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Like the book
says, don’t worry if your trip will work out.
Just go. (Lonely Planet)
There is indeed
something charming concerning the atavistic impulse of young
middle-class Brits in this over-mediated “global village”
age of post-modernity to boldly and bodily transverse the
remnants of their lost empire in mock “Grand Tour” style
(replete with the expected hardships of the toilet, stomach
and other school-boy horrors), perhaps hoping by so doing to
escape the manufactured limits of bourgeois respectability
extant in dull-modern Britain, and sometimes (as a bonus)
gaining some added life-wisdom on the way. At the very
least, they do come away from their travels with a
reservoir of ‘civilizing’ material from which to artfully
draw and deploy fitting bon mots at cocktail parties,
so de rigueur in their (most assuredly) brilliant
careers in years to come. And, if they are at all well-posed
with the mind or pen, they will also (most undoubtedly) keep
a (mental or actual) journal to go along with the certain
panoply of pictures,[i]
so to have, if only unconsciously, “something over” their
inarticulate compatriot Butlin-camp boobs who simply take
cheap package holidays abroad to buy indescribably kitsch
souvenirs and find infamous props for their insufferable
snaps of “significant others” going along for the ride. In
the mock-comic travelogue tradition of Tim Moore[ii]
(and in a global anticipation of his
The Grand Tour: The European
Adventure of a Continental Drifter
[New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001]), Peter Wells[iii]
enacts the “duality” of Alan Watts’ philosophical
description, when he is not practicing “stream of
consciousness” typing cum writing.[iv]
Beginning his world journey in Harare, Zimbabwe,
Wells’
“first self” happily experiences the comfort of a
Western-style “elite” bar he was led to by a local guide,
superior in his mind to “sensitive” Lonely Planet
tourists, but his “other self” also simultaneously questions
the critical appropriateness of this felt response:
I felt a bit of
a fraud in such obvious western decadence, in the middle of
a Third World country. Any real traveller would
surely turn their nose up at such obvious displays of wealth
and indulgence. Surely I should be back in the hostel
counting up the cents for my next train ticket, cooking
Knor[r] soup and rice, and bumming fags of other people. But
hell, this was my trip, and at the end of the day I was
actually tasting the life of (albeit a select group) of
Harareans, which I wouldn’t get counting head lice and pubic
hairs in the shower back with Adrian and his soul mates at
The Number Seven Inn. (35)
Traveling then to Bulawayo, declining an impromptu
invitation to travel to “Vic Falls” by “more experienced”
expats (“I declined, somewhat reluctantly, as they seemed
like a fun bunch, but it did seem stupid to have come all
this way and to miss Bulawayo for the sake of a Nissan
Sunny”), Wells took to his own bodily and mental moods,
wondering about competing philosophies of tourism as he
walked:
I know what I’m
interested in, and as far as I’m concerned, just because a
museum is considered unmissable by somebody else, doesn’t
mean I can’t give it a miss. It is however a little alarming
just how blasé you can become about certain tourist
attractions and high points if you are not careful. I can
recall a friend of mine who spent a month long trip through
Italy, which she dubbed the “ABC Tour”, simply because on
every other corner was “Another Bloody Church”. I didn’t
want to be a moronic traveller, but everything, as they say,
in moderation. (42)
After
taking his time in Bulawayo, including a somewhat dangerous
walking safari in the local wildlife park (of which the
guidebook said “suitable for walkers,” advice he wanted
angrily to cross out after his too-close experience with the
animal kingdom there), Wells did travel to Victoria Falls
(“There seemed little point in delaying my visit to the
falls, which was after all partly the reason I had chosen to
start my world trip in Zimbabwe”), taking in the views there
with a mixture of wonder and worldliness, a feeling later
amplified by meeting both the famous composer John Williams
and a self-impoverished medical aid worker, Brian, “both
dedicated to their work; both successful and admirable; yet
one was staying in Zimbabwe’s most expensive hotel, while
the other slept twenty to a barrack in the sweltering
jungle. The Janus view of life in Africa.” (60)
Journeying then to Livingstone, Zambia, Wells finds a
slow-moving town hosting a depressed side-street “bar” of
out-of-work local men, attempting to drink away externally
caused internal sorrows. In an acute observation drawing
from his serious (if often unacknowledged) Murdochian
empathic seeing sense, Wells concludes:
Of what I had
seen of Livingstone, I was becoming more aware of the
frustration and despair associated with much of the
continent. These were people who could find no way out.
