Magic Bus (36 page)

‘We thought you'd be here earlier,' she says.

I'm right on time.

She's tall and shiny-faced with a nervous thinness. Her mouth is set and her body tense. She moves aside, not so much to usher me into the house as not to stand in my way. I step into the dim front room. ‘This is Joanne,' she says, introducing her twelve-year old Samburu daughter.

The room was once painted sky-blue. Backpacks and old leather suitcases gather dust on top of a metal wardrobe. Empty tubes of cooking spices are locked in a metal-mesh cupboard above a tableful of seasonal fruit. In the corner shrine, candles pool at Bhairab's feet. A line of incense ash falls on a crucifix. Joanne's bed is a thin mattress on the concrete floor.

A melon moves on the glass table. A haggard man, tired of life, lifts his head, pushing aside unread newspapers and unopened envelopes. His eyes are dull and slightly hooded. His white beard is stained nicotine-yellow. I walk towards him. He wavers to his feet and steadies himself by grabbing my hand. His bald head – the melon – is overlaid with forward-combed threads of thin hair. I notice his bent back, bowed legs and the tight dome of a swollen belly. ‘I've brought you whisky,' I say. ‘Johnny Walker Black, right?'

‘You star,' he says, and slumps back down into his chair.

I sit across from the first independent travel guide writer. I start to tell him about my trip, the retracing of his original journey, and how his – and Tony Wheeler's – work taught a generation to move through the world alone and with confidence. He snaps open the bottle, lights his last B&H Extra Mild and says nothing in response. My heart sinks as the whisky level drops. After an hour, he pushes aside a rejected application from American Express, lays his head back down with the soft fruit and falls asleep. Above him buckle shelves of his five dozen guides: BIT's
Overland Through Africa
, Lonely Planet's
South America on a Shoestring
, the
Kenya
and
Uganda
guides which Alice helped him research, all his Asian volumes, undertaken with his second wife, Poon, every book rotting in the tropical humidity. I notice also Newby's
Traveller's Tales
, works by R. D. Laing and Carlos Castaneda,
The Many Ways of Being
and
Drugs of Hallucination
. I can't see a copy of the original
Overland to India
.

In the adjoining kitchen, Alice and Joanne whisper in Swahili. When Crowther starts to snore, anger and disappointment swell inside me. I stand. I pick up my pack. I'm about to walk out. Then, Alice appears at my side. ‘Take him to the bar in the morning,' she says. ‘Buy him a drink.'

‘Is that meant to make me feel better?'

‘It'll make him talk.'

In the spare bedroom I fold myself under the mosquito net. The sounds of unknown creatures rise out of the dark. The beating of the overhead fan blocks out the sound of the sea. I drop into sleep. In the middle of the night I surface from a dream. I'm disorientated, detached from the familiar, not yet connected to the new. In my dream I imagine scrawling words across Crowther's face with a felt-tip marker; words from Roddy's parting prediction at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan airport.

‘My vision of the end of the planet is everyone taking a holiday in the same week,' he said. ‘All the aircraft crash into each other in one great fireball. No more travel agents. No more pimple-faced immigration officers. Just a single, surviving traveller who arrives
at his hotel with a singed copy of
Lonely Planet
crying out, “What do you mean, there's no internet café?”'

Geoff Crowther was born in Todmorden near Halifax on the day the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. After school and a spell working for the Humberside water board, he hit the road. In London at BIT, he collated his travel notes into the Intrepids' first, impulsive guide. He and Tony Wheeler collaborated to produce the original Lonely Planet
India
handbook. His journeys informed the imprint's first African and South American guides. With their success, he bought acre by acre, cheque by cheque, an old banana plantation in northern New South Wales. In the rainforest he created a writers' retreat and nudist commune (the only clothes permitted were Wellington boots because of the snakes). He left his common-law English wife for Poon and built her a Korean-temple-cum-bushwhacker's-chalet on a mountainside. Crowther travelled as he lived, his excesses mirroring those of the age. Every time he returned from a spell on the road, Poon made him have a venereal disease test. Then he drove around the commune collecting his partners for a group visit to the clinic. He drank in those days, too, a six-pack of beer set beside the IBM to see him through the morning. The story of his life was legend among guide writers.

