Paul Theroux - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
B OSTON N EW Y ORK
2008

FICTION
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Murder in Mount Holly
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consul's File
A Christmas Card
Picture Palace
London Snow
World's End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half Moon Street
O-Zone
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro
Blinding Light
The Elephanta Suite

CRITICISM
V. S. Naipaul

NONFICTION
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
The Pillars of Hercules
Sir Vidia's Shadow
Fresh Air Fiend
Dark Star Safari
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Copyright 2008 by Paul Theroux

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theroux, Paul.
Ghost train to the Eastern star : on the tracks
of the great railway bazaar / Paul Theroux.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-618-41887-9
1. AsiaDescription and travel. 2. Theroux, Paul
TravelAsia. 3. Railroad travelAsia. i. Title.
DS 10. T 42 2008 915.04'425 0 92 dc22
2008011436

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Robert Overholtzer
Endpaper map by Jacques Chazaud

MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The lines from "Tom O'Roughley" by W. B. Yeats are reprinted with the
permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Grinne Yeats. The lines from
"plato told." Copyright 1944, 1972, 1991, by the Trustees of the E. E.
Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings,
edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing
Corporation. Excerpts from "Aubade" and "Water" from Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

To Sheila, with love

That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had
long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine.
Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in
trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer,
vaguely improper notions into his head.

G EORGES S IMENON
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By

"I'd much rather go by train," said Connie.

D. H. L AWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover

1. The Eurostar 1

2. The Other Orient Express 14

3. The Ferry to Besiktas 40

4. Night Train to Ankara 59

5. Night Train to Tbilisi 68

6. Night Train to Baku: The Trans-Caucasian 88

7. Night Train from Ashgabat to Mary 103

8. Night Train to Tashkent 136

9. The Shan-e-Punjab Express to Delhi 146

10. Night Train to Jodhpur: The Mandore Express 164

11. Night Train to Jaipur 182

12. Night Train to Mumbai: The "Superfast" Express 193

13. Night Train to Bangalore: The Udyan Express 210

14. The Shatabdi Express to Chennai 225

15. The Coastal Line to Galle and Hambantota 237

16. The Slow Train to Kandy 258

17. Ghost Train to Mandalay 265

18. The Train to Pyin-Oo-Lwin 283

19. Night Train to Nong Khai 295

20. Night Train to Hat Yai Junction: Special Express 309

21. Night Train to Singapore: The Lankawi Express 316

22. The Slow Train to the Eastern Star 341

23. The Boat Sontepheap to Phnom Penh 351

24. The Mekong Express 367

25. Night Train to Hue 376

26. The Day Train to Hanoi 387

27. Tokyo Andaguraundo 400

28. Night Train to Hokkaido: Hayate Super Express 422

29. The Limited Express: Sarobetsu to Wakkanai 428

30. Night Train to Kyoto: The Twilight Express 440

31. The Trans-Siberian Express 460

32. Night Train to Berlin and Beyond 493

Y OU THINK of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacybeing actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.

Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer:

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness,

in a lusty "Look-at-me!" in exotic landscapes.

This was more or less my mood as I was packing to leave home. I also thought: But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."

And there are dreams: one, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crowded bazaars, and what V. S. Pritchett called "human architecture," lovely women in gauzy clothes, old trains clattering on mountainsides, the mirage of happiness; two, the dream state of travel itself. Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisiblethe usual condition of the older traveleris much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo.

Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessnesstraveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train.