“Just My Luck”: adventures and misadventures on the road.

 5:30-7 p.m. Book Passage, Ferry Building, San Francisco

The cover on an Afghan tourism brochure from the 1970’s that I found in a bookstore in Kabul states: Afghanistan, The Friendliest Country. Believe it or not, that’s what I’ve found during my visits there and with the continuing friendships I have made with Afghan people…

…Even though I travel extensively, I was never in a war zone before. There were a few things to get used to. As we left the Kabul Airport, my driver said, “Don’t worry that there is no seat belt,” as he saw me searching along the side of the seat. “I drive slowly.” With that, he floored it, and we raced up the wrong side of the divided street against the oncoming traffic. There are no traffic rules or stop lights in Afghanistan. Traffic when it moves, like spilled milk, goes anywhere there is a space. My driver Nabil’s technique suits the general sense of lawlessness in the air.

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Article and images available about various Relais Chateaux luxury hotels.

“Love: the food of my life, and of my pen.” “Colette

On my way back to Paris after visiting friends in the Dordogne, someone mentioned to me that I’d be passing by Castel-Novel, the thirteenth-century castle where French writer Colette had lived with her second husband, the Baron Henri de Jouvenel des Ursins. Just east of Perigueux, near the town of Brive, I turned off the main highway, hoping to spend the night at Colette’s chateau.

This was the fourth of Colette’s homes I have visited over the years, including her birthplace in the small village of St. Saveure in Burgundy, where the excellent Colette Museum opened a few years ago. In Paris, I’ve stood outside her apartment at Palais Royal, and wandered through her home and gardens in the hills above St. Tropez. Colette’s passions for love, sensual pleasures, and writing make her one of my favorite authors–and role models. One of the most famous and honored French writers of the twentieth century, she was first female member of the prestigious Academie Goncourt, a holder of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, and the first woman in French history to be granted a state funeral. She published more than 73 books, including The Vagabond and Gigi. Perhaps better than anyone, Colette’s writing helps us to relish the temptations and intoxication of love.

A small sign announced the entrance to the chateau, and I turned my rented Citroen into the long tree-lined driveway, which wound through twenty-five acres of exquisite gardens. Just ahead, like something out of King Arthur and Guinevere’s lives, were the crenellated towers and steep walls of a medieval fortified castle. Once I was inside, the chateau’s current owner came out from behind a burnished wooden desk to welcome me….

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed in seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”  T.S. Eliot

It was shark breeding season. On my first dive in the Red Sea off of the Sinai Peninsula near Sharm el Sheik, we watched fifteen 10-foot black-tip male sharks circle one black-tip female. She seemed to ignore them and go about her business, which appeared to be the shark equivalent of running errands–poking in and out of crevices. Being a single female from San Francisco, I was amazed at the sight of fifteen males devoting their total attention to one female.

I was giving myself this Christmas/winter solstice gift of two weeks’ rest and diving aboard the Lady Jenny IV, an English owned and operated dive boat. It was part of a month-long trip to Egypt, a break from an unusually icy winter in Paris where I was living the ex-patriot American life and teaching.

Relaxing on the deck between dives, I was lulled by the Sinai, the islands of the Red Sea, the sea itself. Most predominant was the simplicity of the colors. In the near and far distance was the land–barren, gradations of camel tan from the palest off-white cream to a darker caramel-colored cafe-au-lait. Yet this same land seen from a distance becomes layered with grey-blue haze. All resembles the straight and curved lines of Arabic script. One saying goes that Arabic is so difficult to interpret that out of three people, one will say its meaning is one thing, another person interprets the same serpentine scrawl differently, and a third will say it is only the picture of the humps on a camel’s back. ………

Pacific Heights, SF.