Falling Off the Map
Page 1
Acclaim for
Pico Iyer’s
Falling Off the Map
“Intriguing … Iyer’s eye for detail offers some nice glimpses of destinations few will achieve.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Pungent … Iyer has a remarkable eye for the gently absurd details that lift the lid off a place. I wouldn’t trade his little gem[s] of information for all the guidebooks, Baedekers and travel fact-sheets in the world.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“[Iyer is] among the best of the current practitioners of literary travel writing. The reader very quickly comes to trust Iyer’s judgments. Having [him] as a tour guide, it’s hard not to want to fall in with him; his lonely places breed zany characters, bizarre events. But what really makes the journey delightful is Iyer’s way with words.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“Marvelous … memorable.… Always a keen eye, Iyer is at his best when he’s swept away by some aspect of a particular destination. [He] seems to hit upon the gist of why lonely places are so fascinating. Iyer’s book is a celebration of places that aren’t inclined to purge their own peculiarities to accommodate the expectations of the rest of the world.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A classic travel book in the old sense, not having anything to do with the questionable habits of tourism. Iyer is pungent, witty, often brilliant on his far-flung destinations.”
—Jim Harrison
“Vivid … Iyer remains a consistently engaging observer. The Australian Outback and other landscapes spur Iyer’s eloquence. Irony meets elegy in [his] most haunting reports.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Iyer brings a contemplative quality to his work that makes it exceptional … a wonderful companion.”
—Boston Globe
“Iyer is a post-modern tourist, drawn to the textures of the present. He is alive to video culture and what he terms the emergent global ‘single polyglot multiculture.’ His whimsy makes him a more effective social critic than any ideologue. Iyer’s singular outlook and powers of observation do not grow stale.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“[Iyer has] a special genius for spotting the loony-tunes aspects of East-West culture collisions.… This is terrific stuff.”
—Seattle Times
“A vivid look at places long lost to mainstream travelers.”
—Travel Holiday
“Pico Iyer is a matchless travel companion—wherever it is he wishes us to accompany him … an excellent introduction to one of the most perceptive and engaging travel writers of his generation … Pico Iyer displays here that love and understanding of differing peoples and temperaments that finally distinguishes the brilliant observer. Even if he did fall off the map, I’d happily go along for the ride.”
—Toronto Star
“Entrancing … I enjoyed it more than any travel book I’ve read in years.”
—Norman Lewis
Pico Iyer
Falling Off the Map
Pico Iyer was born in Oxford in 1957 and was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. He is an essayist for Time magazine and a contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler. He is also the author of Video Night in Kathmandu and The Lady and the Monk.
Books by Pico Iyer
Falling Off the Map
The Lady and the Monk
Video Night in Kathmandu
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, MAY 1994
Copyright © 1993 by Pico Iyer
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1993.
Parts of these chapters appeared, in somewhat different form, in Condé Nast Traveler and The New Republic. “Cuba: An Elegiac Carnival” was originally published in Islands.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Iyer, Pico.
Falling off the map: some lonely places of the world / Pico
Iyer.—1st Vintage departures ed.
p. cm. — (Vintage departures)
Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1993.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76072-2
1. Iyer. Pico—Journeys. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Title.
[G465.194 1994]
910.4—dc20 93-43494
Author photograph © Mark Richards
v3.1
“This round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self.”
—MELVILLE
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
A Prefatory Note
Lonely Places
NORTH KOREA: My Holiday with Kim Il Sung
ARGENTINA: La Dolce Vita Meets “The Hyper”
CUBA: An Elegiac Carnival
ICELAND: Rock ’n’ Roll Ghost Town
BHUTAN: Hidden Inside the Hidden Kingdom
VIETNAM: Yesterday Once More
PARAGUAY: Up for Sale, or Adoption
AUSTRALIA: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere
Vintage Departures
A Prefatory Note
Most of these essays were originally written, in somewhat different form, to introduce potential visitors to places of potential interest; to serve, that is, as open-eyed first impressions. In many cases, circumstances have overtaken me—Argentina has stabilized its peso, Cuba’s destiny changes with every passing month, parts of Vietnam are probably unrecognizable. Still, I have not tried to update the chapters, or to allow myself the luxury of retrospective wisdom and prescience. These pieces were aimed to catch their subjects at interesting historical moments, but in moods that would not change with history’s tides.
I would like to extend sincerest thanks to the editors who dreamed up or supported most of the journeys herein described: Harold Evans, Thomas Wallace, and colleagues at Condé Nast Traveler; Joan Tapper at Islands; Andrew Sullivan at The New Republic; and Henry Muller and friends at Time. Thank you, too, to the brothers at the Immaculate Heart Hermitage in Big Sur, for offering peace beyond measure and the perfect place in which to think about loneliness and space.
