What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the April 20 edition of the Frommer’s Travel Show podcast. To listen, click here.
Pauline Frommer: Welcome to The Frommer Travel Show. I’m your host, Pauline Frommer. It’s been a rough couple of months for me. And so what a delight it’s been to get lost in a charming, droll travel memoir going back to the 1970s when life probably wasn’t simpler, but it certainly [seems like it was in retrospect]. I have as my guest the author of that memoir, Mark Orwoll. The book is called Just One Little Hitch, Curious Companions, Debatable Choices, and Life-Changing Revelations on the Hitchhiker’s Road Through Europe and Morocco.
Hey, Mark, thank you so much for appearing on The Frommer Travel Show.
Mark Orwoll: It’s my pleasure to be with you, Pauline, thank you.
PF: So I gotta ask, everything in the book happened to you as a young man. What made you decide to revisit it now?
MO: Well, I guess the main reason is, and I’ll be honest with you: age.
You know, you get to a certain point in your life and you look back on how you got there. And at this stage in my life, it’s almost been almost 50 years since this adventure took place and I thought I should.
What helps also, Pauline, is that I kept a very detailed journal. So I was able to go back to that journal and bring all of those memories back. And I thought, well, heck, let’s put it down on paper and get it out there. Maybe some people will be interested.
PF: Well, I think a lot of people will be interested. I mean, reading it, it feels like a charmed time. You are going around Europe, you’re telling people you’re from San Francisco, and you’re being greeted with great excitement. People want to meet an American, especially from the West Coast, because that was the epicenter of the counterculture at that time.
So you start in Germany, where you first notice they don’t have any damn coffee. Tell us about the coffee that was drunk at that time in Europe. I didn’t know about this.
MO: Well, they had something that they called ersatz coffee, which basically means fake coffee. And it goes back to World War II. The German people, they did not have a lot of the basics that you would expect to have in life, such as a cup of coffee. So they concocted this. It was lots of different grains that they would, you know, ground up and put water through. And it sort of kind of halfway resembled coffee, but not really. Well, it became a symbol to them of, you know, we can make it through the hard times and coffee, the ersatz coffee meant that, you know, you were a tough guy. You could make it.
Well, 20 years, 30 years after the war, they still drink ersatz coffee. It was a lot cheaper than regular coffee, but my goodness, coming from America, where I was used to a regular cup of coffee, ersatz coffee did not cut it.
But you found that in every youth hostel that you visited.
PF: Right. And it had no caffeine. So what was the point?
MO: I guess in one sense, I guess that’s a good thing. And the other sense, it was, it was like, it sort of filled your needs for that habit of drinking something dark and hot in the morning. But that was it.
PF: Yeah. So that was a surprise. And another fun part of the book is you’re not just telling your own story. You’re also weaving in history, the history of travel. And you have a really interesting part about how youth hostels came to be. So can you tell our listeners that?
MO: This actually started back in the 1920s in Germany. And the whole idea was to get the young people out in the open, to go hiking, to go up on top of the mountain and stay at that hostel at the top there. And there would be somebody who would, you know, watch over you, a warden, they called them, and it would be safe.
And so parents would allow their children to go out into the outdoors, spend time with other young people, have a nice meal, and then they would come back a day or two later. So that’s how it began. And then it spread to England and it spread throughout all of Europe and now throughout the entire world.
PF: Right. And part of the point was, they really wanted to force these youths to get out into nature. Part of the point, in the early days, was for [this experience] to be a little bit rugged, right? And you felt that as you were staying at some of these hostels.
MO: I did. And now there’s a weird part about the hostels—and I do have to just at least mention this—when Hitler and the Nazis took over Germany in the 1930s, they absorbed the youth hostels into what they called the Hitler Youth. That’s kind of scary and pretty revolting if you think about it. But the [original] concept is anything but. The concept was to get young people outdoors, meeting other people and asserting their independence. And that’s what it has been doing for nearly 100 years now, mostly in a very good way.
