by Paul Theroux
“Infinite” is the kind of hyperbole that affects many deluded travellers in Africa. The powerful message of The End of the Game was that the animals were finite, that urbanization was a creeping blight, that a free-for-all was imminent. Most of what Beard predicted came to pass, but even he could not have imagined what an abomination the cities of East Africa became — sprawling, dense with slums, so crime-ridden as to be almost uninhabitable.
The End of the Game is less a wildlife book than a book about human delusion, as important now as it was when it first appeared. Rare among visitors to Africa, Beard went simply to learn and grow. Because he was essentially an observer, patient and keen-sighted, not a ranter, with no agenda, he was able to see a process at work that many had missed, in the convergence of people and animals. One of his book’s great virtues, and its lasting value, is that it takes no notice of politics. It is single-mindedly concerned with the living and the dead, predators and prey. Beard was true to what he saw — and the truth of it has made it prophetic.
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
IN 1992, AS he tells us on the first page of his book, W. G. Sebald, a German teacher-writer living in England, decided to strap on his rucksack and circumambulate the flat, featureless, not very large county of Suffolk. The result was The Rings of Saturn, a ruminative work full of free association and arcane lore, with the subtext “Not a lot of people know this!” Sebald claims that the book was “prose fiction” (Chatwin made the same claim about his Songlines) and inspired by Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, but though this is self-serving, the stitched-together anecdotes do have a point, perhaps unintentional, but forceful nevertheless.
To write about what one sees in Suffolk would be a work of topography or social history, but rambling describes what Sebald does — on foot and on the page. What do we find in Lowestoft? Not much. Joseph Conrad had a seafaring connection to Lowestoft, and from this slender link Sebald develops a whole historical reverie that involves Conrad, King Leopold of Belgium, the hellish Congo, Roger Casement, and Casement’s sensational diaries. This is pretty much the structure of the book, except that a bigoted note occurs when he speaks of the Congo and Belgians, whom Germans (though Sebald doesn’t say why) particularly abominate. “And, indeed, to this day one sees in Belgium a distinctive ugliness, dating from the time when the Congo colony was exploited.”
Does he mean a metaphorical ugliness? No. “At all events, I well recall that on my first visit to Brussels in December 1964 I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year. One evening in a bar in Rhode St Genèse I even watched a deformed billiard player who was racked with spastic contortions.” And so forth.
He comes to Dunwich. Dunwich hardly exists, most of it having been overwhelmed by the sea. And so what Sebald provides is nothing less than the history of the town, the name of every sunken church, the monastery, and a detailed account of the storms that reduced Dunwich to a pathetic settlement.
But here is the point: the native of a place seldom sees what the alien sees, seldom remarks on what he or she takes for granted. Sebald describes how the passengers in the first train he takes, from Norfolk to Lowestoft, are so silent “that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives”. This is empty hyperbole. English people, and in particular the provincial English, seldom yammer on public transport. Without saying so, the German is comparing the English to Germans. Still, the originality of the book arises from the remarks that only a foreigner would make, and such observations, even when they are misapprehensions and distortions, have value.
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Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
A PLACE NAME CAN BEWITCH THE TRAVELLER. The name “Singapore” cast a spell on me until I lived there for three years in the 1960s without air-conditioning. But the village of Birdsmoor Gate, in the west of England, near where I lived after Singapore, was just as lovely as its name. California names, such as Pacific Grove, Walnut Creek, and Thousand Palms, seemed to beckon. But in Philadelphia, the corner of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street — music to the ears of the average Anglomaniac — is a dangerous slum area and the busiest drug-dealing site in an otherwise salubrious city. ¶ In Remote People, Evelyn Waugh talks about the deception of names. “How wrong I was, as things turned out,” he says, “in all my preconceived notions about this journey. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing, while the places I found most full of interest were those I expected to detest — Kenya and Aden.”
Here are some place names that have misled the credulous traveller.
Shepherds Bush: A grey, malodorous, overpopulated district, the opposite of its name, in west London. The traveller not wise to the truth of this squints and mutters, “Where is it?” gazing at the greasy cafés, kebab shops, Australian mega-pubs, cut-price emporiums, and honking traffic. Shepherds Bush is noted for its shopkeepers, who, when it’s not raining, stand at their doorways voluptuously scratching themselves.
Casablanca: “Casablanca is an anonymous cluster of high-rises, and modern roads so straight and thin there’d be no room for Sidney Greenstreet there” (Pico Iyer).
Baghdad: “Celebrated as the city of the Arabian Nights,” James Simmons writes in Passionate Pilgrims, “Baghdad 1,000 years before had been one of the great cities of Asia, a centre of art, literature and learning. Richard Burton called it ‘a Paris of the ninth century’.”
