Paul writes many memorable passages that I have captured below more for myself than anyone but I hope they speak to you my random reader and bring you to join Paul on the tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar:
You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
The festival of Novruz Bayram.
With poverty so obvious and unmissable, the foreigner sometimes bursts into tears, until he or she learns the Indian trick of looking only at the background, where all those new buildings are rising.
As an Indian woman said to me, "what about the poor people in your county?" Well, yes. New Orleans is a vivid example of a place where the poor were hidden or unapproachable. it seemed that until the were flushed out by the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina no one knew the existed, nor knew what do with them.
I have never seen any community in India so hopeless or, in its way, so hermetic in its poverty, so blatant in its look of menace, so sad and unwelcoming, as East St Louis Illinois , the decaying town that lies across the Mississippi from flourishing St. Louis Missouri. Yet I can imagine that many people from St.Louis proper would weep at the sight of Indian poverty. They dare not cross their own river to see the complacent decrepitude and misery on the other bank.
On my trip of twenty-eight thousand miles and hundreds of encounters, I met two people who supported the American President (GWBush): the man in Baku who wanted the United States to invade Iran and Rajendra. No one else.
He never grew up and never stop growing
Solving problems, finding meals, buying new clothes and giver away old ones, getting laundry done, buying tickets, scavenging for cheap hotels, studying maps, being alone but not lonely. Its not about happiness but safety, finding serenity, making discoveries in all this locomotion and an equal serenity when she had a place to roost, like a bird of passage migrating slowly in a sequence of flights.
One of the blessings of such poverty was the absence of traffic. Just a few cars, many motorbikes and scooters, lots of bicycles and that relic of the old Burma, the bicycle rickshaw or pedi cab.
The former Ponhea Yat High School, in a respectable residential area of Phnom Penh, had been converted to a prison - a natural conversion, since large schools of classrooms are designed for confinement.
The traveler's conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. the traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And than, to his shame, he realizes that there identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by this own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the face that mass murder is still and annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma, and elsewhere - the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again"
You know what Churchill said: Stalin found Russia working with wooden plows and left it equipped with nuclear bombs.
Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost. Politicians are always inferior to there citizens. No one on earth is well governed. Is there hope? Yes. Mos t people I'd met, in chance encounters, were strangers who helped me on my way. And we lucky ghosts can travel wherever we want. The going is still good, because arrivals are departures.
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