The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

Paul Theroux, an American writer and lifelong train enthusiast who grew up near the Boston and Maine railroad, departed London's Victoria Station on a four-month railway journey through Asia, aiming to board every eastbound train from England to Japan.

The journey began on the 15:30 to Paris, where Theroux first encountered Duffill, a shabbily dressed elderly Englishman carrying oddly shaped parcels bound for Istanbul. At the Gare de Lyon, the car coupled with the Direct-Orient Express, and Theroux met Molesworth, a witty British actors' agent and former Indian army officer who became his chief drinking companion. The Orient Express lacked a dining car, forcing passengers to buy food at station stops. At the Italian station of Domodossola, Duffill was left behind on the platform when the train departed unexpectedly, and Molesworth coined the verb "duffilled" to describe being stranded, a running joke throughout the book. After crossing Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, the train arrived in Istanbul. Theroux spent several days exploring the city's mosques and bazaars and visiting the Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal, a Nobel Prize candidate who declared William Faulkner the greatest Marxist writer.

From Istanbul, Theroux took the Lake Van Express across the barren Turkish interior. After a ferry crossing at Lake Van, he entered Iran, bribing a conductor for a proper compartment that he shared with Sadik, a resourceful Turkish entrepreneur bound for Australia. Iranian National Railways proved surprisingly comfortable, but Theroux describes Teheran as a boom town resembling Dallas, dominated by rowdy American oil workers. An embassy officer warned against the southern route through Baluchistan due to tribal fighting, so Theroux took the Night Mail to Meshed instead.

Afghanistan, which has no railway, forced Theroux onto buses and planes. He describes the country as expensive and barbarous, recounting a gunshot fired through a bus roof in Herat and a camel collapsing under its load in Kabul. He hurried to the Khyber Pass for the weekly Khyber Pass Local, an engineering marvel with 34 tunnels and 92 bridges that carried tribal passengers to Peshawar's bazaar.

On the Khyber Mail into Pakistan, a young Indian man returning from England spoke bitterly about racial abuse in London. In Lahore, Theroux wandered through Rudyard Kipling's city and visited the deserted Punjab Club. On the Frontier Mail to Delhi, his compartment-mate was Hermann, a gaunt German with a heroin addiction whose needle-scarred arms marked him as unlikely to recover. Arriving in Delhi, Theroux confronted the "station village" of families living on the platforms, bathing and cooking amid the commuters.

India occupies the largest portion of the journey. Getting a ticket to the hill station of Simla required navigating a chain of officials, each delegating to the next. On the narrow-gauge rail car ascending through 103 tunnels in the Himalayas, Theroux met Vishnu Bhardwaj, the Accountant General of the Punjab, who had personally fired 32 corrupt employees and never accepted a bribe. Bombay's extremes, from the grandeur of Victoria Station to hundreds of people sleeping on sidewalks, echo Mark Twain's identical observations from 1896. The Grand Trunk Express to Madras filled with Tamil passengers who transformed the train into a mobile home, and the engine broke down outside Sirpur. In Madras, a taxi driver lured Theroux to a rural brothel staffed by girls none older than 15; Theroux declined and left. At Rameswaram, he visited tombs said to be those of Cain and Abel before taking a ferry to Ceylon.

In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), acute food shortages shaped every encounter. Returning to India, Theroux boarded the Howrah Mail from Madras to Calcutta. Calcutta, with its Kali shrines and pavement dwellers, prompts Theroux to compare the city to the London of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. His lasting image of India is a one-legged man hopping through the Chowringhee crowds, outrunning him.

Theroux flew to Burma, where the Mandalay Express played continuous piped music and broke down repeatedly. In the hill station of Maymyo, he met Mr. Bernard, an 80-year-old Anglo-Indian who had been head cook for the Royal Artillery from 1912 to 1941. With help from Tony, a Eurasian Morse code operator, Theroux took the Lashio Mail through forbidden territory to the Gokteik Viaduct, a massive American-built steel trestle spanning a thousand-foot gorge. Security Officer U Sit Aye escorted him and warned him not to return.

Passing through Thailand, Theroux describes Bangkok as a city smelling of sex, its massage-parlor economy sustained by tourism after the American troop withdrawal. The International Express carried him south through Malaysia, where ethnic tensions between Malay and Chinese populations surfaced in conversations with passengers. In Singapore, immigration officers questioned his hair length and counted his money; Theroux recalls his three years living there and describes the city-state as politically repressive despite its modern appearance.

In Vietnam, still at war, Theroux rode the Saigon-Bien Hoa train in the railway director's private car while squatters' huts pressed so close to the tracks that he could see into their rooms. On the Hué-Danang line, the scenery stunned him with jade bays and smoking valleys. He observes that Americans left no durable infrastructure, only crumbling barracks, in contrast to the solid French-built post offices and cathedrals that remained.

Japan offered a sharp contrast: bullet trains of extraordinary speed, and a culture of precision that left Theroux feeling encapsulated and anxious. In Tokyo, he watched a show of stylized violence and eroticism at the Nichigeki Music Hall. In Kyoto, he drank with academics who discussed Yukio Mishima's suicide, strip shows, and Henry James with equal seriousness.

The final leg was the Trans-Siberian Express, beginning with a rough sea crossing from Yokohama to Nakhodka aboard the M.V. Khabarovsk. Theroux upgraded to Soft Class on the Vostok Express and found a luxurious prerevolution compartment with velvet curtains and goose-feather pillows. The Rossiya Express from Khabarovsk to Moscow covered 6,000 miles of taiga, tundra, and frozen rivers. His compartment-mate Vladimir sketched telephone poles, played chess, and recited Alexander Pushkin at Lake Baikal before departing at Irkutsk, having stolen Theroux's cigars. On Christmas Eve, Theroux and Vassily, the dining car manager, drank champagne and sang together in the empty, freezing dining car. On Christmas morning, a BBC broadcast of "Away in a Manger" reached his Japanese radio while Russian passengers watched the Volga glide beneath the train at Yaroslavl.

Arriving in Moscow on Christmas night, Theroux rushed to catch the train to London but was stopped at the barrier: He lacked a Polish transit visa. He watched the westbound express pull away without him, duffilled at last. Two days later he caught another train, slept through Warsaw, and boarded the final connection at Harwich. Holding four stained notebooks, he reflects that all travel is circular, and that the journey moved him from journalism through fiction to autobiography and confession.