His new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, released today, retraces that first trip. It’s Theroux at his best, and it gave him a chance to reflect on how he and the world have changed in the intervening three decades. I dialed him up at his home in Cape Cod to ask him about it. I’d heard Theroux could be prickly and a difficult interview; I found him to be anything but.

World Hum: Near the start of “Ghost Train,” you write that “The lesson in my Tao of Travel was that if one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier.” And you also write, “After a certain age the traveler stops looking for another life and takes nothing for granted.” Can you talk about that? Is that to suggest that you enjoy travel now more than you did when you were younger?

Paul Theroux: I feel less pressure to produce something. At my age, I don’t have to write another book. I can kick back and read a book. Or if I go to a place, I don’t necessarily have to make something of it. It might be a trip that’s a dead end; nothing may come of it. When you’re young and you are working as a writer and traveler, everything has to count. I began writing with a kind of anxiety that I had to make a living at it. That was 40 years ago. The pressure to make something your subject is intense when you’re young, because you think, I don’t have a lot of time. I’ve got to turn this into saleable prose.

Strangely enough, when you get older you realize you’ve got a lot of time and a lot of freedom. I think I’m happier now, less tense, less anxious to make something of it. And so when you’re patient, travel is a different experience—when you’re not thinking, I have to go home or this trip has an end. You might think, well, I’ll stay another month; I could get to know people. The older traveler is less optimistic about things, maybe a little more skeptical when people tell him things. All of those are components in the new book, which was written, I think, in a different spirit from the first travel book, “The Great Railway Bazaar.”

In fact, there’s a revelation of sorts in the new book that when you did embark on that first trip for “The Great Railway Bazaar” you were feeling guilty about leaving your wife and children behind. And you returned to find your wife was having an affair. That relationship ended. This time you write that your wife was much more supportive. I imagine that had an impact on your outlook and perspective on this trip.

Yes it did, because you need people to support you. You need people to be very positive about the trip and assume they’re going to be waiting for you, or they’re on your side. When you feel that you’re just slogging along alone feeling homesick, that’s terrible for travel. It’s hard for writing, too. But I think it makes a good story. “The Great Railway Bazaar” is an interesting book for the amount of trouble that it took to take the trip and then to endure this strange homecoming.

Also, I was thinking how older writers write different sorts of books. Take Evelyn Waugh, for example. When he was in his 50s he felt that he was an old man, and he wrote this book, A Tourist in Africa, where he more or less said I’m through with it, travel isn’t what it used to be, the going isn’t good anymore, I’m out of it. And then, still in his 50s, he wrote his autobiography. And then he died when he was around 60, 61. He wasn’t very old. Conrad was 68 when he died. D.H. Lawrence was 44 when he died. These are guys in their late 50s or 60s who took great trips in their earlier lives and then were very old men and out of it in their 60s. I don’t feel that way. Hemingway wrote brilliantly in his 20s and 30s and then still wrote brilliantly, but he was dead at 62 or 63. I’m 67. To me a guy who’s 62 is a young man. He’s not Papa Hemingway with a white beard. Hemingway didn’t really go back to Africa after he was in his 50s. He was done. It was over. It’s amazing when you compare the age. I’m glad that I’m healthy enough to take this sort of trip and I envision taking more. I feel as if I still have the mojo to keep doing it.

Does that mean we may see “The Old Patagonian Express” Redux at some point?

I don’t think so. This was an interesting one because it was the first trip, the longest one. No, I’d like to go to a new place, to places I’ve never been before, of which there are many.

Any places you have in mind?

Well, the Northern Hemisphere. I’ve never been to Scandinavia, I’ve never been to Greenland, I haven’t traveled in Canada, I’ve never been to Alaska. And plenty of other places. I’ve visited Brazil but I’ve never written about it.

You note in the new book that many of the great travel writers never embarked on a return trip, to retrace their steps. You were very aware that you were doing something many writers haven’t done. Did that present any new challenges for you in the way you wrote about the trip?

I had never written a travel book before when I wrote my first book, so I didn’t know what it would be. I know what a book is now, or I know what a book ought to be. And so I’ve learned a lot in that time. If you compare the two books, you’ll see that in the earlier book I wasn’t interested in politics. I might have mentioned the king of Afghanistan or the Shah of Iran, or something like that, but I never took much notice of political life. But I did in this book quite a lot. There’s a difference.

In the new book you write that “being invisible is the usual condition of the older traveler.” Do you find that you’re regarded differently in your travels now than you were, say, 35 years ago?

Oh sure, yeah. Older people are kind of invisible. It is a fact. The older you get, the less you’re taken any notice of. But it’s a great advantage to be invisible. It always has been for me as a writer. I didn’t know that older people were invisible when I was younger. Say an older man is talking to a woman. She actually doesn’t see him. When you’re young, you’re thinking, maybe she’s the one for me. And the woman’s thinking, maybe he’s the one for me. Maybe we can get it together. There’s a thought that runs through the mind of a younger person, it’s the DNA of it, it’s the mating instinct. With an older person, that doesn’t factor into it. An older person buys something, and the woman looks past him and doesn’t see anything. But you don’t know that until you’re older.

I found that interesting. I’m in my 30s and haven’t, I don’t think, experienced that yet.

It happens to everyone, it will happen to you in the fullness of time.

I’m sure it will. On the other hand, I’m not sure this will happen to me. While you may be more invisible because of your age, you’re better known than you were on your first journey. Were you recognized on this recent trip? Did that factor into things?

Uh, no—for various reasons. Not many people read. If I was Stephen King I’d probably be recognized. But I don’t think people stop him on the street and say, “I loved your latest book.” Writers don’t have faces. But I think that’s a good thing. I’m all for it. I would hate to be Harrison Ford, Laurence Fishburne, an identifiable person. I would find it very tiring, very wearying. They can’t come and go as they wish. That’s a tough thing.

Indeed, you met up with Haruki Murakami in Tokyo in the new book, and I enjoyed the pleasure you took in his invisibility in Tokyo. Even when the two of you were entering the Tokyo subway, which he wrote about so famously, nobody recognized him.

I thought that was really interesting. That’s a perfect example of it. He’s Japan’s most famous writer and no one knows what he looks like. That’s great, actually.

Our reviewer thought she detected more compassion and even admiration from you in the way you wrote about the people you encountered on this journey, more so than in previous books. And I thought I detected that, too. Do you think there’s anything to that? Do you see people differently than you did decades ago?

I think it’s possible. I don’t know whether I’d use the word compassion. More understanding, or attempting to understand things that I would have generalized or written off before. But I think that’s a factor of age. Maybe I’m less of a wise guy. I really don’t know. That’s something only the reader can judge. It’s hard for me to judge. But if you’re saying, do I take people more seriously? Maybe I do. When you’re young and you travel, you don’t compare your life with others’ lives. But when you’ve lived a little, you say, this person is my age but look how different his life has been. When you’re young, you say, my whole life is ahead of me.

