's Aaron.
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Aaron Wolf
A few years ago, I'm sitting at home on my couch in Brooklyn watching tv, and I get an email from my wife, Naomi. Naomi's in El Salvador. And she says I'm okay, which is never a good sign. And then she says that the NGO that she's working with has undergone a series of attacks. There's been hijackings and carjackings and even an assassination. And so I snap into action. I go straight to my therapist and I tell my therapist that I'm really scared, but I'm also kind of jealous. Naomi and I have been spending a lot of time apart lately. She lives this life of, like, adventure and danger and excitement, and I like watching the Yankees. And I'm starting to be afraid that I'm not exciting enough for her. And worse, I'm starting to fear that she's starting to feel that I'm not exciting enough for her. Which is why six months later, I'm on a boat headed towards a jungle volcanic island in Nicaragua with my wife, Naomi. Three weeks, we're going to volunteer on a farm. Naomi gets adventure and excitement, and I get to prove prove to her that I can be dangerous and sexy. Because what my therapist told me is that my therapist told me is that a man without fear is a dangerous man. And a dangerous man can be a sexy man. And I'm not sure why. My therapist is like a samurai love guru, but he is, and I was listening. So the first couple of days on the farm don't go great. We sleep in a tent, which is to say Naomi sleeps in a tent. I search a tent maniacally for mosquitoes all night long. And every night I stay up listening to these sounds. The jungle is incredibly loud, and the one sound I fixate on is the sound of these howler monkeys. And they just scream and it echoes through the hills. And it's scary and eerie and kind of sexy, and I Become obsessed with this idea that if I can just see a howler monkey, I don't know how this works exactly, but if I see one, I can kind of like take its essence and become dangerous and sexy. And so I really desperately want to see one. And a few days later, it's the day of New Year's Eve and all the volunteers on the farm are sort of gathered and we're going to make a big meal together. We're chopping vegetables, we're kind of bullshitting. And all of a sudden this strange thing happens. One of the guard dogs starts barking like crazy and takes off down a jungle path, which is not the strange thing. The strange thing is I take off after it and I'm running through the jungle, just running as fast as I can, and the dog is running in front of me and I have no idea what I'm gonna find. I'm kind of picturing a Sandinista Rebel with an AK47 or like an earnest hippie with high grade weed. Either one would be terrifying to me. And I get to the dog, and the dog is in a clearing and she's growling and spitting and going crazy. And she's staring up at this tree because in this tree is a baby howler monkey. And I'm amazed and I'm staring up at it. And then I realize that I'm surrounded by a fish of howler monkeys. There's babies and adolescents and females. And then there's the alpha male. And I know he's the alpha male because he's got balls the size of my head. And I think, here it is, Aaron, you're about to become dangerous and sexy. And then I think, oop, I better get Naomi. So she sees that I become dangerous and sexy. So I run back to the camp and I say, everybody, you gotta come quick. And everybody comes back and we stand there and we watch. And they're amazing. They're.
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Tony Wheeler
They're beautiful.
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Aaron Wolf
They're putting on the show. They're hanging from their tails, they're grooming each other, they're feeding each other, and it's just wonderful. And then slowly, one by one, the volunteers head back to the kitchen to keep cooking. And I'm left alone with Naomi and the dog, who's now just quiet, just kind of chilling. And I'm kind of not feeling dangerous and sexy yet. But there's also food to cook. So I say goodbye to them and I leave. And I get four steps down the path when I learn something. I learned that the howler monkey is the loudest language mammal on earth. And I learned that because as soon as I'm out of sight, the alpha male decides he's going to let Naomi know who's boss. And he starts going crazy. And it sounds, if you'll permit me, a little bit like this, which I know coming from me sounds like I just did a Bikram yoga class. But from him in the jungle, it's terrifying. And I go running back and there he is, he's on a low branch and his teeth are huge and he's screaming at Naomi. And I turn to Naomi and I said, we gotta get out of here. But Naomi is gone. She is running down the path to the jungle. And I'm alone with the monkeys and the dog. And the dog is barking and the monkeys are barking and I think, I gotta get out of here. But I also gotta get the dog. Because what if the dog attacks the monkey or the monkey attacks the dog, or what if they both attack me? What if the monkey gets the taste of human flesh? Or what if the monkey already has the taste of human flesh? I'm freaking out. And then the monkeys start throwing shit at me, which is when I start begging the dog, please just come with me. But she's 120 pound Rottweiler. She's made of muscle and teeth and she's not budging. And then that's when this spindly hippie volunteer kid named Scott comes over and he's like, hey bro, we should probably get out of here. I'm like, dude, I'm wrestling a rottweiler. You're not helping. And he's like, come on baby. Not, not working. And then it starts to rain and I say, scott, it's raining. And Scott's like, it's not raining, dude. And I look up and there's the alpha with his huge teeth and his bigger balls. And he's pissing directly on me. And I say, scott, they're peeing on me. Which is apparently the phrase you have to say to a 150 pound hippie kid to get him to pick up a growling rottweiler and run. Because that's what he does, he just stoops her up and runs. And I'm like, right, that's what I probably should have done. And then I run to and it's over. As quickly as it started, it's over. The monkeys head back up to the volcano, I head to the shower. We get into bed that night, Naomi and I, and we feel kind of happy and kind of hopeful and not because I was dangerous and sexy. I wasn't dangerous, it turns out. Howler monkeys, vegetarians, totally timid. That's why they're so loud. And I definitely wasn't sexy because I still smelled like monkey pockets. But we were happy because we were on a farm on a volcanic island in the middle of Nicaragua and we were finally doing it together. Thanks.
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Dan Kennedy
Aaron Wolfe Aaron Wolfe is a Moth Grand Slam winning storyteller. He's also a screenwriter and filmmaker as well as an obsessive fan of the Tottenham Hotspur football club. His film Record Play was shortlisted for an Academy Award. You can find out more about aaron@aaron-wolf.com that's all for this week. Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week.
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Great Courses Representative
Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock on An American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer.
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Dan Kennedy
With the Moth Podcast, production by Mooj Zaidy. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Rueest. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.
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Aaron Wolf
Org.