April 2009 Archives

 

 

The trade wind blows moist on the Caribbean side of Panama, stirring the palms of the tiny coastal fishing village of Portobelo, but it isn't enough to put more than a ripple on the plate glass sea.

It's difficult to believe this quiet settlement was once the port of entry and exit for all of Spanish South America. Portobelo was the terminus of the Las Cruces Trail, stopping point of the yearly galleon fleet that hauled gold looted from the Incas across the briny deep to enrich the coffers of the Kings and Queens of Spain.
 
Beside the narrow coast road, a row of rusted cannon peers over the moss-choked walls of San Geronimo fortress. Water laps gently at the foundations, and the cries of distant children carry across the harbour. Grass grows between the flagstones. A windowless room holds a tourist afterimage of initials carved on stone and an acrid smell of stale piss that bakes in the hot dead air.

In the ruins nothing stirs. My shuffling feet scuff gently upon that weighted silence that clings to dead places.

 

 

 

 

Sunlight slants through verdant jungle and illuminates a simple white painted tomb on a hillside overlooking the Nam Khan River. Someone has hacked back the growth to open a view of the smooth brown waters, but vines are encroaching yet again. A square brass plaque, tarnished by constant moisture, reads simply "Henri Mouhot 1826-1861".

Mouhot is credited with "re-discovering" the ruins of Angkor Wat and with popularizing them in the West. His 1858 to 1860 expedition, chronicled in Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos, ended with his death at age 35. In that very same spot on the riverbank 7km outside of Luang Prabang, Laos, he scratched out his final fever-ravaged journal entry: "Have pity on me, oh my God!"

Mouhot's grave was lost to the jungle until its accidental rediscovery by foreign aid workers in 1990. Today it's a quiet place, protected by birdsong. The river gurgles gently as it nears communion with the mighty Mekong. I sat there on the edge of the tomb in light tinged with the green of undersea, and I thought about what it takes to be an explorer.

It is the fate of explorers to leave their bones in lonely places, forgotten except by others of their kind. They forsake a comfortable home and contact with family for the coarse life of the camp. They embrace disease, pestilence, and the hazard of violence for what many would consider scant rewards.

What unstoppable urge sparks the drive to take such risks and to endure such suffering? For Mouhot it was simple. He took joy in the process. His journals record his pride in the great number of new species he had collected. He wrote, "[...] even if destined here to meet my death, I would not change my lot for all the joys and pleasures of the civilized world."

Others seem driven by ego, by the need to prove something to themselves or to the world. And for some it's the quest for scientific knowledge. For me the driver has always been curiosity, a burning need to see what's around the next bend, an all-consuming desire to understand, to feel, and to see it for myself. That and a child's sense of adventure, I think.

Some say the great Age of Exploration died with Wilfred Thesiger. I disagree. It has simply changed. New eras are upon us. People like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who the Guinness Book dubbed "The world's greatest living explorer", continue to test the limits of human endurance. Robert Ballard pushes into new and unsuspected ocean frontiers, while Johan Reinhard probes the hidden reaches of our past--for the hidden past truly is a lost world, and time is imaginary.

As technology evolves we sit on the cusp of new journeys outside the confines of our home planet, into our solar system and possibly beyond. Will future students read about the exploits of planetary explorers with the same sense of wonder and envy that I read of Sir Richard Francis Burton? And will your descendants be among them, sailing bravely away to the unknown stars?

 

 

 

Though Henry Miller's book on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi, is generally regarded as his greatest achievement, he also wrote a second travel book which should be regarded as a definite classic of the genre.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare chronicles Miller's return to America in 1939, hot on the heels of the Greek trip referred to above, and from what he believed would be an open-ended life in France. The journey begins on a note of hope: "I wanted to have a last look at my country and leave it with a good taste in my mouth. I didn't want to run away from it, as I had originally. I wanted to embrace it, to feel that the old wounds were really healed." Instead, he finds despair: a nation where giant industries deaden the lives of their workers while polluting the environment, and a population which seeks nothing greater than credit, cheap cars, and vapid mass consumerism. It says a great deal that many of Miller's scathing critiques are just as relevant today.

And yet the book contains a note of hope. It's also a celebration of those rare individuals--eccentrics, artists, and creative people of all stripes--whose stubborn resilience represents everything that made the nation great in the first place.

A few years after this trip, Miller finally made peace with the land of his birth. He found his paradise in Big Sur, California, and that is where he lived out the rest of his life.

 

 

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Honduras...

 

Stamped into the Republic of Honduras, I stood beside the bus while two mangy German Shepherds sniffed the luggage well. The chief drug cop was a short moon-faced man. He wore black pants and a fading navy t-shirt with the police logo ironed onto the front in peeling yellow ink. An old .38 revolver was tucked into his waistband, tied to his belt loop with a twine lanyard. He picked his teeth and watched with disinterest while two subordinates conducted a superficial search. It was just too hot to work that day. 

 The Western Honduran hills were parched and barren. Stumps of trees poked up like amputations from blanched, lifeless soil. Deforestation seemed only to compound the heat and the dust, to further the vicious circle. Along the roadside were the familiar clapboard shacks I'd seen since Nicaragua, but they looked shabbier somehow: fragile dwellings constructed from garbage; a scrap of sheet metal slapped on here, an old packing crate patched on there. They stood for the temporariness of life and the struggle for existence.

Barefoot children stood on trampled earth and kicked at chickens as they watched the bus rumble past. Their hair hung like greased rope. They drooled and picked at open sores. Their clothes were faded and threadbare, and they looked wormy. Groups of children seemed to share a wardrobe: the boy wore only dusty shorts, the girl a dusty t-shirt.

