You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told...
So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train...
Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.
Friendship is also about liking a person for their failings, their weakness. It's also about mutual help, not about exploitation.
When I began to make some money, I really wanted to have a home.
Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta’s face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth’s had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people...
I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.
I said I was a stranger here. Ain’t no strangers here, baby, she said, and gave me a merry smile.
His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught.
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing...
Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone t...
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible baza...
In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.
The train was sunlit and emptier.
The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
In elk land tonen de treinen de essentiële kenmerken van de cultuur: Thaise treinen hebben de badkruik met de geglazuurde draak op de zijkant, de Ceylonese een wagen die gereserveerd is voor boeddhist...
I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I...
At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not...