Truthfully, I'm not the best traveler in the world.

说实话，我不是世上的最佳旅人。

I know this because I've traveled a lot and I've met people who are great at it. Real naturals. I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go—in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab . . .

我之所以知道这点，是因为我经常旅行，也遇过精通旅行的人，真正生而旅行的人。我遇过身强体健的旅人，即使从加尔各答的水沟喝下一大鞋盒的水，也永远不会生病。有些人很快学会新语言，而我们其他人却只会染上传染病。有些人懂得如何制服边界警卫或利诱执拗的签证官僚。有些人有恰当的身高和肤色，无论去哪儿都是一种半正常人——他们在土耳其可能是土耳其人，在墨西哥就突然成了墨西哥人，在西班牙也可能被误认成巴斯克人，在北非有时可能被当做是阿拉伯人……

I don't have these qualities. First off, I don't blend. Tall and blond and pink-complexioned, I am less a chameleon than a flamingo. Everywhere I go but Dusseldorf, I stand out garishly. When I was in China, women used to come up to me on the street and point me out to their children as though I were some escaped zoo animal. And their children—who had never seen anything quite like this pink-faced yellow-headed phantom person—would often burst into tears at the sight of me. I really hated that about China.

我没有这些特质。首先，我格格不入。高大、金发、粉红肤色。我不是变色龙，反倒是红鹤。除了去杜塞尔多夫（Dusseldorf）之外，我都突兀地刺人眼目。我在中国的时候，妇女经常当街朝我走来，向她们的孩子指着我，仿佛我是从动物园逃出来的动物。而他们的孩子——从没见过这种粉红脸、黄头发的妖怪——往往一见我就哇哇大哭。对于中国，我很痛恨这件事。

I'm bad (or, rather, lazy) at researching a place before I travel, tending just to show up and see what happens. When you travel this way, what typically "happens" is that you end up spending a lot of time standing in the middle of the train station feeling confused, or dropping way too much money on hotels because you don't know better. My shaky sense of direction and geography means I have explored six continents in my life with only the vaguest idea of where I am at any given time. Aside from my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so useful when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know—that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look like you belong there, anywhere, everywhere, even in the middle of a riot in Jakarta. Oh, no. When I don't know what I'm doing, I look like I don't know what I'm doing. When I'm excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transparent transmitter of my every thought. As David once put it, "You have the opposite of poker face. You have, like . . . miniature golf face."

我不擅长（或者说懒得）在旅行前研究目的地，往往是人到了当地后，再看发生什么。这种旅行方式经常发生的是，你花很多时间站在火车站内不知所措，或者花太多钱住旅馆，因为你没概念。我这种不可靠的方向感和地理概念意味着，一生虽去过五大洲，却在任何时刻对于自己身处何处一无所知。除了歪斜的内在罗盘之外，我还缺乏沉着冷静，这对旅行可能是一大不利。我从没学会如何把自己的脸调整为视而不见的面无表情，这在危险的异地旅行时十分有用。你知道——那种超轻松、掌握一切的表情，使你看起来像是属于那个地方，任何地方，所有的地方，即使在雅加达的一场暴乱当中亦然。喔，不。当我不清楚自己在做什么的时候，我看起来就像不清楚自己在做什么。兴奋或紧张的时候，我便露出兴奋或紧张的神色。迷路的时候——这经常发生——我就像迷路。我的脸是每个想法 的透明发送机。大卫曾说你和扑克脸孔正好相反。 你像是……迷你高尔夫球脸。

And, oh, the woes that traveling has inflicted on my digestive tract! I don’t really want to open that (forgive the expression) can of worms, but suffice it to say I've experienced every extreme of digestive emergency. In Lebanon I became so explosively ill one night that I could only imagine I’d somehow contracted a Middle Eastern version of the Ebola virus. In Hungary, I suffered from an entirely different kind of bowel affliction, which changed forever the way I feel about the term "Soviet Bloc." But I have other bodily weaknesses, too. My back gave out on my first day traveling in Africa, I was the only member of my party to emerge from the jungles of Venezuela with infected spider bites, and I ask you—I beg of you!—who gets sunburned in Stockholm?

还有，哦，旅行对我的消化道造成痛苦！我不想把事情说得太复杂，一言以蔽之，我经历过每一种极端的消化紧急事件。在黎巴嫩，某天晚上我突如其来地生了病，使我只能猜想自己恐怕感染上了某种中东版本的伊波拉（Ebola）病毒。在匈牙利，我罹患某种截然不同的肠胃疼痛，从此改变我对苏联集团一词的感受。然而我还有其他的身体弱点。我在非洲之行的第一天弄坏了背；我是我那团人出了委内瑞拉丛林，唯一一个被蜘蛛咬而感染的成员；还有，请问有谁会在斯德哥尔摩晒伤？