William A. Stoever poses with Carol, a friend he made while hitchhiking in Japan.
MAPLEWOOD, NJ — As summer ends and the COVID-19 delta variant gains traction, traveling is off the table for many. But, as all readers know, the second-best way to satiate a need for adventure is to read about it, and Maplewood resident William A. Stoever’s most recent book, “Africa, Japan and Everywhere in Between” certainly fills that craving. In his book, Stoever, a former Seton Hall University professor, details his antics as he traversed Africa and Asia as a hitchhiker in the 1960s. This most recent book is a follow-up to his 2013 book, “Hitchhike the World,” which details his hitchhiking adventures across the United States, Europe and parts of Africa.
Stoever, then a young man, had found himself with time to spare and a hunger for travel after wrapping up a stint teaching in Tanzania on a U.S. government aid program. He decided to defer law school for a year — hoping they would accept him in one year’s time — and see the sights and cultures of the world. And he did it all, primarily, through hitchhiking and subsisting on $3 per day.
Just as Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois has “always depended on the kindness of strangers,” during his journeys Stoever relies on amiable drivers, gracious hosts and an unintentionally helpful military. Some of the most amusing parts of the book are when Stoever bends the truth to get rides and lodging. For instance, he routinely goes to Peace Corps hostels and tells them he was part of the nonexistent Tanganyika 2 PC group. By this point, he is far enough from Tanzania that his story seems believable to the Peace Corps volunteers, and they let him stay.
He also routinely hitches plane rides with the U.S. military. He never explicitly tells them he’s an embedded journalist, but they assume he is, and he just doesn’t correct them.
“I’m not concerned that some U.S. government lawyer or administrator might see that I slightly misrepresented myself during my travels,” Stoever joked to the News-Record. “My misrepresentations were so trivial and so long ago that they wouldn’t be worth pursuing today. During my travels I met a lot of people who misrepresented themselves much more than I did — it was quite routine in the places I was traveling.”
His charade is discovered only once. A colonel in Vietnam discovered Stoever was not an accredited journalist and kicked him off the base, leaving him in the lurch in a war zone. In his book, Stoever discusses his desire to see Vietnam while counterbalancing his fear of entering an active war zone. Ultimately though, it was an experience he is glad he had. Though his parents were perhaps not quite as appreciative of it.
“I wrote letters — sometimes twice a week — during the 18-month adventure described in the book, but I was careful not to mention things that I knew would upset them,” Stoever said about his parents. “They were deceased by the time the book came out, so they never knew about a few of the stories that appear in the book.
“One time when I did get a strong response was after they received the letter I wrote from Saigon, Vietnam,” he continued, adding that they were “highly upset that I had put myself into some danger by traveling to a country where a war was going on.”
Also of note were some of the many people Stoever met during his travels, from weary soldiers to businessmen to “spooks” to ordinary citizens. One of the most entertaining acquaintances has to be Hank, a fellow world traveler Stoever runs into time and again. The two met in Bombay, India, and Bangkok, Thailand, but Hank never seemed to recognize Stoever … until they run into each other again in Nara, Japan, and Hank announces that he has gotten sober.
As Stoever is a young man during these journeys, he also relates several encounters he has with women, some romantic, some comical and some just odd. While some of these women were acquaintances for only one night, they each left a mark on Stoever. One woman, Carol, even became a travel partner.
“I met an American girl in the Tokyo youth hostel and fell hard for her, and she reciprocated. We traveled together for about a month, visiting exhibitions in Tokyo, historic sites, quaint shrines, museums and picturesque villages. We climbed Mount Fuji together,” Stoever said. “Unfortunately I had already made reservations for further travel en route home, so I couldn’t stay with her in Japan. She gave me her parents’ address in Rhode Island, and I wrote to her there after returning to the U.S., and they forwarded my letter to her in California. Unfortunately we ultimately lost touch, but I still treasure the slide I have of her and me in a temple courtyard.”
Sadly, his adventure had to end, because he had a spot waiting for him at Harvard Law School.
“Returning to the law-school grind was quite a culture shock for me after the freedom and spontaneity of 18 months of catch-as-catch-can travel,” Stoever said. “I knew it was time to move on to the next stage of my life, and I did it willingly — knew I had to grow up sometime — but I was sad to leave the adventure stage of my life.”
Throughout his book, Stoever also touches on a feeling that most travelogues don’t discuss: travel fatigue. Though he wanted to continue traveling, there were only so many shrines he could see and landscapes he could behold before it became too much and he needed a break. He notes several times that, in hindsight, he regrets not always seeing all he could due to his fatigue. Luckily, he did have a chance for a do-over for some of it.
“Twenty-some years after I returned to the U.S. and became a college professor, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to travel to India to conduct some research. I spent almost three months in India and took the opportunity to visit some parts of the country that I hadn’t seen on my first trip there. The Fulbright administration also sent me to Egypt and Pakistan, and I saw some sights I hadn’t seen before,” Stoever said. “I made three shorter trips to USSR/Russia to teach short courses and conduct a little research, and a short trip to Japan for the same purposes.”
While Stoever still feels the bite of the travel bug, he admits that his hitchhiking days — when he often didn’t know where he was going to lay his head that night — are over.
“Hitchhiking is a young man’s game. It’s time-consuming and somewhat risky, and I wouldn’t want to do it any more at my age,” he said. “Also, it would be much harder to catch rides as an older man. Besides, I have more money and less time now. I still have a spirit of adventure and love of travel, but I’m willing to do it more conventionally.”
To read about Stoever’s incredible journeys — only a fraction of which were touched on in this review — visit https://tinyurl.com/59kh9jyd to purchase the book.
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