Just about 50 years ago, needing money to support my family—my novels weren't best-sellers-I had the idea of taking the longest train trip imaginable and writing a travel book about it. The trip was improvisational (即兴的).
I didn't have a credit card. I had no idea where I'd be staying nor how long this trip would take. And I'd never written a travel book before. I hoped my trip wouldn't suffer a lot, though it was obviously a leap in the dark.
I set off with one small bag containing clothes, a map of Asia, a travel guidebook and some travelers' cheques, I was often inconvenienced, sometimes threatened, now and then disturbed for bribes, occasionally laid up with food poisoning—all this vivid detail for my narrative.
What I repeated in the more than four-month trip was the pleasure of the sleeping car. Writing on board the Khyber Mail to Lahore in Pakistan, "The romance associated with the sleeping car comes from the fact that it is extremely private, combining the best features of a cupboard with forward movement. Whatever drama is being shown in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window. . . " A train is a carrier that allows residence.
I wrote The Great Railway Bazaar on my return in 1974, and it appeared to good reviews and quick sales. That's the past. Nothing is the same. All travel is time-related. All such trips are singular and unrepeatable. It's not just that the steam trains of Asia are gone, but much of the peace and order is gone. Who'd risk an Iranian train now or take a bus through Afghanistan?
But I've been surprised by some of the more recent developments in travel. I rode on Chinese trains for a year and wrote Riding the Iron Rooster, but now China has much cleaner and swifter trains and modernized destinations.
A traveler today could take the same trip I took in1986-87 and produce a completely different book.
All travel books are dated. That's their fault that they're outdated, and it's their virtue that they preserve something of the past that would otherwise be lost.