 I heard the black turbine roar of our diesel engine as a high wind filled with sand coursed over the denuded hills and lashed the bus with clouds of grit. It shuddered with the force of it, threadbare tires struggling to retain a slim grip on the cankered road. Far to the west, the sun glared white off the gunmetal waters of the Gulf of Fonseca, the very same waters that Maya and Martina had navigated in a Salvadoran patrol boat.
 
The highway forded several dry riverbeds, where the road swerved in sharp S-curves to cross one-lane metal Bailey bridges. A permanent bridge was apparently being built over ruins that lay collapsed in a twisted heap, the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch several years before. Like the sheet metal on the dying homes, the bridge was a hasty patchwork on the country; first aid to prolong the life of a terminal patient.

In such places the wind forgets--the wind is always forgetting--but the sand and the sea remember.

This patch of desolation has always been like this.

 

 

 

Movies shape how we see the world. Movies also shape the world we expect to see when we go out into it. Few things inspire us to travel like a well chosen backdrop. It paints romantic visions in our heads, visions that often linger for years.

Sometimes the reality of a place matches or exceeds our vision, and sometimes it falters. In the end, anything that inspires us to travel, to break the bonds of the everyday, is a force for positive change.

Here are a few films, old and new, that have inspired me to travel or that kept me sane between journeys. I hope they do the same for you. 

The Mosquito Coast (1986)

Based on the bestselling novel by Paul Theroux. Disgruntled inventor Harrison Ford takes his family to the jungles of Central America to found a town and goes insane in the process. Filmed in the lush, steamy jungles of southern Belize, the film and the book inspired me to travel to Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast back in 2000.

 

 

  The Story of the Weeping Camel (2003)

The most accurate film I've ever seen on Mongolia's south Gobi region. Apart from a few minor scenes, the film was shot by following the day to day lives of a family of nomads. As luck would have it, the filmmakers arrived during the camel birthing season. A natural drama ensued when a mother camel rejected its calf, endangering the life of the newborn creature. The reconciliation between the two camels, brought about by a traditional shamanic ceremony, is one of the most moving scenes ever set to film. I visited this same region in 2002, and I'm sure I spent a night in the town where the family searches out the shaman--that building they enter contains a small shop where I bought supplies.

 

The Tempest (1982)

A little-known film by John Cassavettes, starring a very young Molly Ringwald, Susan Sarandon, and Raul Julia. The Tempest is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's play, filmed on a stunning Greek island in the Ionian Sea. I first saw this back when cable TV was new, during a free weekend preview of the movie channel. It had me dreaming Mediterranean dreams long before I was old enough to know where the Mediterranean was. "The Tempest" is also my favourite Bill Shakespeare play. 

 

Mountains of the Moon (1990)

Based on the life of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton spoke some 29 languages and dialects, was a prolific writer and translator, and one of the greatest explorers and travelers of all time. He was the first European to enter the Ethiopian city of Harare, was co-discoverer of the source of the Nile, and was one of the few foreigners ever to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise. Burton was also a master of the sword. On one expedition he fought off an attack by Somali tribesman that saw him wounded through the mouth by a spear, the scars of which are visible in all his later photographs. Whenever I begin to feel like I've accomplished something, Burton's example puts me to shame. He remains one of my personal heroes.

Before Sunrise / Before Sunset (1995/2004)

The quintessential traveler's films, Before Sunrise and its sequel Before Sunset perfectly capture the feeling of the all-consuming road romance. They go further in considering what would happen if we said 'yes' instead of 'no' at that one crucial juncture that could change the course of our lives. Set in Vienna and Paris (respectively), both films are steeped in Old Europe's streets, and they capture those rambling traveler's conversations better than any other film I know. 

 

Summer Lovers (1982)

Every guy's Mediterranean dream--a summer-long threesome on a beautiful Greek island. It's a film about freedom, individualism, charting your own course and creating your own personal morality. It explores what it's like to completely let go of the preconceived, immersing yourself totally in the present. Stunning scenery and an absence of tan lines make this classic a winner in my books.

 

 

High Road to China (1983)

A little known and vastly underrated film by Tom Selleck (if you grew up in the 80's like me, you know him as Magnum, P.I). This film captures the spirit of high adventure and stubborn independence, and includes jaw-drop footage of Central Asia and the Himalayas. Plus, it's got biplanes in it. Who wouldn't want to rip around the world in one of those? High Road to China made me wish I was born in those wildly optimistic pre-war years of the 1920's, when the world was a much larger place. I later traveled to Xinjiang and Tibet to soak up some of those landscapes for myself.

 

The Lover (1992)

Lush scenery of French colonial era Vietnam circa 1929: crumbling moss-eaten architecture, exotic street scenes, slow lazy ceiling fans, and lines of afternoon light casting rectangles of shadow through slatted wooden blinds. The film reminds us that sometimes those blinds also conceal illicit pleasures. You can almost feel the heat and humidity steam through the lens. And the heat between the main characters doesn't hurt either... The Lover perfectly captures the feeling of old Hanoi.

 

The Dreamers (2003)

A shocking coming of age story set in Paris in the turbulent summer of 1968. A young American exchange student goes to the decadent City of Lights to study French, where he falls into a bizarre love triangle with a brother and sister and is drawn into their strange, sheltered world. Though controversial when it was released, the film is oddly enchanting rather than lewd, and it conveys a vivid sense of what Paris must have felt like during that turbulent summer of riots when social norms were shattered. 

 

Lost in Translation (2003)

This film portrays the dazzling disorientation of Tokyo and the loneliness and exhaustion of culture shock better than any I've ever seen. It reminded me of the many times I've been cast adrift on a hostile shore, and it brought back so many vivid memories of everything that's surreal about Tokyo, where I lived for two years from 2000. 

