Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why - Introduction

By Tim Cahill

Introducing this book of humorous travel essays by many fine authors offers me the opportunity to engage in a lot of pious plagiarism. I could very easily climb up on the shoulders of these other writers and give away their best lines, their most outrageous situations: I could, in short, delineate the very circumstances that will often make you laugh out loud while reading the book. In this manner—call it unscrupulous theft—I could make myself appear to be quite an amusing fellow.

There are two reasons why I will not do this.

1. It is morally reprehensible.

2. The editors won’t let me.

In any case, most of these articles do not lend themselves to easy pilfering. This is to say, there are not a lot of one liners here. (Doug Lansky is the reliable exception.) In most of the essays, situations develop, circumstances deepen, plots thicken. In Patrick Fitzhugh’s “The Snake Charmer of Guanacaste” a giant drunken Russian weight lifter encounters one of the world’s deadliest snakes. Doesn’t sound funny on the face of it? I laughed out loud on a crowded airplane.

Even forthright adventures such as riding the rails like the hobos of old present odd obstacles to certain writers, at least to Jennifer L. Leo, who masquerades as a man in the interests of personal safety. Read all about it in “Boxcar Steve.”

Female adventurers abound in this collection. Western readers of any gender will learn that sometimes just buying a bra can be an occasion of exquisite cross-cultural embarrassment as it was for Jacqueline C. Yau, as described in “King Kong in Shanghai.”

I will say, in perfect introductory candor, that not all the stories are outright knee slappers. Every single one, however, is fascinating in and of itself. I especially liked Richard Sterling’s “Saigon Games,” but it didn’t make me laugh. (I gave it to a friend whose taste I admire and she giggled through the whole thing. There’s no accounting for taste.)

Similarly, I would also advise the reader not to give up on a tale. Sometimes it is necessary to comprehend various important taboos and rituals to understand how the writer eventually made a complete ass of himself or herself.

And yes, they almost always make asses of themselves. I suspect the writers, in many cases, wrote these stories as an act of therapy, in the full understanding that only time and the pen can elevate humiliation to humor. I like to think of this process as the revenge of the mortified.

Indeed, I was reading one tale in which Bennett Stevens, a man apparently bereft of any cultural sensitivity whatsoever, resolves to photograph “the single largest gathering of humanity the planet has ever known” and ends up suffering an occasion of mind-numbing disgrace. I’d tell you about it here, but the editors won’t let me.

There is at least one legendary piece in the book, and that is “A Bard in the Bush.” This is the introduction to a memoir by the well-known war correspondent, Thomas Goltz. The book is unpublished for reasons that remain opaque to me. In it, Goltz casts back twenty years to relate tales from his first trip through Africa, which he financed, on the spot, by performing scenes from Shakespearean plays on the street. Turns out you can get arrested for that—“was my Hamlet that bad?”—because, in the end, Shakespeare’s tales of kingly usurpation and assassinations still run uncomfortably close to the truth even in Africa, or perhaps especially in Africa.

Indeed, the best of these stories open up our worlds and our minds. In “Cowboys and Indians, Thai Style,” Rolf Potts purposely goes to a Western-themed “ranch” in Thailand where he is subjected to a dramatic entertainment featuring “drunk man cowboy and his gang.” Lots of people get beaten up, especially those dressed as Indians, and it would be easy, Potts decides, to see all this as a “distinctly negative symptom of cultural globalization.” Well, of course it is, but there’s more to it and Potts finds himself wondering if “Californians who seek solace in Nepali ashrams” are truly experiencing superior cross-cultural authenticity.

This is funny stuff, all of it, but only because it is true, and that is the point of each and every story here.

***

Tim Cahill is the author of many books, mostly travel-related, including Hold the Enlightenment, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Pecked to Death by Ducks, Pass the Butterworms, and Dolphins, as well as the editor of Not So Funny When it Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure. Cahill is also the co-author of the Academy Award-nominated IMAX film, The Living Sea, as well as the films Everest and Dolphins. He lives in Montana, and shares his life with Linnea Larson, two dogs, and two cats.

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