The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place

A PLACE NAME CAN BEWITCH THE TRAVELER. 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 traveler.

Shepherds Bush: A gray, malodorous, overpopulated district, the opposite of its name, in west London. The traveler 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 center 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 travelers. 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 harbor are sullen neighborhoods of public housing, tenements, refugees, and bewildered immigrants, with no one saying bienvenue.

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 harbor 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 — Hotel 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. ¶ Aresourceful 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 traveler. 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 traveler. 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 traveled for this magazine; so did John Steinbeck after he won the Nobel Prize, when he crisscrossed 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 traveler 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 traveler 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.