Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

A creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible, the usual condition of the older traveller, is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveller isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bomb. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo. Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness. Travelling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your travelling life, and not feel like a spectre. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train. Long after I took the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar, I went on thinking how I'd gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world, and reflecting on what I'd seen, the way the unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train too. Ages later you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a distant country, or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears, shrieking, Run, you life, dim, dim! Or the sound of a train at night, striking that precise musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you lie in the train, moving through the world as travellers do, inside the whale. Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives, boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age, but older I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of Wabi-Sabi. Nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts. Without change there can be no nostalgia, a friend once said to me, and I realized that what I began to witness was not just change and decay, but imminent extinction. Had my long-ago itinerary changed as much as me? I had the idea of taking the same trip again, traveling in my own footsteps, a serious enterprise, but the sort of trip that younger, opportunistic punks often take to make a book and get famous. The list is very long and includes traveler's books in the footsteps of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Leonard Wolfe, Joseph Conrad, Mr. Kurtz, H. M. Stanley, Leopold Bloom, St. Paul, Basho, Jesus, and Buddha. The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. Travel also holds the magical possibility of reinvention, that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. In a distant place no one knows you, nearly always a plus, and you can pretend in travel to be different from the person you are, unattached, enigmatic.