The Tao of Travel

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by Paul Theroux


  “Quack!” said Galvis. “Quack! Quack! Quack!”

  — In Trouble Again (1988)

  ARMADILLO RISOTTO

  As night fell we unloaded our ordinary stores from Chimo’s dugout and, leaving Valentine on guard, we set off downstream with the presents, with bowls of manioc, ready-cooked spaghetti, and — the centrepiece — our giant pot full to the brim with agouti and armadillo risotto.

  — In Trouble Again

  MONKEY EYES

  We cut steps up the high muddy bank and made camp. Chimo and Pablo spread palm fronds on the ground and began to prepare the Howler monkey, scalding it with boiling water and scraping off the fur. Its skin turned white, like a baby’s.

  That night, when Pablo had jointed the body and Galvis boiled it, Chimo handed me a suspiciously full mess tin. As I spooned out the soup the monkey’s skull came into view, thinly covered in its red meat, the eyes still in their sockets.

  “We gave it to you specially,” said Chimo with great seriousness … “If you eat the eyes we will have good luck.”

  The skull bared its broken teeth at me. I picked it up, put my lips to the rim of each socket in turn, and sucked. The eyes came away from their soft stalks and slid down my throat.

  — In Trouble Again

  ELEPHANT NOSE

  “I give up,” said Lary, scrutinizing the very tough, gristly, grey lumps of meat hiding among the fresh green manioc-leaf saka-saka in his mess-tin … “Marcellin,” said Lary, chewing hard, “what is this stuff?”

  “Elephant nose!”

  Lary set down his mess-tin. He stood up, lurched slightly, held on to the corner of the hut, retched twice, and was sick onto the ground.

  —Congo Journey (1996)

  Bread Famine in the Sierra

  July 6 [1869] — Mr. Delaney has not arrived, and the bread famine is sore. We must eat mutton a while longer, though it seems hard to get accustomed to it. I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less. The trappers and fur traders in the Rocky Mountain regions lived on bison and beaver meat for months. Salmon-eaters, too, there are among both Indians and whites who seem to suffer little or not at all from want of bread. Just at this moment mutton seems the least desirable of food, though of good quality. We pick out the leanest bits, and down they go, against heavy disgust, causing nausea and an effort to reject the offensive stuff. Tea makes matters worse, if possible. The stomach begins to assert itself as an independent creature with a will of its own. We should boil lupine leaves, clover, starchy petioles, and saxifrage rootstocks like the Indians … We chew a few leaves of ceanothus by way of luncheon, and smell or chew the spicy monardella for the dull headache and stomach-ache that now lightens, now comes muffling down upon us and into us like fog. At night more mutton, flesh to flesh, down with it, not too much, and there are the stars shining through the Cedar plumes and branches above our beds.

  July 7 — Rather weak and sickish this morning, and all about a piece of bread.

  — John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1916)

  Congolese Monkey Stew, Batetela Style

  MY FRIEND DOUG Kelly, a widely travelled Foreign Service officer, served in the Peace Corps in Tshumbe, central Congo, in the 1980s. Over the course of two years there, he frequently observed the Batetela people prepare and eat monkey. Most of the Batetela inhabit an area in the Sankuru district of Kasai Oriental province. Their language, Otetela, is considered very difficult to learn by other Congolese. In fact, it is often referred to as “le Chinois du Congo”.

  The Batetela are fortunate in that their homeland is still relatively rich in wildlife. The most common wild game, and thus the cheapest, is monkey. Following is the recipe for a repast of monkey cooked à la Batetela, as Doug Kelly describes it in a letter to me:

  Take a dead monkey and hack it up. Keep the hands intact, but you can slice the rest of the carcass any way you want. Don’t leave the pieces too big, because they will take longer to cook and you want to eat it soon because you are hungry.

  Place the hacked-up pieces, including the intact hands, in a pot of boiling water and boil away. Don’t add any spices, because you don’t have any, and don’t use too much water, because you’re going to want to drink the watery “gravy” and you want it to have a lot of undiluted monkey taste.

  After the monkey has been boiled for quite a while, take it out of the water and serve it on a bed of rice or millet. (Note: The Batetela are the only people who grow rice in Congo. The Arabs taught them how in the nineteenth century, when the Batetela were raiding tribes to the south and selling the captives into slavery to the Arabs. Millet is the traditional Batetela grain and is still raised in the dry season. Other Congolese tribes prefer manioc, or “fu fu”.) Pour some of the monkey-water gravy on the rice or millet. Eat the whole concoction with your hands, or a spoon if you feel formality is necessary.

  Now comes the good part. Serve the intact hands to your guests. A monkey hand resting on a plate looks like pretty upscale dining, at least if you are sitting in a mud hut in Sankuru. If you are the favoured guest, eat the whole hand — the Batetela never leave any bones when they are eating meat, unless it’s a particularly big pig femur or something equivalent. For monkeys, ducks, and chickens, it’s everything down the hatch. You are encouraged to gnaw the monkey knuckles, removing the meat before cracking them open with your teeth and sucking out the marrow. Yum.