Simmons goes on: “Baghdad disappointed the Blunts, as it has virtually all modern travellers. Freya Stark called it ‘a city of wicked dust’. And Robert Casey, who visited Baghdad in 1930, dismissed it as ‘a dust heap — odorous, unattractive, and hot. Its monuments are few, its atmosphere that of squalor and poverty.’” And this was before the invasion, the fall of Saddam Hussein, and all the bombs.
Mandalay: An enormous grid of dusty streets occupied by dispirited and oppressed Burmese, and policed by a military tyranny.
Tahiti: A mildewed island of surly colonials, exasperated French soldiers, and indignant natives, with overpriced hotels, one of the world’s worst traffic problems, and undrinkable water.
Timbuktu: Dust, hideous hotels, unreliable transport, freeloaders, pestering people, garbage heaps everywhere, poisonous food.
Marseille: Just a short walk from the pretty harbour are sullen neighbourhoods of public housing, tenements, refugees, and bewildered immigrants, with no one saying bienvenu.
Samarkand: Not the Silk Road fantasy of minarets and domes but a stinking industrial city in Uzbekistan, known for its chemical factories, fertilizer plants, and out-of-control drunkenness.
Guatemala City: A place that has continually been flattened by earthquakes and badly rebuilt. The majority of the population are slum dwellers, many of whom are eager to emigrate from their failed state.
Alexandria: Almost all my life I had dreamed of Alexandria. Most of life’s disappointments begin in dreams. At one time, like the greatest cities in the world, Alexandria, Egypt, belonged to everyone who lived in it. And, as Lawrence Durrell wrote in Justine, it was shared by “five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes.” Yet today Alexandria is a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs, and one creed, Islam, and is puritanical.
Kunming: Once a small, self-contained agricultural town in the rural south of China, ancient, visually bewitching, known for its serene parks, Kunming is now a huge horrendous city, overrun by cars and buses, concrete and tenements, and one of the main routes of the drug trade from Burma.
São Paulo: Like Bombay, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, which are known for their ugly buildings, their bad air, and their twenty-million-plus populations, São Paulo (lovely, saintly name) has to be seen and suffered through to be understood as one of the worst city-planning disasters on earth. Or rather, “No planning,” the São Pauleano says, “just�
� — and lifts his hand and makes the money sign.
Biarritz: Apart from the tiny corniche and the picturesque — but grotesquely overpriced — Hôtel du Palais, this is a crowded French city of cement bungalows, labyrinthine roads, mediocre restaurants, and a stony beach of cold and dangerous surf.
Travel Wisdom of
PAUL BOWLES
The Paul Bowles (1910–1999) of stereotype is the golden man, the enigmatic exile, elegantly dressed, a cigarette holder between his fingers, luxuriating in the Moroccan sunshine, living on remittances, occasionally offering his alarming and highly polished fictions to the wider world. This portrait has a grain of truth, but there is much more to know. Certainly Bowles had style, and success with one book, The Sheltering Sky. But a single book, even a popular one, seldom guarantees a regular income. And, apart from money, Bowles’s life was complicated emotionally, sexually, geographically, and without a doubt creatively. ¶ A resourceful man — as the exile or expatriate tends to be — Bowles had many outlets for his imagination. He made a name for himself as a composer, writing the music for a number of films and stage plays. He was an ethnomusicologist, an early recorder of traditional songs and melodies in remote villages in Morocco and Mexico. He wrote novels and short stories and poems. He translated novels and poems from Spanish, French, and Arabic. So the louche, languid soul of the stereotype turns out to have been a busy man, highly productive, verging on a drudge. ¶ He was handsome and hard to impress, watchful and solitary, and he knew his own mind. His mood of acceptance, even of fatalism, made him an ideal traveller. He was not much of a gastronome — as his fiction shows, the disgusting meal (fur in the rabbit stew) interested him much more than haute cuisine. He was passionate about landscape and its effects on the traveller. Bowles was fortunate in writing at a time (not long ago, but now gone) when travel magazines still welcomed long, thoughtful essays. ¶ He wrote for the American Holiday, the frivolous name masking a serious literary mission. The English fiction writers V. S. Pritchett and Lawrence Durrell also travelled for this magazine; so did John Steinbeck after he won the Nobel Prize, when he criss-crossed the United States with his dog. Bowles wrote a piece for Holiday about hashish, another of his enthusiasms, since he was a lifelong stoner. ¶ He knew what he enjoyed in travel, and what bored him: “If I am faced with the decision of choosing between visiting a circus and a cathedral, a café and a public monument, or a fiesta and a museum, I am afraid I shall normally take the circus, the café, and the fiesta.” The following quotations are from Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963).
Each time I go to a place I have not seen before, I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know. I assume it is natural for a traveller to seek diversity, and that it is the human element which makes him most aware of difference. If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.
