On fortune tellers and traveling
November 12, 2006 | 12:00am
Tiziano Terzani’s A Fortune-Teller Told Me found its way into my hands like a 367-page chain letter tucked between covers. It was given to me by Pats, a soul sister and one of the few people I know who has petted a dromedary in Morocco and taken a dip in a traditional bath in Hungary. She got her own copy of the book from our Aussie friend Daniel, whose penchant for languages extends from Chinese to Japanese to Cyrillic and is matched only by his fondness for travel. This chain letter, it seems, has its own taboo – it is passed on only among people bound by a common affliction, an illness called wanderlust.
Terzani, the author, has a terminal case of the disease. So strong is the pull of travel on him that when a soothsayer in Hong Kong, who is able to describe events in his past with an eerie accuracy, warns him to avoid flying for a year, he gamely takes it as a pretext to explore Asia. He wanders all over his adopted continent on boat, on train, even on elephant-back, never for a moment contemplating a break from the peripatetic aspect of his journalistic work as another possible way out of his dilemma. What’s more, he takes it upon himself to seek out wherever he goes "the most eminent local fortune-teller, the most powerful sorcerer, the most revered oracle or seer or visionary or madman of the place" in the hope of learning more about himself and his fate.
That he should heed a prediction that he himself admitted most other Westerners would shrug off as the mere ravings of a mad old man or the fib of a charlatan was unusual enough. The manner he chose to deal with the prophecy guaranteed him no less than a bizarre year – and his readers an exceptional ride with him, by turns philosophical, poetic and wild.
But A Fortune-Teller Told Me is more than a man’s account of his rambles, which was how I read it the first time. My experiences in the three years since I last picked up the book must have carved new facets in my mind, turning it into a prism that unlocked a world of fresh meanings, notions and feelings like a spectrum of colors from Terzani’s tale. The book now revealed itself to me as a meditation on the human condition, on the past and future of Asia, on the ideas of progress and development, and on superstition and that vast otherworld of phenomena we cannot explain – on top, that is, of being a rollicking good travel yarn.
One of the things I realized from A Fortune-Teller Told Me is that travel is something we can so easily take for granted. Humanity has attained such a degree of mobility that we can close our eyes and run our fingers over a map, park them at two random points, and easily find a way to get from one point to the other, be it from the Solomon Islands to Reykjavik, from Mogadishu to Alaska, or from Manila to Thimpu. Budget airlines have whittled airfares down to rock-bottom prices. Cheap package tours are letting unprecedented numbers of people from rapidly developing countries splurge their newly disposable incomes on foreign holidays. Digital cameras and the blog mania now make it possible for anyone to broadcast her Boracay photos and kuwentos over the Web.
In a sense, it is all very democratic. But if you take longer to think about it, you begin to ask: At what cost? The loss of our past as governments tear down historical buildings to make way for commercial strips, casinos and theme parks? The ruin of previously unspoiled island getaways by a surfeit of beer-guzzling, dope-smoking hippie-wannabes? The erosion of cultures and disruption of traditional ways of life as locals adjust their customs and habits to meet the needs and expectations of tourists bringing precious greenbacks?
Is it all worth it, really? I cannot help but share Terzani’s feeling that, somewhere along the way, we have misplaced our sense of the meaning of travel. We have turned it into one big race to accumulate miles, to plant the most number of flags on the world map, to fill the mantel with memorabilia from the places we have been. Yet for all the stamps on our passports, are we truly wiser, gentler and more compassionate, as travel – as God must have meant it to be – is supposed to make us?
In A Fortune-Teller Told Me, Terzani revels in the unexpected blessings of travel. He strikes up conversations with the strangers his journey throws him together with. He enjoys brushing against other warm bodies. He savors the colors, smells, sounds and tastes of landscapes and humanity. "To me this world was beautiful," he says. "A world of cardboard boxes tied with string, bundles, embraces, pushing and shoving, problems solved between people and not between computers, with lots of superfluous words and gestures, but with more feelings, fewer laws, fewer rules."
Terzani’s recollections of his journeys throughout Southeast Asia (though, sadly, he missed the Philippines!), China and Mongolia took me back to the time I went backpacking on my own in Vietnam. I was 21 and fancied myself a different sort of traveler from the typical tourist. I spent 16 days exploring the length of the country, hopping on and off buses at places that intrigued me. I made friends with locals, visiting their homes to drink thick Vietnamese coffee and to eat dragon fruit and longgans. On the train from Hanoi to Sapa, a mountain province populated by montagnards or hill tribes, I made friends with a lovely Brazilian family trekking across Asia (I still remember each of them clearly: Roghiero, Elena and Katerina). On an overnight stay in a boat on Halong Bay – "where the dragon descends into the sea" – I shared a berth with two corpulent Aussie grandpas who merrily recounted to me how Vietnamese would come up to them in the market to rub their bellies as though they were a pair of Happy Buddhas. I sent my family and boyfriend postcards that, when I found and reread them years later, bewildered me with the profundity and lyricism of what I had scribbled on them.