This is another reason why it’s amazing and enjoyable to be an older writer. I’m sorry that the older writers of the past didn’t repeat their journeys. At my age, most writers were writing their autobiographies. Graham Greene started his autobiography when he was about my age. Evelyn Waugh wrote A Little Learning when he was about my age. So did Ford Maddox Ford. Conrad wrote a personal record when he was my age. The older writers of the past tended to say, I’m going to tidy up my affairs, sum up my life and then I don’t know, have a cup of tea and go to bed. But I really don’t feel that way. If someone said what do you want to do, I wouldn’t say I want to write my memoir. I’d say I’d like to go to Angola, I’d like to go back to the Congo. I don’t want to sit around saying I was born and this happened and talk about my childhood.

You wrote, “If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse, than before, it is almost shaming to behold.” And you found Romania to be a somewhat sad place. But what place were you most heartened by on this return trip?

Vietnam. The difference between Vietnam at war and in peacetime couldn’t be greater. The Soviet Union morphing into Russia is not that dramatic. Although there are huge changes, it was a place of great fear before. But I think that Vietnam—because we were there, we were fighting, we were dropping seven million tons of bombs on them, and millions of gallons of Agent Orange. We defoliated them, we killed them, we flattened them, and they crawled out from the wreckage and built, I think, a very viable country that we gave them no help with. In fact, up until ‘94 there was an embargo. We only tried to prevent them from developing. And yet they did. They managed without us, so there’s a hopeful thing. People can survive without American aid. If a people are true to their traditions and see themselves as a nation, they can survive and prosper. Certainly that happened in Vietnam.

In the past, you’ve talked about the importance of isolating oneself in one’s travels, making oneself difficult to reach. And the idea that followed from that was that the more one isolates oneself, the more rewarding or powerful the travel experience is. And yet this time you traveled with a BlackBerry, you stayed in contact with home. I’m curious how that changed your experience.

It did change it, to tell you the truth. When you have a BlackBerry you’re in touch. I could run my life, answer emails, log on and so forth. It’s a detriment, obviously. I don’t really want to be in touch. I tried to see the BlackBerry as a device for playing BrickBreaker, that video game like Pong where you break bricks and try to get a big score. I got up to 8,500 points and thought, OK, that’s the use of it. It came in very useful at certain times, I can’t deny that.

On the whole, though it was useful, I’d rather travel without it. But my wife was happier getting messages from me and the reassurance that I was all right. But I think disappearing is part of the job. It’s not to be recommended for everyone. But travel writing is not recommended for everyone. When I lived in Africa, I didn’t have a telephone and there was no internet. I wrote a letter home and they wrote a letter back, and it took six weeks to go back and forth. And that was a good thing. I learned the language as a result, I was immersed in a culture. There’s no refuge. You can’t hide. You’ve got to make friends and deal with people. Now, I suppose Peace Corps volunteers, when they’re having a tough time, call home, they get on the computer, and they sort of disappear and withdraw from the country, and I don’t think that’s great.

Do you think that since you wrote “The Great Railway Bazaar” the challenge for the travel writer has changed?

No, I think the challenge is what it’s always been, which is to make the reader see a place, experience a place, smell the place, hear the voices. It’s like the great challenge in fiction, which is to persuade the reader that he or she is there in the place and seeing it. It’s quite a big challenge, but that’s what it is. It’s to make the place palpable. You know when you’re reading something like that.

There’s a book that I loved, written in the ‘70s, called The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse. He traveled across the Sahara on a camel with two Tuaregs, and it’s a thrilling story because he had such a terrible time. He didn’t succeed in crossing the Sahara. He only got halfway. But it’s a thrilling book. There’s always room for those books—someone attempting a difficult trip and then writing about it honestly and well.

The books I don’t have a lot of time for are the frivolous ones: lovable people in Tuscany, or a little treasure of a man in Spain, or wonderful meals. The books about having a great time. I’m not too interested in them. But there are plenty of them because people have the fantasy of ditching their job and going somewhere, saying, why don’t we go live in Italy, or Venezuela, or going to a Greek island, that used to be a big fantasy. These books with lots of sunshine and beaches, they have no interest for me. I did write a book about the Pacific that had a lot of sunshine and beaches, but they in were some dark places.

In that case—you’re referring to The Happy Isles of Oceania, of course—I recall that you wrote about your divorce, too, and that cast a shadow over your experience.

Yeah, I got divorced, and I found some of the people very hostile and territorial. No, I’ve never written about, “Wish you were here, having a great time.”

And you don’t seem to have a great interest in writing a travel book about Hawaii, where you spend part of every year.

It’s very hard to write about a place that you live in. I wrote a novel, Hotel Honolulu, and that’s about as far as I would go. I could write about Hawaii, but it’s a place I want to live in, and I’m still sort of learning about it.

That’s another thing about travel. You can go to a place and write about it, but the longer you live in a place the harder it is to write about. That’s why home is so difficult to write about.

You once wrote that “The challenge for the serious traveler in the age of globalization is to prove that the word ‘globalization’ is fairly meaningless.”

Oh yes. Where did I write that?

It was in the introduction to “The Best American Travel Writing” back in 2001. I liked that, because globalization is a phenomenon that every traveler confronts these days. We see KFCs and Starbucks everywhere. Can you talk about that, about proving that the word “globalization” is somewhat meaningless?

Well you know there’s a book by Thomas Friedman called The World is Flat, which says everything is accessible and people from Bangalore can come to New York and all that. I disagree, I think the world is round. It’s not only round, but it also has dark places. At the beginning of “Heart of Darkness,” Marlow says this has been one of the dark places of the earth, talking about England. England was once dark and neolithic. And then he talks about the Congo and how the Congo was a dark place. Well, the Congo is still a dark place.

A guy called Tim Butcher tried to retrace the footsteps of Stanley going through the Congo, and he couldn’t do it. He wrote a book, it’s called Blood River, I think it just came out, and he proved that the Congo is more difficult to travel in than at the time of Stanley, or he’s not the match of Stanley. Stanley took almost three years to go across the Congo. Butcher took six weeks or something.

You could say, how globalized is that? Well, not very globalized in my opinion. If you’re going to a place like the Congo, which is completely out of touch, it’s not connected, there’s no road, no government, just child soldiers or rebel soldiers ripping you off, that’s pretty tough. How flat is that world? There are places in Brazil, India. Name a country. China. Xinjiang in China. You can talk about how modern China is, and the Olympics and so forth. But eastern China: some of those people don’t consider themselves to be even Chinese. Well they’re not. They’re the Uyghur people, and they’re Muslims. They want to be in a country called East Turkestan. And they object to Chinese domination.

