Around-The-World Tour Caps Decades Of Travel For Wanderlust Wyomingite

When people ask Don Hardy what sparked his lifelong love of traveling, he tells a story that’s quite a tearjerker. 

“I was in the Navy in Ethiopia in Eastern Africa,” he told Cowboy State Daily. 

One day, as he was walking a small path in Masaba, Ethiopia, a little boy unexpectedly grabbed his leg from behind.

“I turned around, and he was about 5 or 6 years old, and he was holding his hand out,” said Hardy, who grew up in Cody, Wyoming.

In that hand was a coin. 

Begging was common, so Hardy thought the boy was asking him to give him the same kind of coin in his hand.

“Then he pointed to where I had just been standing,” Hardy said. “To check and see if I had any money.”

That’s when Hardy really looked at the boy, who was literally starving to death in front of him, with a coin in his hand that he was not asking to keep after all. He was trying to return it to Hardy, who’d dropped it as he was walking.

“That choked me up immediately,” Hardy said. “So, I gave him and some other ladies who were also starving, who lived in little tin huts nearby, all the money I had.”

Hardy was ashamed that his first thought had been the young boy was begging, and, when he got back to his ship, he cried. 

“I cried because I knew there was nothing I could do, that they were all going to die,” Hardy said. 

Ultimately, that experience sparked a lifelong interest in traveling around the world, and not just to places where rich tourists gathered to play. Hardy wanted to explore all the little nooks and crannies of the world, all the places where people eke out meager lives on sometimes the thinnest of all hopes.

When Hardy and his wife Rebecca retired in 1999, travel is what they both wanted to do — see the world, warts and all.

“Rebecca has the same travel desire in life that I do,” Hardy said. “She worked in Washington and that’s where I met her.

“At one point, she went to Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism and kind of introduced those people, who had been under the cloak of the USSR to the realities of life in the Western world,” Hardy said.

The Hardys have been to all sorts of places, but particularly to Asia, where they sought out people who needed a little help.

Through all of the adventures, the memory of that emaciated little boy with the coin in his hand has never left Hardy.

The Trip Of A Lifetime

Despite more than two decades worth of traveling, there was still one kind of trip Hardy and his wife had yet to take together. 

A cruise around the world.

“As time went on and I had a few medical problems, it reached the point I couldn’t tramp all over Nepal and all over Southeast Asia,” Hardy said. “Now I’m relegated to traveling any distance at all on a little electric scooter.”

Going on a cruise had always been a dream, and Hardy realized it was time.

He and his wife, after much planning and deliberation, set sail in January for a 104-day cruise around the world that would hit some of the places Hardy had yet to see. They just returned toward the end of May.

“A cruise doesn’t give you an in-depth look at any destination,” Hardy said. “But it’s a great sampler, and you get a sense of what places are like that you might never otherwise see.”

And, despite all his many years of travel, Hardy found he could still be surprised along the way.

Like seeing Cape Town in South Africa.

“That’s a beautiful city and an interesting location,” he said. “You get a sense of Africa that’s blended.

Sightseeing Through History

And another one just north of there is Namibia. That country is almost entirely sand dunes.”

There he learned about people and animals that are real survivalists.

“It’s a fascinating place to go,” he said. “All I could see were huge sand dunes for hundreds of miles. I would certainly go back there.”

While there, Hardy learned some history he’d never known.

“Between 1904 and 1908 in Namibia, then called South West Africa, German soldiers, in an ethnic cleansing campaign, murdered tens of thousands of ethnic men, women and children.”

More than a century later, the country issued a formal apology, pleading more than $1 billion to assist in projects of interest to the descendants of those slain. 

“The last batch of skulls and other remains of the slaughtered tribesmen, which were taken to Germany to promote racial superiority, were returned to Namibia in 2018,” Hardy said.

Another of his favorite ports is Sydney, Australia.

“That port was No. 1 on this trip or anywhere else we have traveled,” Hardy said. “Ferries servicing scores of destinations throughout the area came and went from docks adjacent to ours.

“Gliding out of the harbor at night and past the iconic Opera House was nothing short of magnificence. Something like that can burn its image into your mind and soul.”

