Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Paul Theroux
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON · NEW YORK
2008
BOOKS BY PAUL THEROUX
FICTION
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Murder in Mount Holly
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consul's File
A Christmas Card
Picture Palace
London Snow
World's End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half Moon Street
O-Zone
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro
Blinding Light
The Elephanta Suite
CRITICISM
V. S. Naipaul
NONFICTION
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
The Pillars of Hercules
Sir Vidia's Shadow
Fresh Air Fiend
Dark Star Safari
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Copyright © 2008 by Paul Theroux
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theroux, Paul.
Ghost train to the Eastern star : on the tracks
of the great railway bazaar / Paul Theroux.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-618-41887-9
1. Asia—Description and travel. 2. Theroux, Paul—
Travel—Asia. 3. Railroad travel—Asia. i. Title.
DS10.T42 2008 915.04'425 0 92— dc22
2008011436
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
Endpaper map by Jacques Chazaud
MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The lines from "Tom O'Roughley" by W. B. Yeats are reprinted with the
permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats. The lines from
"plato told." Copyright 1944, © 1972, 1991, by the Trustees of the E. E.
Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings,
edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing
Corporation. Excerpts from "Aubade" and "Water" from Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
To Sheila, with love
That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had
long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine.
Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in
trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer,
vaguely improper notions into his head.
GEORGES SIMENON
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By
"I'd much rather go by train," said Connie.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
CONTENTS
1. The Eurostar 1
2. The Other Orient Express 14
3. The Ferry to Besiktas 40
4. Night Train to Ankara 59
5. Night Train to Tbilisi 68
6. Night Train to Baku: The Trans-Caucasian 88
7. Night Train from Ashgabat to Mary 103
8. Night Train to Tashkent 136
9. The Shan-e-Punjab Express to Delhi 146
10. Night Train to Jodhpur: The Mandore Express 164
11. Night Train to Jaipur 182
12. Night Train to Mumbai: The "Superfast" Express 193
13. Night Train to Bangalore: The Udyan Express 210
14. The Shatabdi Express to Chennai 225
15. The Coastal Line to Galle and Hambantota 237
16. The Slow Train to Kandy 258
17. Ghost Train to Mandalay 265
18. The Train to Pyin-Oo-Lwin 283
19. Night Train to Nong Khai 295
20. Night Train to Hat Yai Junction: Special Express 309
21. Night Train to Singapore: The Lankawi Express 316
22. The Slow Train to the Eastern Star 341
23. The Boat Sontepheap to Phnom Penh 351
24. The Mekong Express 367
25. Night Train to Hue 376
26. The Day Train to Hanoi 387
27. Tokyo Andaguraundo 400
28. Night Train to Hokkaido: Hayate Super Express 422
29. The Limited Express: Sarobetsu to Wakkanai 428
30. Night Train to Kyoto: The Twilight Express 440
31. The Trans-Siberian Express 460
32. Night Train to Berlin and Beyond 493
THE EUROSTAR
YOU THINK of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.
Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.
Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness,
in a lusty "Look-at-me!" in exotic landscapes.
This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."
And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars, and what V. S. Pritchett called "human architecture," lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.