On a clear day, from the right spot on the Maltese coast, you can see Tunisia. It’s about 200 miles away — closer than Los Angeles is to San Francisco — and for most of recorded history, arranging travel from one to the other was about as complicated as hailing a cab.
Recommended Stories
The Malta–Carthage run was one of the busiest sea lanes of the ancient world. Ships crossed it constantly, hauling grain and wine and olive oil and, at least once, the Apostle Paul, who wasn’t even trying to get to Malta. He was bound for Italy and got blown there by a storm. That’s how much traffic that water carried: You could end up in Malta by accident.
Not a bad accident, though, as accidents go. Paul managed to have a lot of interesting adventures during his detour to Malta — poisonous snakes, appreciative crowds, and a hospitable Roman bureaucrat. It’s all there in Acts 28.
I’m not saying that Paul had it easy, but last week, I tried to make a very similar trip. I wanted to get from Malta to Tunis, but on purpose. Here were my options: I could fly direct, but only on certain days of the week, none of which were days I wanted to fly. I could take a ferry to Sicily, cross the island, and catch another ferry to Tunis — a ferry that operates on a schedule best described as aspirational. Or I could do what I actually did, which was board a plane in Malta, fly all the way north to Frankfurt, sit in the Frankfurt airport for two hours, and then fly all the way back south again — passing more or less over Malta, where I may have waved — to land in Tunis about nine hours later. Nearly 2,000 miles of air travel to move 200 miles across the water.
OK, OK, yes: The ancients had obstacles, too, of course. They had sea monsters and whirlpools and corsairs. Odysseus, trying to cross this same general body of water, had to get past Scylla, who had six heads, and Charybdis, who swallowed the sea three times a day, and Calypso, who detained him on her island for seven years, which is a long layover even by Frankfurt standards. He didn’t, though, have to get on one of those overpacked airport buses with the accordion-style middle and bump his way from the plane to the passport line.
Mythological obstacles have another great advantage over ours — they make for good stories. Nobody ever came home from a voyage and sang an epic about EU Rule 261 or a giant Toblerone from duty-free. No poet ever composed an epic about the hero who could not change his return date without a penalty.
The trip redeemed itself on my way out of Tunis, though. From Tunis, within sight of the ancient city of Carthage, I took an actual ferry across actual water to Marseille — 23 hours of open Mediterranean. It left late and arrived late, a few hours behind schedule, which by the standards of that sea still beats Odysseus by roughly nine years, eleven months, and three weeks. Also: Until you’ve seen Tunisian teenagers sing Arabic hip-hop karaoke, you haven’t had much of a journey.
I loved every minute. I stood on the deck at night and looked up at stars I hadn’t seen in years — they’d been there all along, of course. It’s the competing light that went away. I watched Africa slide below the horizon the way a continent should, slowly, mile by mile. A flight erases geography. A ship makes you pay for every mile in hours, and the paying, it turns out, is the point.
WHAT ‘THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES’ CAN TEACH US ABOUT BANKING
So yes, I’m now one of those slow-travel people, and I’ll be insufferable about it for months. Still, slow travel is only wonderful when it’s voluntary. Most of my fellow passengers weren’t on that ferry for the romance of the sea. They were on it because it was the affordable way to get some place when you have a lot of children.
Odysseus and Paul weren’t “slow travelers” by choice. They had some delayed outbound legs and some missed connections and some lost luggage. When the long way chooses you, it’s an odyssey. When you choose it, it’s a journey. And a journey is better, even if it’s through Frankfurt.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
