Carl Hoffman. The Lunatic Express. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

How do you write exotic tales about the world in modern times? Purchas’ Pilgrimage, Melville’s Typee, even Burton’s or Lawrence’s adventures in Arabia could not be duplicated today. National Geographic has been published for over a century and even has its own cable TV network.

The answer is simple: Do something different and dangerous. In this case Carl Hoffman decides to travel on notoriously risky public transportation around the world: Cuban and Afghan air lines, boats on the Upper Amazon, crammed trains in India and Africa, unlicensed ferries in Bangladesh and Indonesia. Adventures all. In most cases he makes friends with natives who travel in groups and accept him as they look out for him. So we learn about Brazilian teenagers, organized crime in Mumbai, and anarchy in Africa.

These conveyances are dangerous because in order to make money and still be affordable to the common people of those countries they have to take risks. Travel quickly. Overload. Remove extra items that might make things safer or more comfortable. Ignore the stink from the bathrooms or the roaches that come out at night. Ironically, the only conveyance that breaks down beyond immediate repair on his round-the-world journey is the Greyhound bus forty miles from his own home.

Every chapter begins with a news report about a disaster aboard one of those buses, trains, planes, or ferries he uses. But by traveling this way he meets the ordinary citizens of the land. One Bangladesh ferry has a first class section he stumbles onto. It is full of Europeans and Americans who are clean and eating good food. He envies them, but, nearly a year into his travels, he cannot identify with them any more. He has been on the Lunatic Express, as he calls it, too long.

There are some stark contrasts–Mumbai where the population density is over 17,000 per square mile to the Mongolian steppe where it is one for every two square miles; the heat of Africa, India, or Indonesia crammed on trains or boars to the crystal cold of the Trans-Siberian Railroad (technically safe and not really part of the Lunatic Express). But the biggest contrast for him is the sense of place that most of the people he meets have. Though they may have worked in Dubai for years, they still send most of what they earn to a small Indonesian island. They are from a village, a tribe, a neighborhood. They have family, extended family, neighbors, and folks from their hometown that are like family. They belong. And for brief times Hoffman belongs to them.

But then he moves on. What started out as an adventure becomes a kind of nostalgia in the literal sense–“a looking back sickness.” Where does this lone traveler surrounded by masses everywhere fit in? Even, what does it mean to be a father, a spouse, a son. He quotes E. M. Forster, admitting it is a cliche: “Only connect.” Yet, how does he connect?

Postscript. One personal note. Hoffman’s description of such public conveyances is not unlike my experience on a 20 hour trip on the Chinese railroad in the year 2000. People tried out their English on me, the “men’s room” was the doorway at the back of the car, and though it was hard to sleep, I knew I was safe and never alone. Interestingly, Hoffman’s experience on a Chinese train a mere nine years later was different. He was just another foreigner who could not speak the language, and the Chinese he saw were more conscious of sex (four inch heels and European tailored clothes) than I saw even in Shanghai and Beijing less than a decade earlier. If what Hoffman describes is generally true in China today, then perhaps I might become nostalgic, too: nostalgic for a more innocent time when the Chinese saw self-control as a virtue and overt interest in sex a sign of weakness.