Naked in Dangerous Places: The Chronicles of a Hungry, Scared, Lost, Homesick, but Otherwise Perfectly Happy Traveler

260 Pages·2009·1.32 MB·English

by  Cash Peters

PRAISE FOR
NAKED IN DANGEROUS PLACES
“Great explorers possess bravery, a cast-iron stomach, and insatiable curiosity
about what lies around the next bend. Cash Peters has none of these attributes.
But he is very, very funny, and his misadventures in exotic locales make for the
best travel writing I have read in years.”
—Peter Allison, author of Whatever You Do, Don't Run
“Like most travelers, but too few travel writers, Cash Peters understands that
nightmares are twice as entertaining as dreams—especially when they come true.
Peters's iconoclastic charm unaccountably fails to seduce South Seas cannibals
and Hollywood producers, but proves a winner in this sharp-witted recap of two
years in the company of such exotic and dangerous creatures. Someone should
make a TV show out of it.”
—Chuck Thompson, author of Smile When You're Lying
“It takes a clever new hook to grab and maintain my attention when it comes to
travel writing. Naked in Dangerous Places is fascinating, funny, and endearing.”
—Doug Lansky, editor of There's No Toilet Paper …
on the Road Less Traveled
Also by Cash Peters
Gullible's Travels:
The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist

For Ruth
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Shocking News
2 Star Jones Misses Her Big Chance
3 A Kiss from a Ghost
4 The Land That Trousers Forgot
5 Fat Kid
6 Joe Versus a Volcano
7 Solvang
8 ΞυχΔΔΔΔΨXςψ
9 More Crew Looks
10 The Girl with No Nose
11 A Gift from the Network!
12 The Emir's New Clothes
13 First Hint of a Problem
14 Mutiny
15 Emma Thompson to the Rescue
16 A Real Celebrity Calls
17 Aaaaaagh—Bears!
18 The Bomb Goes Off
19 Twist of the Blade
20 Aaaaaagh—Lions!
21 Scar Tissue
Acknowledgments
F
irst, let me thank the lovely people at Discovery for allowing this story to be told. That was
pretty darned decent of them and I appreciate it. Unfortunately, it couldn't be the whole story If
I told you the whole story, this wouldn't be a book, it would be a twelve-volume set and you'd
never get it home on the bus. In order to squeeze in as much as I could, therefore, I tweaked
the timeline a little, occasionally condensed recurring situations into one, and made a fraction
of the characters composites of several real people I encountered during the making of the
series. I didn't want to do this, and the individuals in question probably won't thank me for it,
but remember, it was either burden you with a dozen unwieldy, expensive volumes you might
never read, or the single, rather cute one you're holding right now. That said, none of this
distorts the narrative too much. What follows is how things went down, pretty much.
Additional dollops of gratitude go out to my amazing agent, Betsy Amster; my lawyer,
Dina Appleton; Brandi Bowles for championing the book at Crown; Adam Korn for his
insightful edit; Heather Proulx for her insightful edit and voracious enthusiasm; Ronald H.
Brower for his help with the Eskimo language stuff; the Lonely Planet guides and Wikipedia
for doing what they do; plus Bill Margol, Len Richmond, David Austin, Terry Danuser, Ryan
Ely, Lulu Baskins-Leva, Christine Richards, Sylvana Robinson, Sheril McCormack; the
brilliant C. Dalaklis for his guidance (which I so foolishly ignored); the production people at
the office; and the gifted and long-suffering crews who came out on the road with me—in
particular Michael Gatt for his wit and the steady education in kindness. But, above all, to
Stanley for still being there when I finally returned home.

1
Shocking News
“T
his is it. We're going down.”
A painful grinding sound from one of the engines heralds a sharp drop in
altitude. And painful grinding sounds of any kind on a plane are never good,
right? I've seen documentaries. First comes the grinding, then you smell smoke.
And from there it's all pretty straightforward: you crash.
With a violent shudder we tip suddenly to the left.
Yup, here it comes.
Bags somersault to the floor. Tasha, our field producer, is thrown forward,
almost banging her head on the seat in front. My Gatorade is jolted from my
fingers and skitters away, disappearing into the cockpit.
“Mayday, Mayday!”
That's me panicking, by the way, not the pilot. A trained professional, he's
busy surveying the ground through a small triangular panel of Plexiglas to his
left, no doubt trying to figure out how long it'll be before we hit something.
Immediately he sits up straight again.
Uh-oh! Not much farther now, then.
As I'm hanging on, mortified, five rods of brilliant sunlight burst through the
starboard windows and sweep the tiny cabin from front to back like deep-sea
divers searching a sunken wreck for bodies, something that could actually
become a reality very shortly if we don't level our descent. Although, of course,
you learn not to express such things out loud. For a start, it might annoy Eric,
our field production coordinator. And you never want to do that. It was he who
booked us on this bucking clockwork junk heap in the first place, following a
minor altercation at checkin back in Australia over the staggering amount of
equipment and other luggage we'd wanted to wheel aboard the aircraft, the
combined weight of which was so preposterously excessive that, according to
the waspish airline clerk, it would have “negated every one of the laws of
aerodynamics.” (She probably had a good point. I have no idea how many laws
there are, but let's say for the sake of argument fifteen. I mean, who in their right
mind would choose to break all fifteen laws of aerodynamics? It's crazy.)