The world is only globalized to a small extant. People come to the United States, for example. They go to New York and say, Oh, I was in Paris yesterday and now I’m in New York, and it’s so much the same. Well, you have to say to those people, go to eastern Oklahoma, go to the Ozarks, go to North Dakota. Yes, New York may seem flat and globalized, but Fargo isn’t. Billings, Montana, isn’t. There are places that don’t have names, that are off the map. It’s presumptuous to assume that we’re all connected. There are people who have gotten nothing out of globalization. Their lives are only getting worse. They’re more neglected. But those are the places that are worth going to, I think.

And yet, as a travel writer and editor, I like to think that one needn’t go to the Congo to write about the world in an interesting way, and that there are places in New York or Los Angeles that are equally interesting and perhaps even untouched to some degree by globalization.

I don’t disagree with you. In fact, I completely agree with you. But I think that you need a method. The United States can’t be written about like other countries. It should be written about. And there are plenty of places in the States that are never written about. Somewhere in the book—I think I was in India—I talked about how accessible India is. India possesses the accessible poor. You can go up to an Indian and ask how much he makes and meet his family, and the accessibility of people way down on the totem pole allows you to write about them. You can’t do that in the States. You can’t go to a small town in the heartland and write about them as though they were tribal people in Asad. You can’t do it.

My youngest son made a documentary in Jackson, Mississippi. I really admire him for it because I don’t know anyone who’s made a documentary or written a book about Jackson, Mississippi, particularly the inner city, the dangerous part of Jackson. You hear about Jackson—it’s the capital and everything’s fine. It’s not all fine. It’s dangerous and difficult and no one writes about it. I’d like to write that book, but I don’t know how to do it. I’d love to write a book about the States; I wouldn’t know how to approach it. But I agree with you when you say, You don’t have to go to the Congo. I totally agree. You should be able to write about anywhere. In fact, people do. But that’s why the travel book is an amorphous thing. No one knows what it is or what it stands for.

There’s a famous 18th-century book called A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. There’s actually an edition with an introduction by D.H. Lawrence. You can write that. Thoreau wrote a book about his hometown. It’s a great book. He considered Concord, Massachusetts, the equivalent of Brazil. He even said when a man wrote a book about the Arctic that every observation made in that book about the Arctic could be made about Concord. It’s not true, but that’s what he thought. I’d like that to be the case.

A book that impressed me is Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I wish I’d thought of that.  I really do. Of getting low-paying jobs and just traveling around the States and finding out how people live. It’s not a travel book, but it’s a book about America that penetrates it.

It seems that every other month some writer is declaring the death of travel writing. Do you read much travel writing these days? Do you read much of what is being published?

I don’t. I read books by my friends. Now and then if a book comes along that’s a real ordeal, I read it. I’m not looking for a well-written book. I’m looking for a book about something that appeals to me, an ordeal appeals to me, a place I’ve never been that’s written about in a penetrating way. I’m not looking for someone just joyriding or a stunt, someone riding a bicycle somewhere or whatever it is. But people used to talk about the death of the novel. That’s a kind of normal reaction to too much of something. But there will always be travel books, as long as there are places to go.

That sounds like a great place to end. Thanks very much.

When to go: While most cevicher?as are open daily, Sunday is traditionally their busiest day and visiting one is a weekly ritual for many Lime?os. After partying until dawn the night before in Lima’s discos, you might rest for a few hours but still feel like the bottom of your shoe. The act of going to a cevicher?a is something that can both refresh and revive; a combination of hair of the dog and raw seafood. The experience begins in the late morning and typically lasts all day; the overindulgence may, on a good day, eclipse that of the night before.

The basics: Early, crude forms of ceviche began to appear in pre-Colombian times in the coastal civilizations of South America where fish was “cooked” with a fruit called tumbo. Later the Incas ate salted fish marinated in chicha, a fermented corn drink, and when the Spanish arrived, they added limes and onions to the mix.

Ceviche preparations vary from place to place—in Mexico, finely diced fish in lemon juice is served with crackers and Tabasco; in Ecuador, ceviche includes tomatoes and is much soupier; in the Andes, chefs use trout—but it’s the Peruvian version that’s recently caught on outside Latin America.

In Peru, ceviche is eaten as a first course or appetizer. The dish requires fresh, quality ingredients; precise and lightning-fast execution; and a basic understanding of spices and acidity. The chef tosses fresh chunks of any firm white fish, such as flounder or sea bass, with onions, bits of Peruvian aj? peppers, seasoning and—most importantly—lime juice only minutes before serving. Ceviche isn’t exactly raw like sashimi is raw, though. The acid in the lime actually cooks the fish just before you eat it, resulting in an explosion of taste and texture. In the same dish you’ll find a slice of sweet potato, a few sticks of boiled yucca and a small piece of corn on the cob.

Where to go: Pick up Lima’s restaurant guide, “Guia Gastronomica,” for suggestions, or head to the seaside districts of Barranco and Chorrillos, and look for the crowds spilling into the street from restaurants like Punta Arenas or La Canta Rana. For a step up in price and quality, check out dining options in the Miraflores district such as Caplina or the trendster hot spot La Mar, owned by Lima’s outspoken TV chef Gast?n Acurio. At either you’ll find local celebrities and wealthy Lime?os sipping on pisco-infused cocktails and noshing on Novo Andino (New Andean) foods, including a lineup of ceviches and tiraditos.

Still, the best cevicher?as are a bit out of the way. Sonia, a ceviche shack near the Chorrillos fish market that has grown a fanatic following, is tucked away in a far corner of the city. Sankuay, aka Chez Wong, sits in an unpretentious part of Lima, but the loyal ensemble of BMWs and Mercedes outside give it away as a culinary gem. Inside, chef Javier Wong takes a look at you and decides what you are going to eat. If you don’t like it, then leave.

Order like an expert: To begin, pick at the toasted, salted corn kernels called cancha serrana already on the table, and make your first order. Start with something to drink, say, Leche de Tigre, aka Tiger’s Milk. It’s like a kick in the face. More clearly defined, it’s the tangy juice left over at the bottom of the ceviche bowl served in a tall shot glass. Sometimes it’s mixed with a shot of pisco, a white brandy that is Peru’s national spirit. Throw in a few 32-ounce beers (always Pilsen or Cusque?a) for everyone to share. If dining after a rough night, opt for a pisco sour. Better yet, make it a double.

