World Tourism Day: Memorable Trips to India, Easter Island, Italy and Hawai’i

Today marks World Tourism Day around the globe. With that in mind, here are a few of my fave trips from the over the years. Here’s to more travel in the coming years!

EASTER ISLAND

Sunrise on Easter Island, Chile. JIM BYERS PHOTO

I was attending a travel conference in Chile maybe 10 years ago, and was given the chance for a pre-trip to Easter Island, the incredibly isolated dot of rock also known as Rapa Nui and Isla de Pascua. I first saw those famous Easter Island moai statues in a magazine when I was a kid and have been fascinated by tales of Polynesian sea voyages for decades, so I jumped at the opportunity. We had a few days to explore and see various sites with those towering statues and to generally explore the island. We witnessed massive, blue waves rolling in from the direction of Antarctica pounding the south shore, while other parts of the island had pretty, tropical beaches. The island was denuded of trees centuries ago, so the deep green hills were almost reminiscent of Irish farm fields. The best part of trip came early one morning. We got up around 5 a.m., slammed down a quick breakfast, and headed out to Ahu Tongariki, where a series of dark statues rest very close to the sea. It was foggy, and I couldn’t see a lot. The island is home to a pack of wild horses, and I could hear a baby close by in the mist. It was whinnying for its mother, and I could hear the mama answering the little one’s call. I had chills down my spine as I listened to the horses and watched the fog swirl around me. The mist began to lift and the sun began to rise.  We stood behind the towering, mysterious statues and watched as the sun made its first appearance of the day. Just as I clicked on my camera a beam of sunlight came flashing between two of the moai. It seemed to be resting on one of the statue’s shoulders. Here I was, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on this insanely small dot of land, surrounded by wild horses, with beams of light illuminating mysterious statues that still can’t be explained by science. It was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my life.

TRAVELLING WITH MY KIDS

In 2010 our daughter, Kate, was studying in England and wanted to join me on a trip. I had an assignment to write a story about Rome for the Toronto Star, where I was travel editdor at the time, so we settled on Italy.  We stayed at a hotel in the Trastevere region of Rome, and toured the Coliseum. After a day or so, we hopped on a train for the coast, and caught a boat to the island of Ponza. It was too rough to get a boat ride to the island’s famous Blue Grotto, but we rented a beat-up convertible and drove around the island, admiring stunning, white chalky cliffs and deep blue Mediterranean waters and pretty villages dotted with brilliant red bougainvillea. We had a great time, and headed back to Rome. I had snagged us a room at the luxurious Hotel Hassler, which sits at the top of the Spanish Steps. We had a small balcony overlooking the steps, and brought out a couple of chairs and a bottle of red wine to toast our trip. We looked down and noticed a crowd of people gathered around a piano at the little piazza at the bottom of the steps, next to the Fontana della Barcaccia. Suddenly a gentleman with an amazing operatic voice started belting out classic Italian tunes such as “O Sole Mio,” and “Funiculi, Funicula.” It was magical. The next morning, we woke up and looked and it was like nothing had happened. I can’t here Italian music today without thinking back to that moment with our daughter.

Back in 2011, our oldest son, Michael, was doing his final term of law school at the University of Delhi. I don’t recall him staying up late at night when he was a kid listening to George Harrison playing the sitar, but he told me he had long been fascinated by India and really wanted to do a school term there. Okay, go for it. Our youngest son, Chris, was doing a undergrad term in Sweden at the time and had a week off, so we decided to get together in India for a week of touring. We had a couple days in Delhi, where we watched India defeat Pakistan in the World Cup of Cricket, toured temples and generally had a great time. We wanted to go from there to Agra but our train was cancelled, so we had to quickly arrange a late night taxi. The boys sat in back and I sat up front, watching as our driver bobbed and weaved past camels (as I recall) and trucks and motorcycles with a man driving and a woman behind him with a child in each arm. My boys loved it. I was terrified. From there it was on to Jaipur, where we witnessed magnificent architecture and chatted with locals during a festival where elephants were decorated with colourful dabs of brilliant pink and yellow paint. It had been hot and uncomfortable for most of the trip, and we had gone through a bit of sensory overload. I was due to spend the night at an airport hotel to catch my flight the next day, so we gathered at my son Michael’s house in Delhi for dinner. I called a cab and went to say goodbye to my boys. I took one look at them and started to cry. Not little hiccups, but full sobs. I was a mess. I recall my boys looked at each other with sideways “what the hell is wrong with Dad” glances. I finally pulled myself together and got in the cab. About ten minutes into the ride to my hotel I started to laugh. I realized that India had got to me. The food, the heat, the camels, the women holding kids on a motorcycle, the painted elephants, the spirited laughs of the man who served us delicious cups of chai, the bumpy rides in impossibly cramped tuk-tuks. I had been picked up, chewed upon and spit back out by a trip that was truly like no other I have taken. I had been many places before, but, as the cliché goes, this felt like the first time I had really travelled and immersed myself, albeit briefly, in a culture very different from what I grew up with. It was sometimes wild, it was often intense, but it was also achingly beautiful, and but I came away with a deep affection for India, and for its people.

