by Paul Theroux
Afghanistan and Pakistan were — not even that long ago — delightful places to travel in. And they may be again. India is full of terrorist groups, not just the pro-Kashmiris who shot up Bombay, but the more violent Maoist Naxalites who regularly set off bombs, derail passenger trains, and have killed more than six thousand people in the past dozen years in the so-called Red Corridor, a stripe running along the right-hand side of India. But in spite of its violence and disorder, India is still one of the most attractive destinations in the world.
At various times in my life, soldiers or militiamen at roadblocks in parts of Africa have pointed rifles at me and demanded money. I have been shot at by shifta bandits in northern Kenya. But in these places I was off the map and expected to be hassled.
As for my own top ten dangerous places, I have felt conspicuously alien, vulnerable, unsafe, and tended to walk fast in
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea: One of the most dangerous, crime-ridden cities in the world, inhabited by drifters and squatters, locally known as “rascals”, and career criminals, many of whom, wearing woolly hats, come from the Highlands and are looking for prey.
Nairobi: Downtown, muggers galore, even in daylight.
East St. Louis, Illinois: One of the poorest, most beat-up, most menacing-looking cities in the United States.
Vladivostok: A clammy-cold harbour city of vandalized buildings, scrawled-upon walls, underpaid sailors, and confrontational drunks and skinheads.
England: On Saturday afternoons, among the hoodlums, after soccer matches.
Rio de Janeiro: At the reeking periphery of the Carnival mobs, among prowlers and drunks and aggressive celebrants.
Addis Ababa: In the Merkato bazaar, which abounds with pickpockets and thieves.
Solomon Islands: The smaller, hungrier islands, noted for their xenophobia, some of whose locals demand large sums of money from any outsider who lands on the beach.
Kabul: Just outside the city, at a village where walking alone, I was spotted by about a dozen women who, unprovoked by me, began throwing stones at my head.
Newark: Stuck overnight, having missed a plane, I had to walk in the evening from my dreary hotel to find a place to eat, and at one point, dodging traffic, stepping over a dead dog, I was confronted by hostile boys yelling abuse and heckling me.
Happy Places
Are there truly happy places? I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place, an epiphany that remains as a consolation and a regret. Fogies recall many a happy time, because fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. Ordering food in a restaurant in the 1950s, William Burroughs said, “What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1927.”
There is a well-publicized list of happy places, which includes Denmark at the top, followed in descending order by Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Guatemala, and Luxembourg.
With the exception of small, threadbare Guatemala, what do these countries have in common? They are the world’s most developed, urbanized, bourgeois, and (so it seems) the smuggest and teeniest bit boring. I seriously doubt that they are as happy as advertised. Cold, dark Finland in January is not a place one associates with jollification. Finland, in fact, is quite high on the “Countries with the Most Suicides” list, and one doesn’t think of Austria as the Land of Smiles.
Tonga’s archipelago is informally known as the Friendly Isles. Captain Cook initiated the idea, but with the passing years this has seemed more and more like a frivolous sobriquet to beguile visitors, in the manner of bestowing the name Greenland on the land of snow and ice. Tongans are hierarchical, class-obsessed, rivalrous, and, like most islanders, territorial and rightly suspicious of strangers who wash ashore.
The very word “friendly” is loaded, and it is usually just a tourist-industry come-on. I wrote in Fresh Air Fiend, “In my experience, the friendliest people on Pacific islands are those who have the greatest assurance that you are going to leave soon.”
“The real enemy, the destroyer of our happiness, is within ourselves,” the Dalai Lama once said in a homily. Likewise, the true creator of our happiness is within us. There are contented people in the world, whose easy manner and good cheer persuade the traveller that he or she is in a happy land. Happy times are unforgettable, and sometimes they last for more than a moment. I have had joyful experiences in many places, at particular times. I agree with Burroughs’s fish story: happiness is usually retrospective.