PF: Yes, absolutely. Okay, so you’re traveling around, you have to save money because you have very little money.
MO: Zero.
PF: Zero money, yeah. You happen upon one of the greatest ways to save money in Paris. I’ve known about it for a long time. I always wanted to do it. Tell us about bunking at Shakespeare & Company, which is this very famous bookstore.
MO: I had heard about Shakespeare & Company early on. It had an antecedent. There was a bookstore in the 1920s where all the American expatriates used to hang out. Sylvia Beach ran it. It was called Shakespeare and Company right in the heart of Paris.
Fast forward, World War II comes along. Shakespeare & Company goes out of business. But Sylvia Beach goes to this other little bookstore called Mistral Books run by a Bostonian, a man named George Whitman.
He loves writing. He loves writers and the creative lifestyle. He’s moved to Paris and set up this little bookstore. Well, Sylvia Beach and he became friends. When she passed away in 1964, he felt as if he could take over the mantle that she had carried for so long.
He created this bookstore. It’s a crazy, kooky bookstore with the ceilings in every room or different heights. He created these bookshelves that pull out [and become] Murphy beds. [They] fold down so people can sleep in the bookstore….If you’re a writer or a painter or a poet or some other creative type of person, George would say to you, well, you can stay here for free if you want. You just have to sweep up the floor at night, lock up the windows, maybe run some errands for me.
Now, to me, for some reason, he pinpointed me as his guy to help him re-shelf books, which sounds nice. It’s the dirtiest, nastiest job, because your hands get so filthy from those old, old books. But I stayed there, worked there. I ran the cashier for a while. It was a brilliant, brilliant introduction to Paris, and it was my first time. I’m just 22 years old, my first time in Paris, and I’m staying at this magnificent bookstore with a free place to stay.
It’s a great, great tale, not just mine, but that story belongs to many people. And I’m just one who told it this time.
PF: George named his daughter Sylvia after Sylvia Beach, and she still runs the bookstore. Does she still allow people to sleep there at night?
MO: I don’t know. I kind of doubt it, Pauline. The place is so famous now. There are sometimes lines to get into the bookstore. It’s not like it was back in 1976 when I stayed there, unfortunately. Or, no, listen, I wish that bookstore all success. It led me into a wonderful, wonderful experience. And the more success any independent bookstore has, the better off we all are.
PF: Amen. Amen. I’m with you on that.
So you at first stumbled into Shakespeare & Company because you were, you’re a literary type, you’re a writer, you worked for Travel and Leisure for many decades. In the course of your travels [you often followed] in the footsteps of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the other American expats who went to Europe. How did having that mindset shape your travels, do you think?
MO: Well, it was a motivating factor for me. I was a huge fan of Ernest Hemingway even in high school, and it was fascinating to me that a young man from the Midwest could become a newspaper reporter in Kansas City and then later at the Toronto Star. How he could move to Paris and become a foreign correspondent. How he could then use that as the basis to have a stable income while he was writing his novels. In the back of my mind, I always thought, well, that’s amazing. How could anybody do that?
It finally struck me while I was in Paris. Well, heck, I could do that. I don’t mean I’m going to be like Ernest Hemingway. I don’t mean that, but I could be a newspaper reporter. I could travel. I could write books. It’s not impossible. I was just some kid, some stupid kid from Southern California. I did not grow up in a literary family. I did not grow up with these aspirations. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. But in Paris during that trip, it all came to me.
PF: Yeah, and you also had some great strokes of luck on this trip. You were hitchhiking in Spain, and you just come upon two Aussies in a car, a very nice sounding car, and you ended up traveling with them for two weeks. The blessing of that is not only do you have pals, but they were both architecture students, and so they were able to unpack what you were seeing. So tell us about how traveling with architects shaped what you were able to get out of that trip from Europe.
