There was a story in the “breaking news” this morning about international travel. This one did not include violence, it was more of.an account about whether the folks in Pyongyang would honor the U.S. passport for travel to North Korea. It took The Old Salts back a couple decades to the last time we needed to get visas to visit the Hermit Kingdom. The trip was unusual and filled with odd things you will be able to review in the “Traveling Music” book we will publish in the next few weeks.

The breaking news brought back memories. I had seen my favorite Congressman over on the Senate side of the Hill, walking across the breathtaking atrium of the Hart Office building, the one with the big black Calder Stabile sculpture in the middle that has a name. We don’t use it, though, at least not that one. There are some black cloud-like objects that hang down from the ceiling way up there and the jagged shape of a black mountain thrusts toward from the floor to the black clouds.

We called it “B-2’s Over Colorado Springs.” We do not know if they still do.

I asked him if he had any travel coming up that I could help with. He smiled and rattled off a list of places he needed to get to. It was breathtaking in scope. He told me what he wanted to do and who he wanted to see. He wanted to follow up on some Missing in Action issues from the Vietnam conflict. At least that is what we claimed it was about. Naturally, that story was a cover for some other thing that needed to be addressed to finally get peace in a war that had been over s. and check out how a Nobel Laureate might be freed from house arrest, and maybe stop some nuclear proliferation. He said his Chief of Staff, Isobel would be in touch, and he was as good as his word.

There was a lot going on then. I gave the Congressman a big hello. He had been deep in thought but he looked up and recognized me. I had organized some odd trips for him before, into Haiti during the embargo, and the Dominican Republic and the part of Cuba that the United States still occupies and the pleasant little British colony of Grand Turk Island. And a gray ship underway conducting an embargo, which we visited by helicopter. It was a pretty interesting agenda and subject to several others the Clinton Administration had buried in the itinerary.

Some of them were about ending the Vietnam War. Those included normalizing relations with the government in Hanoi and a chat with people in Taiwan and Pyongyang.

The conversation left me pretty stoked. The kind of travel the Congressman viewed as part of his job had an element of danger in it. He went places no one else gets to go to. There is always the possibility, albeit a slim one, that you would not be allowed to leave some of those places. He might be allowed to leave, but lower ranking escorts like me could be detained and thrown in the slammer as a bargaining chip.

In previous trips the focus was in the Caribbean. I had already been to a safe house in Port au Prince, talking on a radio to support one of his dinners with a Dictator. And talked to a young woman with legs all the way up to there with a comic-opera guard with a very real machine gun to protect an ancient blind President.

My days working with the Hill were numbered, so I had a little equity in planning this trip. You can never be sure when next you are going to have the airlines and the military services as your personal flying carpet. If this was going to be my last major trip, I was determined that we were going to stay in the great hotels of the world, or at least some famous ones. I took the list of countries the Congressman wanted to visit and tried to fit the hotels into them.

Let’s see: Rangoon. That would be The Strand Hotel on Strand Boulevard downtown near the Rangoon River.

Bangkok. That is a no-brainer. It had to be the fabled Oriental Hotel.

Hanoi. That was a hard one. The capital was just starting to come back from the hardships of the war and the bombings. It was twenty years almost to the day since Saigon fell, the moment of the North’s greatest triumph. So in that spirit, I selected the Metropole. It was the old French colonial place just down the street from the Foreign Ministry where Jane Fonda stayed when she tormented our captured pilots.

We were to head south to Ho Chi Minh city next, the place we used to call Saigon and some still do. That was a no-brainer, too. There were some new places that had opened to accommodate the European business community, but I am a sentimental slob. I picked The Rex Hotel, the main billet of the American Military Assistance Command, and the site of the wartime daily press briefings they called The Five O’clock Follies.

The Rex was kitty-corner from The Caravel, which was no longer a tourist hotel but had been The Place to have a drink after the briefing and before filing copy for back home. The rooftop bar at the end of a busy day at war and watch the fiery arc of Viet Cong rockets heading for Tan San Nhut Air Base.

Hong Kong. Let’s see, the itinerary had a couple days in Hong Kong to sort out what the British exit from the former Crown Colony was going to mean. So why not just stay at the flagship hotel of the Empire? So what if it was above the per diem rates for government travel? I didn’t think anyone would object if it took a couple bucks out of our own pocket. It would be worthwhile, and it was over a weekend. It would have to be The Peninsula Hotel.

We were not staying overnight in the real China so hotels were not an issue. We would only meet our Beijing country team in transit. Pyongyang was next, and a mystery in more than one regard. We would have to rely on the tender mercies of the North Koreans.

The last time the Congressman had been in the North they kept him sequestered in a countryside villa where he was held when not meeting Government officials. I had only been to the North once before and that excursion had been limited to walking a couple feet on the other side of the conference table in the Joint Security Area at the DMZ. Events further north were completely out of my control.

Coming out again we had to make nice with the South Koreans. I would normally have selected the luxury Shilla Hotel for a transit residence. It was suitably grand, at least in the public areas, but the rooms were a little rigid and the chairs were not comfortable. I had stayed there recently and it was not convenient to the Embassy or the Foreign Ministry. The Hilton would just have to do.

From there it was drafting a concept and linking it all together to see if I could make it work. That meant figuring out how to get visas to the Democratic People’s Republic. It was an odd and unusual process that involved the UN headquarters in New York City. Our passports worked then even if they don’t now. I am only glad that trip is done. We will be telling you more about it in the book, so stand by.

Our trip to Pyongyang was just part of it. We ask you to stay tuned for some international fun (and games). I promise it will be both odd and unusual!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com