The Hardys also enjoyed hiking around vast natural and manmade caverns in the rock at Gibraltar, exploring the narrow streets and cute little shops of Siracusa, Italy, and stops at both ends of Crete, where some people found historical artifacts of interest. 

Just As Exciting As Before

Some of the cruise’s 41 destinations were places Hardy and his wife had already been, but they were incredible all over again.

Like New Zealand, which Hardy has visited twice before.

“The visit to four towns reminded me how delightful this country and its people are,” Hardy said. “The stunning Fiordland National Park at the south end of South Island was truly memorable.”

As Hardy and his wife stood on the deck, they passed through channels between towering cliffs, feeling the immensity of the world they were traveling within.

“Best of all was Milford Sound, one of the rainiest places in the world,” he said. “It rains an average of every other day, and 268 inches annually.”

The Hardys were in luck. Their visit just so happened to land on a dry day.

Another repeat visit that was special to Hardy was Malta, which he first experienced when he was 19.

Discovering that he could legally go to the bars in Malta was exciting at that age. He was set for adventure, even if his beer money was in short supply on a salary of $78 a month.

In one of the first bars he went to, he drew the attention of an attractive, well-dressed woman who sat down right beside him. 

“I thought I must be one handsome dude,” Hardy recalled in an anecdote he’s planning to include in a book he is writing about his many travels. “But I worried she might ask me to buy her a drink I couldn’t afford.”

What she actually did ask him for was a much bigger shock than he could have imagined. She put her hand on his leg and asked if he had $5 for a “good time.”

That’s when he realized this woman was a prostitute.

Hardy was young, but he knew when he was in over his head. He made for the door fast, returning to his ship. He had no more appetite for adventure, at least that night.

Malta, Hardy said, is still a city that’s fast and furious. Of all the ports he’s visited in the world, he rates this one a strong No. 2.

“Just as when I was there 62 years ago, elevators descend and rise on the outside of cliffs and buildings,” he said. “This city is unlike any other that I’ve seen.”

Casablanca, Morocco, was also an interesting stop, but due to a massive protest march in the port area, the Hardys didn’t try to disembark there.

They looked longingly from afar, with a pair of binoculars they’d brought for the trip.

Another Book In The Works

Hardy has already written one book about the late U.S. Sen. Al Simpson. He is planning to write another about his own life and his many interesting travels.

That book will start with the story of the boy in Ethiopia, he said, who sparked a motivation that kept burning throughout his life, pushing him to not just be a tourist in the world, but an actual citizen of it. 

Along the way, he and his wife helped as many people as they could.

In Burma, for example, where the couple lived for a time, they helped doctors and went to villages that had never had access to any medical care at all.

“I helped fix the computers and Becky gave vaccines, immunizations to children,” Hardy said. 

At the time 9/11 happened, the Hardys were traveling in Indonesia and were on a remote island. Friends let them know that radicals were going island to island looking, with ill intentions, for Americans.

“We had to disguise ourselves, so we weren’t too obvious,” Hardy said. “And we rented a little motorbike that we rode to the airport, and I had to pay a guy under the table to get on a plane and get out of there.”

Hardy and his wife also lived aboard a sailboat for a time, until a back injury forced Hardy to return to the states.  

Their recent 104-day trip, which included 41 stops along the way, Hardy counts as the trip of his lifetime. Not only were the stops memorable, but there was great food and entertainment aboard ship all along the way. 

Often the food and the entertainment reflected the culture of the ports where they were about to land, which helped a little bit more with insight and immersion.

But none of the stops were as long as the couple might have wished. That made research and planning critical.

“We spent months researching all of our destinations ahead of time so we could make the most of each stop,” Hardy said. ”A lot of the destinations, you arrive at 6 o’clock in the morning and leave at 6 or 8 o’clock in the evening. So, you really have to take maximum advantage of the time there.”

Hardy would recommend the experience to anyone at least once in their lifetime. 

“You do have to save money for it,” he said. “And you have to have the desire to make it happen. Maybe you have to give up on buying that Corvette.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.