Next, move on to the goods: ceviche or tiradito. Ceviche comes in many forms: cl?sico (the traditional mix), mixto (with fish, squid, octopus and scallops), camar?n (with crayfish), black conch (said to increase your sexual prowess), pato (with duck), and champi?ones (with mushrooms). Tiradito is the modish, young cousin of ceviche. Created by Nikkei (Japanese) chefs in Lima, it relies on the tradition of dousing raw fish in lime juice, but the slices are paper thin and its makers add a spicy aj?-based sauce.

Once you’ve finished your ceviche—another round of drinks, by the way, has likely been put on the table without your asking—you can order the rest of your meal. Your second course will be something hearty, and typically served with rice.

Need more starch? Try tacu-tacu de mariscos: day-old rice and beans refried and stuffed with seafood. Something more filling? Lenguado a la macho: flounder in a zesty sauce of onion, garlic, paprika, cilantro and rocoto peppers. Something unusual? Arroz negro: rice cooked in squid ink with saut?ed squid, scallops and crayfish. Something multinational? Camar?n saltado: a variation of Peru’s favorite Chinese fusion dish with shrimp instead of chicken.

Bask in the benefits: Die-hard connoisseurs will try to sell you the health attributes of ceviche like a can of snake oil—it will prevent sleepwalking, cure a hangover, and even increase your sex drive. While there may be some truth to their words, a visit to a cevicheria will at the very least guarantee good times and a full belly. Buon Provecho!

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which Theroux retraces his “Great Railway Bazaar” travels some 30 years later, is, by contrast, a book I wanted to read again as soon as I’d finished it. It is as observant and finely drawn as the rest of his work, but it also manages to be honest without being caustic, incisive and funny without being snide. The author studies himself—both his past and present selves—as closely as he studies the people he encounters, for whom he has more compassion, and even admiration, than I have ever seen from him. In short, “Ghost Train” is the kind of travel book I’ve wanted to read for a long time.

If much of Theroux’s writing isn’t, as I say, “comfortable,” then let’s face it: neither is long-distance travel. It’s a series of delays, obstacles, bureaucracy, frustration, dangers, skull-crushing boredom and lots of stomach trouble if you’re lucky enough to do it right, more so if you’re lucky enough to do it often. About this Theroux has always been correct. “Travel is the opposite of a holiday,” he wrote in a 1999 New York Times op-ed. “It is about enlightenment, and at its best, is a form of disappearance.”

This disappearance—that which makes the traveler a “specter” in the world—is a recurring theme throughout “Ghost Train,” as Theroux once again ventures out from London by rail to explore the hinterlands of a changed, changing Asia. Parts of his original itinerary are no longer possible—Afghanistan and Iran are off-limits to him in 2006—and so the tracks take him through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, China (closed to Theroux on his first trip), Japan and across Siberia back to London. Despite the altered map, the trip brings back complicated, familiar emotions for him. “Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial,” the author writes, “like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people …”

It is fitting, then, that Theroux’s travels wind through some of the most haunted countries in the world: an India more over-populated than ever, a post-tsunami Sri Lanka ravaged by sectarian violence. Almost three decades after the hell-on-earth reign of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia struggles to maintain what little infrastructure it has and to fend off the foreigners who come to sexually exploit its children. “The ghostliness was present even in the sunniest parts of town,” Theroux writes of Siem Reap, “a suggestion of the hideous past, of blood and unburied bodies, of torture, trickery, lies, punishment—like the darkness I had felt rising from the earth when I walked through Dachau, the stink of evil.”

Similarly, Theroux finds the people of Myanmar have been all but crushed under the weight of military dictatorship, and this part of his journey yields some of the most compassionate, humble writing in the book. It also brings Theroux to reflect on his own role as a ghost returning to his former life: “If a place, after decades, is the same, or worse than before, it is almost shaming to behold. Like a prayer you regret has been answered, it exists as a mirror image of yourself, the traveler, who has to admit: I’m the same too, but aged—wearier, frailer, fractured, abused, weaker, shabbier, spookier.”

Faced with the political graft and social distress in places like Cambodia and Myanmar, Theroux ruminates on the circumstances rather than raging against them (as he did in his book about returning to Africa, “Dark Star Safari”). “Older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law,” he says in the book’s first chapter. “Nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.”

Theroux’s softened attitude undoubtedly says something about the perspective that age has given him, but it also speaks to the happier circumstances of his own life. We learn that while he was traveling through Asia for his “Great Railway Bazaar” journey, he was “miserable” the entire time, guilt-ridden for leaving his wife and children behind. Upon his return, he discovered that his wife had been having an affair. When writing “The Great Railway Bazaar,” he says, “I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering, with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my children, my wife, my happy household.”

There is marked change in the author’s temperament, certainly, but one of the greatest differences between the man who wrote “The Great Railway Bazaar” and the one who wrote “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” is that this time, he is traveling as Paul Theroux, Writer, which perhaps keeps him from being as “unobserved” as he once was, but also makes new opportunities possible. There is a dinner party with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, a visit with Arthur C. Clarke (author of “2001: A Space Odyssey”) in Colombo, a tour of “underground” Tokyo with Haruki Murakami, a stroll through southern Japan with Pico Iyer. Would anyone not kill for this man’s connections?

While Theroux finds certain places from his first trip greatly diminished, others bustle with a new vitality. Istanbul is more vibrant and welcoming than he remembered (”I had been too young and hurried to appreciate its virtue,” he says), and Bangkok “had gotten bigger but had kept its soul.” The desperate, devastated Vietnam that Theroux evoked so well in the early ‘70s is now wholly renewed, “the embodiment of peace and hope.” Throughout the book he is as eager to revel in Asia’s improvements as he is to mourn its decay. (In fact, the words “pleasant” and “lovely” and even “uplifting” appear so many times in “Ghost Train” that I at one point wrote in the margin: “Is this Paul Theroux?”)

The old Theroux is still there, though, still as trenchant as ever, only this time he seems to have found the right targets for ridicule. He dubs Turkmenistan “Loonistan” for the unchecked megalomania of its then-president, Saparmurat Niyazov (who renamed the days of the week and months of the year, one after the title of his own book); Singapore, under the ?ber-strict dictates of prime minister Lee Kwan Yew, “is a place of great loneliness and fear, the apprehension of people who know they are forever being watched.” And yet Theroux largely keeps his criticisms to the governments’ officials who create these climates, rather than skewering the citizens themselves. Here he is not pointing out their flaws; he is trying to understand their lives.

Despite its colorful vignettes and frequent humor, there’s a layer of seriousness—not a darkness, but a seriousness—to “Ghost Train” that directly relates to the war in Iraq. In a globalized Asia, American politics radiate outward, and Theroux finds that most people have an opinion on America’s invasion of Iraq. Hardly any of them (exactly two) support the actions of the Bush administration. Theroux uses the history of Asia as a strong lens for focusing this point. In Cambodia, for example, he finds that the Khmer Rouge used an “enhanced interrogation technique” not too far-removed from water-boarding:

The traveler’s conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government.