There is also another factor, not “I’d like to live here” but “I wouldn’t mind dying here.” Here are ten instances:
Bali: I travelled there in the 1970s and after a week in Ubud wanted to quit my job, summon my wife and two children from Singapore, and spend the rest of my life on that fragrant island. My little family resisted.
Thailand: My recurring fantasy is dropping out and spending the rest of my days in a rural village in northern Thailand, as a paying guest, among hospitable villagers.
Costa Rica: On a bay in the rural north-western province of Guanacaste I felt strongly: I will build a house with a veranda and sit there scribbling like O. Henry in Honduras.
The Orkney Islands: Small, proud, remote, self-contained. Hardworking and well built, with Neolithic ruins and traditional pieties. I went there once and never stopped dreaming about these islands and their fresh fish.
Egypt: Not Cairo but somewhere else. Maybe I’d live on a houseboat, moored on the upper Nile, toward Aswan.
The Trobriand Islands: The people are uncompromising but I would make peace, settle on a small outer island, and sail around Milne Bay, as I did in the early 1990s.
Malawi: I have rarely been happier than I was in the Shire Highlands of rural southern Malawi in 1964, the year of ufulu, independence. I had a little house, a satisfying job as a teacher, and the goodwill of my neighbours in nearby villages. Later, I thought, If everything goes wrong in my life, I can always return to Malawi.
Maine: I think of the coast of Maine as coherent, lovely, well assembled by nature, populated by some of the most decent and reliable people I have ever known.
Hawaii: Perhaps it really is the tourist paradise of the brochures. I have lived in Hawaii longer than anywhere else in my life, and often when I am with a local person, and it’s a beautiful day — the pure air, the fragrance of flowers, the surf up, the usual rainbow arching in the sky — this person will smile and say, “Lucky we live Hawaii.”
Alluring Places
In my mind is a list of places I have never seen and have always wanted to visit. I read about them, look at maps, collect guidebooks and picture books. My imagination is full of appealing images — a great thing. The idea of unvisited places, future travel, enlivens the mind and promises pleasure. Here are ten out of many.
Alaska: Huge and thinly populated, one of the last true wilderness areas in the world, with Denali National Park and North America’s highest mountain, Denali, at 20,320 feet. I imagine paddling along the coast, taking ferries to the annual Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run, seeing the small towns and the empty places.
Scandinavia: I have never been to Norway, Sweden, or Finland. I’d like to see them in their winter darkness, at their gloomiest and most suicidal, and also go cross-country skiing. Then another trip in the summer, reliving Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night in Sweden, picking cloudberries in northern Norway, and visiting the Lapps.
Greenland: With widely scattered and diverse indigenous populations, many of whom have retained their traditional skills, Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) is inviting. Fridtjof Nansen skied across it in 1883, the first recorded crossing. He stayed among the Greenlanders and recounted how, housebound in the depths of winter, they sat naked, perspiring around a fire. I would also like to see Scoresby Sund, the largest fjord in the world, and hear the patter of the drum made from a polar bear’s bladder.
Timor: There is
liberated, independent, and chaotic East Timor and the Indonesian province of West Timor. I want to see them both, go from one to the other, talk to people, eat their fermented rice and steamed fish, go bird watching.
Angola: The Portuguese landed in Angola in 1575, colonized it, converted some people, plundered it for minerals — diamonds in particular — settled the coast, and ignored the hinterland. The Chokwe people in the interior, who now have their own political party, are among Africa’s finest artists, carvers, and dancers. For almost thirty years Angola was engaged in a civil war, but now it is rebuilding, and with its oil reserves it has the money to be independent and prosperous. I would like to see the country before prosperity takes hold.
New Britain Island: A large island off Papua New Guinea, with a small population of indigenous people, secret societies, rare birds, and balmy weather. And if that doesn’t work out, I’d travel in the area, to Manus Island (written about by Margaret Mead) and New Ireland.
