The Benefits of Being Directionally Challenged

Spud Hilton: On getting lost, and getting lost in the moment

12.07.09 | 11:05 AM ET

Photo by Sundials by Carmichael via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Typically, I’m pretty book-friendly. I’ve opened my home to hundreds of volumes, allowing them to shelf-surf and mooch off my hospitality for years. Recently a book landed on my desk, however, that I have no intention of allowing to darken my door.

The volume is Never Get Lost Again: The Complete Guide to Improving Your Sense of Direction by Linda Grekin (who I’m sure is an otherwise terribly pleasant person). That’s as much as I can tell you about the book because, as I said, I have no intention of cracking the binding.

Here’s why: Some of the best travel happens when you’re lost.

Don’t believe me? Many of history’s great tales of travel were based on or featured the authors being catastrophically and comically lost, baffled by the situation and how they got there. Bill Bryson, Tony Horowitz, Tim Cahill and Eric Newby all wrote about moments of great directional challenge, some that were the highlights of a particular tale.

There’s even a wildly popular TV show about a planeload of folks who are lost—called, oddly enough, “Lost.”

Lost equates with interesting, which in travel is almost always good. Upon arriving home from a trip, do you tell friends first about the trains that ran on time, or about the hours you spent trying to find the glorious monument everyone said you can’t miss—which led to a quirky karaoke bar where no one spoke English?

There are other benefits to being lost: It forces you to approach and attempt to speak with locals; it forces you to admit a shortcoming (don’t be one of those people who blames being lost on everyone else); and, eventually, you have to relax. By not worrying so much about how to find your way, you may realize that you already know how.

It turns out there are different brands of being lost. In the more high-minded travel “literature,” being lost nearly always brings on an epiphany of some sort—“part of the eternal search for transcendent, experiential meaning”—but I try not to learn too much from being lost. I probably wouldn’t get lost as much and where’s the fun in that? The common forms of lost include:

A single trip that combines all these is rare; the best example might be a trip taken by Dorothy Gale of Kansas (bet you didn’t know “The Wizard of Oz” is a travel story). I came very close while searching for a Soviet plane in Grenada.

Driving in Grenada was probably an extreme sport even before Hurricane Ivan flattened most of the island, tore the roofs off 90 percent of the buildings and picked up half the roadways and dropped them on Grand Cayman. Navigating the narrow, shoulderless, twisty highways felt a bit like a game in which the challenges are avoiding head-ons, driving on the left side of a road that doesn’t really have two sides, surviving multi-lane traffic circles with no lines and being polite to drivers who yell in Creole something about your failure to embrace the finer points of Grenadian driving.

Ivan would have removed the road signs (if there had been any to start with), so being lost and retracing our route was pretty much a given while trying to find Grenville and Pearl airport, where a Soviet airplane has been moldering since the bizarre 1983 action generously called a war.

After three hours of being lost and overwhelmed by the driving culture, broken roads and heat, we reached Grenville. We were not as lost in translation as I would have expected, being the only tourists in a bustling, scalding downtown with no street signs and no apparent traffic rules. I resisted the male stereotype and asked for directions from the gas station attendant.

And the bank teller.

And the woman selling flowers.

And the shirtless T-shirt vendor.

Finally, we put the search on hold, parked the rental and strolled downtown, heeding a recommendation for Ebony, a locals joint with green curry rotis. Carib beers appeared, spicy rotis arrived and a gentle, warm rain fell for a minute as I stared out the glassless windows. Suddenly, the roads, the traffic circles, the crazed drivers and, especially, the plane didn’t matter.

It was a lost-in-the-moment moment, the kind without which I would be, well, lost.