Lonely Places
On every trip I took to Havana, the ritual was the same: I would get into a car with two of my friends (into a ’56 De Soto most likely), and we would judder off towards José Martí International Airport. We drove past huge pictures of Che (BE LIKE HIM), past billboards that said SOCIALISM OR DEATH, THE MOTHERLAND BEFORE EVERYTHING, IT IS ALWAYS THE 26TH (of July, 1953), past long lines of women waiting for a bus. We spoke only in indefinite pronouns, so as not to arouse the driver’s suspicions, pretending that we thought that everything was well, pretending that we did not hope to meet again. When we arrived at the airport, we would get out and sit under a tree just outside the battered terminal. There my friends would tell me about everything they planned to do as soon as they arrived in America: how they would open a bookstore, or take pictures of the clubs on Forty-second Street, or send all the jeans they could find back to their families at home. Then, when it came time for me to leave, they would turn and, without looking back, walk across the street to another tree and wait for a bus back into town. They couldn’t bear, they said, to see me getting on the plane that they had been dreaming of for twenty-five, or twenty-seven, or thirty-one years.
That is one of the things that make me think of Cuba as a
Lonely Place. Just like the old men sitting on the terraces of the cheap hotels, showing you photos of long-lost fiancées (“Miss Dade County 1956”), or the trim government officials who ask, in perfect Eisenhower-era English, “Do they still play tetherball in the States?” Just like the statues of Don Quixote set on lonely hills across the countryside, and the pictures of Ava Gardner in the downtown restaurants; just like the tiny huddle of worshipers singing hymns on Easter Sunday, or the messages people give you to take to unheard-from mothers in the Bronx, distant cousins in Miami, an Indian—of course you can find him—by the name of Singh. Cuba is ninety miles from the United States, but it might as well be a universe away. Letters pass only infrequently between the two neighbors, and telephone calls are next to impossible (though it was once my mixed fortune to befriend, of all things, a telephone operator: every night in Havana, she would call me up, unbidden, and serenade me with Spanish love songs, and for months after I returned home, the phone would ring, at 2:00 a.m., 3:15 a.m., 4:36 a.m., and I would pick it up, to hear “Oye, oye!” and the opening strains of “Guantanamera”). Exiled from the Americas, deserted by its Communist friends, its only ally these days a xenophobic hermit state run by an octogenarian madman (“Querido compañero Kim Il Sung,” run the greetings in the Cuban official newspaper, Granma), Cuba is increasingly, quite literally, a Lonely Place.
Lonely Places are the places that don’t fit in; the places that have no seat at our international dinner tables; the places that fall between the cracks of our tidy acronyms (EEC and OPEC, OAS and NATO). Cuba is the island that no one thinks of as West Indian; Iceland is the one that isn’t really part of Europe. Australia is the odd place out that no one knows whether to call an island or a continent; North Korea is the one that gives the lie to every generality about East Asian vitality and growth. Lonely Places are the exceptions that prove every rule: they are ascetics, castaways, and secessionists; prisoners, anchorites, and solipsists. Some are famous for their monasteries (Bhutan and, in some respects, Iceland); some are famous for their criminals and cranks (North Korea and Paraguay). And though no one has ever formally grouped them together—save me—every Lonely Place conforms to the Paraguay described by its native writer Augusto Roa Bastos as “an island surrounded by land.”
Yet loneliness cuts in both directions, and there are 101 kinds of solitude. There is the loneliness of the sociopath and the loneliness of the only child, the loneliness of the hermit and the loneliness of the widow. And as with people, so too with nations. Some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them. Each makes its own accommodation with wistfulness and eccentricity and simple, institutionalized standoffishness. Australia, a part of the Wild West set down in the middle of the East, hardly seems to notice, or to care, that it is a Lonely Place; Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to be assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.
Yet all Lonely Places have something in common, if only the fact that all are marching to the beat of a different satellite drummer. And many are so far from the music of the world that they do not realize how distant they are. Both South Korea and North are zany, lonely places in their way: the difference is that North Korea is so cut off from the world that it does not know how strange it is and cannot imagine anything except North Korea. This is how life is, I imagine North Koreans thinking: being woken up each morning with loudspeaker exhortations in the bedroom; being told exactly what clothes to wear and which route to take to work; being reminded each day that Kim Il Sung is revered around the world. In the half-unnatural state of solitary confinement, Lonely Places develop tics and manias and heresies. They pine, they brood, they molder. They gather dust and data, and keep their blinds drawn round the clock. In time, their loneliness makes them stranger, and their strangeness makes them lonelier. And before long, they have come to resemble the woman with a hundred cats in a house she’s never cleaned, or the man who obsessively counts the names in the telephone book each night. They grow three-inch nails, and never wash, and talk with the artificial loudness of someone always talking to himself.
