Billings Gazette Sunday Magazine
Exploring Nooks and Crannies
Couple’s Gypsy-Like Journeys Bring Friendships, Inspirations
By Donna Healy
May 20, 2007

(The article contained eleven captioned photos. This is the article text only)

"I thought he was begging," Hardy said.

The boy was actually returning a coin that had dropped from Hardy's pocket.

"I was flummoxed. I didn't know what to do." Hardy said.

As a crowd gathered, he gave the boy $4, all the money he had with him.

"I went back to the ship and crawled in my bunk and cried," Hardy said.

Since his two-year stint in the Navy more than 40 years ago, Hardy, who is 61, has continued to travel to isolated parts of the globe. Sometimes, when he looks at children living on the streets of Nepal or refugees in Thailand, he sees the image of that little boy in Ethiopia.

Sometimes, he and his wife, Rebecca Hill, find small ways to help out.

Before moving to Red Lodge last summer, Hardy and Hill spent more than six years as nomads, living without a fixed address as they explored some of the world's nooks and crannies.

In 1999, to satisfy their wanderlust, they ditched high-powered jobs in Washington, D.C., and sold their possessions. For 18 years, Hardy had worked for the former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, starting as press secretary and becoming his chief of staff six years later.

As a Senate staffer, Hardy traveled extensively overseas, but the trips were often scripted to some extent by the host countries.

When Simpson retired from the Senate, Hardy worked at the Smithsonian, as the director of government relations and senior policy adviser. Hill worked for the White House under the first President Bush, taught English in Czechoslovakia, got a graduate degree in international business and was working for a Washington law firm when they decided to leave it all behind.

As world travelers, the couple roved the continents like gypsies without itineraries or elaborately formulated travel plans.

Two back surgeries and a book deal convinced them to settle, at least temporarily, in Red Lodge. Hardy, who was born in Montana and grew up in Powell and Cody, Wyo., is working on an authorized biography of Simpson. In late December, he had the second of his back surgeries.

By mid-January, they were traveling again, taking off on a 47-day trip, including stops at breathtakingly beautiful islands in southern Thailand, along the Mekong River in Laos and a visit to the 12th-century temple at Angkor Wat, which is a World Heritage Site and Cambodia's prime tourist attraction. They also visited a pair of remote schools in Thailand and revisited orphanages in Nepal.

In all of their travels, Hardy and Hill have seen more than their fair share of temple ruins and glorious sunsets from a sailboat in the Caribbean, but they have also visited a leper colony in Nepal and other spots not on any tourist's itinerary. In some of those remote spots, they have left pieces of their hearts.

At first, their wandering lifestyle was fairly hedonistic, although limited by their budget. They wanted to find out what it would be like to live in places they had visited briefly on vacation, places that seemed like bits of paradise. To immerse themselves in foreign cultures and to economize, they tried to live among the local people.

They stayed on a beach in a fishing village along Mexico's Pacific Coast for four months, then took a three-month road trip to Alaska and the Yukon. They spent two months in Portugal, came back to the United States and headed for Thailand, revisiting a place they had spent an afternoon on their honeymoon in 1995.

In Thailand, after they had seen every attraction within a hundred-mile radius, the steady diet of travel started to wear thin, like a steady diet of candy.

In Thailand, they started forging friendships with locals who were trying to make a difference in their own communities.

Hardy had visited many refugee camps as a Senate staffer, and their first link, in 2000, was to a hospital for refugees on the border between Thailand and Burma. For four months, they helped out at makeshift health clinics in remote villages with no access to regular medical services. Hardy fixed computers and acted as driver for the hospital truck. Hall gave polio vaccines and helped teach well-baby classes.

In 2004, they made their first trip to Nepal. When they arrived, they found it wasn't safe to go trekking because of the political unrest.

In Kathmandu, they met an American man who opened orphanages for children he saw living on the streets of the community, which is Nepal's capital and largest city. The foundation he started, Virtue's Children Nepal, is now involved in funding a couple of homes for abandoned or orphaned children in Kathmandu and in other villages, along with a school for the blind and a home for lepers. For $500, Virtue's Children can educate, house and feed a child for a year.

"We visited the orphanage and found there are enthusiastic, bright kids who otherwise might have died on the streets or have turned to some other lifestyle," Hardy said.

On their most recent trip to Nepal, they saw the seven blind and five deaf children they have sponsored through another organization, the Early Rehabilitation Centre. The organization teaches blind and deaf children how to earn a living by making felt hats, candles and slippers.