Their government could do nothing to help, as they
themselves are caught up in a vicious circle and the
stranglehold of the international institutions, which refuse
to grant development loans until old debts are paid (debts
which continue to grow as infrastructure and the commercial
base declines). The international community is not
interested in Zambia. It was once one of the world’s leading
producers of copper, thanks to natural resources in the
western part of the county, but when these mines dried up,
so did Western commitment. (63)
But
Africa was not only depressing to Wells, it was also
invigorating, as when he traveled to the island of Zanzibar,
Tanzania. Waiting for a flight to Kenya (his next African
stop), he was “taken in” by an idealism that grows on one
who sees too much dirt and despair too soon:
With every
restaurant and cafe I discovered, the food seemed to get
better. Even the fresh fruit in the roadside market, with
its piles of mangoes and melons piled up like soup tins in a
supermarket, seemed more ripe and pungent than the week
before. It is a pity you can’t take smells and tastes home
with you, for they are often the things that bring back
memories best of all. (96)
Upon departing
some hours later, on the plane Wells reflects, “Glancing
back at Zanzibar from my window seat for the last time, I
again regretted having to leave. Paradise found and lost”
(97).
Wells’ next continent was Asia, and specifically India, a
dualistic, starkly polarized place where sanitation,
transport and hotels gave him the most trouble.[v]
Seeking to appear calm while waiting for the police to
arrive at a corrupt desk manager’s call (when disputing an
overcharged stay), Wells casually looked over a news item of
a (too soon to expand) terrorist wave:
Momentarily I
was intrigued by a map on page two of the Bombay Times.
A better map than the one in my book, I tried to work out
where my Amityville hotel was. At first I didn’t register
the newsworthy reason for the map, and then slowly I was
drawn to the red flashes that appeared all over it. The
caption under the map read: “13 Bombs Explode in Bombay
Friday. 27 Dead. Tamil Tigers Accept Responsibility”. The
report continued with the exact locations and times of the
explosions. . . . Shit. (126-27)[vi]
Wells’
strenuous, yet ineffectual efforts to avoid dirt, dysentery
(the second word in his title), bothersome rickshaw drivers,
corrupt officials, et al., lead him to happily
forsake Bombay and, soon, much of India. When an Indian
train passenger pointed to a filthy and huge slum there with
a hit of ‘slumdog’ pride, Wells knew his time to leave had
surely come, a feeling compounded by an “imagined history”
of industrializing 18th-19th century
England: “It was simply just too depressing and big a
problem to even begin to rationalise. I looked at the time
on my watch, but for once didn’t see the time, only an
expensive diving watch – brightly coloured and clean. I was
not travelling across time zones – I was travelling
back in time” (128). The polarity of
which Watts spoke was most concretely revealed when Wells
went to visit the famed Taj Mahal.[vii]
Perhaps Wells’ most difficult time, both in body (now
suffering from the feared dysentery) and spirit (wrestling
with culturally conditioned polarities of dirt and
cleanliness) came when he saw how the poverty-stricken
society in Indian slums see (and use) excrement. Remarking
on his seminal rickshaw-in-traffic ‘experience’ in Varanasi
(near the famed Ganges River), Wells recounts, “a beautiful
tall woman in full dazzling sari, was guiding a small herd
of oxen shepherd like down the main street. Following just a
few metres behind, every so often she stopped in her tracks
(and thus stopping us in ours) to scoop up another freshly
jettisoned, shiny pool of cow dung with her hands and wallop
it into a shit hod tin dish she balanced on her head” (161)
for later depositing on a fuel pile. When he follows her to
the holy Ganges River, Wells sees her buy a roll and then
happily sharing it with friends, mindless of the sanitary
issues involved. Moving from the personal to the social
realms via this trope of ‘holy shit,’[viii]
Wells then reflects on a seemingly simple (yet socially
utopian) solution to third-world poverty and disease,
sensibly right out of the “Godliness is next to cleanliness”
Protestant playbook:
I decided that
there is one thing that would save the lives of millions,
and improve the productivity of a constantly sick population
in India. Soap. Plain soap; not expensive Body Shop scented
stuff – just plain old soap. If instead of spending its aid
money on vaccines and short term cures against the illnesses
that still plague the country, the government provided every
household with a bar of soap and instructions to use it, a
preventative program might for once be set in motion for a
sustainable healthy populace. (162)
Fleeing bothersome India, Wells makes an unplanned side trip
to Nepal and Katmandu, seeking to get control of his
dysentery with a pharmacy of pills while running into three
European backpack expats living the life of Enlightenment,
with the aid of mountain climbs to Everest and cheap buys.