 

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

Based on the posthumously published diary of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, the film chronicles his coming of age journey through South America. Shot on location in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Peru. I read the original book of Guevara's travel journals years ago, and feared the film would be an overblown foreshadowing of the world figure he would later become. That wasn't the case. The movie stayed true to the road trip lark of the book, complete with the sort of South American scenery that'll have you lacing up your hiking boots before the credits begin to roll.

 

The English Patient (1996)

Romance and archaeology in the Sahara desert in an age when high adventure was still a possibility, and when parts of the globe remained undiscovered. The film contains stunning desert footage, and was based on the real-life search for the lost city of Zezura. Yes, it's a bit of a chick flick, but if you love the desert you only have to switch off the sound and feast on the imagery.

 

 

So that's it. Twelve picks off the top of my head to inspire wanderlust and Vagabond Dreams.

What are your special travel films? I'd love to hear about them. Please share them with me in the comment section below.

 

 

 

 

Strong syrupy coffee in the cobbled streets of Sarajevo's Turkish quarter. The Muslim call to prayer reverberates through narrow alleyways, the echoes compounding as it bounces back upon itself. Just around the corner is a synagogue and an Orthodox church. East meets West to the metallic tap of tinsmith's tiny hammers.

The centre is rebuilt, but further out bullets and shell bursts have pitted the stone facades. Bombed out buildings stand hollow and abandoned. Staccato jackhammer roar as the city slowly puts itself back together.

Old men in shabby coats and dark berets sip rakija at early morning café tables, starting the day with a long slow burn.

 

Spring always reminds me of the years I spent in Japan. The damp chill of Tokyo winter gives way to gentle warmth. There's a sense of optimism in the way people walk, and a smile hovers at the corners of every mouth. It's a wonderful time to be alive.

In Japan, spring is also the season for festivals. Most celebrate nature, renewal, and transformation. Those may seem like innocent topics, but as every traveler knows, you sometimes get a little more than you bargained for.

Allow me to paint you a picture of a festival I attended back in the halcyon days of 2002. Imagine for a moment that it's you in these shoes, rather than me...

You've decided to visit the city of Kawasaki, on the southern fringes of Tokyo, simply to pass the time. The air is fragrant with the scent of cherry blossoms, and trees are bursting with their delicate white blooms. The sun warms your skin and practically urges you to take an innocent stroll.

You wander down narrow a street, your mind dancing along springtime thoughts like a butterfly flitting in the breeze. Close to Kawasaki Daishi station your ears prick up at the sound of drums and chanting. You've stumbled upon a festival.

The noise and the increasing crowd draw you to Wakiyama Hachiman-gu, a local Shinto shrine. You're about to cross the street when the procession begins. Your timing couldn't be better.

The shrine attendants and local dignitaries pass under the gate and out into the street. Here comes the first o-mikoshi (portable shrine). You pull out your camera and prepare to take some great travel photos. But... wait a minute... You chuckle nervously to yourself. Your mind must be wandering with springtime thoughts. It couldn't possibly be.... My God!

You don't know whether to laugh or run as a group of ten very un-feminine drag queens clad in shimmering pink kimono trudges towards you, grunting and swaying beneath the tremendous weight of a giant pink penis. This is followed by another o-mikoshi, a long thin wooden black phallus. Pardon the pun, but there's much more to come.

The Kanamara Matsuri has become a yearly focal point for Tokyo area gays, lesbians and drag queens to come out and strut their stuff. Shinto has always been a non-judgmental religion when it comes to matters of sex and morality. During the Edo period (1603-1867) the area around the shrine was home to a large number of brothels. Prostitutes came to the shrine to pray for the prevention of syphilis. With the advent of HIV/AIDS the focus of the shrine has broadened.

Straight couples also go to Wakiyama Hachiman-gu to pray for fertility and for help in starting a family. It's considered good luck to ride the phallus shaped see-saw, or to rub the various penis-shaped objects strewn about the shrine grounds.

I have to admit that I clutched my girlfriend a little closer when I realized what we'd stumbled into. And maybe I used her as a human shield, a sort of "moral prophylactic," if you will. But I was just paranoid, and there was really no need. We were welcome there, just as anyone was who came armed with a smile. (I could say that they welcomed all comers--but that would be in poor taste.)

Whatever your sexual orientation, if you're ever in the neighbourhood at this time of year, I urge you to go. The Kanamara Matsuri is a raucous, cheerful festival full of dirty jokes and the crack-hiss of beer cans. A group of colorful drag queens picnics on a blanket in the middle of the shrine gardens, basking in the rapt attention of curious camera-toting Japanese. Vendors sell cock-shaped candies and lollipops. Red-faced, tipsy old men ogle uniform clad schoolgirls as they pose suggestively in front of the shrine's icons. Shy couples hold hands and giggle nervously. One of the day's central events is the auctioning off of daikon (giant radishes) carved in the shape of, you guessed it, enormous dicks.

It's a fun filled day of drunken camaraderie where gay and straight link arms and drink to fornication and to enormous pink genetalia. If a better subject exists for building cross-cultural bonds, I don't know what it is.

 

 

 

Charles Doughty's imposing 1,400 page tome is one of those strange books many people hail as a masterpiece of travel literature but which few of those people have read. Famous among scholars of Arab history and culture, it's more often been described as "an achievement" than a gripping read. But thanks to this well chosen selection from Dover Publications, the casual reader can now enjoy some of the author's best passages without bogging down in rambling Victorian-age digressions.

Charles Doughty traveled the Arabian peninsula in the 1870's, when Wahabi fanaticism was at its height. Other explorers had made similar journeys before him, but usually in disguise. Doughty traveled openly as a Christian and an Englishman, among ragged Bedouin tribesmen and devious Arabian townsmen, through desolate wasteland where his life was worth less than the coins in his pocket. He was repeatedly robbed, sometimes beaten, and often taken advantage of, but he also found kindness, honesty, and companionship on his journey. Once you get past the old-fashioned style of his prose, the story of his famine-level existence and his endurance of climactic and cultural extremes makes for a gripping read.

