From Don DeLillo's The Names:

My life was full of routine surprises.  One day I was watching runners from Marathon dodge taxis near the Athens Hilton, the next I was turning a corner in Istanbul to see a gypsy leading a bear on a leash.  I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist [emphasis mine].  There was something agreeable about this.  To be a tourist is to escape accountability.  Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home.  You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.  You're expected to be stupid.  The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly.  You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps.  You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it.  Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm.  You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequences.  Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms.  You are an army of fools, wearing bring polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty.  There is nothing to think about the next shapeless event.

DeLillo's narrator here spouts the typical rant against tourism, but his novel is an expert and sometimes wearying analysis of a different kind of travel—living in one place for a long while; or in the case of this narrator, in several places.  American travel novels, beginning with Paul Bowles, tend to find the sophisticated paranoid and the exasperated pilgrim in difficult places.

From the Daedalus Books Catalogue description of Wilfred Thesiger’s The Danakil Diary:

At 23, Wilfred Thesiger became the first European to travel through the fabled Sultanate of Aussa, a daunting land where two Italian expeditions and an Egyptian army had previously been annihilated by Danakil tribesmen. "The Danakil Diary" records how Thesiger survived the constant threat of death and genital mutilation by the Danakil—warriors whose tribal status depended on the number of men they killed and castrated—to survey the beautiful, savage landscapes of one of Africa’s last remaining geographical mysteries, and how he became what many consider the century’s greatest living explorer. Thesiger is a good son as well, dutifully writing letters home to his mother in London, which are interspersed throughout the memoir, along with his diary of the month-long solo hunting trip in 1930 through the hostile Danakil desert (now Ethiopia).

This wonderful synopsis captures the essence of British travel writing—the danger, the sexual threat (and hence thrill), the relentless search for untouched (virgin) territory, the odd combination of very masculine adventuring and boyish sweetness—he writes home to mother often.  Thesiger in many ways embodies an older form of traveler and travel writing.  By mid-century, most of the undiscovered places had been discovered and made too easy to reach.  In Abroad Paul Fussell describes a more ironic and self-conscious traveler between the wars—Evelyn Waugh the preeminent example.  Oddly, Waugh’s great spurt of travel came because of a divorce and the need to escape the sadness and loneliness of the situation.

From Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief, which is only intermittently good, but when it’s good...

For two centuries the Arabs remained masters of the coast.  Behind them in the hills the native Sakuyu, black, naked, anthropophagous, had lived their own tribal life among their herds—emaciated, puny cattle with rickety shanks and elaborately branded hide.  Further away still lay the territory of the Wanda—Galla immigrants from the mainland who, long before the coming of the Arabs, had settled in the North of the island and cultivated it in irregular communal holdings.  The Arabs held aloof from the affairs of both these people; wardrums could often be heard inland and sometimes the whole hillside would be aflame with burning villages.  On the coast a prosperous town arose; great houses of Arab merchants with intricate latticed windows and brass studded doors, courtyards planted with dense mango trees, streets heavy with the reek of cloves and pineapple, so narrow that two mules could not pass without altercation between their drivers; a bazaar where the money changers, squatting over their scales, weighed out the coinage of a world-wide trade, Austrian thalers, rough-stamped Mahratta gold, Spanish and Portuguese guineas.  From Matodi the dhows sailed to the mainland, to Tanga, Dar-es-Salaam, Malindi and Kismayu, to meet the caravans coming down from the great lakes with ivory and slaves.  Splendidly dressed Arab gentlemen paraded the waterfront hand in hand and gossiped in the coffee houses.  In early spring when the monsoon was blowing from the Northeast, fleets came down from the Persian Gulf bringing to market a people of fairer skin who spoke a pure Arabic barely intelligible to the islanders, for with the passage of years their language had become full of alien words—Bantu from the mainland, Sakuyu and Galla from the interior—and the slave markets had infused a richer and darker strain into their Semitic blood; instincts of swamp and forest mingled with the austere tradition of the desert.

I love this sort of prose, which compresses so much time, so much history, into a few sentences.  I reread Points in Time recently, impressed by the odd and effective way Paul Bowles does this, leaping across centuries as if they were merely punctuation, which, come to think of it, centuries are.  Waugh is so elegant and disinterested in this kind of writing, you almost forget that he has an even finer point of satire in mind, in the end, which is both disappointing and strangely thrilling.  Such great prose at the service of silliness is a kind of exquisite pleasure.

Isak Dinesen, on her relations with the Native:

For some time I had a small farm up at Gil-Gil, where I lived in a tent, and I traveled by the railway to and fro between Gil-Gil and Ngong.  At Gil-Gil, I might make up my mind very suddenly, when it began to rain, to go back to my house.  But when I came to Kikuyu, which was our station on the railway line, and from where it was ten miles to the farm, one of my people would be there with a mule for me to ride home on.  When I asked them how they had known that I was coming down, they looked away, and seemed uneasy, as if frightened or bored, such as we should be if a deaf person insisted on getting an explanation of a symphony from us.

Much as I love Dinesen in Out of Africa and Winters Tales, this sort of caricature of the earth-bound, all-knowing African is terribly familiar.  From less sympathetic writers, like Lord Cromer, Governor of Egypt at the turn of the 20th century, this same attitude becomes a disgust with circular logic and fate-bound lives.

I own a 1953 original paperback of Frederick Prokosch's strange Nine Days to Makula, about four Europeans who crash in a plane on the beaches of Oman.  The wonderfully racy cover shows a white woman, naked, with a thin lacy scarf over her waist, sitting beside a pool.  An Arab man stands behind a screen staring at her.  The viewer is behind the woman.

Death in Egypt

A doctor must pronounce the death and issue a death certificate, which must be endorsed by the Public Health Department.  The doctor will notify the security police.  It is important that the deceased’s passport and/or birth certificate be found.  The deceased’s embassy will help acquire all the necessary documents and help make arrangements for repatriation or reburial.  It will cost approximately $2,500 to ship an American home, and £ E.1,000 for a British National.  Payment must be assured by the company of the deceased or the next-of-kin.  There are several cemeteries in Cairo where foreigners may be buried.  Costs will be approximately £ E.700.

—from CAIRO: A Practical Guide, for foreigners living semi-permanently in Egypt

A postcard story I wrote for my novel I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing, which did not make it into the novel:

Time and space are different for the European and the Egyptian, especially at the edge of the neo-colonial city.  Notice the sun has almost set and the buzz of Ramadan traffic has changed to a hum.  Behind the 40-story Ramses Hilton hotel on the banks of the Nile several smartly dressed bellboys carry trays of food down the loading dock to the narrow street that still backs one corner of the magnificent hotel.  This quarter is destined for destruction and rows of new office buildings.  Half or nearly all of some buildings in fact have been demolished, exposing kitchens or courtyards still used by the inhabitants.  They no longer know what to call their district.  The wiseacres, mostly those who have moved in since the demolitions began and who have nothing to lose by speaking ill of the neighborhood, call it the City of the See-Through Walls.  The bellboys carrying trays of sweets and snacks thread their way down narrow alleys.  They take shortcuts through people's living rooms, where the walls have ears and holes.  Children form a ragged line behind them, hands like baskets below the trays, hoping a cake or two will tumble off.  The bellboys finally arrive at their destination, a dusty brown door that looks ready to sag off its hinges.  They knock and enter, an enormous house spread out at right angles from them, clean surfaces, sparkling tables laid out with food.  The children fall back.

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