After a spell of staying with them and being (partially
contentedly) involved in their concerns, he nonetheless
concludes:
The twilight
zone was becoming a reality. I decided that, shits or no
shits, I had to get the hell out of beautiful Kathmandu
before I too became victim of ‘the madness’ that was forcing
two people up the toughest mountain in the world and another
to fly over it. One day longer and I could easily have found
myself teaming up with an occult wandering-circus-trainer
convinced that it was God’s will that I open the first
Dunkin’ Doughnuts in Tibet. I had to leave; and soon. (192)
Wells’ next stop was the ‘expected’ China trip,[ix]
where, via another flight of bureaucratic tourist planning
fantasy, he encounters, in a fashion, Roger Moore as “007”
at the Forbidden Palace as his tape-recorded guide. At the
end of his time in the most populated country with a longish
history to boot, China stoutly remained an enigma to Wells:
“Every other country I have visited, even for a very short
time, I have always come home thinking that I had an angle
at least on where they were coming from – albeit stilted or
blinkered. With China I felt like I had never really been
there; like I had spent twenty-one days browsing through a
pictorial handbook” (238).
As
for the third term in the title (“black jack”), Wells had a
chance of playing it in the role of a trained card shark in
Penang, Malaysia, a life-chance he almost took up with the
sharpies that had marked and nabbed him for the role. He
fantasized, “No, this time I was going to try my luck, I
might come away rich or I might not, it didn’t matter,” yet,
in fact, his ‘proper’ British side saved him from a (life)
time of iniquity. Moving eastward towards the end of his
‘irresponsible,’ and timeless travels and to ‘responsible’
Master’s study in Florida, Wells has a more-understood, if
at times perplexing, stay in Australia (the perplexing
arising largely from experiences marked by unexpected
intrusions upon expected British-ness in a country marked by
many wild spaces and unpredictable, but nonetheless
alluring, people.
Coming ever closer to America, Wells is mostly ‘turned-off’
by Honolulu, even if the waves and climate are
accommodating. One possible aspect of this effect is that he
chances to arrive while contrived and colossal US
Independence Day celebrations are underway, which, by their
overbearing nature, serve to polarize him against them:
It was a
baptism of Americana that almost made me gag. OK
everyone, I get the picture - you can stop now. It was
like an episode of The Truman Show. Even the hostel guests
were behaving like extras on Beverly Hills 90210. Girls from
Preston mysteriously started to put their hair up in
ponytails and tie their t-shirts in a knot at the navel.
Blokes from Ilford started rapping with each other and
“chugging” beers – chugging beers in brown paper bags that
is. This was a most bizarre revelation for me…. Singing the
Star Spangled Banner with a load of Aussie larger louts
clutching jiffy bags was more than I could bear. Forced
entertainment, forced American patriotism and enough burgers
to feed the Gettysburg address. Welcome to the land of the
Free. (306-08)
Finally arriving in San Francisco, Wells
meets the surreal-ness of The Truman Show in
‘reality,’ facing an unwelcoming, certainly humorless, US
immigration official with a conceptual problem of
understanding the physical polarities inherent in world
travel, i.e., that if one can go in one direction towards a
destination, one can just as well go in the other, and yet
end up there just the same. Upon presenting his passport, he
gets an absurdist drilling:
“Why did you
come this way?”
“I’ve just come
from Hawaii.”
“I know. Why?”
“Because that’s
where I was before I came here.”
“Why did you go
to Hawaii?”
To get laid,
find witchcraft and gun down hostellers having fun at
intersections.
“To see
Hawaii.”
“You are from
England right?”
“Yes.”
“So how come
you[’re] entering the US in San Francisco?”
“Because I’ve
been on a trip that took me east and so I’ve arrived here on
the west coast.”
I was mustering
all the restraint I could by this point.
“Why if you are
coming to study in Florida did you come into San Francisco?”
He continued to
examine my documents (which included an invitation from the
Dean of Studies at FSU). He was utterly confused. He went on
to ask me about every place I had been to before.
“Why did you go
to India?”
“Because I
wanted to”
“Why did you go
to China?”
“Because I
wanted to”
“Why did you
make this trip?”
