An Invitation
Tu connais cette maladie fiévreuse qui s’empare de nous dans les froides misères, cette nostalgie du pays qu’on ignore, cette angoisse de la curiosité?
—Charles Baudelaire, “L’invitation au voyage”
You know that feverish sickness that seizes you with shivering sorrow, that nostalgia for a place you’ve never been, that anguish of curiosity?
—“Invitation to the Voyage”
The first nonfiction book that captured my imagination was Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels. Halliburton was a Marco Polo for the Jazz Age, one of the last traveling writers to set himself the goal of seeing the whole wide world. He was already a quaint figure by the time I discovered his book in my grandmother’s library in Oxford, Mississippi, and he is nearly forgotten now, but in Halliburton’s heyday his thrilling narratives of voyages to exotic places made him a celebrity and bestselling author to rival Hemingway. There were pictures on nearly every page, many of them photographs of the dashing author in flawless khaki, posing with sultans and mystics. Halliburton swam the Panama Canal, crossed the Alps on an elephant, flew loop-the-loops around the peak of Mount Everest.
The Barnumesque feats of derring-do weren’t what attracted me, it was the glamorous places he visited. Halliburton voyaged to the lost cities of the world, from Machu Picchu to Petra to Angkor. Some of his most renowned exploits took place during an eighteen-month aerial circumnavigation of the globe, which began on Christmas Day 1930 aboard a two-seater biplane called the Flying Carpet, piloted by his sidekick, Moye Stephens. After a dazzling performance of stunts at an air show in Fez, the pair flew across the Sahara to Timbuktu, byword of exoticism and fabulous wealth, which had been closed for centuries to infidels: the city at the end of the world. There he met Père Yakouba, born Auguste Dupuis, a Frenchman who had come to Timbuktu as a Catholic missionary, a vocation he renounced. Yakouba told his biographer, William Seabrook, “I quit the Church because I didn’t want to leave Timbuktu and didn’t want to give up women,” specifically his wife, Salama. Seabrook (whom Time called “the Richard Halliburton of the occult,” because of his investigative books about voodoo and cannibalism) described Salama as a “magnificently strong, clean, healthy, full-grown negress with character and brains,” who bore Yakouba a dozen children.
It would get my narrative off to a neat start if I said that Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels inspired me at the age of eleven to resolve that I would follow in the author’s footsteps and see the world. Growing up in suburban Houston, I didn’t dream of seeing the world, exactly; somehow I just knew that I would. Halliburton introduced me to the concept of the world as a finite place in which one could move about at will. The only difference between driving to the beach for the weekend and a journey to Timbuktu was the force of will required to make it happen, that and the money. If you want to go somewhere, anywhere, you can find a way to get there.
After I graduated from college, I moved to New York, an adventure of a different sort. I arrived in the great metropolis with a trunkful of dreams. (There was actually a trunk, a footlocker from the army-navy store in Houston, which my mother had filled with woollies when I left for my freshman year of college in Massachusetts.) In New York, I devoted what pluck I possessed to making a career as a freelance writer. I was curious about almost everything, which expanded my markets to the editorial horizon but made for an odd collection of clips. On my first overseas reporting trip, to Buenos Aires, I had two assignments: a profile of a polo player for Sports Illustrated and an interview with Jorge Luis Borges for Connoisseur. I wrote a sports column for Andy Warhol’s Interview, profiled rock stars for Rolling Stone and Life, interviewed orchestra conductors and opera singers for The New York Times and Vanity Fair—anything to avoid getting a job, especially if it came with an invitation to a voyage.
In 1986, I visited my first lost city. I had an assignment to write about the opera in Santiago de Chile, a revolutionary Rigoletto that has long since been forgotten. I routed my return through Lima, and from there booked a flight to Cuzco and the train to Machu Picchu. The night before I left on the trip, the Shining Path guerrillas bombed the train to the ruins, killing seven tourists. My mother called me up and begged me not to go, but it was too late. I had managed to get a reservation at the only hotel at the ruins, which had just twelve rooms, and I wasn’t about to give it up. At that time most tourists to Machu Picchu took the train up for a day trip; no more than twenty-four visitors could tour the ruins by moonlight and see the sun rise behind the mountains. I would be among them.
