He Took The Road Insanely Traveled By [Books + Media]
Friday July 02nd 2010, 2:21 pm
Filed under:
Bad Asses,
Books + Media,
Close Calls,
Drive Like Hell,
European Delights,
Hotel Hell,
Human Sacrifice,
India,
Mountain Madness,
Off The Map,
Road Warriors
Only one piece of carry-on luggage allowed? Make it this book.
Dear Readers, as you head into that great American tradition, a long, lost weekend of drunken pyromania family, friends, and tasty BBQ, take a minute to consider the less fortunate, like adventure travel writer Carl Hoffman, whose new book ‘LUNATIC EXPRESS: Discovering the World…Via its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes’ has just hit the shelves, despite his many apparent efforts to off himself while reporting it. Hoffman just returned from Thailand, where he traveled to write a piece about his 81-year old father’s restaurant in Chiang Mai. We caught up with him just as the jet lag was wearing off.
In one sentence, please defend your sanity. Thank you.
I did not jump out of a plane or climb a mountain or plunge down a waterfall in a kayak; I merely bought tickets on regularly scheduled buses, boat, trains and planes that millions of people take every day.
Seriously, should travelers throw caution to the wind and take their own Lunatic Express trips? What is it about moving around the world through these kinds of corridors that you found so compelling?
The whole point of the journey wasn’t some death defying macho thing, but to use those conveyances as a window through which to see and understand the world as it is for the majority of its people. The world is changing rapidly and huge numbers of people, mostly poor, are on the move, traveling from countryside to city, from one end to the other of enormous cities, from country to country, on epic and often dangerous and uncomfortable journeys. If you’re looking for an authentic travel experience, if you’re looking to meet people and plunge deeply into the world, than there’s no better place than an overcrowded Indonesian ferry or a jam-packed Kenyan Matatu or Mumbai commuter train. And I found that the further off the beaten path I got, the more I put myself into places few westerners went, the more gracious the people became and I was treated with great care and hospitality. So, in a word, yes. Everyone should take their own Loony journey.
Any points in your reportage when you thought, ‘Feck. Now I’ve really done it. Goodbye, world.’ What happened next?
A few times I felt really, really out there – when I squeezed into a shared car in the Peruvian Amazon or when I boarded a small ferry in the Molucca Islands of Indonesia for a place called Buru, and I had no idea where I was going or what I’d find when I got there, and I carried no map or even extra food or water. But those times were the best! I felt a total freedom and exhilaration at moving through the world into this great unknown, and at giving up control and surrendering to whatever lay ahead. And on a bus through Afghanistan, well, it broke down for a bit in a bad area and that was the only time I though, ‘uh oh, I’m stupid and if I die or get kidnapped it won’t be fun and what was I thinking?’ But then the bus coughed to life and off we went.
What’s the most important item in your bag or suitcase, aside from your passport?
My notebooks. Everything else was replaceable, but those weren’t. I kept them in sealed zip lock bags and close at hand, hoping if the ferry sank or the bus plunged off a cliff, I’d be able to keep them safe. And something to read. And Ibuprofen. A must for hangovers.
Why do they hate us?
They don’t. They love us. They’re dying to know everything about us and they all want to move here. The only people who hate us are urban Europeans, and that’s because they’re really so much like us. And maybe a few Taliban, but they secretly all want to move here, too.
I’m a fan of writer William Boyd. His debut novel ‘A Good Man in Africa’ made me howl. What fiction and non-fiction travel-themed writers do you love the most, and why? Do you see yourself writing fiction? What’s next?
I love Tobias Schneebaum, a gay, New York artist who shed his clothes and disappeared into the Amazon in the 50s, and then lived with the Asmat in Indonesian Papua in the 70s. ‘Keep the River on Your Right’ and ‘Where the Spirits Dwell’ are haunting, unbelievable books, and they’re all about the outsider in his own culture who seeks connection in the exotic, and sort of finds it, but not really, because a white Westerner is even more of an outsider with a bunch of natives than he is at home. Naipaul’s old stuff like ‘A Bend in the River’ and ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ really take you into the Congo and Trinidad, and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s African books are wonderful. I loved Lawrence Osborne’s ‘The Accidental Connoisseur’. John Burdett’s thrillers like ‘Bangkok 8′ and ‘The Godfather of Kathmandu’, about a half Thai, Buddhist detective in Bangkok, are pretty insightful about Thailand and fun to breeze through.
You seem totally unafraid of riding trains like the one on your book cover, overloaded with thousands of death-defying maniacs clinging to the roof. What are you afraid of in the United States?