FIRST TRIP TO HAWAI’I

My Dad, Robert Byers, with a prize catch in Hawai’i in 1968.

I’m going to have to wing it somewhat on this one, as my first trip to Hawai’i took place when I was 12 years old and not yet in the habit of taking notes everywhere I went. My Mom and Dad had been to Hawai’i on two or three trips when the year 1968 rolled around in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb where I grew up. We knew how much they loved it, and they had, I believe, talked to us about someday going with them; probably after much begging on our part. Our Mom had a wall calendar in the kitchen with pretty travel photos on it. Oje day my sister and I saw that two weeks of the summer were blocked out for what looked like a trip. Our Mom had scribbled M, K, O and H on the calendar for various days. Being quite clever, my sister, Christine, and I deduced that M was for Maui, K for Kaua’i, O for O’ahu and H for Hawai’i Island, then called the Big Island. “Oh, no,” Mom replied when we confronted her with our sleuthing abilities. She insisted that O was for Oakland, H was for Hayward, about a mile from our house, K was for Kensington (an unincorporated area near Berkeley) and M was for Milpitas, then a nothing farm town south of our home in Castro Valley. Of course, one day we learned the truth. I don’t recall searching for library books or the Fodor’s Guide to the Hawaiian Islands, but I’m sure I was excited as the trip grew near, We flew Pan Am or some other huge plane from California and landed in Honolulu, then took a cab (or maybe drove) to Waikiki Beach. I couldn’t believe my eyes. We used to go to the beach in California at Santa Cruz, but the water was cold and grey, not warm and inviting and a shade of blue I had never witnessed. There were palm trees where we lived, but they didn’t rise into a piercing sky dotted with perfect, white clouds, and rustled by whispering trade winds. The entire trip was magic. We whizzed down a natural rock slide into a cool pool of fresh water on Kaua’i. My sister and I learned to surf at Waikiki Beach and the two of us sang on stage with Don Ho (all the kids were invited up). We dug sand castles and snorkeled at Maui’s Napili Beach, where we stayed at a great little spot called The Mauian, which had a pool and shuffleboard courts and small, wild mynah birds that jumped all around on the grass on their little claws. Our mom didn’t know they were mynah birds and called them “hoppities,” which I thought was perfect. To this day, the sight of a hoppity/mynah bird in Hawai’i makes me smile. One day I was drying my bathing suit on the balcony of our hotel in Hilo, on Hawai’i Island. The wind came up and sent my trunks onto the balcony below. Our Dad used to bring a portable fishing rod with him on many of our trips, so he got it out, dropped a line, and hauled in the winning prize. I still have a black-and-white photo of our Dad grinning on the balcony of a Hawaiian hotel in 1968, with a small boy’s bathing suit dangling from his fishing pole. I later took trips with friends and with my wife, Barbara, and our kids, driving the famous Road to Hana on Maui, surfing on Kaua’i, admiring the volcanoes on Hawai’i Island, I did trips with my Dad to Maui and Lana’i, and later to the supremely quiet island of Molokai, which I dearly love. I’ve been back probably 35 times since that first trip, and there’s still no place on earth that moves me the way Hawai’i does.

JUST ABOUT ANY TRIP WITH MY WIFE, BARBARA

Barb and I met travelling in Italy in 1979. This year we celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary! How anyone could possibly stay married to me for more than four decades is beyond comprehension, but I’m very grateful for it. Here’s to 43 more, Barb!