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.
26. Five Travel Epiphanies
NOW AND THEN IN TRAVEL, SOMETHING UNexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler. Burton traveled to Mecca in disguise, considering it a lark, but when at last he approached the Kaaba this skeptic was profoundly moved. It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected. The discovery of an unanticipated pleasure can be life-changing. ¶ Here are five epiphanies that I have experienced in travel, unforgettable to me, and for that reason they have helped to guide me.
One
I WAS IN Palermo and had spent the last of my money on a ticket to New York aboard the Queen Frederica. This was in September 1963; I was going into the Peace Corps, training for a post in Africa. The farewell party my Italian friends gave me on the night of departure went on so long that when we got to the port, a Sicilian band was playing "Anchors Aweigh" and the Queen Frederica had just left the quayside. In that moment I lost all my vitality.
My friends bought me an air ticket to Naples so that I could catch up to the ship there the next day. Just before I boarded the plane, an airline official said I had not paid my departure tax. I told him I had no money. A man behind me in a brown suit and brown Borsalino said, "Here. You need some money?" and handed me twenty dollars.
That solved the problem. I said, "I'd like to pay you back."
The man shrugged. He said, "I'll probably see you again. The world's a small place."
Two
FOR THREE DAYS in August 1970 I had been on a small cargo vessel, the MV Keningau, which sailed from Singapore to North Borneo. I was going there to climb Mount Kinabalu. While aboard, I read and played cards, always the same game, with a Malay planter and a Eurasian woman who was traveling with her two children. The ship had an open steerage deck, where about a hundred passengers slept in hammocks.
It was the monsoon season. I cursed the rain, the heat, the ridiculous card games. One day the Malayan said, "The wife of one of my men had a baby last night." He explained that the rubber tappers were in steerage and that some had wives.
I said I wanted to see the baby. He took me below, and seeing that newborn, and the mother and father so radiant with pride, transformed the trip. Because the baby had been born on the ship, everything was changed for me and had a different meaning: the rain, the heat, the other people, even the card games and the book I was reading.
Three
THE COAST OF Wales around St. David's Head has very swift currents and sudden fogs. Four of us were paddling sea kayaks out to Ramsay Island. On our return to shore we found ourselves in fog so dense we could not see land. We were spun around by eddies and whirlpools.
"Where's north?" I asked the man who had the compass.
"Over there," he said, tapping it. Then he smacked it and said, "There," and hit it harder and said, "I don't know, this thing's broken."
Darkness was falling, the April day was cold, we were tired, and we could not see anything except the black deeps of St. George's Channel.