  Sampling Fried Sago Beetle in New Guinea

  Stef cooked a dinner of fried catfish, along with a healthy portion of sago beetle. The larvae were fried brown in the pan. They were crisp and sort of fishy tasting on the outside, probably because they had been sautéed in fish oil. Inside, the larvae were the colour and consistency of custard. They were unlike anything I had ever eaten before, and the closest I can come to describing the taste is to say creamy snail.

  —Tim Cahill, Pass the Butterworms (1997)

  Dog Meat in Asia

  THE SMELL OF a skinned, sinewy dog, hung by its hind legs in a Chinese butcher shop, can been detected from many feet away. So their term “fragrant meat” is related to the sort of euphemism that identifies a garbage truck as a honey wagon. In the literal-minded Philippines the dish is unambiguously called dog stew (aso adobo), and the key ingredient in the Korean soup boshintang is always understood to be dog meat. Dogs are eaten in many parts of Asia and the high Arctic, and have been a staple in much of the Pacific: Captain James Cook mentioned that a dish of Tahitian dog was almost as tasty as lamb. It is only the Western prohibition against pet-eating that horrifies us, but the edible dog is never a pet.

  While it is generally known by educated travellers that the Cantonese (and, for that matter, Dongbei Ren; that is, north-Eastern Chinese) love dog meat, it is not as well known that (1) it is seasonal — dog meat is considered warming for the blood, so is overwhelmingly eaten in the winter; and (2) a dog is considered good to eat only if its fur is black or, in a pinch, dark brown. I’ve never been given a good explanation for the second requirement, although it seems to be linked to the first, seasonal reason for eating dog meat — dogs with dark fur have the highest warming quality. I don’t know what this theory is based on, but it’s real — a Cantonese would be shocked if you suggested he eat a white poodle, and it would confirm his belief that you are, after all, a barbarian.

  In Shenyang, in eastern China, the walls of the U.S. consulate are occasionally scaled by asylum seekers from North Korea, which is not far away. These refugees, weakened by their escape ordeal, often ask to be restored to health by the Chinese equivalent of fortifying chicken soup, which is dog-meat soup (xiang rou tang). Since the canteen in the consulate did not offer dog-meat soup, a consu
lar official would send for takeout: “There are innumerable restaurants in Shenyang, as throughout the north-East of China, that do fine dog-meat soup,” I was told by my informant. And he added, “To make dog-meat soup, simply chop up a dog with dark fur and boil the hunks of meat, with the bone in, in water flavoured with green onions, red chillies, and soybean paste. You can also throw in noodles to make a heartier soup.”

  From the Eskimo Cookbook of Shishmaref, Alaska

  IN 1952, IN order to raise money for the Alaska Crippled Children’s Association, the students of Shishmaref Day School compiled a small cookbook. Shishmaref is on Sarichef Island in the Chukchi Sea — Russia is ninety-five miles to the west. Lately the island has been seriously threatened and impoverished by the effects of climate change. The students, living the traditional Inupiaq life, from foraging and fishing households, contributed recipes that were favourites at home, and sold the small booklet for fifty cents. Here are a few dishes.

  WILLOW MEATS

  Inside of barkbirch [birchbark] there is something that is yellowish. That is called the meat of the willows. They are very good to eat. People eat it with sugar and seal oil. First clean off the barkbirch from the meat of the willow. There is also soft green barkbirch inside of outside barkbirch. Never eat green stuff on willows. (Augustine Tocktoo)

  PTARMIGAN

  Take the feathers off the ptarmigan. Cut the meat and wash so they wont have dirt or feathers on. Put in a pot with water and salt. Sometimes some people make soup on it, I think they like them best without soup. (Pauline Tocktoo)

  PTARMIGAN SMALL INTESTINE

  Cook the small intestines about five seconds in boiling water. Old men and women always want to eat them. (Alma Nayokpuk)

  SEALS’ BARE FEET (SEAL FLIPPERS)

  Put the seal’s bare feet into a cooking pan. Cover them with blubber and keep in a hot place until the fur comes off. Then it is time to eat the seal’s bare feet. You can cook them or eat them without cooking. (Pauline Tocktoo)

  BEAR FEET (EE-TEE-YAIT’)

  Most of the people like the bear feet better than the meat. We cook them well, add salt. Four feet would take about one teaspoon salt. Take them out of the pot and let them get cool. Eat them with seal oil. (Nellie Okpowruk)

  18

  Rosenblum’s Rules of Reporting

  IN THE LOBBY OF THE SPEKE HOTEL IN KAMPALA, Uganda, in 1967, I saw a bushy-haired man holding a stenographic notebook and smiling wolfishly at a diplomat, demanding to know why he was killing people in Biafra. That was my first encounter with the foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum. We were both covering the Nigeria–Biafra peace talks. I was a teacher at Makerere University but also moonlighting as the Time-Life stringer in Uganda. Mort was then the Associated Press bureau chief in Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), Congo. We have remained close friends ever since. I have marvelled at his life as a traveller, writing home from the field.