My previous foreign travels had followed the path of most postcollegiate wanderers, to London and Paris, Tuscany and Rome; this would be my first visit to a truly exotic place. At Machu Picchu, I learned my first lesson in how fragile the romance can be. The hotel was clean and comfortable, but it had the thereless feeling of a motel on the interstate. Dinner was included; there was nowhere else to eat. I was seated with a couple from New York, jolly socialists of the City College variety, a species now nearly extinct. Comparing notes over mystery meat and mashed potatoes, we soon discovered that we were near neighbors in Greenwich Village. Very near: my rear apartment on Morton Street looked out on the same courtyard as their place on Commerce Street, just opposite. We feigned delight at the coincidence, but I think they were as disappointed as I was. The fantasy of a pilgrimage to Machu Picchu doesn’t include meeting your back-fence neighbors. We resolved to resume our friendship in New York with a hallo from one fire escape to the other, but when I got home, I kept the curtains drawn.
A year later, I wrote a magazine profile of David Soren, an archaeologist who was directing an excavation of a Roman city in Cyprus that had been buried by an earthquake. He asked me to co-author a book about his dig. It was my first book, Kourion: The Search for a Lost Roman City. My toehold of an archaeological niche became more secure after Kourion was published, when my agent arranged an introduction to a paleoanthropologist named Russell Ciochon. Ciochon and his colleague the archaeologist John Olsen had been invited by the Institute of Archaeology in Hanoi to collaborate on a dig in Vietnam, on the border with Laos. It was the first joint program of field research carried out by scientists from the two countries since the end of the war, twelve years before. I got a contract to write a book about it.
Hanoi itself was something of a lost city in those days. We stayed at the Hoa Binh hotel in the Old Quarter, the only part of the city that was continuously electrified, at least in theory. At night, the city’s residents sat on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and playing dominoes by lamplight. It was a quiet place, scarcely like a city at all. You rarely heard music, and television almost never. The only traffic noise was the whirr of bicycles. In 1988, there were no more than a few dozen passenger automobiles on the streets of Hanoi, and all of them belonged to party officials or foreign ambassadors. There were no tourists. We were admitted to the country on humanitarian visas, which entailed bringing in cases of vaccines from Thailand. The three of us were the only guests at the Hoa Binh apart from some lugubrious Bulgarian electricians and an Iraqi “diplomat,” who was a fixture at the hotel bar. He plied us with questions about what we were doing, where we were going, who was paying for the expedition, but he was better company than the electricians.
On our first day in the city, after lunch at the hotel (bamboo rat, which tasted nothing like chicken, stuffed with white rice), we saw the city’s sights: Ho Chi Minh’s house, Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, the Hanoi Hilton, and the Museum of the Vietnamese Revolution. We found the only private restaurant in the city that catered to foreigners, a small cadre of marooned journalists and burned-out philanthropists, which served a reasonable facsimile of French bistro food. The specialty of the house was duck à l’orange, which savored of Tang.
The expedition in Thanh Hoa was a success, and my book was published the following year. It got a good review in The New York Times, which seemed like the most important thing in the world at the time. Yet in retrospect the most significant event of the trip came at the end, on the eve of our departure from Hanoi. Russ Ciochon and I were wandering through the Old Quarter and came upon a trim bamboo house flying the flag of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the puppet government installed by the Vietnamese after they invaded Cambodia in 1979, ending the disastrous, bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge. We were greeted by a remarkably cheerful man named Bun Sambo, who appeared to be the only person there. He made tea for us, the necessary preliminary to any conversation, and then asked what he could do for us. It was an easy question. I replied, “We want to go to Angkor.”
When we first met, Ciochon and I bonded over our shared lifelong passion for the ruins of Angkor in central Cambodia, the classic model of a lost city in the jungle. We had collected nearly identical Angkor libraries, starting with the April 1960 issue of National Geographic, which featured the article “Angkor, Jewel of the Jungle,” by W. Robert Moore. The story was accompanied by a series of lurid paintings, alternately sexy and gory, that depicted life in Angkor at the zenith of the Khmer Empire. Ciochon and I had both read the old French archaeological studies and a madly overwritten memoir of an Angkor pilgrimage by the French travel writer Pierre Loti. Loti’s rapturous descriptions of the ruins promised an experience that fell somewhere between a religious vision and an orgasm.
