When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home

When You Look Like

Your Passport Photo,

It's Time To Go Home

Books by Erma Bombeck

At Wit's End

“Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!”

I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression

The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank

If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

Aunt Erma's Cope Book

Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession

Family: The Ties That Bind ... and Gag!

I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up,

I Want to Go to Boise

When You Look Like Your Passport Photo,

It's Time to Go Home

Erma Bombeck

When You Look Like

Your Passport Photo,

It's Time To Go Home

HarperCollinsPublishers

WHEN YOU LOOK LIKE YOUR PASSPORT PHOTO, IT'S TIME TO GO HOME. Copyright ©

1991 by Erma Bombeck. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by Karen Savary

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bombeck, Erma When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home/Erma Bombeck.—

1st rd.

p.cm.

ISBN 0-06-018311-X

1. Bombeck, Erma—Journeys 2. Humorists, American—20th century— Journeys. 3. Voyages and travels—Humor. 4. Travel Humor 1. Title

PS3552.059Z47 1991 818'.5403—dc20 [B] 91-055097

91 92 93 94 95 MAC/RRD 10 987654321

Contents

Papua New Guinea

Centerville, Ohio

Closing Down the House

Canada

“Honey, I Just Ditched the Kids”

Packing

Twenty-One-Day European Getaway

The Rental Car

Italy

Tipping

Cruising the Baltic

Shopping

South America

Flying for Peanuts

Language

Spain

Six Worst Arguments on Vacation

Death by Drivers

Indonesia

Slides

Africa

Picking a Date for the Family Trip

Rafting Down the Grand Canyon

“Let Me Entertain You”

Antiquity

Sick

Mexico

Traveling with Parents

Restrooms

Istanbul

Brochure Speak

Alaska

Working Vacations

Russia

A Jack Nicholson Wheat Toast Day

Montserrat

Great Barrier Reef

Time to Go Home

Jet Lag

Homecoming

Papua New Guinea

When You Look Like

Your Passport Photo,

It's Time To Go Home

Papua New Guinea

The gunshots started about two in the morning. They were followed closely by the sounds of broken bottles being thrown at the hotel and screams from the room next door. Lying next to me in bed was a lunatic who brought me to this place to shed the stress of kids, phones, and meal-planning anxiety.

This was the third week of our vacation in Papua New Guinea, and my husband and I were in the middle of a tribal war in a small village called Kundiawa.

In the lull, we both stared at the ceiling of the dark room, not daring to move. “Call me crazy,” I said, “but I don't think these people have a handle on tourism.”

My husband breathed deeply. “I've told you before, the fighting has nothing to do with us. It's between two tribes.”

“You do have a way of turning gray skies into blue,” I said flatly.

A dog barked. In the hallway outside our door, there were hurried footsteps and shouting that faded quickly.

“Did you know there is no water in this hotel?” I asked.

“How many times do I have to tell you, this is a third-world country. You can't expect to have a mint on your pillow every night. You have to appreciate the primitive charm of this place.”

“Do you think it's safe to crawl across the floor to the bathroom?”

“No,” he said and turned over to sleep.

I couldn't close my eyes. What was I doing here? I was a woman who washed her tennis shoes every week sleeping on a pillow without a case. A woman who hyperventilated when she found a roach in her grocery bag sharing a park restroom with a snake coiled just above the commode. A woman who brought one nice dress with her to wear to church on Sundays only to discover the natives went to Mass topless. God, I hated being overdressed!

Vacations always sound so great on paper. They are supposed to save your marriage, save your sanity, bring about understanding in the world, clear up your skin-all those things. The truth is if you do them right, they're hard work. They're like an Outward Bound experience with diarrhea. We pay a lot of money to sleep in airports, lug around suitcases twice our body weight, eat food we can't identify, and put our lives in the hands of people we have never met before.

In more than twenty years of traveling, I had to admit, Papua New Guinea was the most unusual culture I had ever witnessed. I know that because my husband told me so. He is like one of those talking cassettes where you hit a button and it spews out details of what you are seeing. Just push on his navel and you'll hear, “On May 27, 1930, Papua New Guinea became the last inhabited region on the planet to be explored by Europeans.” He will also tell you it is crucial to see all of this before civilization dumps its technology on it in the name of progress.

When he delivered that soliloquy, we were standing on a dirt street in the center of Goroko where people had their pigs on leashes. Somehow I didn't feel the threat was imminent.

Their driving laws weren't exactly out of an AAA manual. If you are involved in an accident in Papua New Guinea, don't stop. Keep going until you reach the nearest police station. There is a payback law by which the wronged person randomly selects the next person matching your skin color and kills him. If you hit a pig, don't even think of pausing to make restitution, but go to the police. “And don't forget,” my husband warned, “if you see people walking with axes, knives, or bows and arrows, do not stop. Keep moving.”

I remember staring at him and saying, “You have just ruined my surprise.”

Another gunshot cracked into the night. I shook my husband awake. “Are you wearing your Mickey Mouse underwear today?”

“Yes,” he said sleepily.

“Then tomorrow must be Wednesday . . . Joe Palooka day.”

“Try to get some sleep,” he said. He resumed snoring.

The underwear. It had all seemed so long ago since we arrived here. We were scheduled to stop off in Papeete in Tahiti for a couple of days to get over jet lag before pushing on to Port Moresby. I remember it was eleven o'clock at night when the luggage carousel ground to a sickening halt and we realized we were the last two people there. I had my luggage, but my husband had the look of a man who had just had his life-support system removed.

