As a solitary traveler, I began to discover who I was and what I stood for
© Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides |
Travel seems to produce a peculiar sort of licensed bore, the very worst of whom rejoice in the theme"When the going was good." The point is usually that when they traveled ("Oh, heavens, this was years ago..."), it was absolutely marvelous, and too bad you weren't traveling then. But this is largely boastful bunk, and misses the point, for travel is the opposite of a holiday. It is about enlightenment and, at its best, is a form of disappearance.
As recently as 40 years ago, a person could evaporate by traveling; even a trip to Europe involved a sort of obscurity. A trip to Africa or South America was a vanishing into silence. In a connected world, it is not so easy to get lost, and this is probably to our detriment.
As a traveler, the wish to disconnect and disappear has greatly appealed to me. During my twenties, I was out of touch, living in the hinterland of various distant countries. Living frugally, I did not own a telephone, and the few calls I made were all in the nature of emergencies-reporting births and deaths, summoning doctors, all on borrowed phones.
These ten years of being phoneless were the making of me. As a solitary traveler, I began to discover who I was and what I stood for. When people ask me what they should do to become writers, I say, "First, leave home."
Twenty-six years ago, I left London for Paris, boarded the Orient Express to Istanbul and traveled by various trains to Mashad, near the eastern frontier of Iran, and crossed into Afghanistan, near Herat, where I caught a bus. I found another train in the Khyber Pass and resumed chugging, eventually getting to Japan and Siberia and boarding the Trans-Siberian Express back to London.
I requested a ticket for a sleeper train to Madras and was hooted at...
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That same trip is not possible today. The Orient Express is gone. Iran's a headache. Afghanistan's a nightmare. The Soviet Union has crumbled. Earlier this year in Bombay, I requested a ticket for a sleeper train to Madras and was hooted at by an Indian Railways booking clerk, who told me I needed to buy a ticket three months in advance.
But a variant itinerary is possible. I am tempted to do it myself, with a detour through Baluchistan, in western Pakistan, and, having been rebuffed on my first try, a pass through Vietnam and China. My book about the journey, The Great Railway Bazaar, would be entirely different. And the same would be true for other journeys I would retrace-to Patagonia, around Britain, up and down China, and through the Pacific.
One hundred years from now, such trips will likely be doable, too, even if they are an altogether different kettle of fish. "Fish" is the operative word. There will be fewer of them and fewer other wild animals-no gorillas, no rhinos, no elephants, no tigers. But given the birth rate, the world's population is projected to be 9.5 billion. Travel in the future will be an experience of continuous human confrontation, and consequently will be much less predictable than now, yet in the insecure world of strangers there are revelations galore.
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