Doughty's remarkable firsthand observations of Arab life and culture provide modern readers with a window into our now vanished past, as well as a glimpse of what it was like to travel before there were hostels, tour packages, or the Lonely Planet.  Travels in Arabia Deserta can be a challenging read, but the insights you'll come away with are worth the effort.

(For those like me who are interested in old explorer's journals, Dover publishes many of these in inexpensive reprint editions. Some of this stuff can be very hard to come by, so I'm grateful for a company like Dover that continues to put it out there.)

 

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place on the outskirts of Managua...

 

I sat in blank Zen-minded drowsiness as the plush coach sped through vacant pre-dawn streets, letting the rumble of the engine lull me to sleep. I was just dozing off in the shabby outskirts of Managua when the driver slammed on the brakes. He got out of the bus. Voices carried through the open door; one authoritarian, the other desperate.

The passengers froze. I could almost see their ears twitch as they listened with absolute concentration, straining to take in every phrase. I was slower to react, resentful that my sleep had been disturbed. I sat up slowly and rubbed my eyes.

The neatly groomed man in shirt and tie seated next to me asked if I spoke English. He held a red-covered Mexican passport in his hand. He looked exactly like 80's rock star Falco, but I couldn't imagine what the fuck Falco would be doing on a Tica Bus.

"We've been stopped by the military police," he said, his voice pitched low. "This could be very bad." He continued to listen, and the set of his jaw revealed the tension creeping into his face. "The driver apparently went through an intersection. They say we must go back. That we can't continue today."

The bus shook with the thump of heavy boots. Two soldiers in fatigues came on, carrying Russian assault rifles.

"Passaportes!"

One stood at the front caressing the blued metal of his Kalashnikov, while the other swaggered down the aisle to glance contemptuously at our documents. He frowned as he flipped the pages one by one, deliberately drawing out that moment of held breath with the sadism of the torturer, before passing it back and moving on.

Passengers held their identity cards with whitening fingers and stared straight ahead as their fate clumped down the aisle in heavy black boots. The soldier finally reached the back and stood opposite me. He riffled through my passport and then glared at me with black eyes filled with spite. I met his gaze until he threw the document into my lap and moved on. I felt no fear, only contempt for this pathetic man who would use the implicit threat of violence to frighten peasants and old people who can't fight back.

In hindsight, perhaps I wasn't afraid because I couldn't comprehend the consequences. Only a few years before, during the Contra reprisals of the 1980s, such a roadside stop would very probably have meant several "disappearances", or even an entire busload of people massacred with a grim deliberation calculated to send a message those who would find them.

The disappointed soldiers clumped back down the steps. Moments later, with no explanation (a greasing of palms), we were on our way. Passengers collapsed into their seats. Strangers sought the comfort and reassurance of strangers. Conversations broke out throughout the bus, and loud forced laughter that sounded a lot like barking.

I turned back to the Mexican. "Where are you headed, amigo?"

"Colorado. My wife and children are there."

"Taking the bus all the way?"

"Si."

"How long is it?"

"About a week. In Mexico there are overnight buses. There it will be faster."

I thought about what that would mean.

"I took a three-day Greyhound once. I don't think I could do a week."

He shrugged and smiled. It was a typical gesture down there in Jungleland.

 

 

 

  

Arrival is an event to be delayed as long as possible. To arrive is to end the journey. That period between departure and arrival, when the days blur together and time becomes plastic, is the opiate. It's what keeps us going. For the true traveler, life is a series of consecutive journeys, one leading into the next, culminating in that most final of arrivals. And for all we know, that might just be the beginning of yet another eternal series of journeys...

The traveler flows with life, swept along by Taoist currents. To be stagnant in one's life, to stop learning and changing and tempering one's character, is to die a smothering death.

All of life is change and movement. Stagnancy is death. Even the rocks of the earth know this. There are many paces of change.

 

 

 

Laos is a jungle country of rural villages with wooden stilt houses and smoky cooking fires. Karst hills obstruct the journey, jutting up like horribly broken teeth, unbrushed and moss-covered. Distances are not great, but winding roads make journeys into marathons. The highway between Vientiane and Luang Prabang is like a footpath that--over time and purely by default--became a highway. Modernization goes no further than the edges of the pavement.

 

 

In the small-town streets of Vientiane, the French colonial legacy survives in baguettes and strong black Lao coffee. Eleven hours by winding bus to the north, this foreign influence fades like a song. Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital, drowses beside the muddy Mekong River, where gilded temples with low swept roofs dream quietly in the side streets. Nothing much happens in Laos. The French colonizers said: "The Vietnamese plant rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, and the Lao listen to it grow." The Lao proverb is more direct: "Too much work is bad for the brain."

 

The journey from Managua to the port town of Bluefields on Nicaragua's remote Mosquito Coast takes place in two phases: the first a teethrattling ride in a dustchoked bus down the only jungle road. At the road's terminus, the lost town of Rama, you must throw your lot in with the Rio Escondido as it seeks communion with the sea.

The engine pulses and shudders through the flaking steel deck as the boat parts slowly from the broken wooden pier. Bags of concrete sit in a dusty pile on the aft deck. The hold is stuffed with sacks of fruit and the lounge with Nicaraguans chatting happily over the too-loud TV.

I make my way to the quiet of the open roof to stretch out in the pre-dawn cool. A damp rotting smell of vegetation tints the air. As we near the estuary, this will change to the tidal smell of mangroves; but that's still hours away, almost a day. I sip from a coconut and a book alternately. Even after the sun comes up, the breeze on the roof provides relief from heat that holds a smothering pillow over my nose and mouth.

