By Ralph P. Davidson

As TIME'S 94 correspondents round the world can readily testify, 1973 was an unusual year with many challenges. But in the course of pursuing stories for the magazine, correspondents had some offbeat adventures. Hong Kong Bureau Chief Roy Rowan, for instance, was in Peking to cover a reception given by the Chinese for visiting Ethiopian dignitaries last February. Rowan was jogging early one morning when a bearded man leaned out of a taxicab and frantically ordered him to stop. The man was a French television cameraman who had been assigned to record the first signs of the American presence in Peking but was having trouble locating Americans. "Finally, I saw a foreigner running in the freezing cold wearing a blue sweatsuit with red and white stripes," the cameraman explained. "I figured it had to be a crazy American." For the next hour, Rowan ran in circles between the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the Great Hall of the People while the Frenchman made his documentary.

Working for TIME also placed an unusual burden on one of Rowan's colleagues in the Hong Kong bureau, David Aikman. After completing an interview with Moslem rebels in the southern Philippines, Aikman was paddling down a creek when an entire rebel village -- men, women and children with assorted weapons -- hailed him from the shore. "They said they were fighting for secession from the Philippines," he reports, "but they had a novel alternative to independence: they wanted to be taken over by the U.S. and imagined that I had been granted Kissingeresque powers to rearrange national sovereignties on the map of Asia." Aikman posed with the villagers for a high school-type photo and exited gracefully. In Uganda, Nairobi Bureau Chief Lee Griggs momentarily forgot his manners when President Idi ("Big Daddy") Amin Dada admired his necktie. "I should have remembered," confesses Griggs, "that when a Moslem admires something of yours, you give it to him." Good-naturedly, Big Daddy, a former heavyweight boxing champ of Uganda, punched Griggs in the chest. Griggs, incidentally, did not give Big Daddy the necktie.

That was nothing compared with the existential dilemma of the New York bureau's Richard Ostling when he found himself trying to interview the followers of Swami Satchidananda during one of their "silent retreats" at Yogaville East in Connecticut. Possibly the most metaphysical experience of 1973 belongs to Boston Bureau Chief Sandra Burton, who was sent through Mexico's Sonora Desert one night in search of the Yaqui medicine man Don Juan for TIME'S Carlos Castaneda cover story (March 5). At one point, she recalls, she and Photographer Eddie Adams pulled their car off a deserted road for an "atmosphere" shot of a cactus silhouetted against the desert moon. Suddenly, a man appeared out of nowhere, asked for a cigarette and then vanished again into the night. The question still in Burton's mind: Was he or wasn't he?

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