MO: The architecture that you see wherever you travel, whether it’s Europe or South America or Asia, is one of the distinctive differences between what we live in our daily life and what we can experience outside when we travel to foreign countries. And these two guys had just graduated from architecture school… To me, I looked at a building and I said, “oh, cool building.” These guys made me realize, Mal and Jeff, they made me realize that a building is a component of so many parts. The arches over the windows, the elaborate designs around a doorway, the sloping of a roof. These are not all just one thing. They’re independent elements that all come together that make distinctive architecture.
And I never knew that. I started to get a little bit of that sensibility from these two guys. Again, I had no architecture background.
But now today, thanks to that trip, I can actually appreciate a building from its components as well as its overall architectural aesthetic. And that was something I learned. That’s what happens when you get out and travel. If you keep your mind open, you’ll learn things that you didn’t even expect to learn. And that was one of the great things that I came away with from this adventure.
PF: Yeah, absolutely. So you’re traveling with these two dudes. You’re having all kinds of adventures and misadventures. You get robbed. You fall into a pile of camel poo. All kinds of things happen. I have to ask, are you still in touch with them and do they have the book?
No, I am not in touch with them and it kills me. I have done internet searches for like the last, I don’t know, year and a half trying to track them down. The last correspondence I had with them was about a month or so after I returned back to the United States. They were continuing their epic journey. They were in Greece. They were heading up to Istanbul. And they said, oh, we’re not going to make it out to the United States this year, mate, to meet up with you, but maybe we can do it next year. So let’s stay in touch. And I lost touch. It’s one of the great regrets that I have, Pauline.
Because, you know, because it’s people that make travel so wonderful. I can remember everything they told me, but now I lost touch with them. Well, I just feel like a damn fool, to tell you the truth, that I didn’t maintain that contact. I haven’t let that happen again. I keep in touch now with everyone.
Of course, it’s easier with email addresses and all of that. But that is one of the things that I came away with. It’s people like that and the many, many other people that I came in touch with that are the reason to travel.
Yeah, the places are cool. The buildings are neat and the experience are great. But when you come back home, finally, it’s the people that you meet that are the most important things and the things that can stick with you up here forever.
PF: Definitely. You travel with that duo and they convince you to go to Morocco. The picture you draw of Morocco in the ’70s is so fascinating. I’ve been to Morocco, but in the last decade, and so it felt like you got a more Moroccan version of Morocco than I did. Have you been back? I mean, it still feels very authentic when you’re there, but things like the men with these crazy hats carrying water. I didn’t see any of those guys in Marrakesh.
MO: I’ll tell you, I have not been back. I’m eager to go back, but I have not been.
And just as you say, I believe things have changed quite a bit there. And everything I hear from people, now they still love it. Morocco is a great country, great country to visit, but it’s not the same.
You know, life goes on, things change, but I still think Morocco must have so much attraction because everybody I know who’s been there loves it. So I am eager to go back.
PF: You came back from this trip to Europe with a bad habit because cigarettes back then were very much part of how you socialize. And frankly, I think they may be still. I have French cousins who had children. So my children are actually very close to their children. And my daughters have never smoked cigarettes just because it’s not something you do as a young person in the United States anymore. But their Parisian second cousins refuse to believe [that they don’t smoke, since so many Europeans still do]. So talk about the role cigarettes played then and I suspect still today.
MO: Well, I found out early on in my travels through Europe that the first thing people would do in those days [when you met them] would be: they would pull out a pack of cigarettes and would hand you the pack and say, would you care for one of my cigarettes?
Well, if you said no, it almost sounded like you were being unfriendly.
So, I started accepting the cigarettes, but I would put them in my pocket, because that wasn’t a smoker. I would put it in my pocket and I said ‘I’ll save this for later’. Then I realized that was still seeming unfriendly.
So, I would start to smoke and take a couple of puffs. Then I realized also, I should be offering them a cigarette in exchange, because that was the norm.
