The Tao of Travel

I have had nothing but safe travel experiences in South Africa, and yet the official statistics are very scary. In a one-year period (the twelve months from April 2007 to March 2008) South Africa reported 18,148 murders, and many had presumably gone unreported. The number of reported sex crimes, including rapes and assaults (according to a New York Times report in 2009), was 70,514. The violence in South Africa is increasing. This news does not deter safari-goers, soccer fans, bird watchers, or the many oenophiles who seek to sample the dessert wines and Pinot Noirs of the Western Cape.

Apart from some obvious hellholes—Mogadishu, Baghdad, Kabul—every city has its high-risk neighborhoods. It is in the nature of a city to be alienating, the hunting ground of opportunists, rip-off artists, and muggers. I once asked a concierge in a large hotel near Union Square in San Francisco for directions to the Asian Arts Museum. Though it was within walking distance, he begged me to take a taxi, to speed me past the streets of panhandlers, homeless people, decompensating schizos, and drunks. In the event, I walked—briskly—and was not inconvenienced.

Afghanistan and Pakistan were—not even that long ago—delightful places to travel in. And they may be again. India is full of terrorist groups, not just the pro-Kashmiris who shot up Bombay, but the more violent Maoist Naxalites who regularly set off bombs, derail passenger trains, and have killed more than six thousand people in the past dozen years in the so-called Red Corridor, a stripe running along the right-hand side of India. But in spite of its violence and disorder, India is still one of the most attractive destinations in the world.

At various times in my life, soldiers or militiamen at roadblocks in parts of Africa have pointed rifles at me and demanded money. I have been shot at by shifta bandits in northern Kenya. But in these places I was off the map and expected to be hassled.

As for my own top ten dangerous places, I have felt conspicuously alien, vulnerable, unsafe, and tended to walk fast in

Port Moresby,Papua New Guinea: One of the most dangerous, crime-ridden cities in the world, inhabited by drifters and squatters, locally known as "rascals," and career criminals, many of whom, wearing woolly hats, come from the Highlands and are looking for prey.

Nairobi:

Downtown, muggers galore, even in daylight.

East St. Louis, Illinois: One of the poorest, most beat-up, most menacing-looking cities in the United States.

Vladivostok: A clammy-cold harbor city of vandalized buildings, scrawled-upon walls, underpaid sailors, and confrontational drunks and skinheads.

England: On Saturday afternoons, among the hoodlums, after soccer matches.

Rio de Janeiro: At the reeking periphery of the Carnival mobs, among prowlers and drunks and aggressive celebrants.

Addis Ababa: In the Merkato bazaar, which abounds with pickpockets and thieves.

Solomon Islands: The smaller, hungrier islands, noted for their xenophobia, some of whose locals demand large sums of money from any outsider who lands on the beach.

Kabul: Just outside the city, at a village where walking alone, I was spotted by about a dozen women who, unprovoked by me, began throwing stones at my head.

Newark: Stuck overnight, having missed a plane, I had to walk in the evening from my dreary hotel to find a place to eat, and at one point, dodging traffic, stepping over a dead dog, I was confronted by hostile boys yelling abuse and heckling me.

Happy Places

Are there truly happy places? I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place, an epiphany that remains as a consolation and a regret. Fogies recall many a happy time, because fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. Ordering food in a restaurant in the 1950s, William Burroughs said, "What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1927."

There is a well-publicized list of happy places, which includes Denmark at the top, followed in descending order by Switzerland, Austria, Finland, Australia, Sweden, Canada, Guatemala, and Luxembourg.

With the exception of small, threadbare Guatemala, what do these countries have in common? They are the world's most developed, urbanized, bourgeois, and (so its seems) the smuggest and teeniest bit boring. I seriously doubt that they are as happy as advertised. Cold, dark Finland in January is not a place one associates with jollification. Finland, in fact, is quite high on the "Countries with the Most Suicides" list, and one doesn't think of Austria as the Land of Smiles.