But in the end, I realized that I wasn’t too different from the other tourists who acted as though the country they are visiting is one huge production that had been prepared solely for them. I, too, succumbed to the instinct to turn other people and their culture into objects, exotic artifacts to be possessed and shown off. This dawned on me while I was in Sapa, when some girls from the Hmong tribe tried to sell me some of their weaving. The girls’ striking features and beautiful Indigo-dyed garb and silver accessories stirred in me an irresistible impulse to capture them on film, so I agreed to buy a few of their wares if they would let me take their photograph. Later as I walked away hurriedly, trying to shake off one of the girls, who was unhappy that I had not bought anything from her, I realized what a callous fool I had been in paying them to pose for a picture just so I could add flavor to my memoirs of my visit to Vietnam.
If I rate badly as a traveler among countries and cultures, how would I rate as a nomad in this sprawling and surging landscape of life? What sort of footprints am I leaving on the trails I roam? These are also questions that Terzani mulls and inspires.
Reading the book, it once occurred to me that, perhaps, we should impose on ourselves a moratorium on travel until such time that we have learned to be better, kinder voyagers. But what of the journey of life? We human beings are passengers on a nonstop bullet train ride that we get on at the moment of our birth and disembark from only when we emit our last breath. And even then, we might not really be ending the trip, but simply changing stations. The best we can do on this open-ended journey is to find as much beauty and meaning as we can from our vagabonding.
P.S. Shortly after I finished this essay, an unexpected blessing fell in my lap: a chance to spend a month in India. I wondered then whether Terzani was able to fulfill his dream of moving to India, and if so, whether he was still there. It even crossed my mind to look him up when I got there, certain that he would instantly recognize a fellow member of the tribe of wanderers and bid me welcome. I got so caught up exploring India, though, that I totally forgot about the whole thing. Then just a few days after I got back to Manila, my husband e-mailed me an article reviewing a book by Folco Terzani, Tiziano’s son, of his memories about his father. Tiziano had died.
My first impulse was to get my copy of A Fortune-Teller Told Me to check if any of the soothsayers had correctly predicted the date and circumstances of Terzani’s death. But I stopped myself midway, realizing that I did not really want, nor need, to know.
Terzani, the author, has a terminal case of the disease. So strong is the pull of travel on him that when a soothsayer in Hong Kong, who is able to describe events in his past with an eerie accuracy, warns him to avoid flying for a year, he gamely takes it as a pretext to explore Asia. He wanders all over his adopted continent on boat, on train, even on elephant-back, never for a moment contemplating a break from the peripatetic aspect of his journalistic work as another possible way out of his dilemma. What’s more, he takes it upon himself to seek out wherever he goes "the most eminent local fortune-teller, the most powerful sorcerer, the most revered oracle or seer or visionary or madman of the place" in the hope of learning more about himself and his fate.
That he should heed a prediction that he himself admitted most other Westerners would shrug off as the mere ravings of a mad old man or the fib of a charlatan was unusual enough. The manner he chose to deal with the prophecy guaranteed him no less than a bizarre year – and his readers an exceptional ride with him, by turns philosophical, poetic and wild.
But A Fortune-Teller Told Me is more than a man’s account of his rambles, which was how I read it the first time. My experiences in the three years since I last picked up the book must have carved new facets in my mind, turning it into a prism that unlocked a world of fresh meanings, notions and feelings like a spectrum of colors from Terzani’s tale. The book now revealed itself to me as a meditation on the human condition, on the past and future of Asia, on the ideas of progress and development, and on superstition and that vast otherworld of phenomena we cannot explain – on top, that is, of being a rollicking good travel yarn.
One of the things I realized from A Fortune-Teller Told Me is that travel is something we can so easily take for granted. Humanity has attained such a degree of mobility that we can close our eyes and run our fingers over a map, park them at two random points, and easily find a way to get from one point to the other, be it from the Solomon Islands to Reykjavik, from Mogadishu to Alaska, or from Manila to Thimpu. Budget airlines have whittled airfares down to rock-bottom prices. Cheap package tours are letting unprecedented numbers of people from rapidly developing countries splurge their newly disposable incomes on foreign holidays. Digital cameras and the blog mania now make it possible for anyone to broadcast her Boracay photos and kuwentos over the Web.