  A self-described “old guy from the road”, he has had the longest, hardest, most successful career as a foreign correspondent of any I know. Fluent in Spanish, he was head of the AP bureau in Buenos Aires during a turbulent time there. He covered the Bangladesh war, and South-East Asia, while he was based in Singapore. He was for a time editor in chief of the International Herald Tribune, and for many years was a special correspondent based in Paris. On his first day in Paris he interviewed President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, speaking in fluent French. He has been to virtually every country I can name, and many I have only trailed my fingers upon in atlases.

  In addition, Mort has done what many journalists promise they will do but seldom succeed at — write books. His Olives: History of a Noble Fruit won the James Beard Award, and his Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light was a bestseller. He has also written books on journalism, ecology, and Africa, as well as (when he was living on a houseboat in Paris) a travel book, The Secret Life of the Seine. I asked him to provide me with some rules of the road that have served him well in over forty years of writing in distant places.

  1. Always arrive at roadblocks before noon, because in the afternoon the soldiers manning them are invariably drunk and abusive.

  2. Learn French and Spanish, and then some other foreign languages. And learn to say, “Don’t shoot, I’m a reporter,” in at least a dozen. This might help but is no guarantee of your safety.

  3. Take lots of notes and reread them as soon as possible, before they’re lost beyond any deciphering. Or maybe that’s just me. Recorders are tiny and reliable now; carry one, and you’ll be amazed at what you thought you didn’t miss.

  4. If you are left-handed, learn to eat with your right in Islamic and Hindu countries, especially when gathered around a common platter. The left hand is for postprandial hygiene, and you may lose it if you thrust it into someone’s lunch.

  5. Carry lots of cash, dollars and euros, but keep it somewhere sneak thieves, bandits, and customs officials are not likely to look. They know about socks and money belts. Get a tailor to sew secret pockets in pant legs or jackets.

  6. It is often insulting to refuse someone’s food or water. It can also be seriously painful to accept. If the proffered comestible is merely disgusting, suck it up; if not, find some tactful excuse not to partake. Do not make a face or say, “Eeeyeuw.”

  7. Despite certain novelists’ do-it-the-hard-way approach, try to get a visa and cross at border posts. If you are a reporter or a spy or have overriding reasons to skip formalities, use your judgement. Just remember that some countries hang people.

  8. Put together a medical kit, including a range of antibiotics, field dressings, and antiseptics. Take lots of Lomotil or Imodium; few miseries compete with a long plane or bus ride, rebellious bowels, and no WC.

  9. Think carefully about your kit. Binoculars can be handy, but they suggest to authorities that you might be up to no good. Don’t wear military khaki, designer camo, or anything bright that prevents your blending in. And forget weapons. You are unlikely to shoot your way out of trouble, especially the trouble you face when armed dudes find you are packing.

  10. On arriving in any distant place, the first thing you should do is learn the quickest way out — times and frequency of buses, trains, or planes. You have to know in advance how to leave.

  Travel Wisdom of

  CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS

  Lévi-Strauss memorably opened his travel book, Tristes Tropiques, with the line “I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.” (An early translation of the book, with a variation of this opening, is A World on the Wane.) He was trained as a philosopher but was one of the great theorists of anthropology and linguistics, an explainer of mythologies, and a describer of structuralism. He began his travels in Brazil, made journeys in India and Pakistan, and taught in the United States. He was a member of the Académie Française and lived to over a hundred (he died in 2009). The following are excerpts from Tristes Tropiques.

  Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is in itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.

  There was a time when travelling brought the traveller into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveller is less surprised than he cares to admit.

  Perhaps, then, this was what travelling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.

  19

  Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable

  UNWELCOMING PLACES
ARE A GIFT TO THE travelling writer. They have always been so, an early example being Ibn Battuta’s arrival in Tunis in 1325, at the beginning of his global wandering. He “wept bitterly” because he met with utter indifference: “not a soul greeted me and no one there was known to me.” The winter darkness and killing cold of Cherry-Garrard’s Antarctica; the cannibals, disease, and general hostility in Stanley’s Congo; the devout Muslims tormenting Charles Doughty with howls of “Nasrani!” (“Christian!”) in Arabia Deserta — these inhospitable situations gave us great books. Heartwarming interludes, lovable locals, and delicious meals have informed the most tedious travel accounts — the blissful vacation is desirable but not a fit subject for a book.

  The early travellers in Africa always kept in mind that the cannibal was a better subject than the missionary. Even the high-minded Mary Kingsley knew that, and spent much more time writing about (and exaggerating) the anthropophagous Fon people in Gabon than the pleasures of her botanizing of the jungle, which (so she said) was the whole point of her West African trip. You don’t want to hear about the traveller’s fun; what keeps you reading is the traveller’s misery, outrage, and near-death experience. Either that or a well-phrased dismissal, as when the English traveller Peter Fleming took a close look at São Paulo and wrote, “São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away.”

 

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