Mr. Bun smiled and said, “You want to go to Angkor? I can arrange that for you.”
And so he did. Six months later, Ciochon and I flew to Siem Reap, the town near the ruins, and checked into the Grand Hotel d’Angkor. In its decaying art deco magnificence, the hotel looked like an exile from the Riviera, condemned to molder in the jungle. The lobby ceiling soared twenty feet overhead, making the sagging rattan furniture look dwarfish. The room reeked of the signature fragrance of the tropics, a heady mélange of mildew, fermented fish paste, and bug spray. Spiders had colonized a Parisian-style cage elevator, a former marvel of modernity that hadn’t ascended in decades. After we checked in, Ciochon, sick with the usual complaint, ran to the room. I sent up four bottles of cold lemonade and returned to the waiting car.
I had promised Ciochon that I would save Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous temple, for him and told the driver to take me to Angkor Thom. The capital of the ancient empire, Angkor Thom occupies six square miles of cleared tropical forest, crowded with ornately carved stone temples and palaces. When the French naturalist Henri Mouhot came here in 1860, he found the place completely overgrown by jungle vegetation. In a burst of enthusiasm, he declared that the ruins of Angkor were “grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.” When he asked the people living among the monuments who had built them, they answered: “It is the work of the King of the Angels”; “It is the work of giants”; even, “They built themselves.”
I knew the layout of Angkor Thom by heart from a guidebook by the archaeologist Henri Marchal, published in 1928. The city is walled and moated, accessible by five monumental stone gateways surmounted by towers with four identical faces at the cardinal directions, smiling serenely into the jungle. The identity of the Angkor face, which is found everywhere in the ruins, remains a mystery. It has been variously identified with the Hindu god Brahma, the popular bodhisattva Lokesvara, and Jayavarman VII, the twelfth-century king who built many of the principal temples. The image could have served all three cults at once.
At the center of Angkor Thom rises the Bayon, an eccentric labyrinth of corridors and courtyards described by Loti as “this basilisk phantom, a bridge to ancient times, constructed with cyclopean blocks.” Literally a labyrinth: wandering around the Bayon, one easily gets lost or comes to a dead end. The walls are covered with fine bas-reliefs depicting scenes of war and domestic life, interspersed with hundreds of images of elegant apsara, usually translated as “celestial nymphs.” The upper level is crowded with four-faced towers like those on the city gates. Even authoritative sources disagree as to how many towers there are: most say fifty-four, while one scholar goes as low as thirty-seven surviving of the original forty-nine. I tried to count them, but no matter how methodically I went about it, I kept losing track, just as the driver had warned me I would. I returned to the hotel for lunch, where I was attended by a dozen adolescent boys wearing dirty white shirts missing buttons and skinny black ties.
As the afternoon sun declined, Ciochon had recovered sufficiently to accompany me to Angkor Wat. Called the largest stone monument and the largest religious building in the world, it occupies a square mile, constructed from pale gray fine-grained sandstone carved with a delicacy that exceeds the other ruins of Angkor. The central tower takes the shape of a colossal lotus bud, rising to a height of two hundred feet, lording over the forest for miles around. We roamed the grounds of the temple guided by a demented old man with a stiff brush of white hair named My Huy, who said he had been trained by French archaeologists. He told me that he had survived the Khmer Rouge era by lying awake in bed for hours every night, continually gripping and turning a rough stick in his hands, which raised calluses that enabled him to pass for a peasant and avoid summary execution as an “intellectual.” A pair of cowherds, boys no older than ten, drove their charges at a discreet distance behind us, the thok-thok of wooden cowbells setting a gentle, strolling pace.
Ciochon and I were the only guests at the Grand Hotel d’Angkor. At dawn, when I opened the door to our room, I found the waiters seated cross-legged on the floor in the corridor, peering up at me hopefully, like a class waiting for the teacher. In fact, that was exactly what they had in mind. Their ostensible purpose was to practice English conversation, but what they really wanted was to bask in my splendid blond otherness.