In 2004 they also ran across a Nepalese woman, Meena Singh Khadka, who runs a school for street children. The school feeds 65 children one meal every day for a total cost of a $7 a day.

In another innovative program, Meena, who is a recognized leader of the women's movement in Nepal, has provided sewing machines to rural women who have no source of income because the revenue from trekkers has fallen off dramatically. The sewing machines were carried on the backs of porters for four days to a mountain village where Meena taught the women to sew.

Hill describes those grassroots leaders as inspirational.

"They see solutions everywhere. They see horrible poverty and terrible problems everywhere, but they march on unfazed," she said.

On the outskirts of Pokhara, in western Nepal, Meena has organized a home for some of Nepal's lepers, who are shunned by their own families. With Meena and the founder of Virtue's Children as their guides, Hardy and Hill delivered some cook stoves and mattresses to the Pokhara Leper Colony.

The eye-opening visit allowed the couple to witness the resilience of real survivors.

"They live with something every day that almost every American would tell you doesn't exist anymore," Hill said.

"It's not the sort of thing you call American Express and say, 'Put me on the list to go see lepers,' " Hardy said. "But, once you get there, especially with someone knowledgeable, who understands their own world, which is very isolated, we weren't there 15 minutes, and I was falling in love with those people.

"Some couldn't speak. Some could speak only through an interpreter. Once you enmesh yourself in their world, which happens pretty quickly if you're a compassionate person, you identify so deeply with people in straits so dire that you never imagine. Then you see their sense of joy when someone gets a small butane cook stove."

On their most recent trip, from which they returned in March, they visited a Thai friend who has become an English teacher at a school in northeastern Thailand. They delivered a suitcase-size load of basic school supplies and soccer balls to her rural school and to an even more remote school in Thailand.

"We don't necessarily go around thinking everyone's life needs to be improved by anything we can offer," Hill said. "But there are some situations where we can clearly be of help."

The couple has helped create English-language brochures and Web sites for some nonprofit organizations. On their own Web site, their travel blog provides another avenue for people to get involved with grassroots projects.

From his work in the Senate, Hardy receives a federal retirement package, which provides them with the means to travel. Although the couple will never have the income to be philanthropists, they have witnessed the amazing efficiency of grassroots projects, he said.

"If you can promote that and encourage people to support things like that, where there's no overhead and total efficiency, then we greatly magnified our ability to help people," Hardy said.

When the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, unfolded, Hardy and Hill were on a remote island in Indonesia.

The proprietor of a place where they were staying warned them about militant Islamist groups on a nearby island who might be looking for Americans as hostages. It took four days for the couple to get a flight off of the island. Rather than stop traveling, the couple decided to stay closer to home. They bought a sailboat, which became their home for the next four years as they traveled 10,000 miles, sailing mainly in the Caribbean and along the East Coast.

They were in the Dominican Republic in 2005 when their cell phone rang. The phone had not worked since they left the United States. The call was from Simpson, who wanted Hardy to write his biography, a project they had discussed for decades.

When they first met, Hardy was a rambunctious teen in Cody. Simpson, an attorney, helped him through a scrape with the law.

When Simpson ran for the U.S. Senate in 1978, Hardy was working as a TV news director for KULR-8 in Billings. After the election, he was tapped as Simpson's press secretary. Hardy describes the former senator as a straight-shooter who speaks his mind regardless of the fallout.

In writing the biography, Hardy has had complete access to copious notes Simpson made during his Senate career. The notes and extensive interviews offer a glimpse of history in the making.

The couple still intends to travel, but the length and frequency of those trips may be shorter because they're putting down roots as homeowners. Through the Internet, they keep in touch with overseas friends.

At the moment, they're searching for a volunteer to travel to northeastern Thailand to help children at a school in an impoverished rural community get enthused about learning English. They assume an adventuresome volunteer might spend two weeks to three months in the area.

"They would leave a piece of their soul there," Hardy said.

Of all the countries they have visited, Hardy considers New Zealand the most beautiful. Thailand offers the most variety of things he loves.

"The countries where I've left more pieces of my heart are Nepal and Thailand," he said. "Nepal more than any."

"The common denominator that binds them all together and makes them all alluring is the people you find when you get there," he said.

Exploring the world's nooks and crannies has deepened the couple's understanding of the way other people live their lives.

"As the world becomes smaller and more of a global community, we have to be more responsible as partners - not as leaders, not as rulers, not as traffic cops, but as partners," he said. "Many of them can teach us a great deal, but we have to listen. So many people won't listen."