Morning brings the river slowly to life. A dugout canoe loaded to the waterline with bananas and an Indian family pushes into the current. A cluster of stilt houses slips by, then another. The settlements become more and more intermittent until there is only jungle and the winding mud brown river.

Hours later, I climb down to the galley window and bring back a pile of fried plantain nestled in a damp, warm banana leaf. I unwrap it and eat slowly, watching the deep green of the jungle--now closer, now farther as the river winds. A shrill monkey screech echoes from dark depths beyond the tangled shoreline, hinting at unseen faunal abundance.

We carefully swerve around a shattered, half-sunken relic poking redstreaked metal arms into the channel. Another settlement passes by: a sorry accumulation of makeshift shelters, rusting corrugated roofs and mud. Unpainted wooden houses, two-roomed, small and square, sit at the edge of the riverbank on high stilts, closed up against the heat. A handful of others sit in the middle of a little garden of yucca and bananas. The jungle closes in again, and it's as though they never existed.

River travel has a rhythm all its own. It's speculative: my thoughts flow and surge, drawn along by the current to the relentless slow throbbing diesel beat. It's less predictable. Timetables don't matter, and so the clock has less hold. My mind is free to wander like the murky river I ride.

Of course this applies only to slow boats. I'm not talking about speedboats that rush backpackers from site to site, crammed in like sheep, prisoners of an agenda. True river travel is the realm of half broken down scows, double deckers with tired clanking engines and flaking paint.

River travel is the opposite of hurry.

 

If you want to write meaningful travel literature, you've got to immerse yourself in everything that's been published in the genre. In addition to reading broadly, I've made it a habit to read deeply of specific writers whose work truly resonates with me. I first read everything they've ever published. Next, I read their collected letters and journals. After that comes biographies, and finally, critical writings about the author's work.

I've read everything published by Paul Theroux--not just his brilliant travel books, but also his much larger catalog of fiction. For those who haven't read him, it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to my favourite travel writer. For those who have, please read on for a review of his most recent book of travel lit.

 

The publication of a new book by Paul Theroux is always a bit of an event for serious travelers, whether armchair or active. In his latest work, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux sets out to retrace the route of his groundbreaking first travel book, thirty years later. It is a journey that finds him absolutely at the top of his form.

Already an established novelist, Theroux injected new life into the travel genre in 1975 when he published The Great Railway Bazaar. The story of his mammoth train journey from Britain through Europe to India and Sri Lanka, across Southeast Asia, up Japan, and full circle back to England on the Trans-Siberian Express became an immediate best seller and catapulted the author into the literary big leagues.

That first book was pivotal because it introduced extensive dialogue to a genre that had always tended towards the personal diary, pontification, and self-aggrandizement. Theroux's gift for allowing strange local characters to reveal a place in their own words, coupled with a keen eye for the telling observation, has made him arguably our greatest living travel writer.

"Writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life," Theroux says in the opening chapter, "the nearest I will come to autobiography." That sense comes across most clearly in this new work. The Theroux of Railway Bazaar was somewhat lost: nearly out of money, a novelist struggling for ideas. He set out on that first journey in 1973 with the vague notion of finding something to write about. And though we only read about it now, three decades later, he was also struggling with desperate loneliness, the constant ache of homesickness, and a deeply troubled marriage. The writer who takes this new journey is a changed man: the highly regarded author of dozens of acclaimed novels and travel books, wealthy, respected, and happily married. He is more relaxed, introspective, open, and with nothing to prove. As the journey unfolds Theroux looks back to confront that earlier self, to relive what he was and to take comfort in what he has become.

The issue at the heart of the book is one I've often struggled with: whether to return to a place where you had experiences which fundamentally altered the course of your life.

"The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible," Theroux writes, "not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since. In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and hardly recognizing the object of desire in this funny-looking and bruised old fruit."

Will revisiting these places and seeing the inevitable changes alter your precious memory of them? Will sadness and nostalgia for what has been lost come to replace what you had there? If so, are those memories better left safely untouched, cherished in the past rather than revised by the present?

In the end, Theroux finds his joyful reunion--one particular episode in Burma was especially moving, a meeting with a family who remembered him and who had waited patiently for his return--and he finds a sense of peace with his past.

[Note: I met that family when I was traveling in Burma back in 2002. When I told them I'd searched out their hotel because Theroux had written about it in Railway Bazaar, they asked if I could give them his phone number. They were always hoping he would return. I was glad to read that he did.]

Readers of The Great Railway Bazaar will be pleased to note that Ghost Train to the Eastern Star also covers new ground. Due to war in Afghanistan and an inability to secure a visa for Iran, Theroux was forced to reroute through the Caucasus nations of Georgia and Azerbaijan, and the Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which he was visiting for the first time. As he travels through these poverty stricken offshoots of the former USSR, we are reminded of his scrupulous honesty, his firm belief that the bleaker aspects of a country cannot be ignored--as they have been by so many writers of the "isn't it lovely here" persuasion. Theroux has always sought to produce a balanced view in his travel writing, and while that may not fuel everyone's ideal dream, I believe that it cuts much closer to the honest reality of the experience.

Fans of Theroux's work will find all his strengths on display in this new book: his gift for dialogue, precise observation, the well-chosen anecdote or detail which reveals a place, and a full cast of fascinating characters. From the brilliant opening chapter--which startles by calling into question the very practice of travel writing--you can expect to be well and truly hooked.

But don't take my word for it. Pick up a copy for yourself.

 

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Guatemala...

During highland evenings a damp chill replaced the setting sun.