“My luggage! It's not here,” he gasped. “It's probably still on the plane here in Tahiti. I'm going to check on it before the plane takes off.”

I grabbed his arm. “Grow up! It's not still on the plane. It's probably back in Phoenix.”

“Everything I own is in those suitcases. My binoculars, my film, all my clothes and toiletries.”

“Did I ever tell you about that grandmother from Fort Lauderdale?”

“Yes,” he said miserably, looking for an agent.

“She was going to her grandson's wedding in Pittsburgh and her luggage went to Canada?”

“You told me,” he said.

“The airline told her if she didn't receive her luggage in twenty-four hours, she would receive $35 for new underwear, but that was the least of her problems because all she had to wear to the wedding were the slack suit and sneakers she had traveled in. Are you sure I didn't tell you this?”

“Do you see a representative of the airline anywhere?”

“Anyway,” I continued, “the family tried to come to the rescue, but the mother of the bride was too short and too thin, so she finally ended up in something that fit—a blue maternity dress. They washed out the old spots and dried it with a hair dryer and she marched down the aisle between her two grandsons wearing a maternity dress and a pair of gold bedroom slippers.”

“Make your point,” he said, irritably shuffling through the claim forms.

“The point is we are en route to Papua New Guinea for a trip down the Sepik River and you are dressed like an investment broker.”

“The luggage will show up,” he said.

My last words on the subject were “In your dreams.”

He had ignored the first commandment of adventurers everywhere, “Thou shalt not travel with anything thou cannot carry at a dead run for half a mile and store under thy seat.” He was learning firsthand what a man in St. Louis found out when he told the ticket agent he was going to Dallas and asked, “Can you check my luggage through to Honolulu and Passaic, New Jersey, first?” When the agent said he couldn't do that, the passenger replied, “Funny, you routed it there last week.”

Two days passed in Tahiti. . . two days of lounging around the pool in a business suit. I told him, “Stick a lamp cord in your ear and everyone will think you're a Secret Service agent.” On the fourth day out, I convinced him his luggage had gone to that big Bermuda Triangle in the sky. He simply had to go shopping.

Port Moresby looked like the best shot to pull together a wardrobe, considering it is the capital city of Papua New Guinea and the main gateway to the South Pacific. It would probably offer the best shopping before we went into the highlands of the Wahgi Valley, the small towns of Lae and Madang, or the primitive villages dotting the Sepik River. We expected the selection of clothes to be limited. That was a given. But we didn't anticipate the real problem of shopping in Port Moresby.

Papua New Guinea has an indigenous population. Its people are the products of dozens of ethnic groups, mostly Melanesians. There are bearded highlanders, hook-nose lowlanders, men who wear body armor, wig men, mud men, warriors, fishermen, farmers, and mountaineers. With the exception of the people of the North Solomons, they all have one thing in common. They are short. Real short. They don't walk under coffee tables, but most of them are no more than four feet tall.

When my husband, who is six feet tall and wears a size twelve shoe, walked into the menswear department in Port Moresby, the salesman didn't know whether to launch him or erect him in the center of town and direct traffic around him. In metric, he was awesome. There are a few Australians in the city, but mostly you're looking at little people who go around talking earnestly to licit buckles.

I must also add that Papuan New Guineans are the world's friendliest people. Upon meeting you they will grasp your hand excitedly, say good morning, and begin a conversation. (In the bush the greetings are a little more graphic. Women push in your chest with both of their hands. When I asked how the men greeted one another, our guide said, “You don't want to know.”)

As my husband flipped through the racks of little shirts and troll shorts, he said, “This has got to be the boys' department.”

“No, no, it's for men,” said our salesperson, a young kid who never stopped smiling. During u lull, he turned to me and said, “Did you know that Number ()ne Jesus Man was just here?”

“And who would that be?” I asked.

“The Pope. Do you know him? He came to Port Moresby and kissed the ground.”

I told him I had not had the pleasure.

Then he observed, “You are from America?” I nodded. “Then perhaps you know a friend of mine. He lives in Chicago.”

“What's his name?” I asked.

My husband stared at me astonished. “Are you crazy?” he whispered. “Do you know the odds of—”

“His name is Joe,” said the clerk.

“I only know one Joe in Chicago,” I said.

“It's probably him.” He smiled.

I waited on a small chair while my husband paraded in and out of the dressing room in one little outfit after another looking for approval. After several pairs of trousers that would have seen him through a Texas flood, I said, “I'm telling you this as a friend. Stick to the shorts.”

Reinforced by a gym bag filled with underwear emblazoned in old comic strip characters, a couple pairs of shorts, and a few T-shirts, we embarked on our first adventure through a country where women are considered currency and isolated ceremonial cannibalism was practiced as recently as the 1950s.

If nothing else, the limited wardrobe took away major decisions. We measured time by my husband's underwear. Every Monday he wore the Blondie and Dagwood print while Tuesday's Mickey Mouse print was drying and Wednesday's Joe Palooka was being washed.

The drive through the highlands was incredibly lush and beautiful. At one point our driver pointed out a remote spot where a plane had gone down several years ago. “The natives saw it fall to the ground,” he said, “and when they got there, two were still alive.”

“They took them to the hospital?” I asked.

“They ate them,” he said.

It gave new meaning to the catch-of-the-day.

We stopped at a few burial caves where villagers inter their family by propping the skeletons up on a ledge or leaning them against the wall. It reminded me of a spa in California where I spent a week once, but that's another chapter.