He learns that the people of the world resent (and fear) American policies abroad, but nearly everyone envies the lives Americans lead. The world has its eyes turned west.

“Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” is Paul Theroux at his best. It is a gracious, expansive book that lives up to the gifts of its author, and delivers on the premise he set out to unpack in 1975, that “anything is possible on a train.” Even more is possible, perhaps, on the ghost train.

Two years later, Troost gave a repeat performance with “Getting Stoned with Savages,” where he, once again, followed his wife to a tiny island nation (in this case Vanuatu and Fiji) and soon found himself knee-deep in hijinks and misadventure. In Troost’s third and most recent tome, he changes gears, taking on China. Though he rarely strays off the beaten path in Lost on Planet China, Troost’s keen eye for the absurd has become even sharper. The result is one of the year’s best travel books. David Farley caught up with Troost via email to discuss China on the eve of the Olympic Games.

World Hum: After writing about island nations in your previous two books, what inspired you to take on a beast like China for your next book?

J. Maarten Troost: In retrospect, I had no idea what I was in for when I set out to do a book about China. I was simply curious. I’d been living in the far periphery of the world for so long that these tidbits of news you now and then hear about China—Lenovo buying IBM, for instance, or the fact that there are more than a hundred billionaires in China—seemed all the more startling. And as I began to read more, it seemed clear that if you’re going to understand this world, you need to understand China. Plus, I like a little dissonance in my life, and nothing is more dissonant than moving from the world’s smallest nations to its largest.

The writing in the book flows smoothly between personal narrative and historical backstory, and you do a particularly fine job of exploring aspects of China’s history while still maintaining your entertaining voice. What kind of research did you do to prepare for the trip and for writing the book?

I read. I Googled. I spoke with everyone I knew who had been to China. But nothing really prepares you for modern China, and so I traveled in a state of saucer-eyed wonder. It was only later, once I settled on the basic structure of the book, that I was able to think through all the issues one confronts with China.

A British friend of mine told me she recently watched a TV show on America’s foreign policy over the last 50 years. The show’s conclusion had a rather surprising twist: if you don’t agree with what the United States has done in the world, just wait until China rules the planet; you’ll be yearning for the good old days of the American empire again. What are your thoughts about the idea that the Chinese will own the 21st century? Are you frightened?

The Chinese regard the past two hundred years, when Europe humbled it with its drug trade and Japan bloodied it with its war, as a historical aberration, a traumatic anomaly. They see the 21st century as their moment to return China to its rightful place among nations—the top. But they are not looking to dominate the world with any kind of ideology. Their model, as far as I could tell, begins and ends with economic growth, and they are as willing to trade with a democracy like Norway as they are with a cruel, authoritarian regime like Sudan’s. The challenge for the rest of the world is how to accommodate China, and in particular, how to respond to the ferocious demand for resources that China’s growth demands. The American way of life, for instance, is predicated on cheap oil. The rise of China ensures the end of cheap oil. So now what?

And correspondingly, how does a world on the cusp of climate change deal with the catastrophic levels of pollution emitted by a surging China? Already today, roughly one-third of all the air pollution found in California originates in China. Those are the kind of issues, I think, that will define China’s relationship with the world during the 21st century.

Throughout your travels in China, people kept telling you—almost warning you—that it’s necessary to look at the country and its customs in the “Chinese context.” Was there a moment when this context came into focus and you could understand things that seem absurd to those of us who haven’t had the privilege of seeing China in the “Chinese context”?

When I first arrived, I wasn’t exactly feeling the love for China. The pollution was apocalyptic. The presence of hideously disfigured children begging on the streets suggested a cruel society. And for all the vaunted economic reforms, this new China seemed to encourage a kind of Darwinism—the strong prosper, the weak are crushed. And yet, after months of traveling, I came to appreciate China, to admire it even, for all that it had accomplished. This is because once you are there, once you are able to live and breathe the history of China, you can contextualize your observations. I felt this most profoundly at the end of my trip near the North Korean border. There across the Yalu River lay North Korea, a brutal totalitarian dictatorship that could not even offer electricity to its citizens. That was China thirty years ago. And today, on the Chinese side of the border, there is light and energy and opportunities. It’s an extraordinary transformation.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered about China?

I was overwhelmed by the pollution, which was surprising, really. I had, of course, known that China was polluted. At no time did I expect my wanderings to be accompanied by crisp, blue skies. And yet, I was utterly unprepared for the environmental catastrophe that is China. From Beijing to Lanzhou and on to Guangzhou and Chongqing, most of China resides in a swirling haze of coal and particulate matter that every year kills more than 700,000 people. One-third of all the freshwater in China is considered unsafe for industrial use, never mind drinking. For all the whiz-bang flash of contemporary China, I think the environment is where the country hits a brick wall.

Given the gross amounts of pollution that you just mentioned, as well as the Chinese philosophy that they’ll “eat anything with four legs except for a table,” would you rather be a long-distance runner at the Beijing Olympics or a contestant in an eating competition in China?

Bring on the Reptile Sampler Platter.

You mentioned in the book that when you were going through customs, you feared they weren’t going to let you in because you’d been critical of China in “The Sex Lives of Cannibals.” In “Lost on Planet China,” you seem to have been shocked and awed into respecting the country, while at the same time you’re also quite critical. Do you think you’ll ever be able to go back?

I don’t know. On the one hand, China has a way of making you feel small and insignificant. The observations of some writer are nothing compared to the larger story of China. On the other hand, China can be a trifle sensitive to how it’s portrayed to the outside world. I suspect I’d be allowed back in. I hope so.

Some people boycott traveling in China because of the Chinese government’s less-than-savory policies—such as their proclivity for killing citizens for what seems to us like minor infractions. What do you think about that ethical debate? Do you think traveling there is a better approach?

I’ve never believed in abstaining from traveling to a country for political or moral reasons. We’re human beings before we are citizens, and while you may find a government unappealing, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with seeing what your fellow human beings are up to in some other corner of Earth. But, of course, these days it’s easy to turn the question around. I live in an area that sees quite a few tourists. Over the past year I’ve noticed a lot of Chinese visitors. Perhaps they object to the Iraq War? Or the U.S. government’s detainment of foreigners in Guantanamo Bay? Or you could go on and on, but I for one, am happy they’ve decided to visit despite their concerns about the U.S. government.

Your chapters on Tibet were some of my favorite parts of the book. After being there, do you have any hope that Tibet won’t be completely decimated a generation from now?