In a sense, it is all very democratic. But if you take longer to think about it, you begin to ask: At what cost? The loss of our past as governments tear down historical buildings to make way for commercial strips, casinos and theme parks? The ruin of previously unspoiled island getaways by a surfeit of beer-guzzling, dope-smoking hippie-wannabes? The erosion of cultures and disruption of traditional ways of life as locals adjust their customs and habits to meet the needs and expectations of tourists bringing precious greenbacks?
Is it all worth it, really? I cannot help but share Terzani’s feeling that, somewhere along the way, we have misplaced our sense of the meaning of travel. We have turned it into one big race to accumulate miles, to plant the most number of flags on the world map, to fill the mantel with memorabilia from the places we have been. Yet for all the stamps on our passports, are we truly wiser, gentler and more compassionate, as travel – as God must have meant it to be – is supposed to make us?
In A Fortune-Teller Told Me, Terzani revels in the unexpected blessings of travel. He strikes up conversations with the strangers his journey throws him together with. He enjoys brushing against other warm bodies. He savors the colors, smells, sounds and tastes of landscapes and humanity. "To me this world was beautiful," he says. "A world of cardboard boxes tied with string, bundles, embraces, pushing and shoving, problems solved between people and not between computers, with lots of superfluous words and gestures, but with more feelings, fewer laws, fewer rules."
Terzani’s recollections of his journeys throughout Southeast Asia (though, sadly, he missed the Philippines!), China and Mongolia took me back to the time I went backpacking on my own in Vietnam. I was 21 and fancied myself a different sort of traveler from the typical tourist. I spent 16 days exploring the length of the country, hopping on and off buses at places that intrigued me. I made friends with locals, visiting their homes to drink thick Vietnamese coffee and to eat dragon fruit and longgans. On the train from Hanoi to Sapa, a mountain province populated by montagnards or hill tribes, I made friends with a lovely Brazilian family trekking across Asia (I still remember each of them clearly: Roghiero, Elena and Katerina). On an overnight stay in a boat on Halong Bay – "where the dragon descends into the sea" – I shared a berth with two corpulent Aussie grandpas who merrily recounted to me how Vietnamese would come up to them in the market to rub their bellies as though they were a pair of Happy Buddhas. I sent my family and boyfriend postcards that, when I found and reread them years later, bewildered me with the profundity and lyricism of what I had scribbled on them.
But in the end, I realized that I wasn’t too different from the other tourists who acted as though the country they are visiting is one huge production that had been prepared solely for them. I, too, succumbed to the instinct to turn other people and their culture into objects, exotic artifacts to be possessed and shown off. This dawned on me while I was in Sapa, when some girls from the Hmong tribe tried to sell me some of their weaving. The girls’ striking features and beautiful Indigo-dyed garb and silver accessories stirred in me an irresistible impulse to capture them on film, so I agreed to buy a few of their wares if they would let me take their photograph. Later as I walked away hurriedly, trying to shake off one of the girls, who was unhappy that I had not bought anything from her, I realized what a callous fool I had been in paying them to pose for a picture just so I could add flavor to my memoirs of my visit to Vietnam.
If I rate badly as a traveler among countries and cultures, how would I rate as a nomad in this sprawling and surging landscape of life? What sort of footprints am I leaving on the trails I roam? These are also questions that Terzani mulls and inspires.
Reading the book, it once occurred to me that, perhaps, we should impose on ourselves a moratorium on travel until such time that we have learned to be better, kinder voyagers. But what of the journey of life? We human beings are passengers on a nonstop bullet train ride that we get on at the moment of our birth and disembark from only when we emit our last breath. And even then, we might not really be ending the trip, but simply changing stations. The best we can do on this open-ended journey is to find as much beauty and meaning as we can from our vagabonding.
P.S. Shortly after I finished this essay, an unexpected blessing fell in my lap: a chance to spend a month in India. I wondered then whether Terzani was able to fulfill his dream of moving to India, and if so, whether he was still there. It even crossed my mind to look him up when I got there, certain that he would instantly recognize a fellow member of the tribe of wanderers and bid me welcome. I got so caught up exploring India, though, that I totally forgot about the whole thing. Then just a few days after I got back to Manila, my husband e-mailed me an article reviewing a book by Folco Terzani, Tiziano’s son, of his memories about his father. Tiziano had died.
My first impulse was to get my copy of A Fortune-Teller Told Me to check if any of the soothsayers had correctly predicted the date and circumstances of Terzani’s death. But I stopped myself midway, realizing that I did not really want, nor need, to know.
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