The Tao of Travel

But here is the point: the native of a place seldom sees what the alien sees, seldom remarks on what he or she takes for granted. Sebald describes how the passengers in the first train he takes, from Norfolk to Lowestoft, are so silent "that not a word might have passed their lips in the whole of their lives." This is empty hyperbole. English people, and in particular the provincial English, seldom yammer on public transport. Without saying so, the German is comparing the English to Germans. Still, the originality of the book arises from the remarks that only a foreigner would make, and such observations, even when they are misapprehensions and distortions, have value.

24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place

A PLACE NAME CAN BEWITCH THE TRAVELER. The name "Singapore" cast a spell on me until I lived there for three years in the 1960s without air-conditioning. But the village of Birdsmoor Gate, in the west of England, near where I lived after Singapore, was just as lovely as its name. California names, such as Pacific Grove, Walnut Creek, and Thousand Palms, seemed to beckon. But in Philadelphia, the corner of Kensington Avenue and Somerset Street—music to the ears of the average Anglomaniac—is a dangerous slum area and the busiest drug-dealing site in an otherwise salubrious city. ¶ In Remote People, Evelyn Waugh talks about the deception of names. "How wrong I was, as things turned out," he says, "in all my preconceived notions about this journey. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing, while the places I found most full of interest were those I expected to detest—Kenya and Aden."

Here are some place names that have misled the credulous traveler.

Shepherds Bush: A gray, malodorous, overpopulated district, the opposite of its name, in west London. The traveler not wise to the truth of this squints and mutters, "Where is it?" gazing at the greasy cafés, kebab shops, Australian mega-pubs, cut-price emporiums, and honking traffic. Shepherds Bush is noted for its shopkeepers, who, when it's not raining, stand at their doorways voluptuously scratching themselves.

Casablanca:

"Casablanca is an anonymous cluster of high-rises, and modern roads so straight and thin there'd be no room for Sidney Greenstreet there" (Pico Iyer).

Baghdad: "Celebrated as the city of the Arabian Nights," James Simmons writes in Passionate Pilgrims, "Baghdad 1,000 years before had been one of the great cities of Asia, a center of art, literature and learning. Richard Burton called it 'a Paris of the ninth century.'"

Simmons goes on: "Baghdad disappointed the Blunts, as it has virtually all modern travelers. Freya Stark called it 'a city of wicked dust.' And Robert Casey, who visited Baghdad in 1930, dismissed it as 'a dust heap—odorous, unattractive, and hot. Its monuments are few, its atmosphere that of squalor and poverty.'" And this was before the invasion, the fall of Saddam Hussein, and all the bombs.

Mandalay: An enormous grid of dusty streets occupied by dispirited and oppressed Burmese, and policed by a military tyranny.

Tahiti: A mildewed island of surly colonials, exasperated French soldiers, and indignant natives, with overpriced hotels, one of the world's worst traffic problems, and undrinkable water.

Timbuktu: Dust, hideous hotels, unreliable transport, freeloaders, pestering people, garbage heaps everywhere, poisonous food. Marseille: Just a short walk from the pretty harbor are sullen neighborhoods of public housing, tenements, refugees, and bewildered immigrants, with no one saying bienvenue.

Samarkand: Not the Silk Road fantasy of minarets and domes but a stinking industrial city in Uzbekistan, known for its chemical factories, fertilizer plants, and out-of-control drunkenness.

Guatemala City: A place that has continually been flattened by earthquakes and badly rebuilt. The majority of the population are slum dwellers, many of whom are eager to emigrate from their failed state.

Alexandria: Almost all my life I had dreamed of Alexandria. Most of life's disappointments begin in dreams. At one time, like the greatest cities in the world, Alexandria, Egypt, belonged to everyone who lived in it. And, as Lawrence Durrell wrote in Justine, it was shared by "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes." Yet today Alexandria is a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs, and one creed, Islam, and is puritanical.