The celebrated writer turns his eye toward the changing travel experience.
In 2000, I traveled through parts of India with Paul Theroux, who, with 20 nonfiction books and 30 works of fiction to his credit, is a prolific, incisive observer of the human condition—and the ultimate traveler. A demonstration had closed down the Agra-Jaipur road and we were stranded amid hundreds of seething Indians who would not let us pass. We sneaked around the edges of the crowd and reached a jeep on the opposite side of the barricade. In pidgin Hindi and with perhaps $20 in baksheesh, Theroux persuaded the driver to turn his jeep around and take us jouncing along dusty, camel-crowded riverbeds to a hotel—proof that Theroux knows how to deal with all that travel throws at you. He made his mark in 1975 with his first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounted his journey by train across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Since that highly praised work, he has penned best seller after best seller, including The Old Patagonian Express, The Happy Isles of Oceania, and The Mosquito Coast, the latter made into a movie starring Harrison Ford in 1986. Born in Medford, Massachusetts, Theroux has truly become a citizen of the world.
In your latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, you retraced your 1973 Great Railway Bazaar journey. What changed between trips? "Even a rickshaw wallah has a cell phone," an Indian said to me. In 1973 I tried to make two phone calls in four and a half months—one, from Japan, succeeded, the other, from India, failed. Cheap watches and blue jeans were almost unknown in the wider world in 1973, but everyone has them now, in Americanized cultures. In 1973, China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution—the whole of China disrupted with mass hysteria—and now, of course, the Chinese manufacture most of our goods.
What's stayed the same? Undoubtedly village life in rural India—the pattern of harvest, or drought, debt, hunger, and the pieties of Hinduism. This in great contrast to parallel developments in information technology.
What surprised you? The forgiveness in Vietnam. After we dropped over seven million tons of bombs, 13 million gallons of Agent Orange, and killed millions of their people, Americans are greeted politely, welcomed, urged to have some noodles. It's a great lesson to anyone familiar with other wars and atrocities.
