The hugger-mugger squalor endured by the planet’s traveling billions.
No one pretends anymore that it is fun, or even pleasant, to fly on any airline in the U.S. these days. It is a task—a travail, from which French linguistic origins the word travel is most appositely derived—to which few can possibly look forward. Perhaps only being trapped overnight, waterless and powerless, in an Amtrak siding in Indiana, or changing buses before dawn in a Greyhound depot in West Virginia coal country, can offer up a more sobering experience of what it is like to be on the move in America today.
And yet, for all its shortcomings, the process of wandering anywhere in this country, between Bangor and Baja, or between Kodiak and Key West, remains an experience that is an order of magnitude more acceptable— and, crucially, many orders of magnitude more survivable—than is endured by most of the rest of the traveling world. For the planet’s poor—which means the vast majority of humanity—the simple business of getting from place to place is almost invariably a savage and insufferable nightmare, unsafe and unsanitary, run by incompetents and regulated by crooks.
Carl Hoffman, a courageous and interestingly untroubled man from Washington, D.C., has done a great service by reminding us, in “The Lunatic Express,” of this abiding truism: that the world’s ordinary traveler is compelled to endure all too much while undertaking the grim necessities of modern movement. Mr. Hoffman spent a fascinating year going around the world precisely as most of the world’s plainest people do—not on JetBlue or United or American or Trailways, modes of transport that look positively heavenly by comparison, but in the threadbare conveyances of the planet’s billions.
So he headed across the Andes crammed inside half-welded and smooth-tired buses. He sardined himself into the creaking fuselages of the notoriously unsafe airlines of former Soviet-bloc banana republics. He sweated on Indian or African railway trains (the Lunatic Express of the book’s title is the nickname of a train in Kenya) that were filled to bursting—though with the numbers occasionally reduced as passengers gasping for fresh air had their heads lopped off by passing bridges. He slept on the bilge-water-stinking hammock-decks of ferries, in the Philippines and the Ganges tributaries, that tip over more regularly than cattle outside Wisconsin college towns, and with the accumulated drownings of thousands.
I confess that I did not expect too much of this book. I fancied it to be either a mere travel stunt or a maudlin or misanthropic adventure story by an updated hipster version of Paul Theroux. It was neither. Mr. Hoffman, a man whose persona is colored by some matrimonial tensions, an eye for the ladies and a fairly predictable tincture of middle-age angst, manages to be both brave and compassionate as he lurches on his near-interminable journey from his home turf in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington to the Gobi Desert and back again.
He learns enough about himself en route to satisfy the travel-writing theorists, true, and this can be a little tedious. But—more important—he learns along the way a great deal about the habits of the world’s peripatetic poor, and he writes about both the process and the people with verve and charity, making this book both extraordinary and extraordinarily valuable.
Mr. Hoffman is perhaps at his most powerful when he abandons himself to the simple hugger-mugger squalor of his journeying—as here, when he is on a ferry in Indonesia, on passage from Jakarta to Sarong by way of the alluringly named towns of Surabaya, Banda Neira and Fak Fak: “The more I shed my American reserves, phobias, disgusts, the more [my fellow-passengers] embraced me. In the weeks ahead I would accelerate what had started gradually over the miles. I would do whatever my fellow travelers and hosts did. If they drank the tap-water of Mumbai and Kolkata and Bangladesh, so would I. If they bought tea from street-corner vendors, so would I. If they ate with their fingers, even if I was given utensils, I ate with my fingers. Doing so prompted an outpouring of generosity and curiosity that never ceased to amaze me. It opened the door, made people take me in. That I shared their food, their discomfort, their danger, fascinated them and validated them in a powerful way.”
He had a habit of noticing countless things, as the best of traveling writers do. Among the most fascinating, and at first, puzzling, was that at a certain point in his journey he was all of a sudden—the American traveler in exotic lands—not being noticed. Beforehand, whether on that Indonesian ferryboat or on buses in Senegal or mutatas in East Africa or jammed into the slow expresses in Bihar, he was the center of a small whirlwind of curiosity. But then it all evaporated—at the very moment he arrived in the deserts of western China.
He had flown in to Urumqi and had made plans to get himself to Hohhot on the way to Ulan Bator, and yet one day he found in an instant that no one now paid the slightest attention to him. It was as though in China, unlike everywhere else, he didn’t exist.
He was, of course, in Chinese eyes no more than a barbarian, an uncouth and vulgar interloper to whom no attention should properly be paid. And insofar as all official Chinese policy toward the outside world will from now on be made according to that single precept of institutionalized disdain—more especially now that China is so successful, so powerful and so rich—Mr. Hoffman’s slim book is rendered even more valuable than, as a simple travel account, it might at first appear.
It is a wise and clever book too, funny, warm and filled with astonishing characters. But it also represents an important exercise, casting an Argus-eye on a largely invisible but un-ignorable world. It is thus a book that deserves to be read widely. Perhaps in some airport in a blinding rainstorm in the Midwest, while waiting for yet another infernally delayed American plane.
Mr. Winchester’s “Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean” will be published next year.
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