The waiters’ attempts at speaking English were mostly a waste of time, for few of them possessed sufficient vocabulary to construct simple sentences. However, the headwaiter’s English was amazingly good. His name was Munny, which means “clever” in Khmer; it might have been a nickname, because he was. After the boys escorted Ciochon and me to the dining room for American breakfast (latex fried eggs and a single Vienna sausage, served with asbestos toast), Munny started up a conversation. He said he had learned English by listening to the BBC and the news in Special English on VOA. Munny knew nothing but was curious about everything. Is it true that American people went to the moon, or was it a trick? If America is the richest country, then why is your money not worth as much as British money? What is a Jew? He kept creeping closer, with the other waiters just behind him, until their elbows were on the table. Ciochon, less interested in these simple country lads than I was, suddenly brandished a fork at them and yelled, “Scram!” They scattered, shrieking with laughter.
Ciochon and I set out to see every stone of Angkor. In 1989, the Khmer Rouge still controlled much of the district, so if we wanted to venture beyond the walled confines of Angkor Wat or Angkor Thom, or go anywhere after dark, we had to be escorted by soldiers, more silly adolescents, loaded into a jeep with Kalashnikovs. The reason the country’s workforce seemed to be almost entirely in its teens was that so many young men had died during the brutal four-year regime of the Khmer Rouge. The soldiers detailed to guard us, like the waiters at our hotel, were young enough to have escaped the roaming execution squads that decimated the country. My Huy told us that many of them were government soldiers during the day and KR by night.
I wanted to visit a minor temple called Baksei Chamkrong, which dates to the early tenth century, making it one of the earliest sites in the Angkor district. It bears a curious resemblance to early lowland Maya pyramids, an interesting case of cultural convergence. Baksei Chamkrong was just off the main road to Angkor Thom, but because it was outside the ancient city walls, we were required to bring the soldiers with us. It was midday and the forest was thin, so the chances of encountering the Khmer Rouge appeared to be nil, but having a military escort made it more of an adventure. As a pair of soldiers led the way down the short path to the temple, I saw a lizard dart in the underbrush and chased after it. My Huy became hysterical. He shrieked, “No! No, no, no! You must never leave the path! You must always stay on the path. You must put your foot where the soldier puts his foot.”
Then I realized that he was afraid I might step on a land mine. There were thousands of unexploded mines in the fields and forests of Cambodia; in the market in Siem Reap, we often saw beggars missing one or both legs, farmers who had stepped on a mine and survived. I contritely returned to the path. My Huy repeated, “You must always put your foot where the soldier puts his foot.”
I answered, “But if the soldier steps on a mine, he may die.”
“Pfeh.” The old man shook his head impatiently. “No problem if the soldier dies, he is Khmer person. Big problem if American guest dies.”
The site that Ciochon and I most wanted to visit was Banteay Srei, an exquisite Angkorean temple constructed from rose-colored sandstone carved in an ornate style unique to itself, sixteen miles northeast of the main group of ruins. However, at that time Banteay Srei was a full-time Khmer Rouge encampment and firmly off-limits to all visitors. Ciochon, the scientist, tested this assertion by frequently displaying an American hundred-dollar bill to the police in Siem Reap and requesting an escort to Banteay Srei, which elicited not even a flicker of interest. Weary of his entreaties, the constabulary finally offered as a consolation to take us to Preah Khan, a major temple just beyond the north wall of Angkor Thom, which had been closed for decades. A force of forty soldiers was mustered, armed with bazookas and rocket launchers in addition to the usual Kalashnikovs; forty more infantrymen were stationed around the perimeter.
The soldiers also carried phkok, the local machete, which they used to clear away the dense vegetation so we could make our way inside. Before we entered the temple precincts, they hacked away masses of vines to reveal a deep-relief wall sculpture of Garuda, the Hindu bird-god, mount of Vishnu. It was fearsomely hot, and the soldiers were tormented by fire ants and big black flies as they chopped away at the tapestry of vegetation that covered the entrance. Then one of them screamed: a krait on a vine overhead had fallen on his neck. He killed the serpent before it bit him, which saved his life, for the venom of the krait kills very quickly, and the hospital in Siem Reap was a bamboo shed with a dirt floor.