Sakhalin: I could just make it out, grey and flat, over the windswept channel, from the northernmost port in Japan, Wakkanai. I could have taken a ferry, but I had to travel south, so I filed this away in my mind as a place I wished to see. Once a prison colony, Sakhalin was visited in 1890 and written about by Chekhov. What’s the attraction for me? The challenge of bleakness, no city to speak of, hardy people, and a railway.
The Darien Gap: I have travelled around but not overland through this section of jungle that lies between Panama and Colombia. The road is not reliable, and the fact that it is a geographical bottleneck, not to say a barrier, makes it inviting as a place in which I would happily disappear.
The Swat Valley: Once, long ago in Peshawar, I met some locals — tribals — who offered to take me upcountry into Swat, and to see the surrounding area — Taxila and ruined Buddhist monasteries, which comprised ancient Gandhara and its Hellenic art. I said, “Some other time.” Now it is the haunt of the Taliban, but perhaps one day …
The American South: I have had the merest glimpse, a long drive around the entire Gulf Coast, from Florida to New Orleans. But that glimpse, and the people I met, made me want to take a trip of six months or so, in rural Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, through Tennessee and the Carolinas — off the highways, into the pinewoods, down the red clay roads.
26
Five Travel Epiphanies
NOW AND THEN IN TRAVEL, SOMETHING unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveller. Burton travelled to Mecca in disguise, considering it a lark, but when at last he approached the Kaaba this sceptic was profoundly moved. It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected. The discovery of an unanticipated pleasure can be life-changing. ¶ Here are five epiphanies that I have experienced in travel, unforgettable to me, and for that reason they have helped to guide me.
One
I WAS IN Palermo and had spent the last of my money on a ticket to New York aboard the Queen Frederica. This was in September 1963; I was going into the Peace Corps, training for a post in Africa. The farewell party my Italian friends gave me on the night of departure went on so long that when we got to the port, a Sicilian band was playing “Anchors Aweigh” and the Queen Frederica had just left the quayside. In that moment I lost all my vitality.
My friends bought me an air ticket to Naples so that I could catch up to the ship there the next day. Just before I boarded the plane, an airline official said I had not paid my departure tax. I told him I had no money. A man behind me in a brown suit and brown Borsalino said, “Here. You need some money?” and handed me twenty dollars.
That solved the problem. I said, “I’d like to pay you back.”
The man shrugged. He said, “I’ll probably see you again. The world’s a small place.”
Two
FOR THREE DAYS in August 1970 I had been on a small cargo vessel, the MV Keningau, which sailed from Singapore to North Borneo. I was going there to climb Mount Kinabalu. While aboard, I read and played cards, always the same game, with a Malay planter and a Eurasian woman who was travelling with her two children. The ship had an open steerage deck, where about a hundred passengers slept in hammocks.
It was the monsoon season. I cursed the rain, the heat, the ridiculous card games. One day the Malayan said, “The wife of one of my men had a baby last night.” He explained that the rubber tappers were in steerage and that some had wives.
I said I wanted to see the baby. He took me below, and seeing that newborn, and the mother and father so radiant with pride, transformed the trip. Because the baby had been born on the ship, everything was changed for me and had a different meaning: the rain, the heat, the other people, even the card games and the book I was reading.
Three
THE COAST OF Wales around St. David’s Head has very swift currents and sudden fogs. Four of us were paddling sea kayaks out to Ramsay Island. On our return to shore we found ourselves in fog so dense we could not see land. We were spun around by eddies and whirlpools.
“Where’s north?” I asked the man who had the compass.
“Over there,” he said, tapping it. Then he smacked it and said, “There,” and hit it harder and said, “I don’t know, this thing’s broken.”
Darkness was falling, the April day was cold, we were tired, and we could not see anything except the black deeps of St. George’s Channel.
“Listen,” someone said. “I hear Horse Rock.” The current rushing against Horse Rock was a distinct sound. But he was wrong — it was the wind.
