The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

25. Dangerous, happy, Alluring

Dangerous Places

"WHAT GIVES VALUE TO TRAVEL IS FEAR," Albert Camus wrote (Notebooks, 1935ߝ1942). "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 traveling."

Stirring stuff, but the first thing to say to this is that Camus, a timid traveler, never traveled 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 traveler. 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 traveler 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 traveler 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 other 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 neighborhoods. 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.

Afghanistan and Pakistan were — not even that long ago — delightful places to travel in. And they may be again. India is full of terrorist groups, not just the pro-Kashmiris who shot up Bombay, but the more violent Maoist Naxalites who regularly set off bombs, derail passenger trains, and have killed more than six thousand people in the past dozen years in the so-called Red Corridor, a stripe running along the right-hand side of India. But in spite of its violence and disorder, India is still one of the most attractive destinations in the world.

At various times in my life, soldiers or militiamen at roadblocks in parts of Africa have pointed rifles at me and demanded money. I have been shot at by shifta bandits in northern Kenya. But in these places I was off the map and expected to be hassled.

As for my own top ten dangerous places, I have felt conspicuously alien, vulnerable, unsafe, and tended to walk fast in

Port Moresby,Papua New Guinea: One of the most dangerous, crime-ridden cities in the world, inhabited by drifters and squatters, locally known as "rascals," and career criminals, many of whom, wearing woolly hats, come from the Highlands and are looking for prey.

Nairobi: Downtown, muggers galore, even in daylight.

East St. Louis, Illinois: One of the poorest, most beat-up, most menacing-looking cities in the United States.

Vladivostok: A clammy-cold harbor city of vandalized buildings, scrawled-upon walls, underpaid sailors, and confrontational drunks and skinheads.

England: On Saturday afternoons, among the hoodlums, after soccer matches.

Rio de Janeiro: At the reeking periphery of the Carnival mobs, among prowlers and drunks and aggressive celebrants.

Addis Ababa: In the Merkato bazaar, which abounds with pickpockets and thieves.

Solomon Islands: The smaller, hungrier islands, noted for their xenophobia, some of whose locals demand large sums of money from any outsider who lands on the beach.

Kabul: Just outside the city, at a village where walking alone, I was spotted by about a dozen women who, unprovoked by me, began throwing stones at my head.

Newark: Stuck overnight, having missed a plane, I had to walk in the evening from my dreary hotel to find a place to eat, and at one point, dodging traffic, stepping over a dead dog, I was confronted by hostile boys yelling abuse and heckling me.

Happy Places

Are there truly happy places? I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place, an epiphany that remains as a consolation and a regret. Fogies recall many a happy time, because fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. Ordering food in a restaurant in the 1950s, William Burroughs said, "What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1927."

There is a well-publicized list of happy places, which includes Denmark at the top, followed in descending order by Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Guatemala, and Luxembourg.

With the exception of small, threadbare Guatemala, what do these countries have in common? They are the world's most developed, urbanized, bourgeois, and (so its seems) the smuggest and teeniest bit boring. I seriously doubt that they are as happy as advertised. Cold, dark Finland in January is not a place one associates with jollification. Finland, in fact, is quite high on the "Countries with the Most Suicides" list, and one doesn't think of Austria as the Land of Smiles.

Tonga's archipelago is informally known as the Friendly Isles. Captain Cook initiated the idea, but with the passing years this has seemed more and more like a frivolous sobriquet to beguile visitors, in the manner of bestowing the name Greenland on the land of snow and ice. Tongans are hierarchical, class-obsessed, rivalrous, and, like most islanders, territorial and rightly suspicious of strangers who wash ashore.

The very word "friendly" is loaded, and it is usually just a tourist-industry come-on. I wrote in Fresh Air Fiend, "In my experience, the friendliest people on Pacific islands are those who have the greatest assurance that you are going to leave soon."

"The real enemy, the destroyer of our happiness, is within ourselves," the Dalai Lama once said in a homily. Likewise, the true creator of our happiness is within us. There are contented people in the world, whose easy manner and good cheer persuade the traveler that he or she is in a happy land. Happy times are unforgettable, and sometimes they last for more than a moment. I have had joyful experiences in many places, at particular times. I agree with Burroughs's fish story: happiness is usually retrospective.

There is also another factor, not "I'd like to live here" but "I wouldn't mind dying here." Here are ten instances:

Bali: I traveled there in the 1970s and after a week in Ubud wanted to quit my job, summon my wife and two children from Singapore, and spend the rest of my life on that fragrant island. My little family resisted.

Thailand: My recurring fantasy is dropping out and spending the rest of my days in a rural village in northern Thailand, as a paying guest, among hospitable villagers.