That night, I added superb romance to my perfect jungle adventure. I was intrigued by this passage in Marchal, in his description of the Bayon: “At whatever hour one walks around it, and particularly by moonlight on a clear evening, one feels as if one were visiting a temple in another world, built by an alien people whose conceptions are entirely unfamiliar.” After we left Preah Khan, a thundershower swept across the plain of Angkor, leaving the sky sparkling clear, and I knew that that night there would be a full moon, or near it; so Ciochon and I returned to the Bayon after dinner to tour it by moonlight. I could embroider on Marchal’s description of the experience, but basically he got it right. The moonlight was extraordinarily bright: I read the guidebook to Ciochon without using my flashlight, just to prove that I could. I felt a shiver when the faces on the towers looming overhead melted into view, here and there and far in the distance, then receded into the gloom when a puff of cloud passed over the moon. Periodically, the metallic buzz of the insects rose to a roar and then quickly fell quiet, so you could hear the breeze in the pine trees surrounding the temple. Even the soldiers spoke in whispers.
On the morning of our departure, I gave tips to the staff of the Grand Hotel, two one-dollar bills for each of them. (I had brought a stack of singles, knowing it would be impossible to get change for big bills here.) The lads were astounded to receive such a treasure; they knew they hadn’t done anything to earn a tip except follow me around. They were crisp new notes, obviously worth a great deal more than Cambodian money, the filthy stuff we bought in pulpy bricks on the black market. It took millions of riel to buy anything at all. Munny studied the bills carefully. Pointing at George Washington with obvious disdain, he asked, “This is your king? He looks like a lady.”
* * *
After I got home, I came to the realization that the power Angkor exerted over my imagination derived only in part from its geographic remoteness from Texas and Greenwich Village. Even more potent was the romantic allure of a place that had escaped time. A lost city is a fragment of the past, immured from change and thus insulated from the persistent sense of loss in the dynamic life of a modern city. Victor Segalen, a Breton naval doctor who traveled extensively in Polynesia and China from 1903 to 1917 and wrote novels, poetry, and essays based on his experiences, was at work on a comprehensive theory about this subject at the time of his death in 1919. Segalen’s working title was Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity.
In his earliest surviving sketch of the essay, written “within sight of Java” in October 1904, he noted, “Argument: Parallelism between stepping back in time (Historicism) and moving out in space (Exoticism).” Four years later, he set as his first goal in the essay to “throw overboard everything misused or rancid contained in the word ‘exoticism.’ Strip off all its rags: palm tree and camel; colonial helmet; black skins and yellow sun.” He liberated the concept from its exclusively geographic meaning: “Exoticism does not only exist in space but is equally a function of time.” Thus Angkor is more closely related to Machu Picchu than to the villages of modern Cambodia, and people who reenact Civil War battles inhabit a more exotic space than those who go to Singapore and shop at the luxury malls on Orchard Road.
For Segalen, exoticism “is nothing other than the notion of difference, the perception of Diversity, the knowledge that something is other than oneself.” He postulated an elite group of travelers who seek to immerse themselves in otherness, whom he called “exotes,” in contradistinction to the “impressionistic tourist,” a contemptible creature epitomized by Pierre Loti, whom Segalen condemned as a “pimp of the exotic.” Exotes, he wrote, are travelers who “recognize, beneath the cold and dry veneer of words and phrases, those unforgettable transports which arise from the kind of moments I have been speaking of: the moment of Exoticism.” For me, the unforgettable transport came not when the soldiers hacked away the jungle vines so I could enter the ancient temple of Preah Khan, or when I toured the Bayon by moonlight, but when Munny asked if George Washington was my king. This Cambodian farmer’s son had stopped me cold. I looked into Munny’s smooth, unformed face and could no more read it than if it were a text in a lost language, an inscription on a fallen stone pillar in the jungle. He was a living connection with another world, an alien people whose conceptions were entirely unfamiliar to me.
