Reporters and foreign correspondents are supposed to report the news, not wind up in the headlines themselves. But that's exactly what happened to me during a 21-year-career with the wire service United Press International. My journey began in California but took me to exotic locations in Spain, Hong Kong, the Indian subcontinent, Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific, and finally Japan. I was thrown in jail in Santa Barbara covering a bank-burning student riot in 1970 and kicked out of an entire country for reporting on the outbreak of civil war in Sri Lanka in 1983. I was surprised to learn I had discovered traces of the lost continent of Atlantis, as was reported in an announcement from Cadiz, Spain, in 1973, and was chased out of that country by Generalisimo Franco's navy. If I wasn't in the headlines, my pet tarantula, Crazy Legs, and baby camel, Kim, were. In fact, Kim got an invitation from the Dalai Lama to visit him at his home in exile in the foothills of the Himalayas. I welcome you on a journey through a bygone era of journalism when reporters banged out stories on typewriters and foreign correspondents occasionally wore trench coats.