Worst Journeys - The Picador Book of Travel.

With severely under-resourced public libraries these days, I thought, just blindly grab a book.

The old-school plastic around the dust-cover was crumbling.
It looked old.

Pages yellow like mayonnaise, but the content sets my heart ablaze.

The book is: Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel. Edited and with an introduction by Keath Fraser. Vintage Books, New York:1992.

Various authors, in fact the literary avant-garde of the early 1990's.

I think I'll add to the thread from the book as I have energy and something strikes me as interesting.

www.amazon.com...

There's still a lot of post-war, if not downright World War II memories in the book.

For example, Jan Morris in "Part One".
Beginning her writing career as James Morris, until this book, I didn't even know Jan Morris was transgender.

She writes:

Two principles I resolved at the end of the Second World War: I would have a glass of wine every day for the rest of my life, if there was wine to be had; and after a youth that seemed to have been spent very largely in the jammed and blacked-out corridors of troop trains, bouncing about in the 15-cwt trucks or being hurled around the interiors of Sherman tanks - after a distinctly uncomfortable introduction to the practice of travel, If I could possibly help it, I would never travel disagreeably again.

(Ibid. page 7)

More on Jan Morris:
www.theguardian.com...

a reply to: halfoldman

That's very strange.

But he was a 'she' before it was cool, baby.
You dig? I don't dig it, but I get it.

I got 2 library books the other week, the main one is due to a thread here on ATS about Shadowvale. It's called 'It Devours'
I haven't started it yet since I am still reading Books of Blood by Clive Barker.
He's really good.
Doesn't push his gayness onto the page, unless it's relevant to the story.

Martha Gellhorn (once married to Ernest Hemingway):

"The longest time I ever passed upon the waves was eighteen days in 1944, crossing the Atlantic on a dynamite ship. (...) Smoking was forbidden though by special permission of the Captain I could smoke in my cabin with a big bowlful of water as ashtray. (...) But Bali was a transcendent experience for me too, in rare circumstances: the Japaneses surrender. This momentous occasion took place in March 1946. The reason for the delay, so long after the Japanese defeat, was that no one had time to get around to Bali. (...) When the troops caught sight of bare Balinese breasts, they cheered. Breasts were covered at once throughout the island".

(Gellhorn, Ibid. Pages 36-38.)

Edward Hoagland:

My own questing instinct tends toward a tolerant, patient, almost trusting viewpoint, and I don't find people suspect or dis-likable by clan or race. I've experienced racism as a white man in Africa, and religious prejudice as a Christian in Israel and Yemen. But I find that the balancing act by which I make my way among personalities and groups at home not so unlike getting along with strangers abroad".

(Hoagland, Ibid. Page 39.)

Martha Gellhorn on the hippies she encountered: "What bores whom"?

Like their bourgeois elders, who swap names of restaurants, they told each other where the hash was good. It is impossible to escape a painful amount of dull conversation in this life but for sheer one-track dullness those kids took the cookie.

(Gellhorn, Ibid. page 33.)

a reply to: halfoldman

Looks like a good read, it's very engaging.

"I'm like, you know there's no hot water"?

He's like: "tough".

In America, people didn't just come home.

Hugo Williams - "La Foile Anglaise" (Ibid, pp. 79-85).

How sad regarding young Tahitian males at the time:

Most of the new passengers were "metropolitan" civil servants returning to France with their Tahitian wives and girlfriends. But there were some young Tahitian boys leaving home for the first time. Since 1958, all eighteen-year-olds have had to do two years military training in France. It is all part of de Gaulle's plan for integration and assimilation. After two years the young men return to their island completely Gallicized and Tahiti is a little more part of France than it was before. So far the results have been sad. The young men come home dissatisfied and uncertain. They no longer feel part of Tahiti and yet they know that they can never be true Europeans.

(Ibid, page 80.)

More on Hugo Williams: en.wikipedia.org...

When medicine was still effective!

P.K. Page - "On the Road Again: The Australian outback, June 1956". (Ibid., pp. 90-99.)

The only tap was marked COLD. I turned it on. Nothing (...) I contemplated a sponge-bath in the small hand-basin in full view of all visitors to the lavatory, telling myself I'd have no more privacy on a Canadian train. But I wouldn't have been as hot and dirty either. Then a tiny dribble began (...) A. meanwhile, had shared the shower with the Inspector, who had commented as he saw him naked, "That's no bull ant bite. You'd better see a doctor". So we dressed, still whispering and if not clean - at least changed - drove to the hospital, a bungalow-style building on the edge of town. (...) Somewhere between the first report given by the Inspector (...), the bite had become that of a red-backed spider. Its sting is not necessarily fatal but it is serious. And the doctor planned to do what the book said and administer morphine at once. He was a young Englishman who had been in Australia exactly three weeks!

(Ibid. Pages 94-96.)

More on P.K. Page: en.wikipedia.org...

I thought it goes without saying, but feel free to add your own travel experiences, literature and comments.

Just an aside, but it's surprising how old most of these writers got.

I recall once seeing an A.A. chart of careers with the highest chances of premature death: barman, chef and writer.

I guess you shouldn't believe everything you read.

Mark Salzman - "From Iron & Silk" (1986, Ramdom House), cited in Ibid. pp.121-129:

Changsha stayed hot and humid through the early part of November. By then I had developed a painful case of athlete's foot and started looking around for some medicine. None of the local stores carried anything for it, and none of my doctor students was familiar with the symptoms. At last someone acquainted with the diseases of the skin had a look at me. He recognized the problem right away, but was unable to treat me. Athlete's foot, he told me had been successfully driven out of China, and therefore could be contracted only if one left the Socialist Motherland or had contact with foreigners. For this reason it was now called "Hong Kong Foot", and no medicine was available for it.

(Salzman: Ibid. page 121.)

For more on Mark Salzman:
en.wikipedia.org...

Ronald Wright - "From Cut Stones And Crossroads: A journey in the two worlds of Peru" (Viking Penguin,1984). Cited in Ibid., pp 195-204.

I wait all morning at the service station on the edge of Chimbote for a vehicle going my way. Gasoline architecture varies little around the world: this place has greasing bays, four pumps and an office full of oil tins and girlie pinups. Blondes, of course. Latin Americans' ideal of beauty has nothing to do at all with racial fact. Advertising, pornography, and images of Christ all share a taste for pallid Aryans. They like girls a little heavier than the current gringo vogue: skinniness is too suggestive of poverty. [...] After siesta a three-ton Ford arrives. A sticker on the windshield says: VIRGINITY CAUSES CANCER-GET YOUR VACCINATION HERE.

(Wright Ibid., pages 195-196.)

From the same Ronald Wright chapter as above:

"Ah," Ruiz sighs, "England. England is the mother country of Canada and the United States. That so? Just as Spain is the mother country of Peru"!
I reply without thinking: "It's not really the same. Spain isn't the mother of Peru in the same sense. In North America most of the people have originally come from Europe, but Peruvians are mostly native, descended from the Incas. . . ." The look on Ruiz's face tells me how he has taken my effort to instill national pride. He knocks over his chair and shoots to his feet with impossible speed.
"There are no Indians in Peru! No Indians in Peru"!

(Wright Ibid., page 201.)

For more on Ronald Wright: en.wikipedia.org...