 The park was filled with couples. Old couples walked arm in arm, dressed as though for a first date. Young couples clung to each other on secluded benches, their passionate kisses generating a heat that staved off the cold. Empty promises and romantic nonsense flowed between them like liquid moonlight. Teenaged boys posed and snuck glances at giggling girls, who were sneaking glances back at them.

Each night I walked through the park with my ice cream, like so many of the other walkers. I paced the paths slowly, and I sat on a bench to watch the people. The intimacy of the couples reminded me of my solitude, of the life I'd left behind to make this journey, and it underlined the gulf that separated us.

Objects are defined by space. We know what a tree is because of the space around it that is 'not tree.' We extract meaning from a sentence because of the empty spaces between words. Without space, spoken words would be a stream of garbled noise. Space can also contain meaning. The pauses in a conversation, the things left unsaid, often reveal more than the words. Space provides an invisible subtext to the entirety of our lives.

Space and distance also define relationships. If the perception of space between the other and ourselves is felt to be too far, we're seen as distant and aloof. If it's too close, we're smothering.

Interactions with others define who we are. They identify the boundary of where I end and other people begin. This space gives us solidity; it acknowledges us. Our gravitational forces tug as we orbit each other, letting planet hunters know we're there. Each night in the park I watched life happening but I wasn't a part of it. I was distant. I moved through the night in an orbit of my own.

At those times I felt my hollow aloneness, and I almost began to doubt my existence.

 

 

 

A heavy silence replaced the motor's shake and grind. Metal ticked softly in the disconnected dead of night, and the side wall of the bus was cold to the touch. I struggled out of my plywood bunk and climbed over baggage and sleeping bodies to take a piss outside the front door. Suddenly lightheaded, on the edge of passing out, I stumbled back to my bunk where I shivered in a panting heap. Then the nausea struck, and I slid back the window to dry heave into the dark.

Trapped at the crest of the Tanggula Pass (5,231 meters above sea level, the highest point on the road to Tibet), the rest of that night was a patchwork of semi-conscious dream interspersed with fragments of half-remembered reality. The blackness was rent by jagged lightning bolts that crackled across the sky and strobe lit the barren moonscape, burning painful afterimages on my eyes that lasted for several seconds. The storm engulfed us as it worked its way across the plain. The flashes from the ground strikes and the thunder were simultaneous. They shook the bus and the air smelled scorched. No one spoke in the silence between explosions. There was only the hiss-gasp of passengers sucking on oxygen canisters in the dark.

Day brought the sort of light that thrusts daggers into the aching cavern of your mind. The throbbing haze of altitude sickness gripped me behind the eyes and churned my stomach. My breath was shallow and my heartbeat fluttered in the rarefied air. Outside the grime streaked window, snowcapped peaks towered above the road and glaciers swept between the crests to drip muddy rivers to life. They swirled brown like chocolate milk, etching shallow tracks into the barren plateau.

Only those with little money and infinite patience would consider crossing the continent by bus, but it can be an unforgettable experience, one that's inaccessible to the short distance traveler. A barrier is breached when you go beyond that one-day travel gap. Your time sense shifts, the days become cyclical, and the only constant is movement.

Like a rocket or a submarine, the bus carries its own self-contained atmosphere. The air is a stale funk of old socks and slept-in clothes tinged with greasy fast food from crumpled paper bags. Scattered conversation crests above the engine drone and the hum of great wheels on asphalt. The bus heaves and sways on its chassis like a creaking ship riding ocean swells. The people creak too--they're old and worn, or young and poor. The faces change as the miles roll by, and each new seatmate is a story: some dull and circular, some slightly crazed, and some as sad as the threadbare seats and the scratched plastic armrests that surround you.

To travel by Greyhound is to catch a glimpse of the warp and woof of a lost America: an America of small town main streets, of diners and general stores, of apple pie and peeling wooden houses. It's the America of Jack Kerouac's road, that endless searching black ribbon that rolls through hills and mountains and deserts and prairie to Pacific heights, ending suddenly in the terrifying plunge of sea girt cliffs.

It's also the new America of inner city slums and tedious interstates. Endless stretches of four-lane monotony connecting cankerous urban sores, old downtowns boarded up and forgotten by the suburb-dwelling middle class. The bus station usually sits at the centre of those districts left behind by urban renewal and expansion, left behind with the population that the Hound primarily serves.

I once took the Hound from the Canadian border at Ogdensburg, NY to Tucson, AZ--a three day (and night) ride, all for an incredible sixty bucks. I saw some scarcely believable things on that trip, including an episode with a man in Texas who was in complete harmony with nature. I watched through the bus window as he sauntered over to one particular tree. I'm not sure why he chose that tree or what was going through his mind, but I watched as he looked it over and carefully chose a small green twig. He broke the twig off and brought it back to where he'd been leaning against the wall, where he held it up close to his eyes and plucked several pieces from it. Satisfied with his preparations, he began to clean his right ear with the twig. He examined it closely, scraped it on the corner of the building, and then carefully went about cleaning his left ear. When he was finished, he threw the twig away. You don't observe scenes like that by staying at home!

I'm not sure if I really enjoyed those three cramped days on the bus, but I did find them compelling enough to continue a month later from Tucson to Los Angeles and on up the coast  to Vancouver--another two day journey. From there I crossed the Rocky Mountains to Banff, Alberta on the Canadian Hound (one full day), and drove back--halfway across Canada--with family to Quebec (five days). It was over two months of hard, slogging road. Three long distance legs I could have easily flown in just a few hours. But I never would have seen so much land.