I always get scared when I tip over my sailboat in the middle of the Potomac River. Which is ridiculous, because the River is about four feet deep and warm and full of boats and only a mile across. But it always freaks me out.
What’s the best skill or piece of local knowledge you’ve picked up from your book project?
I always jump into the front seat of taxis; it establishes a little dominance and rapport. Never be afraid to eat street food or to walk into that dingy, crowded little restaurant. And when in doubt, keep your back to the wall or keep moving.
Any countries you’re still dying to get to? Why?
So many! All of Africa, especially the weird, crazy little countries of West Africa, like Liberia and Sierra Leone that are full of music and life and are recovering from horrible wars. Ethiopia, because its landscape and its people are beautiful. Burma, because its hot and wet and in a socialist authoritarian time warp.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received while traveling?
My father used to tell me when I was little about DC’s inner city: Don’t be afraid; they’re just like you and me, only poor.’ I never forgot that and it’s true about the whole world.
The worst?
Don’t go there, it’s dangerous.
[Journalist Carl Hoffman traveled 159 days in 2008 and 2009 for The Lunatic Express, published by Broadway Books on March 16th, 2010. Buy it here. He is a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler, Wired and Popular Mechanics magazines, and his stories about travel, adventure and technology – and often the nexus between them – also appear frequently in Outside, National Geographic Adventure and Men’s Journal. His first book, Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II, was published by Ballantine Books in 2001.]
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India Hour One [Hotel Hell]
No convenience is overlooked in Paradise!
APRIL 18, 2010…After 25+ hours of traveling, my mom and I made it to Delhi from Denver. I was going to volunteer for three weeks, and roped her into a week of sightseeing first. Although we consider ourselves seasoned travelers, my mom’s experience with Third World countries was non-existent, and she had a lot of apprehension, to say the least. I assured her all would be fine and I would handle it all. So, naturally, we were on Indian soil for only an hour, and already there was a story worth repeating.
As we walked out of the Delhi airport we looked for our hired guide among the hundreds of guides lining the exit waiting for their tourists to arrive…
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Toy Story [Nothing to Declare]
Fulla, the Muslim Barbie.
After spending five anxious days in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, hanging out in a Bedouin tent with an international fugitive who’s wanted as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”—a character who figured prominently in a story I was reporting about a Muslim charity in southern Oregon with purported links to al Qaeda—I was relieved to finally be en route to Portland, albeit standing at the tail end of a line that was advancing glacially toward a distant security checkpoint at Frankfurt Main Airport.
As the final boarding call for my connecting flight home echoed through the cavernous hall, I thrust the shopping bag that I’d been lugging onto the conveyor, and waited anxiously at the end of the X-ray machine for my bag, growing increasingly agitated the longer it failed to appear. The scanner technician motioned for his superior, and then a security guard, toting my bag, asked me to follow him into another room, where he asked me to empty the contents of the bag onto a table. First I pulled out a silk black abaya and boshiya (traditional Saudi dress and veil) for my six-year-old daughter, then a white thobe and red checkered ghutra (robe and headdress) for my eight-year-old son.
No problem there. Then I remembered the toys.
On the way to King Khalid International Airport, my Saudi host made a detour at a toy store, and had picked out two dolls for my kids that he insisted were all the rage in Riyadh. So out came “Fulla,” the Saudi version of Barbie, robed and veiled in black, accessorized with a prayer rug. The guard pressed the button on Fulla’s back and looked at me quizzically when the doll called out to Allah, praying in Arabic. He stiffened when I presented him with a Saudi G.I. Joe, a bearded, chamo-clad airborne ranger toting an automatic rifle, bandolier, grenades and dagger. “Fur die kinder!” I said lamely, as the guard, registering his disapproval, swabbed the toys and ran the sample through a mobile mass spectrometer.
For a few tense seconds that ticked like minutes, I wondered if I’d been set up by my host. Then the explosives detector spat out its reading: Negative. And I was on my way. My daughter has never played with Fulla, whose muffled prayers sometimes sound when she’s jostled in her resting place at the bottom of the toybox. But that plastic Saudi warrior stands at attention on a prominent shelf in my son’s room. A gift that traveled all the way from Arabia.
He calls it his “Jihad Joe.” —Ted Katauskas is a former magazine writer currently based in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
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This Air Bag May Take Your Life [Rough Landings]
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Here’s a yarn from the writer Bill Gifford: Eight friends went hot-air ballooning in the Poconos on a perfect spring day. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve done plenty of stupid stuff that could have killed me, everything from backcountry skiing after a snowstorm without avalanche gear (or knowledge), to riding a moped on the island of Mykonos after consuming some sort of blue drink, without lights and late at night. Bad ideas, all. But the worst it ever got, the closest I’ve ever come to starring in one of those two-inch stories buried in the back of the New York Times, happened in the Poconos. In the basket of a hot air balloon.