I have little hope for Tibet. I think the railroad to Lhasa is the beginning of the end. Suddenly, Tibet is accessible, and by the tens of thousands the Han Chinese are moving in. Tibet will be crushed by the demographics of China. And the Han Chinese, by and large, do not have soft and fuzzy feelings for the Tibetans. Many regard Tibetans as a primitive tribe with a backward religion. Indeed, they largely resent Tibetans for their ingratitude towards China. From the Han perspective, China has brought money, development, economic progress and so forth to this poorest corner of the country, and the Tibetans have yet to say thank you. So combine the sheer number of Han Chinese with an undercurrent of resentment that flows both ways, and things don’t look so good for Tibet.

What parts of China would you go back to? And where would you not want to go back to?

I would like to return one day to Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces in the Southwest, as well as to Xinjiang Province in the far West. If I never have to spend another day in a Chinese megacity, I’ll be happy.

Do you have any plans for your next book yet?

India, baby.

David Farley is a contributing editor of World Hum. He recently interviewed writer Tony Perrottet for the site.

Preston landed, in other words, in a fictitious place: a country that existed in his mind, but not in reality. We all do this when we arrive someplace new. By the time we reach a place, it’s already there in our minds. We have built it partly from what we know, partly from what we imagine and partly from what we hope it will be.

It wasn’t long before reality intruded on Preston’s Italy. He soon discovered that the olive grove near his front yard marked the spot where two young people having sex in their car had been murdered and mutilated by the so-called “Monster of Florence.”

Preston, who writes thrillers, could not resist the pull of the story. He struck up a friendship with Mario Spezi, a journalist who has spent his life trying to solve a series of 16 (and possibly more) murders suspected to have been carried out by the Monster. Together, they collaborated on Preston’s new book, The Monster of Florence, which chronicles their quest to find the killer—and their even more bizarre dealings with the Italian legal system, such as it is. It’s such a fast read that I couldn’t wait to get to the next page.

But I found it interesting for a number of reasons.

I think it’s safe to say we are living through a particularly superficial era where image is everything and much time is spent on the surface of things. In the travel world, I see this in the nation-branding wars, which we’ve chronicled on World Hum. Another place I see it is in the growing chorus of naysayers who claim that travel is finished, the world is exhausted and that there are no new discoveries to be made. 

I couldn’t disagree more.

The English philosopher Herbert Spencer once wrote about a Frenchman “who, having been three weeks here, proposed to write a book on England; who, after three months, found that he was not quite ready; and who, after three years, concluded that he knew nothing about it.”

Which is exactly where “The Monster of Florence” comes in handy as a book about Italy. At its core, it’s a breakneck read. But in the margins a more complex country takes shape.

Take the scores of young men and women in their late teens and 20s having sex in cars. I knew this was a result largely of people living at home into their 30s and marrying later, as well as the high cost of real estate. But I didn’t know there was another subculture of “Indiani” who creep around at night peering into those cars, using parabolic microphones and night-vision cameras. I didn’t realize the hills were divided into zones or that “good cars” were traded for money among the Indiani. 

Preston also writes about the Italian judiciary, where the author endured Kafkaesque interrogation by judge Giuliano Mignini, who was convinced that the most simple explanations were the most far-fetched, and that there was a vast satanic conspiracy behind the Monster killings. Mignini even tried to implicate Preston, and he is the same judge currently pursing the investigation of American exchange student Amanda Knox in the murder of her British roommate.

Italians’ penchant for conspiracy is also well known, but one of Preston’s Italian friends puts a finer point on it. He says the force driving the Monster investigation is Dietrologia, the study of what is behind (dietro) the facts. “Nothing is simple, nothing is as it seems. Does it look like a suicide? Yes? Then it must be murder. Somebody went out for coffee? Aha! He went out for coffee…But what was he really doing,” he tells Preston.

For Preston, all this was a little deflating. Before he came to Italy, he thought of Italy as a different place. “I imagined Italy as I think many Americans do,” Preston explained in an email. “A magical place of fine food, exquisite landscapes, and warm people—a civilized country, the birthplace of the Renaissance.”

I asked him how all this had transformed that view.

“My feelings are very changed,” Preston wrote. “There are no ‘magical’ places once you get to know them well—human nature is the same everywhere. While Florence is a beautiful city, it can also be squalid, dirty, dark, cold and quite different from the image presented in the tourist brochures.”

But I think he misses his own point. I thought his insights about dietrologia, about the machinations of power, about many things made Italy seem more fascinating, not less. It is what I love most about the world: Where there is sun, there are also shadows. Italy, like every place, is a study in complexity. And in this era of nation branding and travel-is-so-over cranks, it doesn’t hurt to remember that while oceans may have been crossed, there are still worlds underneath waiting to be explored by those who want to dive a little deeper.

We were on Colin’s farm in western Uganda, 20 miles from Fort Portal, a languid colonial town near the Rwenzori Mountains. I’d met Colin a few days earlier, squished together in the back row of the Horizon bus from Kampala. We’d struck up a conversation on the outskirts of town, as I’d fiddled with my iPod and waited out the bumpy ride. Curious eyes followed my thumb as it whirled in circles, heads poking over seats and craning into the aisle, when the man by the window—lean, bookish, scratching at his wiry moustache—leaned toward me and cleared his throat. He asked about the storage capacity, and we soon got into a heated discussion about file-sharing and intellectual copyright law. This was not, I suspected, your typical conversation on the Horizon bus from Kampala.

When we arrived in Fort Portal, he ushered me through the crush of cab drivers and helped me to my hotel. Along the way he professed his admiration for Truman Capote. He’d read “In Cold Blood” and had heard stories of the author’s legendary Black and White Ball. Soon he shyly admitted that he was something of a writer himself. We shook hands and parted warmly and made plans to meet later in the week.

Fort Portal slumbers in one of Uganda’s countless backwaters. Once a busy hub for colonial administrators in the West, it now seems content to shuffle along, rubbing its eyes and looking up now and then to wonder what time the British left. It’s a lovely place, with acres of tea plantations sitting in neat parcels on the surrounding hills, and the blue-gray ridges of the Rwenzoris rising on the horizon. I had no plans for my stay—I was only passing through—and was happy to spend a few days strolling down dirt roads and waving to naked kids scooting between the banana plants. Meeting Colin gave me an excuse to stick around, and a few days after our bus ride, he was waiting for me on the steps of the public library.

Colin carried copies of the day’s papers folded under his arm and a canvas shopping bag full of muffins and mango juice. We wedged ourselves onto a motorbike and puttered down the street, soon finding ourselves on a dirt road stitched through the hills. Tea plantations and coffee farms sandwiched the road, goats chewed on grass. We passed a dairy farm and Colin gestured to the plump, handsome cows flicking their tails on the hillside.