In the morning, Alice points me towards the ocean. Crowther left the house early. I walk barefoot along a sandy lane, through the soft embracing heat, past St Anthony's Church (patron saint of lost travellers). Coconut palms rise above the paddy fields. A heavy blossom drops from a tree, plummeting to earth like a falling bird. Waves whisper along the beach like lovers sharing secrets.

The Guru Bar overlooks the rocky bay. Crowther sits alone under its palm-frond balcony with his daily crossword. Only geckos keep him company. Beyond him the Arabian Sea glints in the morning sun.

‘Is a symbolic tale an allegory?' he asks me without lifting his eyes. The wire arms of his pilot spectacles ride halfway up his temples. ‘
Nairobi Times
is best, a crossword without clues, but I
can't get it. So
Indian Express
has to do.' His hand shakes as he fills in the boxes. At his side are a bottle of Wite Out, a dictionary and an empty glass.

‘Allegory is spelt with two “I”s' I say.

Crowther leans back on his chair and laughs at himself. A raw grinding of gravel and phlegm. His flat feet are splayed on oversize flip-flops. He wears a pair of old shorts and a floppy, faded sweatshirt.

‘Nobody comes to visit me here,' he says.

‘Can I top up your beer?' I ask.

‘You star.'

I buy two for him, one for me. The drink loosens his tongue.

‘Kathmandu,' he says. ‘You've just come from Kathmandu.'

I nod.

‘From Delhi catch the Upper India Express – platform 13, 8.10 p.m. – to Patna. Cycle rickshaw to steamer
Mahendra Ghat
and Ganges. The Raxaul train leaves at 10.20 p.m. Cost in 1969: 17.50 rupees with student reduction.'

‘Very good,' I admit.

‘In Durbar, hash cookies were on every menu. The Cabin restaurant's telephone number was 14724.'

It's my turn to laugh. ‘You have a good memory.'

‘I
never
let go of my journals. Slept with them. Drew maps by hand. No laptops back then. No photocopiers in Africa. If you lost a journal you were royally screwed.'

He stamps the table with his fist, misses the fly, knocks over the bottles. I buy him another beer.

‘Got screwed by lice too. On a bus, your neighbour's head would be crawling with them. They'd drop on to your lap. You'd feel them biting the back of your neck. Crabs were a pain in the ass too. Literally.'

‘I guess it was all part of the experience.'

‘A dollar bought 12.50 rupees in 1970,' he adds, eager to share again his archaic knowledge.

As he talks, the day's heat gathers around us, coiling between the chairs and tables, thickening and condensing before our eyes.
Shadows of sea birds sweep across the bamboo sunscreen, as does a black spider the size of a walnut. Backgammon tiles begin to click at other tables. Teaspoons clink on china cups beneath toadstool umbrellas. Loud Germans drop by for a late
frühstück
, complain about stale
brötchen
and coffee that's
nicht gut
. English tranceheads in ripped loincloths fall into the sea. Crowther snaps a flame to his cigarette. ‘I only started smoking when the dope ran out. Possession got you ten years in Turkey.' Then he details the ride-by-ride bus fares from Istanbul to India. Total 1971 cost: $15 to cross Asia.

His recall does impress me. His interest in my questions eases my anger. He suggests that I read Pope's
Persian Architecture
and Naipaul on India (who wrote off the hippies' fascination with Hinduism as a ‘sentimental wallow'). He speaks of the world as if it truly were a village; dawn in Sri Lanka, house prices in Bali, sundowners in Marin County book shops.

Around noon, when I buy him his sixth drink, Crowther says, ‘Siggy's served the coldest beers in Iran.'

‘Siggy's was in Kabul.'

‘Don't fucking tell me about Siggy,' he spits back. ‘
I
knew him, knew his place; not you.'

I let it drop, but he goes on, ‘There were bottlenecks on the trail, places everybody turned up and hung out: the Pudding Shop, the Amir Kabir, Siggy's place. Siggy's was in an alleyway behind the White Palace so I'm not about to forget it.' The White Palace was in Tehran. ‘We'd hang out with Siggy, then crash at the Yogi Lodge.' The Yogi had been in Varanasi.

When he starts to slur his words, I leave him at the bar. His lucidity has darkened for the day. Along the beach are fishermen, volleyball players, tourists smoking, sunbathing and scolding their children. Underfoot the sand is oil-stained and litter washes into the coves. I find a quiet beach-house café, order grilled fish and write up my notes.