There are probably few accessible places on the face of the globe where one can get less comfort for his money than the Sahara. It is still possible to find something flat to lie down on, several turnips and sand, noodles and jam, a few tendons of something euphemistically called chicken to eat, and the stub of a candle to undress by at night. Inasmuch as it is necessary to carry one’s own food and stove, it sometimes seems scarcely worth while to bother with the “meals” provided by the hotels. But if one depends entirely on tinned goods, they give out too quickly. Everything disappears eventually — coffee, tea, sugar, cigarettes — and the traveller settles down to a life devoid of these superfluities, using a pile of soiled clothing as a pillow for his head at night and a burnous as a blanket.
Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price.
25
Dangerous, Happy, Alluring
Dangerous Places
“WHAT GIVES VALUE TO TRAVEL IS FEAR,” Albert Camus wrote (Notebooks, 1935–1942). “It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travelling.”
Stirring stuff, but the first thing to say to this is that Camus, a timid traveller, never travelled very far. Camus was afflicted with motorphobia, a morbid fear of riding in cars. The irony of this is that he died in a car crash. His publisher, Michel Gallimard, asked Camus to accompany him to Paris from Provence in his expensive sports car, a Facel Vega, insisting it would be the quickest way to get there. Speeding through the village of Villeblevin, Gallimard lost control of the car, killing himself and Camus, in whose pocket was his unused train ticket to Paris. Camus was that singular pedant, a theorist of travel, rather than a traveller. But his argument is a good one: a place’s aura of danger can cast a spell.
I was once on a TV show with the self-appointed chronicler of such places, the Canadian traveller and journalist Robert Young Pelton, who made his name with his first book, The World’s Most Dangerous Places. Quite different from his public image as Danger Man, in person he was likable and eager to please, though he wagged his finger as he told horror stories of his travels. Yet most of his stories were about places I’d been to and hadn’t found horrible. I agreed that Algeria was somewhere to avoid for its frequent massacres, also Chechnya and Abkhazia — as though anyone would want to go to those bombed-out places. When he droned on about Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines (“Don’t be fooled by the modern veneer of the Philippines. It is a have and have not country where outsiders are spared much of the brutality and injustice,” he says on his website, ComeBackAlive.com), I said, “Robert, we are on the outskirts of Newark!”
Newark, with its adjacent and stagnant wetlands, seemed dank and cut off and ominous, like a city in a swamp. It was at the time advertised as “New Jersey’s homicide capital” by its own newspaper, the Star-Ledger: more than a hundred murders a year. Pelton conceded that point, and my next one, which was that countries are not violent, people are, some more than others, and parts of Newark were possibly as dangerous as parts of Chechnya.
On Pelton’s ominously titled “Could Be Your Last Trip” list are Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Mexico, the whole of Russia, New Guinea, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Sudan.
I do not quibble with his listing Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which are war zones. Somalia has no government and exists in a state of anarchy managed by tribal chiefs, warlords, and pirates. But by taking care I have had a wonderful time in Cambodia, Mexico, Burma, Sri Lanka, Russia, and even Sudan (see my Dark Star Safari), which Pelton describes as “a big, bad, ugly place with a belligerent, extreme Islamic government hell-bent on choking the entire country under Islam’s shroud”. Yes, the Sudanese government is bad and ugly, but from village to village I met only friendly folk.
The Philippines is one of the world’s most underrated travel destinations, hospitable and very beautiful. I would advise the traveller to be cautious in certain areas of Mindanao, in the way I would advise caution in certain areas of Camden, New Jersey, seventy-three miles from Newark, named the number one most dangerous city in the USA.
One list of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world, based on their murder rate (number of murders per 100,000), has Ciudad Juárez at the top (130 murders per 100,000). The ot
her cities on this list include Caracas, New Orleans, Tijuana, Cape Town, San Salvador, Medellín, Baltimore, and Baghdad. Other lists include Mogadishu, Detroit, St. Louis, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg.
I have had nothing but safe travel experiences in South Africa, and yet the official statistics are very scary. In a one-year period (the twelve months from April 2007 to March 2008) South Africa reported 18,148 murders, and many had presumably gone unreported. The number of reported sex crimes, including rapes and assaults (according to a New York Times report in 2009), was 70,514. The violence in South Africa is increasing. This news does not deter safari-goers, soccer fans, bird watchers, or the many oenophiles who seek to sample the dessert wines and Pinot Noirs of the Western Cape.
Apart from some obvious hellholes — Mogadishu, Baghdad, Kabul — every city has its high-risk neighbourhoods. It is in the nature of a city to be alienating, the hunting ground of opportunists, rip-off artists, and muggers. I once asked a concierge in a large hotel near Union Square in San Francisco for directions to the Asian Arts Museum. Though it was within walking distance, he begged me to take a taxi, to speed me past the streets of panhandlers, homeless people, decompensating schizos, and drunks. In the event, I walked — briskly — and was not inconvenienced.
