You’ve been traveling for a lifetime: are you still excited?
I love life and when you travel, every day you live twice as much.
Sometimes twice as bad?
In any case, you live what is new with greater intensity and your memory is refreshed again with new experiences…
Thomas Mann writes that if each day is similar to the previous one, they end up being the same.
The trip makes no day the same as the previous one. But I agree with Mann, and you would if you went by boat from Japan to the US: we traveled nine days and every eight hours we changed the clock. It was an eternal journey.
Don’t you think that cities, no matter how much you move, become more and more alike?
That is the fault of the comfortable tourist who does not move from the centers, where it is true that the big franchises abound and are always the same.
Do the guides make sense since Google Maps or the entire internet exists?
More than ever. The other day I was in Winnipeg, the coldest city in Canada, and there was the same restaurant that we recommended 20 years ago in our guide. That is a reference that the network does not give. If that restaurant is still there, it’s worth it… Like me.
Why don’t I see paper guides anymore?
Today they are carried on the mobile, but they are carried.
Quick: the most hidden corner of the Earth to declare my love to someone.
The Solomon Islands, because in their capital there is a mission chapel and if you ask they give you the key in the house next door. There I would declare my love to my wife who is traveling with me.
I’ll be a hooligan: if you travel with your partner, do you pay twice as much and have half the fun?
There you with your partner and I with mine.
If you want company, says Herodotus, travel alone.
The truth is that each destination also depends on who you visit it with. And traveling alone for some is even more intense than accompanied. And we put the Solomons in our guide even though no one ever went to visit them.
Where would you go to live?
To the entire planet: traveling is my life.
And to die?
Where I was born, Bournemouth, England. People repeat that it is God’s waiting room: perhaps because on its beaches in the south the sunset is melancholic and sweet.
Are the English great travelers because England is enjoyed when leaving?
In Bournemouth there is a museum of tourism that is worth visiting.
Is nomadism in vogue like traveling?
I was raised by my family in Pakistan, then we lived in the Bahamas and eventually returned to England; but only one year to be later assigned to the US, where I went to university and met my wife and with her I decided to travel to live and live to travel. And that we do.
How long is the journey of your life?
Half a century already, friend. Fifty years…
Have you tried other trips without moving?
Except for a couple of drunken binges, my thing is not alcohol. In any case, I have tried the local marijuana and the LSD just enough not to want to repeat it.
What trip would you repeat right now?
If sometimes traveling is not so much where but with whom, I like to discover the world with my grandchildren. In reality, it is they, the children, who teach the world to you again.
If you let yourself: you have to be humble.
God has not given me the gift of writing well, but I am still able to reveal some detail.
And traveling in a large group?
The key is that everyone agrees to choose the one they don’t like and that he gets along well. He will be the one to blame for everything that is not perfect and thus the rest of the group will get along great and enjoy the whole trip.
Does that holy man have to be paid?
Well, it’s not necessary because he doesn’t usually find out that he is the jinx.
What destination is worth it to later leave this world in peace?
A trip to my youth in the time machine knowing what I know now and also giving myself permission to forget it.
Where would I never return?
I wrote Darklands (Dark Lands) about those destinations; but I would go back: to the Congo River…fascinating. Or Detroit… It was the dream of the working class and today it is the sleeping city.
It was the birthplace of the modern automobile.
Hong Kong is also on a downward slide; or go to Sofia, where communism collided with reality; o Romania: the splendid beauty of Transylvania and the recovery of Bucharest, o Albania, forgotten.
What do you save from that sad Europe?
Plovdiv in Bulgaria. But go to northern Chad and you’ll see Gadhafi’s Soviet tanks being destroyed by Toyotas with ingenious local guerilla missile launchers.
Isn’t it a dangerous country?
The risk is exaggerated because there are interests in all of us always going to the same destinations… Oh and I forgot about the Lost City, in Colombia: don’t miss it!