“This is, I think, the best dairy farm in the district,” he said, his voice warming with appreciation. “They have very nice cows—pure Friesian. A very nice breed, from Europe.”

A half-hour later we pulled up to his farm. Colin’s cows—lean, scruffy, not-at-all Friesian—buried their faces in a trough. It was a modest bungalow surrounded by bright, flowering plants; by western Ugandan standards, I knew the house suggested some small measure of wealth. Inside we sat across from each other at the kitchen table, picking at the muffins, when Colin offered to read me his poem.

“Let me try to pick the least worst,” he said, again adjusting his glasses, which slid back down the bridge of his nose. Finally he leaned forward, cleared his throat and began to read.

“Deception,” he said.

I saw a spider

perched high up on the ceiling in its web.

It looked down

and saw

flies, on a clear blue surface,

and it said to itself,

“I will let myself down on my thin silky thread

and have a meal.”

And it did.

And it sunk!

For the flies were floating dead

on the surface of water in a blue basin.

Colin continued to the end, sat back, awkward, smiling, lapping up my praise. Gathering confidence, he read another, and then two more. On the table were dozens of poems written in his small, neat hand. He explained he was also working on a handful of stories—even a play—and it dawned on me that Colin Kisembo was, without question, the most prolific writer I knew. But when we talked about publishing his work, he wagged his hands with disapproval. Though a friend in Kampala helped to publish a literary journal, and Colin often thought about submitting his own poems, he still hadn’t worked up the nerve.

“I am afraid,” he said. “What if I am rejected?”

Rejection, I offered, is part of the writing process. In all my years of writing, rejection had been one of the few constants. And while you never get used to those dismal letters and emails—or the attendant feelings of self-doubt—you learn to negotiate them as part of the landscape.

“It will be an act of great courage,” he said, eager to change the subject.

He opened the mango juice and passed a muffin to me and asked about my travels. We talked about my long odyssey since leaving home almost two years ago. He smiled and sighed and shook his head as I described Barcelona and Beirut, London and Damascus. Then he told me about his own journey five years ago, when he quit his job as a lawyer in Kampala to travel through Africa. He went south, through Rwanda and Tanzania, making it as far as Malawi. Soon he was low on money. He grew lonely.

“It is all the same, wherever you go,” he said.

Returning to Uganda, he came west to look after his father’s farm. Life here was hard. Money was scarce; often, he had to ask his sister and an elder brother for help. The neighbors were guarded, suspicious.

“They see this house, and they think we must have so much money,” he said. Even years later, he had few people he could trust. He was bothered to see friends and neighbors hobbled by bitterness and petty grudges.

“We have a saying: nohandika ha maiise,” he said, tapping each syllable on the tabletop. “It means ‘like writing on water.’” He laughed at this, amused and resigned. “You cannot change how people are.”

Outside he showed me around the farm. It was a small plot of land; in just a few minutes we’d crossed through the brown stalks of maize, pausing to stop in the shade of a flowering tree. It was a sunny afternoon, and the heat rose from the dry grass crunching beneath our feet.

“I live alone, and it makes me sad and lonely sometimes,” Colin said, shaking his head. There weren’t many guests, and when he alluded to a few fleeting romances through the years, his voice trailed off. We paused beside a small clearing paved over with concrete, where he gestured to three graves lying side by side. The names of his mother and his father and his father’s father were chiseled into gray tombstones. He stopped briefly and then stepped across the lawn, his strides short and brisk, as if the balm for his loss might be waiting somewhere across the yard. We came to his cows, thin and skittish, nuzzling against each other in the shade. He took a few light-hearted stabs at their meagerness.

“I’m sure you’re used to udders that sweep the floor when the cows walk,” he suggested, though I had to admit that, as a New Yorker, I was not really used to udders at all. He patted a few of the cows with tenderness.

“I watch them feed, I just …” His voice trailed off, and his eyes grew misty. He frowned. “I feel so … I don’t know what it is,” he said, resting a hand on his chest. We watched the cows rubbing flanks by the trough, nudging each other out of the way, then scampering off to relieve themselves against a shed. Colin smiled, sighed, shook his head. And then again, turning, leaning forward, he marched back toward the house.

Inside, Colin fidgeted with the antenna on his radio. Sitting at the table each night, with the cows huddled together in their pen and the light from the paraffin lamp casting shadows on the walls, he tunes in to the BBC to hear the news from abroad. Sometimes he opens a Bible, scanning well-remembered verses for hope and consolation. Christianity, like writing, had offered a kind of companionship for him, and he was curious about my own beliefs. He asked about my soul, about salvation and the afterlife. In the story he’d begun to read to me earlier, the main character, Lazaro, was inspired by the biblical Lazarus. Did I believe my own soul would play Lazarus and rise from the grave? Scientists, he pointed out, had found that the body loses 21 grams immediately after death. Could those 21 grams be the weight of one soul? Could any of us be saved?

He adjusted his glasses and looked across the room, where the half-filled cupboards and dusty bookshelves suggested a life still waiting for fulfillment. It was late in the day, and soon we’d have to head back into town. Colin stared out the window. When the silence became unbearable, he leaned forward and folded his hands on the table.

“You have traveled around the world,” he said. “Is there any purpose to this? Or are we just trudging through life, waiting for time to pass?”

The wind shook the banana plants outside, rustling the leaves.

I wasn’t sure what to say, and soon Colin, slightly embarrassed, wagged his hands and got up from the table. We waited on the porch, insects humming over the grass, sunlight falling through the trees. Then an engine puttered up the walkway.

On the back of the motorbike, with the sun dipping toward the horizon, everything was drenched, golden. The wind roared in our ears and we shouted to make ourselves heard over the noise. It was a beautiful ride. I held tightly to Colin’s waist, afraid for every bump and jolt in the road, and thought about our conversation. Nohandika ha maiise. For Colin, it was a simple life lesson on human stubbornness, on the impossibility of changing our ways. But life itself is like writing on water, each of us scribbling our stories across a tide that will bear no trace of our passing. Maybe there’s no purpose to any of this, maybe the collected heartbreaks, rejections and sorrows are all we get. But we’re still here, passing the time as best we can, and taking comfort in the people we find to share the ride.

“I’m sorry!” he says. “There’s just so much pressure. It’s Prague!”

In the beginning, at least, an international romance can play out with all the subtitled allure of the best foreign film—full of innuendo and curiosity, and brightened by the nuances of language and cultural differences. And with Hollywood endings rare between lovers who live in distant lands, the passion factor can run particularly high—while it lasts.

Herewith, seven reasons—some admittedly more serious than others—for giving romance across borders a go:

7) The World Feels Smaller

The emotional differences between a Swedish man and an American woman can seem daunting in Stockholm or San Francisco. But set out for Morocco or Malaysia to travel together, and, chances are, you’ll discover you have a lot more in common than you thought.

