To the Ends of the Earth

The trip recorded in The Great Railway Bazaar was the trip I took, and the manner of my journey and my way of writing about it became my method in all my future travel books. I changed the names of some people I wished to protect, but many of the names I left as was. My problem in writing the book was finding a form for it—a structure. In the end I simply hung it on a series of train journeys. I had never read a book quite like the one I was writing. This worried me, as well as making me hopeful. The writing of the book took the same amount of time as the trip itself, four months.

That was more than seventeen years ago. The book is still in print and still sells well. Some people think it is the only book I have ever written (which annoys me) or is my best (which is equally untrue). I think the writing in The Old Patagonian Express is more fluent, The Kingdom by the Sea funnier and more knowledgeable, and Riding the Iron Rooster more prescient. For example, in The Great Railway Bazaar, my train passed through Nis in Yugoslavia. I mentioned this but I never bothered to discover anything about Nis. I have just located a copy of The Blue Guide to Yugoslavia and found that it was the birthplace of Emperor Constantine. Reading on, I came to the sentence “Though not a pleasant place in itself, Nis has several interesting monuments” and I realized, perhaps, why I did not linger in Nis.

It has been a satisfaction to me that my Railway Bazaar (I got the title from a street name in Kanpur, India) and the rest of my travel books have fared well. I did not realize when I wrote my first one that every trip is unique. My travel book is about my trip, not yours or anyone else’s. Even if someone had come with me and written a book about the trip, it would have been a different book. This is true of life in general. It bothers me, as it bothers the Borges character Ireneo Funes, “that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).”

Another thing I did not know was that every trip has a historical dimension. Not long after I traveled through those countries there were political changes. (It seems to happen every time.) The shah was deposed and Iran became very dangerous for the traveler. Afghanistan went to war with itself. India and Pakistan restored their rail link. Laos shut its borders to foreigners and exiled its royalty. Vietnam fixed its railway, so that now it is possible to travel by train from Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to Hanoi. Many of the individual trains were taken out of service, most notably the Orient Express. The train that plies from London to Venice under that name is for rich, idle people who have selfish, sumptuous fantasies about travel that bear no relation to the real thing. However awful my old Orient Express was, at least I can say that all sorts of people took it—rich and poor, old and young, rattling back and forth between East and West. It was cheap and friendly, and like all great trains, it was like the world on wheels.

Attempting to write my travel experiences for the first time, I was groping in the dark—although I was careful to disguise the fact. I am told that I often seem self-assured in my travel writing, but that is usually my way of whistling to keep my spirits up. I know that I have hijacked a venerable form, the travel book about a grand tour, and am steering it my own way, to suit myself, and my peculiar trip and temperament. Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different from writing a novel: fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act—like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence. When I finished a novel I never knew whether I would be able to write another one. But I knew, when I finished my first travel book, that I would be able to do it again.

Someday I hope to complete a shelf of travel books, which, between bookends, will encompass the world. In the meantime, this selection, drawn from six of my books, can stand as a set of traveler’s tales.

—Paul Theroux

East Sandwich

May 1991

The Great

Railway Bazaar

The Mysterious

Mister Duffill