After our trip to Angkor, Russ Ciochon and I traveled to the other major archaeological sites of Southeast Asia. He got us little grants here and there to pay expenses on the ground, and I sold stories to Natural History and Archaeology magazines to cover my airfare. We saw the two thousand pagodas of Pagan, Burma; we visited Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos, and the Plain of Jars, a megalithic enigma that has not yet been solved; working from a sixty-year-old French monograph, we made our way to all the recorded ruins of the kingdom of Champa, dispersed along the coast of Vietnam from Ho Chi Minh north to Hué, the imperial capital of the Nguyen Empire, a scaled-down knockoff of the Forbidden City. In the early 1990s, all these places were still fairly isolated and visited by very few tourists, but I was never able to replicate the template experience at Angkor.
As Ciochon and I ran out of lost cities in Southeast Asia, I looked farther afield, and my freelance career flowed into the mainstream of travel writing. India, source of the religious traditions that inspired the empire builders of Southeast Asia, was the logical next stage. I toured the earliest shrines of Buddhism in Sanchi, Bhimbetka, and Udayagiri; I celebrated Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, at the palace of the maharaja of Bhopal, where the garden was lit by hundreds of tiny, fragrant oil lamps. The Taj Mahal, of course. In Kathmandu, I saw men washing the corpses of their fathers on the ghats along the Bagmati River, preparing them for cremation. I made the pilgrimage to see the Great Buddha of Kamakura. Voyaging ever further back in time, I toured the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, the rock-cut city of Petra, the ruins of Ephesus and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the fallen stones of the Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria, the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. The Athenian acropolis, of course.
The risk of a career as a travel journalist is that you may become a traveler more than a writer. I began to seek assignments that would take me to the places I wanted to go rather than to those where I would find the best stories. I frequently toured in a high style of luxury—not because I had a weakness for champagne and foie gras, or wanted rose petals strewn in my marble bathtub, but because traveling as a journalist was the easiest way to see the world. Being an invited guest does entail a certain ethical dilemma, which is often overestimated: I was no more likely to give a hotel or even the destination itself a good write-up because I wasn’t paying the bill than a theater critic is to publish a positive review of a bad play because the tickets are on the house. Nonetheless, the editorial brief was always, at least in part, to make the destination attractive (otherwise known as pimping the exotic). It wasn’t a question of publishing untruths so much as verbal airbrushing, smoothing away the unflattering features.
Yet, after all, you learn a lot by seeing the world. One lesson I learned is that where you call home doesn’t matter nearly as much when you’re about to head off to a legendary place you’ve always dreamed of visiting. Like most domestic immigrants in New York, I was an enthusiastic believer in the city’s supremacy, but as I spent more time abroad chasing the moment of exoticism than I did in New York, I found myself growing less susceptible to feeling homesick. A perfect bowl of rice is just as satisfying as a perfect bagel, and a shadow-puppet drama performed by torchlight in a Javanese village is more exciting than most nights at the Met. If you want urban buzz, Hong Kong and Tokyo leave the West behind.
The insoluble problem with travel as a way of life is that it becomes an end in itself. You never arrive. In the mid-1990s, I discovered cruising, an efficient way to visit a string of destinations without having to pack and unpack. On a Crusades-themed cruise to the Levant, I met a lady of a certain age from Santa Monica named Inez who belonged to the Travelers’ Century Club. The only qualification for membership, she said, is to have traveled to a hundred countries. Inez admitted that the list of countries was rigged: Hawaii and Alaska counted as countries, and in the days of the U.S.S.R., if your ship docked at Leningrad, you got credit for all fifteen Soviet republics. The Travelers’ Century Club seemed to have even less point to it than the Mile High Club. Traveling with the object of ticking countries off a list robs the very concept of novelty of its novelty.
I never pursued such an acquisitive approach to travel, but sometimes the destinations blurred together. Every now and then, jet lag would awaken me before dawn in a hotel room, and for a moment I would forget where I was. The surroundings were familiar: the room temperature was perfect, the supersoft bedsheets were combed Egyptian cotton with a desirably high thread count (whatever that was), the fragrant toiletries in the bathroom were from Floris or Hermès, or better yet some desperately chic parfumerie du jour. I was in Luxury Land, and it was as distant from the Grand Hotel d’Angkor, vintage 1989, as my apartment on Morton Street.