6) It’s the Fast Track to Learning a New Language

Clich?d, but true. Forget using Rosetta Stone or schlepping to night school. There are few better ways to motivate yourself to learn a foreign language than by discovering the limits of the international one. Spend more than a few weeks with your lover in his or her native country, and you’ll soon realize that the language of love doesn’t cut it for long. One long dinner spent sitting for hours with a clueless smile plastered on your face—pretending to enjoy yourself while your beloved struggles to translate the punch lines, hence missing all the fun, too—is sure inspiration for finally buckling down and learning French, Spanish, Greek, whatever.

5) Need Some Space? Take a Continent.

Sure, the logistics of spending time together while maintaining jobs and relationships in your home countries can seriously strain things. But sometimes the highs of being together followed by the lows of being apart can feed the fire even more than day-to-day stability—leaving you plenty of time to grow as an individual, too. Despite much forced time apart from her Irish boyfriend due to the distance, Mary Wisneski of Asheville, NC said she can see the benefits of the situation, too. “It’s nice to know there is someone that loves me but isn’t glued to me, if that makes sense,” Wisneski wrote in an email. “I know I don’t want to be with anyone else, so I really get to focus and enjoy what I’m doing right now. Then, every couple months, I get to spend a few weeks with someone I love, somewhere different.”

4) It Breaks Down Stereotypes, for Better or Worse

Think all French men are natural-born lovers? Or all American women are high-maintenance and addicted to US Weekly? Falling for someone is a surefire way to discover which stereotypes are true and which couldn’t be further from reality. 

3) You’re Forced to Communicate More Clearly and Fairly

In his book, “The Global Soul,” Pico Iyer wrote that sharing no “public tongue” with his Japanese partner leaves them “free, for the most part, from subtexts and from the shadows and hidden stings that words can carry.”

“I can’t make puns with her, spin ambiguities, or engage in very much verbal subterfuge, and she can’t pore over my words to see what they mean or don’t mean, what covert weapons they hide or betray,” he writes. “Speaking across a language gap means speaking less to win than to communicate.”

2) It Boosts Self-Esteem

Back home in Poughkeepsie, it’s hard to feel exotic. But it’s amazing what capturing a foreigner’s interest can do for your ego. And let’s face it, seeing your all-American affinity for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches turned into something quirky and cute is just what some of us need to feel special. At home, your verbal acuity may be barely average. But suddenly, with your Czech lover, you’re an authority on the English language, and nearly every phrase you utter can inspire delight.

A well-traveled friend of mine put it best:

“Back home you’re sullen, you’re a workaholic, you’re a bit shy around girls. But here you are, doing the funky chicken on a dance floor in Ljubljana with some cute Slovenian girl.”

1) You Might Hear Terms of Endearment That Are Seriously Swoon-Worthy

Babe, sweetheart, darling and pookie bear certainly have their places in the lexicon of love. But you’d be surprised how sweet harsh languages such as German and Arabic sound when uttered from a lover’s lips.

A few great international sweet nothings:

Spanish: Mi vida (my life)

German: Schneckchen (little snail)

Arabic: Habibi (my love)

French: Mon petit chou (my little cabbage)

I looked around the village bus depot, a dusty field lined with boutiques and filled with groups of juice sellers waiting for the next bus arrival. I strolled up and down aisles of vendors who were squatting next to their goods. Faded second-hand T-shirts folded in piles three feet high. Banana bunches reaching from the vendors’ mats like hands with dozens of edible yellow fingers. Multicolored plastic buckets and tea kettles. Sticky pyramids of red and green mangoes, their leaking nectar glistening in the afternoon sun.

Finally, I found what I was looking for: an old woman sitting on an overturned wooden crate selling peanuts. She had about 40 plastic bags, each holding handfuls of either plain or sugarcoated nuts. Her head was wrapped in fluorescent pink fabric, folded like a crown. Grey hair peeked out at her temples. She was chewing on a neem branch, a favorite toothbrush of many rural Senegalese. When we started to talk, she did not take it out but rather pushed it to the corner of her mouth, where it bounced with her every word.

I greeted her in Wolof, eager to practice. Three days of navigating from one small town to the next had improved my language skills more than three months of classroom lessons. 

I asked about her family, asked if she felt at peace, and then we both praised God. Eventually, I got around to asking her how much the peanuts cost.

My Wolof was not native enough to avoid getting quoted the toubab, or foreigner, price. I decided to bargain with her Senegalese-style: taking my time with friendly small talk.

She asked my Senegalese name. 

“Kuumba N’dour,” I replied. By sharing my adopted last name, I was revealing that I belonged to the Sereer, one of the dozens of ethnic groups in Senegal. I knew that if she were also Sereer, I would have no problem negotiating. The Senegalese believe in solidarity. 

“What a terrible name,” she said with a straight face. “You must be very stupid.”

Without flinching, I asked her name. 

“N’daiye Diatta.”

Her last name told me that she was Joola, another of the tribes. In fact, the Joola are considered cousins of the Sereer. 

I looked her straight in the eye. “Joola?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “You are selfish and love to eat rice, you pig. Begg nga cebb.”

The two vendors on either side of her had been listening with disinterest. At that moment, though, they burst out laughing, repeating what I had said. 

”Kuumba N’dour. Begg na cebb.” One of the women slapped her knee as she laughed. 

Other vendors on the periphery strolled over to check out the commotion. As I tried to reassure myself that I’d said the right word for pig, my hands grew clammy, and I became aware of the circle of strangers closing in around me. 

The peanut vendor had not smiled once. She still looked stone cold, the neem stick dangling out of the corner of her mouth.

“Begg na cebb?” she asked. “I like rice? I don’t think so. You,” she said, pointing at me. “You are my slave and I know you spend all day eating peanuts.” At this point, the growing crowd around me erupted in laughter. The woman smiled, and with relief, I started laughing, too.

As members of cousin ethnic groups, the Joola and Seerer, we were “joking cousins.” This means that whenever we meet, as a sign of friendliness, we insult each other without hesitation. Every ethnic group in Senegal has at least one or two joking cousin groups, so meeting one is rare enough to be a delight but common enough that it is protocol. 

Once everyone surrounding us settled down, she sold me the peanuts for half the original asking price.

“Kuumba N’dour,” she said. “Come eat dinner with my family tonight.”

I thanked her and said I would the next time. As I settled into my bus seat and waved goodbye, I felt like I was not so far from family after all. 

I want to go backpacking for a year around the world, but as a woman, I’m always wondering how safe it is. Can I realistically jump on a plane now without too much fear for my safety?

– Sandrine, U.K.