If you’ve ever been ballooning, then you know that there’s basically nothing less extreme—and nothing more peaceful. You ascend silently, borne up by the power of warmed gases, and then you drift along with the wind, in perfect relative stillness, high above the world and its busy little tangle of people and problems. Cars slow to watch, the people inside pointing and going, “Look! A hot-air balloon!” Many people seem to get engaged on balloon rides; perhaps you did, too. This is the story of a balloon ride gone wrong. (more…)
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And Then It Flew Into Space [LAUNCH PARTY!]
it seemed like a good idea at the time
THE ACCIDENTAL EXTREMIST and LOADS OF PROSE LLC PRESENT:
THE DIRTY LAUNDRY SERIES
Volume 18: True Dirt from Far and Wide
We’re joining forces! On Thursday night, May 21, please join us in New York’s East Village as we officially launch the H.M.S. Accidental Extremist into the stormy seas of new media.
We’re grateful to Emily Rubin and her much-loved reading series for the invite. Previous readers include Roy Blount Jr., Rob Brezsny, Will Leitch, Susan Shapiro, and too many others to list. They’ve got an illustrious past we can only hope not to tarnish forever.
We’ll have a reading (about one hour, tops) in a very special location (keep reading), then relocate to a nearby bar to keep the stories going strong.
When: Thursday, May 21st, 2009, 8-9pm, followed by an after party
Location: Avenue A Laundromat (yes, really.)
97 Avenue A between 6th and 7th Street, NY, NY
AFTER PARTY: ARROW BAR, one block south on Ave. A. 9PM - very late.
http://www.arrownyc.com/
Drink Specials and actual DJs, which may or may not include members of AWESOME DUDES, GENIUS STEALS, and THE FOGGY MONOCLE
FEATURING the READERS:
KATE DAILEY’s travels have taken her to Dublin, Ireland, where she wrote for The Dubliner magazine; Berlin Germany, as part of a Gordon Grey fellowship in international reporting; and to a very shabby motel room in Cleveland, Ohio, for a long weekend involving a bottle of tequila and a male stripper (but not the way one might think, she assures us). She’s written for numerous publications, including Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, MediaBistro, NYMag.com, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. She now works for Newsweek, where she runs the Human Condition blog.
JAED COFFIN is the author of A CHANT TO SOOTH WILD ELEPHANTS (Da Capo, 2008), which chronicles the time he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother’s village in Thailand. As the 2008 Resident Fellow of The Island Institute, Coffin researched his next book, ROUGHHOUSE FRIDAY, which documents the year he spent as a the middleweight champion of an Alaskan barroom boxing circuit. From Brunswick, Maine, he teaches at University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing.
A New York-based writer who grew up on a hazelnut farm outside of Portland, Oregon, CHRISTIAN DEBENEDETTI founded The Accidental Extremist in early 2009. Previously he has worked on the staffs of Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal magazines. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, FOOD&WINE, and others. A Contributing Editor to National Geographic Adventure and a Correspondent for Outside, he once spent an entire year traveling alone to study ancient methods of making beer in 14 European and West African nations, a journey which resulted in—among other things—malaria, a fall into a Togolese drain ditch, bribery at gunpoint, and an arrest for defiling the musical legacy of Bob Dylan on Prague’s Charles Bridge without a permit.
PLEASE COME, and SPREAD THE WORD!
MORE INFO:
http://dirtylaundryreadings.com/html/main.html
http://www.theaccidentalextremist.com
This event is funded in part by Poets and Writers, Inc. and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with public funds from the York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
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Smell of The Wild [Amateur Hour]
There's nothing like a long flight with a beautiful lady.
I’m from the Northeast, so the term ‘river trip’ doesn’t resonate as much as it does out West. When I agreed to meet a guy friend for one of them on the South Fork of the Salmon River in Central Idaho, I could only imagine what I was in for.
To get there, I flew into Spokane, Washington on a little puddle jumper from Salt Lake City. This was after I didn’t get on my original flight out because I was too heavy and my luggage was too big (I’m 121 pounds and a light packer). We finally landed at 10 at night. I met my friend in the airport, grabbed my luggage, and then it was a five hour drive from Spokane to the sleepy whitewater rafting town of Riggins.