And that's just it, isn't it? The true reward of bus travel is the land as it rolls by in one unbelievable huge panorama outside your window. You get a sense of the vastness of it all and of the countless lives being lived in it, of the individual people each striving to realize their hopes and dreams, every one with a story and a past and memories. Some of those people will sit next to you and tell you their stories. You'll connect, and that will outshine the sleeplessness and the sore ass and the bad food. They'll spin their story out slowly, woven with detail, carefully and well, because the journey is a long one and you have nothing but time.

 

Show kindness to your friends by not eating them, the sign said. But what the fuck else is there to eat? I shake my head as the soft flesh of a newly cooked baby dissolves on my tongue. They don't know what they're missing. My larder is an assemblage of appendages. The valley made me into an aunt-eater.

The valley night pulses malevolence. It's a Galt's Gulch of assassins and necromancers. A place without law where the punishment pre-empts the crime. People dream of crumbling concrete post-Soviet apartment blocks with clanking inefficient central heating, but they live underground in fetid blocked-up sewers. Somebody broke the weather. In summer the sun melts the flesh from your bones, and in winter it freezes the flesh from your bones. The weather is a force of pure negation.

The valley is a panopticon. Eyes watch from everywhere. Their gaze doesn't moderate your actions: they only seek to worsen you. Sickness seeps from the ground through your feet, poisoning your soul and blackening your aura. The only cure is the shaman who will purge the blackness at the cost of your life. Basically you're fucked.

The people of the valley grow viler and viler with every passing day. Their accent thickens and becomes guttural. You can't have a conversation without being burned by gobs of green hissing saliva that eats into the surface of your skin and leaves your clothing pock-marked. The conversation of the older residents is lethal. It literally bores you to death.

Painted men, their tattoos are on the inside. Their past is forged beyond believing. Worshippers of false gods. Idolaters, every fucking one. They're ruled by discorporeal entities, mediated by melancholy dog-faced priests who hypnotize you with ethereal nose whistles. A sudden disorientation as they melt your will in torrents like butter. Who'd have guessed it'd be so oily? They keep this in carefully labeled jars. You wander about will-less, wasting your days in sophistry, trying to hide your Confucian. Until you recover it you're hopelessly entranced. But drink it down and the dream dissolves with a hiss.

In the valley there are no interiors or exteriors. Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. Everything is permitted that is forbidden. Self-mutilation is just a way to pass the time.

I find myself bartering with the owner of a shop that sells shadows.
"What kind of shit are you pushing here? We don't need that apparition."

It's raining cats and dogs again. They hit the ground with a wet thud. Moans and whimpers fill the air. I step around the large ones and kick the small ones into the gutter.

A moist breeze wafts through caverns in the barren valley wall. The air grows small fingers and tickles you delightfully as it picks your pockets.

The cave dwellers are pale blind men with transparent skin: sacks of visible organs. They eat once every seven years. Too lethargic to hunt for food, they ingest themselves from the extremities inward, until one day they digest their own stomach and end up a steaming turd on a dusty floor. Passers-by are a delicacy. Semi-organic walls absorb any cries for help.

Somewhere in my memory there's grass. Distant music. Summer evenings. Sputtering buckets of citronella. Pink lemonade. We were merely flesh then.

I was there all the time, but acting in tomorrow. They never thought of looking for me there.

They say someone escaped the valley once. They say. As for the rest of us timid souls, the valley has become our lifeline. It's poisoning us, but without that poison we would vanish in a burst of primal matter. Or perhaps like a song we'd just fade away. Apathy and lethargy have soaked into our bones and left us wilted and invertebrate. Something or someone has fucked with our density.

I don't know how I got here, but I know I'll never leave. There are worse places I suppose...

Every journey needs a soundtrack. The music of The Church has always formed the backdrop of mine. The band's singer, Steve Kilbey, an accomplished lyricist, poet, blogger and painter, has also been one of my most significant writing influences. Allow me to introduce you to Kilbey's recent solo album: Painkiller.

 

I've made it a habit--well, call it a ritual--that each time I receive a new album from The Church or Steve Kilbey, I get that first listen in while lying in a darkened room with the headphones cranked. First impressions are important, and I want the music to totally wash over me.

On that first listen, I'm looking for the song that causes goosebumps to ripple up and down my arms. The one that makes me forget myself. There's always at least one on every Church album. A song I latch onto immediately. Others take a few listens to sink in, and sometimes a song I won't like for years suddenly worms its way in and becomes an enduring favourite.

I plugged in Painkiller at midnight, while the city slept. I'd already heard the first track, "Outbound", on Kilbey's myspace page, so I knew it wouldn't be the one. I'd heard "Wolfe" too, on several acoustic bootlegs, so it wouldn't startle me either.

But... wait a minute! I'd never heard it like this!

My eyes popped open as the music swelled, and that familiar feeling swept over me. It built even more with "Celestial", and "Crystalline Rush" took it to the ecstatic. It's difficult to describe the beauty of these songs, the feelings of nostalgia and hope they inspire. The best I can do is to say that they cause your chest to expand and swell as though your heart might burst. That's the sort of energy contained in these songs.

And then things suddenly turn darker. "Song for the Masking" slides in with the sort of baseline that makes your skin crawl and your morals do likewise.

The dissolution truly begins with "File Under Travel." This felt like everything "Travel by Thought" (from The Church's 1983 album Seance) was trying to be but couldn't quite reach. It drives you relentlessly out of yourself until you don't know up from down, left from right, fractured from whole. It's a journey all right, one that shatters your consciousness into a thousand pieces and leaves you disoriented, but strangely open and receptive.

From there to the end of the album was a sonic blur--the songs pulled me along on a rollercoaster journey of pure emotion.