My career as a world traveler effectively ended with that Crusades cruise. The last shore call was a day trip to Jerusalem that managed to squeeze a complete pilgrimage into twelve brisk hours. Bus departs Haifa harbor at six o’clock for the two-hour drive, first stop Manger Square in Bethlehem. There we had a parking place by the entrance so we could jump the queue and file past the birthplace of Jesus, which was marked by a brass plate in an alcove hung with a sequined lavender curtain, like the stage of a marionette theater. Once in the city, we power walked the Via Dolorosa, back on the bus for a quick swing by the Mount of Olives, kosher set lunch at the King David Hotel, the Israel Museum (straight to the Dead Sea Scrolls, optional detour to see the Rembrandt), then the Wailing Wall, Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque, and finally the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The holiest place in Christendom at closing time was packed solid, like the mosh pit at a Nirvana concert, with a distinct air of hysteria. Every few minutes there was another shrill polyglot announcement about lost children. I had buddied up with Inez, who panicked in the crush outside the narrow entrance to the sepulcher itself. She squealed, “My feet are not touching the floor!” I disengaged her from the pious mob and ferried her to safety, but when we got back on the bus, she was disconsolate because she hadn’t persevered and entered the sanctum sanctorum. The cruise director handed out pink certificates proclaiming that the bearer had completed a pilgrimage to the Holy City of Jerusalem, listing all the places we had visited. Inez, a devout Catholic, tearfully refused to take hers.
As the coach sped down the dark motorway back to the port, I thought about what I would write in my journal. My journal was supposed to be, at a minimum, a record of places seen and people met, all spelled correctly and with enough detail to allow me to reconstitute a narrative later if need be, but I had my detailed certificate of pilgrimage, and we had moved too fast to meet anyone. I settled on a passage I had read in a memoir of a pilgrimage in 1480 by Santo Brasca, a noble minion of the Sforzas in Milan. He admonished, “Let no man go to the Holy Land just to see the world, or simply to boast ‘I have been there’ and ‘I have seen that,’ and so win the admiration of his friends.”
The last lesson I learned is that home can be a choice. I found my stopping place in Bali, where I went to live in 1999. Indonesia came late in my travels, as I was becoming aware of the limits of the traveler’s life. In 1995, I flew to Jakarta to profile the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and by the end of the week I had fallen in love twice, with Indonesia and with my partner, Rendy. My interest in other destinations fell off drastically, and I returned to Jakarta as often and for as long at a stretch as I could manage. I made friends with a circle of American and British expatriates my age who had come to Indonesia after college and settled there. It took me no time at all to envision myself living their lives, with a housekeeper and a driver to take care of me. I would have a garden, bigger than the ones kept by millionaires in Manhattan brownstones.
I was in Jakarta in May 1998, when the country’s dictator, Suharto, was brought down by mass demonstrations. I sat up until the wee hours with friends and strangers of all ages who were exhilarated by their nation’s rebirth as a democracy. They were hopeful and idealistic and excited in a way I hadn’t seen since I participated in antiwar rallies when I was a college student—with the huge difference that this was for real. For Indonesians, “Smash the state” wasn’t an empty slogan: they did it! When I returned to the United States at the end of that year, the country’s business came to a halt for the impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton. I was transfixed with disgust. So when Rendy sent me a fax proposing that we find a house in Bali, where he intended to open a restaurant, I said yes in a New York minute.
I made my move to Indonesia on April 1, 1999. My initial escape was planned as a completely reversible decision. I got a year’s leave from my job as an art reviewer at The New Yorker, I found a nice British couple to sublet my apartment, and I booked a ticket: it was easy. There was no going-away party, because my friends thought it was an April Fools’ Day prank and I would be back at the end of the year. I didn’t make any promises, but I didn’t think I would be coming back.
I spent my last night as a New Yorker alone, happily packing. Clothes were simple; you can wear shorts, T-shirts, and sandals anywhere in Bali. I filled the venerable collegiate footlocker with books, which required more thought: they are one necessity in scant supply in the tropics. Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels wasn’t a candidate for export, but I took it off the shelf and leafed through it again. My grandmother’s book was now an antique. It opened in my hands at the photograph of the weird mud-brick mosque of Timbuktu, and I felt a keen twinge of desire to see it in this life. Then it occurred to me that the real hero of the book wasn’t Halliburton but Père Yakouba, who repudiated a sacred vow to stay in the place he called home.
Copyright © 2016 by Jamie James