Burma, out of the blue, decides to call itself Myanmar and to name its most famous city, unintelligibly, Yangon. Iceland speaks a tongue that Grendel would have recognized. North Korea, which sees no tourists, is building the largest tourist hotel in the world, 105 stories high. And for many years now in Havana, across the street from the U.S. Interests Section, there has stood a huge billboard, with a caricature of a “Ggrrrr”-breathing Uncle Sam, next to the message SEÑOR IMPERIALISTS! WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FEAR OF YOU! There are more things on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
When people think of Lonely Places, they tend to think of moody outcrops off the coast of Scotland, or washed-up atolls adrift in the Pacific. They may even think of the place where I am writing this, a silent hermitage above the sea along the unpeopled coast of northern California. But Lonely Places are not just isolated places, for loneliness is a state of mind. The hut where I am sitting now is utterly alone. For days on end, I do not hear a single voice; and from where I write, I cannot see a trace of human habitation. Yet in a deeper sense, the place is packed. I am companioned—by rabbits, stars, and wisps of cloud—in worlds far richer than any capital. The air is charged with presences, and every inch of hillside stirs. I watch for the skittering of a fox on my terrace, listen to the crickets chattering in the dusk, catch a blue jay’s wings against the light. Birds sing throughout the day, and the ocean’s colors shift. Everything is a jubilee of blue and gold, and at night, walking along the hills, I feel as if I am walking towards a starlit Temple of Apollo. A Lonely Place in principle, perhaps, but certainly not in spirit.
More than in space, then, it is in time that Lonely Places are often exiled, and it is their very remoteness from the present tense that gives them their air of haunted glamour. The door slams shut behind them, and they are alone with cobwebs and yellowed snapshots, scraps of old bread and framed photographs of themselves when young. The beauty (and pathos) of Burma today derives from the fact that it is stranded amidst decaying remnants of its former glory, and the poignancy of Cuba that in the midst of leafy university quadrangles, you will find bird-spotted tanks. You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, “We have now landed in Lonely Place’s Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is … frozen.”
Yet Lonely Places are generally sure that their time is about to come. North Korea is just waiting for Stalinism to sweep the world and the Olympics to be held in the stadia it has built for them (the secret of his longevity, says Kim Il Sung, the world’s longest-running dictator, is his optimism); Argentina is just waiting for the day when it will be a world power again, the cynosure of every distant eye. Lonely Places have seen Bulgaria, China, even Albania admitted, or awakened, to the world; they have seen the Falklands, Grenada, even Kuwait enjoy their moments in the spotlight. They tell themselves that even Japan was once a “double-bolted land,” as Melville put it, and China, and Korea too; they tell themselves that tomorrow will bring yesterday once more.
Lonely Places are often poor places, because poverty breeds wonkiness and a greater ability to visualize than to realize dreams. Lonely Places are often small countries, because smallness gets forgotten: the tiny voices of Tibet, or Benin, or East Timor are seldom heard at international gatherings. But even huge countries can be Lonely Places, or have Lonely Places inside them, as anyone who has been to Siberia or Ladakh, Kashgar or Wyom
ing, can attest. Everywhere, in some lights, is a Lonely Place, just as everyone, at moments, is a solitary. Everyone sometimes dances madly when alone, or thumbs through secrets in a drawer. Everyone, at some times, is a continent of one.
Lonely Places are defined, in fact, by their relation to the things they miss. You would expect the western fjords of Iceland, or the depths of Tierra del Fuego, to be lonely; but there is a more unanswerable kind of loneliness, and restlessness, in Reykjavik and Buenos Aires, the loneliness of people just close enough to the world to see what they might be. Both American Samoa and Western Samoa are pretty little South Sea bubbles a world away from anywhere, and both are isolated hideaways lost in their own surf-soft universe. Both are graced by palm-fringed beaches, Technicolor cricket games, and huts echoing with cries of “Bingo” in the dark. But what makes American Samoa a Lonely Place is that it also has a zip code, a Radio Shack, and a Democratic caucus. It has American-style license plates, yellow school buses, and Days of Our Lives. It sends a congressman to Washington, but he is not allowed to vote.
Other Lonely Places are happy in their loneliness, or able, at least, to turn it to advantage. The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of “No worries, mate,” while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point. Others, like Tibetans, pine for a loneliness that is tantamount to peace. Still others have the bitterness of outcasts: if they cannot play the game, say the Libyans, why should you? “Ye Visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places!” sang Wordsworth, who found all his solace and scripture in his loneliness, and saw in it purity and a return to buried-over divinity. Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed. Everyone longs at times to get away from it all. Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.