One of the things that impressed me most was the intricate structure of the album. It felt like the songs at each end mirrored--or better yet, provided a foil for--each other. The swelling chords and shouted vocals of "Wolfe" paired with the easier, wiser, more upbeat retrospective of "Forever Lasts for Nothing." The sublime hope of "Celestial" was set against the darker, more jaded perspective of "Spirit in Flame." But the absolute masterpiece was the placement of the two bookends: "Outbound" and "Not What You Say." Painkiller opens by launching you out into space, beyond the solar system and into unexplored territory. In the middle, the journey turns transdimensional. It's like being sucked into a black hole and dissolved into your component elements. You're gradually reassembled in an entirely new and unfamiliar form, until at the end of the journey you suddenly find yourself drifting eerily at the bottom of the sea, a place you never expected to end up--or have you reached another strange galaxy altogether? You could just as easily be floating in the void.

That last song, "Not What You Say", is a particular stroke of genius. It uses some of the same elements as the rest of the songs, a vocal or a melody that gives you something familiar to cling to, setting your mind at ease, before blindsiding you with sounds you never could have anticipated. Its effect is to "unhinge" you. After the initial lyrics set the stage there's a long middle bit where a few simple notes are repeated over and over. Like a metronome, it's incredibly effective at dropping you into a meditative state. The music eventually swells once more and lyrics come in, taking you a bit higher, and then those notes come back and reinforce your trance, sinking you deeper and deeper.

Soundscape is an apt description of Kilbey's and The Church's work. This was nothing short of an aural journey through a richly described inner landscape, orchestrated by a master.

Simon Polinski's mixing was inventive and effective. Leaving in odd echoey bits of studio conversation at exactly the right moment was a stroke of genius. Nothing about this album is what you predict or what you expect.

And lest the above sound esoteric or somehow granola, this album totally rocks. It's bass-driven in a way that SK's prior solo work wasn't. The bass comes fully to the forefront and slithers like a houri through a cloud of incense until you're nearly intoxicated. Combine that with Church drummer Tim Powles's relentless driving beat and you've got rock on an entirely new level.

I have to say that I loved (and still love) Kilbey's previous solo album Dabble (2001). "Blessed One" is a sublime track. "Untitled Too", with its nautical terminology and shouted delivery, hinted at some of the vocal territory that would later be explored here. And "Time to Say Goodbye" is my funeral song, for when my bones finally turn up bleached and brittle in the desert. But the contrast between these two consecutive solo albums is night and day. The artistic development that took place in those seven intervening years is staggering. This is another world entirely, with a depth and a layering that was never realized on Steve Kilbey's prior solo work (though you always felt he was reaching for it).

Simply put, this is art that rocks.

 

(Painkiller can be purchased online from Karmic Hit records. Check out Steve Kilbey's myspace page to hear several songs off the album.)

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in the highlands of Guatemala...

 

 

Within days I had become a regular in the Parque Central and the vendors left me alone. But on the day of my arrival I was constantly assailed. Most went away after two or three polite "Non, gracias." One didn't.

I was reading John Steinbeck with my legs stretched out in a patch of sunlight. I wasn't bothering anyone; I just wanted to be left alone. The old Indian woman spotted me from a distance and circled in like a hungry shark.

"What do you want to buy?" she asked, thrusting her aggressive presence into the sanctuary of my silence.

"Nothing, thank you."

"Look at these bracelets. Very nice. Wallet? Change purse?"

"No thank you."

She kept on talking as though she hadn't heard, chattering incessantly while squatting on the ground to empty the contents of her basket on the stones between us.

"Look at these blankets. Look." She unfolded several, held each one up, and dropped it onto a growing pile. "A hat then. A small statue. Buy something!" I kept shaking my head no, and then I finally went back to my book, ignoring her completely. I was too polite to simply tell her to fuck off, and so she continued her tiresome monologue, pausing only for breath.

"Something for your mother then. For your wife." She'd sunk to new depths, appealing to a Latin sense of reverence and guilt that I didn't possess.

The simplest thing would have been to get up and walk away, to find another bench. But I was comfortable there. I'd done nothing to deserve this. I'd been polite. Her incessant badgering was the worst tactic she could have tried on me. It only made me more obstinate. I was determined to hold my ground.

"Make me an offer! Buy a shirt, a necklace." She shoved them in my face with meaty, wrinkled hands. I brushed them aside and continued to read, but I could feel the annoyance bubbling up inside me.

A young girl passing by paused to show me her basket.

"Would you like anything?"

"I'll buy that bracelet," I said, pointing at one of the many draped over her arm. I didn't bargain. I didn't ask the price. I simply handed her the money. She smiled and thanked me, then walked away.

It had just been an impulse. The girl was pretty, and I appreciated the politeness of her approach in contrast to that of the bullying old hag. But I'd also done it out of spite. More than anything, I hated being told what to do. That fact had probably been responsible for most of my high school suspensions. Tell me that I "need" to do something and I'll resist it to the bitter end, even if it's in my best interests. I hate to be confined.

The old woman watched this transaction in shock. When it was over, she exploded.
"Buy something from me!"

"I don't want anything. I've been telling you that for twenty minutes."

"You bought something from her!" She pulled at her hair with both hands, and for a moment I thought I'd fallen into a Greek myth. "You have to buy something from me! I showed you all this stuff!"

She'd gone and said "have to." My resolve was absolutely sealed.

"I didn't ask you to show me anything," I said, looking directly into her greedy eyes. "You shoved it rudely in my face."

At that moment she realized she had lost. Silence. Glacial cold. She thrust her shirts and blankets into her basket with punches of frustration, and then paused to shoot me an icy glare.

"You are a very evil man."

I smiled sweetly, using kindness to get in one last dig. She set her back rigidly upright, turned slowly, and stalked away.

I saw that old lady again several days later, using the same belligerent tactic on other new arrivals. They always gave in to her incessant badgering, simply to get rid of her.

Age is just as wicked as youth, and we are all capable of being thieves.