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My daughter’s godfather is a peripatetic Frenchman who I got to know at college in Australia in the early ‘nineties. The Frenchman and I weren’t especially close friends at college, but around the time my wife and I settled in St. Francisville, he landed a job with an airline and relocated to Dallas. Thus did each of us become the closest thing the other had to a familiar face for several thousand miles in any direction. Afflicted with chronic wanderlust, the Frenchman had taken the airline job for the travel perks and justified living in Dallas by vowing never to spend a weekend in Texas so long as he had the strength to drag himself to the airport. Since he could fly pretty much anywhere for next to nothing (and take friends along for the ride) we took to going places: either in Louisiana, when he would “pop” over after work on a Friday to spend the weekend, or if he could wrangle buddy passes for unsold seats, to other interesting locations in the Americas. So in our pre-kids, pre-saving, pre-taking-anything-seriously years, my wife and I had strange and marvelous adventures flying what we affectionately referred to as “Air Frog.” At lunchtime on a random Thursday one of us would answer a phone to the Frenchman shouting “What are you doing zis weekend? Nozzing? OK! We going to … um … [pause while flight schedules are consulted] Venezuela!” Then would follow forty-eight hours that might or might not involve mountaineering, sleeping in airports, jungle navigation, dugout canoe travel, bribery, haggling, bouts of severe gastric distress, and on one occasion, the thrilling experience of being caught in a mob of angry men jumping up and down waving farm implements and chanting “Cha-VEZ! … Cha-VEZ! … Cha-VEZ!” Kaleidoscopic, unpredictable, and occasionally terrifying, what Air Frog Tours lacked in organization they made up for in improvisation. We visited places, saw ways of life, ate things we never would have encountered otherwise, and lived to tell the tales.
One Memorial Day weekend (in 1998, I think), the Frenchman called to announce that there were open seats on flights to Rio de Janeiro if anyone was interested. We went down on a Thursday—him flying from Dallas, me from New Orleans through Miami—and spent a colorful weekend doing the typical touristy things (riding the cablecar up Sugarloaf Mountain, visiting the Christ the Redeemer statue, swimming at Copacabana Beach), plus some inadvisable things (trying to join the dancefloor in a Samba club at 2 am, falling asleep on park benches) that you’d expect a couple of twenty-eight-year-olds to get up to when let loose in Brazil. Despite that, the whole adventure went off pretty well until we got to the Rio airport to come home. The Frenchman’s Dallas flight left several hours before mine (through Miami) was due to depart, so after seeing him off I passed a pleasant hour or so deciding which taxidermied piranha to spend the last of my Brazilian reales on in the airport souvenir shops, secure in the knowledge that once aboard my flight I’d get something to eat and a few hours’ sleep before landing back in the U.S. in time for work on Tuesday morning.
James’s Escapes Issue travel tip: If leaving Brazil on the last flight of the day with no working financial instruments in your possession, do NOT spend the last of your cash on a stuffed piranha. Because if you do, and your flight develops engine trouble after takeoff, dumps its fuel in the sea, and lands back in Rio tailed by a fleet of fire trucks, you stand a good chance of spending the next twenty-four hours penniless, hungry, and alone, clutching your backpack and hiding behind a row of seats in a darkened corner of the (quite scary, at 2 am) Rio airport, with only a stuffed fish for company. Apparently the airline’s policy of whisking paying passengers off to area hotels in the event of mechanical problems does not extend to cheapskates traveling on their employees’ buddy passes. Live and learn. The piranha was confiscated at U.S. customs in Miami anyway. At that stage I didn’t care; I’ve never been gladder to see a Burger King in my life.
For this annual Escapes issue of ours, that is my cautionary tale. You’ll find some lovely, unusual, and thoroughly worthwhile adventures on the stories within. They’re all within easy driving distance, too. So if things do go horribly wrong, home won’t be so very far away.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
This article originally appeared in our May 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.
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