We arrived in Riggins at three-o-clock in the morning and set up our tent for three hours of (ahem) sleep. The next morning I looked far from my best—okay let’s face it—completely beat-up, and we met all his friends at the town’s only diner for a hearty breakfast. I brought my make-up case along so I could sneak into the bathroom and attempt to look halfway decent, but it was so obvious what I was doing and embarrassing to think about now.
We got our gear in order and headed off to the put-in, a three hour drive. We stopped at the local Sate Recreation Center to get a map and directions, but what was supposed to be a quick break turned an hour-long debate among the seasoned kayakers on our trip. Forest fires were burning very close to our put-in. The patroller warned us to turn around, and that because of roadblocks we wouldn’t be able to get to the part of the river we needed to.
We didn’t listen. We found an alternative route to avoid the section of blocked-off road, and started down river. Paddling through freshly burnt forests, we were inhaling acrid smoke. Not good for the eyes, nor the lungs for that matter. But we had plenty of whiskey and beer to keep us hydrated. And I needed the alcohol to calm my anxiety about how dangerous this all was… (more…)
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13 Epics of Woe [Hall of Infamy]
A friend from Outside Magazine, Senior Editor Jeremy Spencer, reminded us of this excellent collection of misadventures he edited four years ago. Featuring the likes of Jane Smiley and Jon Lee Anderson, it’s a ghoulish gallery of murderous hitchhikers, lightning strikes, and worse. A little something to inspire your own submissions here. The article was paired with a classic travel disaster reading list, and a rundown of the 10 worst adventure disasters of the last 200 years. Enjoy—CDB
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Fly The Fiery Skies [Sulleysque]
Come fly away to exotic locales!
[Here's an amazing yarn from our first octogenarian contributor, Bob Nielson, age 86...we're not worthy! —Ed.]
Back in 1960 the Toronto Star sent me to South Africa to report black-white violence. I boarded an American Airlines 6-propeller plane in New York, which crossed the Atlantic and stopped briefly at a few East African cities while heading south. I had a window seat over the right wing and saw the nearest engine catch fire, shooting flames 30 feet high. Called the flight attendant who ran to the cabin. Turned off, that engine glowed like a red-hot coal. We were over the jungle with no place for an emergency landing…
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Spin Cycle [Love on the Road, Love on the Rocks]
I just feel so safe with you.
On Valentine’s Day 1998 I decided to surprise my new boyfriend with what I imagined would be a romantic and unforgettable helicopter tour of the Mile High City.
It was on the way to the airport that I learned of his terrible fear of heights. What should have been an amorous 35-mile limo ride from Boulder to Denver became nothing short of a ledge-talking scenario, but I did my best to reassure him while he nervously chugged champagne from the bottle.
Our pilot, a sweet man in his mid-50’s, assured us that he would give us a night we wouldn’t forget. As we ascended, I glanced furtively at my boyfriend only to notice his white knuckles clutching both knees. We circled downtown Denver for 30 minutes before our pilot took us west towards the lights of Golden and Central City. By the time we reached the foothills, we were met with winds so fierce that our pilot radioed to his supervisor to request permission to land at a nearby airport. No sooner had he done this than all of the lights went out in the cabin, the engine cut off, and we started to fall for what seemed like an eternity.
I always thought if I were ever in an accident that I would be a screamer. But instead I was silent—we all were… (more…)
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Twin Beds and Thin Walls [Love on the Road, Love on the Rocks]
After the wedding, all we want to do is relax by the beach.
Here, excerpts from an entertaining piece by writer Rob Story which recounts his action-packed honeymoon throughout Asia—and some of its more memorable catastrophes. —CDB
We’re a funny couple to watch. She, all of five feet and 99 pounds, blithely swings her skis down steep mogul runs with apparent amnesty from the laws of gravity. Trying gamely to knit near misses and miraculous recoveries into a line that at least looks intentional, my 200-pound carcass hurtles down slopes with the subtlety and grace of the Hindenburg. She never, ever biffs on a mountain bike. Me, I’m attempting to become the first human to be constituted completely of scar tissue.
I guess the sea kayaking session in Thailand presented the most interesting realationship dynamics. When M’Lissa emerged wearing an XL life jacket on her petite frame, I said something along the lines of: “Whoa, looks like Tattoo got in Mr. Roarke’s closet again.” (It was quite a clever remark, as we were in a gorgeous marine national park dotted with all manner of Fantasy Islands, but she didn’t care for it. Apparently, California kids like M’Lissa frequently grow up in an environment polluted with sports and activity, suffering from dangerously low levels of TV exposure.)
Things only got worse on the water, because our vessels were tandem sea kayaks…. (more…)
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