“Would you like one of my cigarettes?”
“Oh, thank you. How about one of mine?” And you would hand it to them.
And that was sort of the process of how this worked. And so, I started buying cigarettes. And so, I started to smoke the cigarettes.
And before you knew it, I was smoking cigarettes when I was all by myself, not for the social aspect, but just because I was getting used to it. By the time I returned home to the United States after five months, I was a hardcore smoker. Thanks a lot, Europe!
PF: Wow.
So, in the book, you go from the continent of Europe to the United Kingdom, which had been in your mind the be all and end all. That’s where a lot of your literary heroes were from. You’d be able to speak English. Did it live up to the way you had built it up?
MO: Well, at first, it did. Although the whole idea of speaking English is kind of iffy. I had a number of exchanges with people where I didn’t understand a word they were saying, even though they were allegedly speaking English, in Cornwall especially, my goodness! And then you talk to some of the people with really strong Cockney accents. You wouldn’t even know it was English—being an American, that is.
But, and you know, I wanted to see cozy pubs. I wanted to see castles on hilltops. I, you know, I wanted that old fashioned idea of England that I think many of us grew up with.
But you know what? England is a real country with real problems, real socio-economic issues. There’s an element of racism just as there is in our country.
The people are great. Trust me, I love the English. I love the English countryside and I love the cities.
But I had a bucket of cold water splashed on me when I realized that this is not literary heaven.This is a real working country. Now, we have to realize that wherever we travel, anywhere in the world, it’s not all going to be just palm trees and beaches and people bringing you a Mai Tai. It’s a real, real world wherever you go.
And I think that’s important because if we experience the negative aspects of a destination, as well as the positive, we have a deeper appreciation of that destination because it’s not a painted picture. It’s a three-dimensional place that you enter into, if you’re lucky. Good and bad, doesn’t matter.
PF: Do you think that a lot of travelers struggle with how to respond to the three-dimensionality of travel?
MO: I wish more people did. There are two kinds of travelers. There are the people who go on vacation. Okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. One of my relatives and his wife love to go to Aruba. All they do all day is lie on the beach. They drink more than they usually do at home. They enjoy the spa at the hotel, and then they come back home.
I can’t do that. I think most of the people who follow Frommer’s don’t do that. We want to penetrate a little deeper under the surface, into the culture, into the reasons why this place is like it is. The food, the art, the history, these are things that to me make a real traveler as opposed to a vacationist.
PF: Yeah, no, absolutely. So what do you think was the highlight of this trip for you, looking back and having written this book? What was the place that really made you the man you are today?
MO: Well, it has to be Paris, of course, because on July 17th, 1976, I was drinking a beer on the terrace at the Cafe Select. And I had dropped out of college. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. And I had, and this is going to sound silly, but I had an epiphany. I realized there that I could do kind of what Ernest Hemingway did. I could get, I like to write. So I could be a newspaper reporter. I like talking to people, interviewing people, asking questions. I love to travel.
Heck, go back home, change your major to journalism, and get into newspapers. And that’s exactly what happened. And I went from newspapers into magazines and now freelance writing for lots of different publications, including Frommer’s.
PF: Yes, thank you.
MO: And it changed my life. It changed my life, Pauline. That trip in general and that specific moment on the left bank of Paris, almost 50 years ago, changed my life. And for the better, I like to think.
PF: Yeah, definitely. Well, it’s a beautiful book. It’s a nice escape. It was such a delight to travel with you on the page with you and your buddies and your hitchhiking, which, you know, as a mom now made me nervous. But you found the kindness of strangers almost everywhere you went.
So thank you so much for appearing on The Frommer Travel Show. Mark, really appreciate it.
MO: Thank you so much for having me on the program, Pauline.
A new episode of Pauline Frommer’s travel podcast, The Frommer Travel Show, is published every Sunday.