Later, at the house, Alice tells me he hasn't come home yet. She invites me to share a plate of maize meal and greens with her and Joanne. We are asleep when he comes in.

On the second morning, he's back at the Guru, a stack of
cloth-bound foolscap notebooks alongside his crosswords. I buy him two beers and he talks me through the pages. Here are the room rates of Kandahar's first freak hotel. On the next pages are the departure times of every bus from Jalalabad to Peshawar, with chai and chillum breaks noted, and a precise plan of Amritsar. Crowther walked every street for every map in his early guides. In the margin he had written in copperplate handwriting, ‘Golden Temple dorm free but treat hospitality with respect as many bad scenes with Westerners smoking.'

I ask him if he has a copy of the original BIT
Overland to India
guide. He says that he's lost it.

‘At the end of each trip, I typed up my notes at the commune in the company of pythons and kookaburras. Then I'd head down to Melbourne with the pages. Andy Neilson, LP's first employee and as mad as a snake, sat with her baby and a glass of strawberry Nesquik pasting up the layout. Maureen proofread while breastfeeding Tashi. As soon as one book was put to bed, Tony and I would take off again, visiting the countries we wanted to see, writing books for real travellers.'

Crowther researched and wrote many
Travel Survival Kits
during Lonely Planet's first eighteen years, educating readers without patronizing them.

‘But every time we returned to Melbourne we'd find a new employee, then two more, then a staff canteen. Those desk jockeys started to judge us, and our sanity, by the thickness of our socks. The thicker the socks, the longer we'd been on the road. After five years' travel, most of us went feral.'

Crowther lifts the bottle to his lips, drains it, heaves it toward the sea. ‘Something got lost,' he says, his body tense, his eyes closed. ‘Something essential. Doing the third edition of the Thailand guide I started feeling… trapped. My last job, I was asked to write a “Highlights” section for “mature adventurers”.'

The millions Crowther made by trailblazing the globe were pissed away on alcohol, alimony and a three-bed suburban unit near Surfer's Paradise. He, Alice and Joanne arrived penniless in Goa six months ago.

A girl brings him a couple of boiled eggs, which he rolls in his hands to cool. As he eats, I look at the typescript of his first Nepal guide, the letters typed with such manifest urgency that the ‘o's punched little holes through the tissue-thin foolscap. His photograph in the front of
Africa on a Shoestring
shows a bright-eyed, curious twenty-seven-year-old with a wild beard reaching down to his chest.

‘Tony loaned me his first computer – a Kaypros – in 1984,' he remembers, calm once more. ‘Then we moved over to DOS and Windows 3.1, Windows 95…'

I hope that the food will extend our conversation, but he soon begins repeating himself.

‘… No laptops back then. No photocopiers in Africa. In the sixties you had to believe in a better world. Now, who's got the time? Man, the Karakoram Highway was beautiful.'

I leave him with his crossword and walk beyond Dando Vaddo for a swim.

On the third morning, Crowther isn't at the Guru. Alice tells me he didn't come home that night. On the fourth morning, he is back at his corner table, offering no explanation for his absence.

‘China's the future,' he says, before I've even sat down. ‘Those billions of golden boys and girls with spending power are about to hit the beach. They won't
defer
to other cultures. They don't want to be
transformed
. They want adventures without risk. Forty years ago, we put on kaftans and headed east,' he says. ‘Now the East is coming back at us dressed in DKNY.'

Over the next week, we meet at the beach bar every morning, talking until noon when he becomes abusive, insensible or comatose. Often he falls silent and gazes at his newspaper for twenty or thirty minutes. One day he says nothing at all. For my part, I try not to develop too much of a taste for a morning beer.

‘At the start of every trip I used to get a mental picture of the end,' Crowther says on our final morning together. ‘I always knew things would be OK if I could imagine myself arriving at my destination. That last flight from Brisbane with Alice, it didn't happen. At first, I thought it was just my bloody mind. Then half
an hour out of Bombay the lights went dim. Captain came on saying we had hydraulics problems. He couldn't lower the undercarriage. We ditched fuel over the sea. The stewardesses strapped themselves in. The whole of the airfield was a mass of flashing blue and red lights. I thought, “This is my crash landing. This is the end.”' Crowther looks out at the waves. ‘I settled down,' he says, almost as an afterthought. ‘I let go of what I loved.'