Costa Rica: On a bay in the rural northwestern province of Guanacaste I felt strongly: I will build a house with a veranda and sit there scribbling like O. Henry in Honduras.

The Orkney Islands: Small, proud, remote, self-contained. Hard-working and well built, with Neolithic ruins and traditional pieties. I went there once and never stopped dreaming about these islands and their fresh fish.

Egypt: Not Cairo but somewhere else. Maybe I'd live on a houseboat, moored on the upper Nile, toward Aswan.

The Trobriand Islands: The people are uncompromising but I would make peace, settle on a small outer island, and sail around Milne Bay, as I did in the early 1990s.

Malawi: I have rarely been happier than I was in the Shire Highlands of rural southern Malawi in 1964, the year of ufulu, independence. I had a little house, a satisfying job as a teacher, and the goodwill of my neighbors in nearby villages. Later, I thought, If everything goes wrong in my life, I can always return to Malawi.

Maine: I think of the coast of Maine as coherent, lovely, well assembled by nature, populated by some of the most decent and reliable people I have ever known.

Hawaii: Perhaps it really is the tourist paradise of the brochures. I have lived in Hawaii longer than anywhere else in my life, and often when I am with a local person, and it's a beautiful day — the pure air, the fragrance of flowers, the surf up, the usual rainbow arching in the sky — this person will smile and say, "Lucky we live Hawaii."

Alluring Places

In my mind is a list of places I have never seen and have always wanted to visit. I read about them, look at maps, collect guidebooks and picture books. My imagination is full of appealing images — a great thing. The idea of unvisited places, future travel, enlivens the mind and promises pleasure. Here are ten out of many.

Alaska: Huge and thinly populated, one of the last true wilderness areas in the world, with Denali National Park and North America's highest mountain, Denali, at 20,320 feet. I imagine paddling along the coast, taking ferries to the annual Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run, seeing the small towns and the empty places.

Scandinavia: I have never been to Norway, Sweden, or Finland. I'd like to see them in their winter darkness, at their gloomiest and most suicidal, and also go cross-country skiing. Then another trip in the summer, reliving Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night in Sweden, picking cloudberries in northern Norway, and visiting the Lapps.

Greenland: With widely scattered and diverse indigenous populations, many of whom have retained their traditional skills, Greenland (Ka-laallit Nunaat) is inviting. Fridtjof Nansen skied across it in 1883, the first recorded crossing. He stayed among the Greenlanders and recounted how, housebound in the depths of winter, they sat naked, perspiring around a fire. I would also like to see Scoresby Sund, the largest fjord in the world, and hear the patter of the drum made from a polar bear's bladder.

Timor: There is liberated, independent, and chaotic East Timor and the Indonesian province of West Timor. I want to see them both, go from one to the other, talk to people, eat their fermented rice and steamed fish, go bird watching.

Angola: The Portuguese landed in Angola in 1575, colonized it, converted some people, plundered it for minerals — diamonds in particular — settled the coast, and ignored the hinterland. The Chokwe people in the interior, who now have their own political party, are among Africa's finest artists, carvers, and dancers. For almost thirty years Angola was engaged in a civil war, but now it is rebuilding, and with its oil reserves it has the money to be independent and prosperous. I would like to see the country before prosperity takes hold.

New Britain Island: A large island off Papua New Guinea, with a small population of indigenous people, secret societies, rare birds, and balmy weather. And if that doesn't work out, I'd travel in the area, to Manus Island (written about by Margaret Mead) and New Ireland.

Sakhalin: I could just make it out, gray and flat, over the windswept channel, from the northernmost port in Japan, Wakkanai. I could have taken a ferry, but I had to travel south, so I filed this away in my mind as a place I wished to see. Once a prison colony, Sakhalin was visited in 1890 and written about by Chekhov. What's the attraction for me? The challenge of bleakness, no city to speak of, hardy people, and a railway.

The Darien Gap: I have traveled around but not overland through this section of jungle that lies between Panama and Colombia. The road is not reliable, and the fact that it is a geographical bottleneck, not to say a barrier, makes it inviting as a place in which I would happily disappear.

The Swat Valley: Once, long ago in Peshawar, I met some locals — tribals — who offered to take me upcountry into Swat, and to see the surrounding area — Taxila and ruined Buddhist monasteries, which comprised ancient Gandhara and its Hellenic art. I said, "Some other time." Now it is the haunt of the Taliban, but perhaps one day…

The American South: I have had the merest glimpse, a long drive around the entire Gulf Coast, from Florida to New Orleans. But that glimpse, and the people I met, made me want to take a trip of six months or so, in rural Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, through Tennessee and the Carolinas — off the highways, into the pinewoods, down the red clay roads.