Paul Theroux: “Travel is both a desire to flee and a desire for pursuit.”
He fired my imagination about trains. “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.”
The opening sentence to “The Great Railway Bazaar” got me on a train from Penang to Singapore, first chance I had.
“I sought trains, I found passengers”. That statement opened my eyes to travelling through people, not places – that the best travel stories lie in the people.
He accompanied me when I did my fly-through of the South Pacific in a single-engine Piper Malibu. His “Happy Isles of Oceania” was not a happy book, despite its title. Paul Theroux had just split up with his wife and he was clearly depressed, and he wrote about the islands and the people as he saw them through that filter.
I appreciated his honesty because he delved beneath the surface of “paradise” to reveal another side to the islands. Not many did. That book was panned mainly in Australia, and earned him the reputation of “grumpy traveller”.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I met him in the dressing room backstage before our session during the Singapore Writers Festival last week. But I know I didn’t expect the man I met.
First he took pains to get my name right. Then he wanted to find out where I went to school. “Penang, that’s changed so much. You’ve been to Langkawi? That’s like Penang was 50 years ago.”
I explained to him that Penang and Langkawi weren’t exactly alike – one’s an island that happens to be a port and commercial centre, the other a rural island with mainly fishermen and farmers.
“You’re right,” he said. “But can you name an area of Penang that’s still quiet? It’s so developed now.” I confess I was a bit stumped for a quick answer.
I sensed he was a bit nervous about his upcoming lecture to a packed house. So I kept talking. I also got an idea of how this is how he strikes up conversations on the road. A genuine curiosity and interest in people he meets.
I reminded him that he had once said his idea was to retire to an island in Thailand or Malaysia. He tells me he’s found his island home. He lives in North Shore on Oahu island, Hawaii, where he has a farm. He used to keep bees – “they died from some disease” – and he has chickens and ducks.
“You’re gentleman farmer,” I said.
He nods, laughs. “Now I grow bamboos, all kinds of bamboos. That’s the material of the future.”
I said that’s the material of the past where I grew up. We had to make things of bamboos in school for survival camp. I told him about the new luxury island resort in Bintan being built by the developers behind Nikoi Island, which will be all-bamboo, no-kids.
“Where’s that? How do I get to Bintan?” he asks with all the curiosity of a traveller when I tell him that Nikoi is just sand and houses on a private island, no frills-luxury.
He thinks luxury travel is over-rated. He remembers paying $2,000 for a villa in Hawaii which came with all the trimmings. “I’d just be happy in a hut on beach,” said the man who, on a whim one day, took the train from London to Afghanistan and onwards to Thailand and Singapore and so wrote “The Great Railway Bazaar”.
Unless you’re in India, he says, where you shouldn’t travel cheap. And there luxury is true luxury, grand historic hotels with character and service built-in.
He’s never heard of Airbnb. “I wouldn’t like to stay in people’s homes – all that karmic energy from another family. To see their children’s things, their things around,” he gives a shudder.
What about hotels then? Aren’t they full of other people’s karmic energy too? “I’ve always thought of hotels as love nests – for use of a better word – people making love in that bed, doing very personal things, all that residue.” That’s a theme that comes through in one of his fiction books, “Hotel Honolulu”.
“I like being at home,” he says. I am glad he is as full of contradictions as most of us are. I too like being at home but I also need to travel.
“Travel is both a desire to flee and a desire for pursuit,” he says.
Later in his lecture, which was about his journey as a writer since his first visit to Singapore in 1978, when he wrote the book, “Saint Jack”, he tells his audience that his mission as a writer is to see things as they are and not as how one might wish to see it or as how others might see it. “It’s an assertion of myself, my view of things.”
Well, that’s my 30 minutes with Paul Theroux as I saw it.
Next: Notes from his lecture
