Slovenia is not a suspicious land, but the hotel clerk seemed to be taking a long time to confirm my reservation. At last she looked up from her screen, and with a quizzical expression said, "Aren't you..."

I grinned. "Yes, I am!"

"I knew it," said the girl, grinning too. Then she became quizzical again. "Was there really plutonium on that bus?"

"Noooooo. I just made that up! Also the stuff about the viral coat proteins." That's what everyone asks about when they recall my first travel piece in The New York Times.

I thought a bit, then said: "It occurs to me right now that you must have read this just before independence. Was The New York Times available in Yugoslavia? It hardly was in Lubbock."

I admit I was expecting to hear something with smuggling or samizdat in it, with maybe a war cry, something like "threw off the hated Balkan oppressors!" at the end. This was after all eastern Europe. But all she said was, "We Slovenes have always been the most sophisticated Europeans."

Someone must claim to be the most sophisticated Central Americans. At the hotel in Guatemala City, the girl checking me in likewise stared hard at her screen. Then she said, or rather asked, "What the...?" I didn't even know you could say or ask that in Spanish. But then, like her opposite number in Ljubljana, she laughed in recognition, then asked about a detail from another of my contributions to The Times.

"No, I never actually met a Nicaraguan tank commander," I assured her. "And truth to tell, I would not have recognized one in Houston traffic anyway. It was really just folks from Michigan who'd moved down in the 1980s who ever found it challenging or astonishing." Then, just making conversation, I asked if she had ever met a Nicaraguan tank commander.

"Not professionally," she answered. "Or in any other capacity, come to think of it. We Central Americans don't mix much. When was the last time any of us invaded any of the others of us? I ask you."

Good question. (The answer is I think 1969.)

When your literary fame precedes you, you get lots of good questions. I myself refrain from asking bad ones, at least in the hotel-reception context. I don't want to put anyone on the spot, especially if it's a local person working in a Mississippi motel for someone who is named after or (for all anyone knows) is a Hindu god. On both sides of the counter, we Americans just try to keep our What-are-they-cooking-back-there-NOW eyerolls to a minimum. In all modesty I state that it sure does help conversation if the guest is a renowned author!

"I sure feel bad about those Icelanders who asked you the time as you bicycled by them," said the clerk at the last such lodging I visited. "Fast. And downhill. I've been there! Being pulled by gravity the wrong way, I mean. Hey, is Iceland really full of ice?"

"Not where I was," I assured her. "But yeah, they got it farther north. By the glacierful. Is that a word?"

"Man, it is now!" What a writer wants to hear. "Hey, did that chick really drive backward on I-64 to pick you up hitchhiking?"

"I freely admit I didn't actually see that. I was, as I stated in print, sitting on the guardrail and looking the other way when I noticed a car parked a yard from my right knee. I do however feel certain that the woman got on the shoulder first, then put it in reverse, rather than do a 180. Even in West Virginia. I might have asked but under the circumstances, ones very favorable to me, it seemed rude to question my benefactress too closely."

A cackle. "Love it. Do you always talk like some kind of lawyer?"

"Only when I'm setting a record straight. Or publicly patting my image back into shape. Otherwise, I'm a regular guy doing regular stuff, like paying for a room at a motel or getting a newspaper to pay me."