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6. Travel to a Place from Your Past
Author Paul Theroux reflects on revisiting a country, which is the subject of his new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.
With The Great Railway Bazaar 30 years ago, I wanted to write a travel book that had no sightseeing in it, no churches or museums. Just encounters with people I met along the way. But in the course of writing, I saw that a travel book is really an exercise in autobiography. As a fiction writer, used to inventing characters, this was a revelation. But I needed a foreign landscape to write about myself and others. So I traveled.
Patience is the greatest gift in travel. I think it comes with maturity—probably late, in my case! It took me about 50 years or more. I still have curiosity and a desire to be a solitary traveler, and a fantasy longing to be a wanderer in a hot climate, sleeping under trees. I'm drawn to the life of the Indian, the Jain mendicant monk, the holy man seeking enlightenment, the person who, in old age, abandons everything and everyone and strikes out to become a wanderer.
To me, it is essential to travel alone if the intention is to write about the experience. If I'm with other people, it's a different mood—no intensity. Another person, no matter how beloved, is a distraction. Rudyard Kipling said, "He travels the fastest who travels alone."
When I returned to Africa to take the Dark Star Safari trip, I realized that a return can be a startling experience—for the difference in the places traveled, but most of all, for the difference in me, the traveler. I loved returning to India to write Ghost Train and taking this long retracing of The Great Railway Bazaar. I was engrossed as a traveler, but I also saw how I had changed.
People ask me, "Where do you really want to go?" and I always have the same answer: home. I love summer on Cape Cod. I love winter in Hawaii. I love marine sunlight and sea air. Cape Cod and Hawaii provide both. But there are still many spots on the map I'm interested in. I was thinking of going to Alaska this fall. Maybe later to Bhutan. I've never been to Greenland. You see? Too many! as told to claire martin
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