“Because I
could.” (312)
In
summation, if one wants to share a “wild and strange story”
with a world traveler “to unheard places” who understands
the polarity extant betwixt cultures, consciousness and
cant, one could do much worse than read this uniquely
remembered journal, disregarding its mock-ironic title,
authorial voice, and even mock-elite layout and editing
“lapses.”[x]
Worthy pluses are richly descriptive passages recalling
lovely pre-terrorist Bali and lively pre-Katrina New
Orleans. Which brings one to the “dynamite” in the title: At
the end of Wells’ trip, the first bombing of the World Trade
Center marked (albeit then largely unacknowledged) a newly
more-dangerous world, one that would be less welcoming to
intrepid “slacker” travelers with nothing to do but observe
(whilst not concentrating upon) anything useful.[xi]
“My stomach groaned again,” Wells concludes, “Dynamite,
dysentery and Black Jack. The story of my trip” (334). It
too, in part, can be part of your life experience via this
enticing read.
ERIC GILDER
Lucian Blaga
University, Sibiu
Notes
[i] Different
from most travel authors, Wells, according to his
thoughtful postscript, wrote his remembrances down
strictly as such, ten years after the fact, without
notes – the photos he had, but his attention to them
once they were taken, was scant indeed. His creative
method drawing from a picture-perfect memory gives a
positive spin to the usual writer’s put-down of
chroniclers: “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”
The only shortcoming to the book is the lack of some
“snaps” that would pass the writer’s high taste.
[ii] Who
derived his travelogue method from Thomas Coryate
(1577-1617) and his Coryats Crudities. As
Grace Kerina has noted in the blog “Highly Sensitive
Power” (http://www.highlysensitivepower.com/2008/08/books-tim-moore-travel-writing/),
“British writer Tim Moore has charmed me thoroughly.
He writes irreverent, utterly hilarious travel
memoirs with the twist that he’s frequently and
unabashedly incompetent at what he sets out to do.”
Without doubt, by his own admission, Wells is his
esteemed peer in the genre.
[iii] Now an
eminently respectable programme specialist at CEPES-UNESCO
in Bucharest, these writings represent the author’s
lesser experiences when he was traveling “between
studies” in 1993-94.
[iv] Alan Watts
in The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity
(New York: Macmillan, 1969), describes the “myth of
polarity” as the make of false distinctions of
black/white thinking, a product of our culturally
specific education, with each culture holding to
different constructs of black/white, good/bad,
clean/dirty, etc. One of the benefits of travel is
that it allows “the innocent abroad” to see the
fluidity, if not the falsity of such specific
judgments being transformed into universals. As
Wells remarks in the book’s subtitle, he is
precisely one who benefited by being “occasionally
impressed and frequently not concentrating.” He
could thus “save” the gestalt of his worldly
experiences by not being overly distracted by (i.e.,
by “losing”) irrelevant details of his journeys.
[v] Perhaps it
is not ironic that Watts’ primary insights came from
his close study of Asiatic (Indian) philosophies.
[vi] Wells
later recalls his parents and family being
distraught over hearing of the bombings and fearing
he could have been killed or inquired thereby.
[vii] “It is
ironic that the lasting memory of this man a hundred
years later should be the shining white marble
epitaph he built for his wife. And that in fact his
vision, created under hardship and bloodshed should
be the lasting memory of so many tourists to India”
(154).
[viii] The
reviewer is reminded of the “demonic trinity” of
Kenneth Burke, which includes the disgusting cum
sacred item, transposed within the polarity noted by
Watts.
[ix] The
reviewer recalls a sardonic cartoon by William
Hamilton of the New Yorker magazine in the
mid-1970s (when China trips were popular among the
“smart” set): Two society hostesses are telling each
other: “Now we know, never invite two China trips to
the same [dinner] party.”
[x] As noted in
the “Forewarning” which stands in place of a
“proper” Foreword, Wells says we should not be
reading this “drivel.” Readers cannot say they were
not warned, if their scholarly senses are
scandalized, for he does state:
Before you publish a book you are
supposed to have it edited, proof-read, re-edited,
approved by MI6 and the Royal Household. I couldn’t
be bothered. As a consequence what follows is
riddled with typos, spelling errors (which I think
are correct, thanks to a 1970’s experiment in
primary school phonetics), factual errors, tedious
details and lies. When the book goes into its 15th
edition and the movie rights are bought by Danny
Boyle, I may tweak the odd phrasal verb. Failing
that, it remains as is. (14)
Don’t follow this mock “advice”
(i.e., be as open as Watts thinking of his
polarities) and one will surely benefit from the
time spent. Better a self-deprecating “incorrect”
literary friend than a pompously correct one (at
least at disconcerting “times like these” when
“experts” are clearly fooled and fooling entities).
[xi] A feel
that well resonates with the theme of (British
alternative music band) Blur’s signature 1993 album,
“Modern Life is Rubbish” and 1994 album “Dookie” by
American punk rock music group, Green Day.
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