We kept together. Fear slowed our movements, and I felt sure that we had no hope of getting back that night — or ever. The cold and my fatigue were like premonitions of death. We went on paddling. A long time passed. We searched; no one spoke. This is what dying is like, I thought.
I strained my eyes to see and had a vision, a glimpse of cloud high up that was like a headland. When I looked harder, willing it to be land, it solidified to a great dark rock. I yelped, and we made for shore as though reborn.
Four
WE WERE DRIVING in western Kenya under the high African sky, my wife beside me, our two boys in the back seat. It was not far from here that I had met this pretty English woman and married her. Our elder son had been born in Kampala, the younger one in Singapore. We were still nomads, driving toward Eldoret. Years before, as a soon-to-be-married couple, we had spent a night there.
The boys were idly quarrelling and fooling, laughing, distracting me. My wife was saying, “Are you sure this is the right road?” She had been travelling alone for three months in southern Africa. We were in an old rental car. Cattle dotted the hills, sheltering under the thorn trees. We were just a family on a trip, far away.
But we were travelling toward Eldoret, into the past and deeper into Africa, into the future. We were together, the sun slanting into our eyes, everything on earth was green, and I thought: I never want this trip to end.
Five
JUST BEFORE INDEPENDENCE Day in 1964, when Nyasaland became Malawi, the minister of education, Masauko Chipembere, planted a tree at the school where I was teaching in the south of the country. Soon after this, he conspired to depose the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. But Chipembere himself was driven out.
Time passed, and when I heard that Chipembere had died in Los Angeles (“in exile”, as a CIA pensioner), I thought of the little tree he had shovelled into the ground. Twenty-five years after I left the school, I travelled back to Malawi. Two things struck me about the country: most of the trees had been cut down — for fuel — and no one rode a bicycle any more. Most buildings were decrepit too. Dr. Banda was still in power.
It took me a week to travel to my old school. It was larger now but ruinous, with broken windows and splintered desks. The students seemed unpleasant. The headmaster was rude to me. The library had no books. The tree was big and green, almost forty feet
high.
27
The Essential Tao of Travel
1. Leave home
2. Go alone
3. Travel light
4. Bring a map
5. Go by land
6. Walk across a national frontier
7. Keep a journal
8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in
9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it
10. Make a friend
Afterword
An anthology, especially one as personal as this, reflects a lifetime’s reading and travelling; the maddening aspect is that I am still here, still reading, still travelling, still finding quotations I wish I’d included. The seventeenth-century English scholar and antiquarian Robert Burton spent most of his later life issuing new editions of his (also deeply personal) The Anatomy of Melancholy. I now see why: he went on reading, he went on feeling melancholic, he went on improving his book, and finally he hanged himself.
After my The Tao of Travel was published, I kept discovering writer-travellers who stayed on the road for the sheer joy of it. Take Chekhov, on his way to Siberia in 1889: “I am not going for the sake of impressions or observations,” he wrote in a letter to a friend prior to his departure, “but simply for the sake of living for six months differently from how I have lived hitherto.” And to another friend, “I must do something to rouse myself.” Sakhalin Island was the result, and also a restoration of his peace of mind.
A book we had around the house when I was a small boy was called In Little America with Byrd (1937), a popular account of Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1929 meteorological expedition in Antarctica (the base on the Ross Ice Shelf was called Little America). I read this long ago, a dramatic narrative of isolation and Byrd’s near-asphyxiation from a faulty gas stove. More recently I came across Alone (1938), his own telling of his isolation in the ice station, and I was struck by his utterly unscientific view of his experience, depicting his solitude in joyous, near-mystical terms: “No important purpose,” he writes, “Nothing whatever, except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are.” And when his winter was over he spoke of his “appreciation of the sheer beauty and miracle of being alive, and a humble set of values.” This seems an extraordinary conclusion from a scientist and naval officer, but because it is salutary and unusual—indeed Zen-like—it is discussed in, among other books, Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self.