The Lunatic Express (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Quotes edit see section history

• “P.08: The classic move was to leave the world for the exotic to be born anew: Gauguin shipped himself off to Tahiti, Wilfred Thesiger to the Empty Quarter; the New York artist Tobias Schneebaum literally shed his clothes by the Madre de Dios River and walked naked into the Peruvian Amazon.”

• “P.28: In some ways, I'd discovered during years of travelling, home life was like an insulating callus you had to wear off before you could even properly see and absorb the new world around you. I knew that would happen eventually, but meanwhile I had the idea I just wanted to make tracks, to knock back the miles, to go without stopping straight into the heart of the world.”

• “P.54: When you travel you imagine leaving your old self behind. But hunger, fatigue, the aches and pains of life in a bus seat, only show you the real you — there's never any escape from yourself. And that's no small thing. It was just me, and over the past few years I felt like I'd gotten so twisted up in multiple lives of trying to be different for different people, it was sometimes hard to remember who I was. Out here I could just be myself, happy, self-reliant, content, exactly where I belonged. <Lawrence> Osborne was saying this was an unreal life, and maybe it was — I certainly couldn't do it forever. But it was also the opposite, real, a reminder that happiness wasn't all the external comforts but just there, within myself.”

• “P.106: I was happy, losing myself in the African train and the African landscape. And hungry: whenever we'd stop I'd hop off the train and buy whatever was offered — grilled chicken and greens and bright red Baggies of frozen hibiscus juice, and sweet syrupy coffee, and never worried about my luggage, which nobody touched.”

• “P.148: Men held hands with each other, walked with their arms around each other. They squatted on the ground together, sat on walls together. A soccer game broke out on a muddy field. Always, everywhere, people were together; that's why my being alone was so hard to fathom.”

• “P.151: Hendro and I sat down at a table covered with a yellow plastic tablecloth, and sipped coffee with Santoso's brother and sister. Santoso reached over and held my hand. It was a disconcerting sensation, this strange man holding my hand in his. My American instinct wanted to pull it away; it went against everything I knew. But it also felt nice. Warm. Welcoming. It just "was" — the most elemental of human connection, laden with no expectations. An embrace, and no one else even noticed it. We said goodbye after coffee, and I followed Hendro through town. Birds chirped. The sound of voices on the breeze, since there was no traffic, no sounds of mechanization at all, and we came to a long one-story building with jalousied windows, gardens.”

• “P.204: We pulled into Patna at 10:00 a.m. I was so covered in dirt, I looked like Pigpen. But an elephant was walking down the street, and the city was a dynamic jumble of brokenness and blacktop covered in sand and cows munching in piles of garbage.”

• “P.224: I had no idea what the future held for me. But I had a growing sense that I would know soon, and that it was this journey that was pointing me in the right direction. That clarity was in my power to have, and that I knew there was, in fact, an other side and I could get to it, find it.”

• “P.234-235: But how could you not live that life, taste that taste, after you'd had it? The bus rolled on and my fear was a memory already, mitigated and rounded, its sharp edges sanded off. That moment was there, though. That moment of fear. Of intensity. Of feeling so afraid that I knew I was alive and didn't want to be dead, and that I loved my family and missed them, even as I knew I had to straighten everything out and change my life. And that that was what travel was all about, showing you things in a starker way than you could ever see them at home.”

• “P.263: In everyone, I suspect, lay a tension between the need for otherness and home. We all want security, we all want adventure, the familiar and the new always jockeying for control. But when otherness began to be normal, home itself begin to seem like the other, perhaps even the exotic. Even Schneebaum had finally stumbled out of the world of the Akaramas and back to New York, "going out to look for the same self that I always was." Thesiger and T.E. Lawrence left behind their beloved Arabia for London.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Travel was only worthwhile when your eyes were fresh, when it surprised you and amazed you and made you think about yourself in a new way. You couldn’t travel forever. When you stopped seeing, when you lost your curiosity and openness to the world, it was time to return to your starting point and see where you stood.

  Highlighted by 38 Kindle customers

• After so many days on crowded buses and boats, it was becoming clear that more than anything else, money bought insulation and protection. From wind and rain and heat, from other people, from noise, from pollution. The deeper I went, the clearer this became.

  Highlighted by 31 Kindle customers

• Lawrence Osborne’s words: “A journey is never a simple thing. The hitches and the boredom, the missed connections and empty hours are the price for leaving one’s real life and entering an unreal one.”

  Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers

• “Yes,” he said, “but remember: you never know when you will die, so you must be happy all the time.”

  Highlighted by 21 Kindle customers

• The third world is all about tiny margins of profit in billions of minuscule exchanges; speed and maximum capacity are of the essence. Regulation; safety; comfort—they cost money and there is no money here. Or rather, there’s money, it’s just like grains of sand instead of pebbles that fill your hands.

  Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers

• In everyone, I suspect, lay a tension between the need for otherness and home. We all want security, we all want adventure, the familiar and the new always jockeying for control. But when otherness began to be normal, home itself begin to seem like the other, perhaps even the exotic.

  Highlighted by 18 Kindle customers

• And that that was what travel was all about, showing you things in a starker way than you could ever see them at home.

  Highlighted by 18 Kindle customers

• East of Eden. “One of my favorites,” she said. “Read it.” I did, and it was all about men’s complex but stunted emotional lives and I saw my life and my journey in every word.

  Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers

• The word itself comes from the French travailler—to toil or labor, reflecting the difficulty of going anywhere in the Middle Ages.

  Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers

• “Either your time comes or it doesn’t,” he’d said to me, “and when it does there’s just not anything you can do about it.”

  Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Carl Hoffman (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 910

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Travel › Specialty Travel › Adventure
• Books › Travel › Reference & Tips › Essays & Travelogues
• Books › Nonfiction › Transportation