The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes - Hardcover

Hoffman, Carl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767929802 ISBN 13: 9780767929806

Publisher: Broadway Books, 2010

Synopsis

Indonesian Ferry Sinks.  Peruvian Bus Plunges Off Cliff.  African Train Attacked by Mobs.  Whenever he picked up the newspaper, Carl Hoffman noticed those short news bulletins, which seemed about as far from the idea of tourism, travel as the pursuit of pleasure, as it was possible to get.  So off he went, spending six months circumnavigating the globe on the world's worst conveyances: the statistically most dangerous airlines, the most crowded and dangerous ferries, the slowest buses, and the most rickety trains.  The Lunatic Express takes us into the heart of the world, to some its most teeming cities and remotest places: from Havana to Bogotá on the perilous Cuban Airways.  Lima to the Amazon on crowded night buses where the road is a washed-out track.  Across Indonesia and Bangladesh by overcrowded ferries that kill 1,000 passengers a year.  On commuter trains in Mumbai so crowded that dozens perish daily, across Afghanistan as the Taliban closes in, and, scariest of all, Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., by Greyhound.

The Lunatic Express is the story of traveling with seatmates and deckmates who have left home without American Express cards on conveyances that don't take Visa, and seldom take you anywhere you'd want to go.   But it's also the story of traveling as it used to be -- a sometimes harrowing trial, of finding adventure in a modern, rapidly urbanizing world and the generosity of poor strangers, from ear cleaners to urban bus drivers to itinerant roughnecks, who make up most of the world's population.  More than just an adventure story, The Lunatic Express is a funny, harrowing and insightful look at the world as it is, a planet full of hundreds of millions of people, mostly poor, on the move and seeking their fortunes.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Hoffman has driven the Baja 1000, ridden reindeer in Siberia, sailed an open dinghy 250 miles, and traveled to 65 countries.  When he's able to stay put for more than a few months at a time, he lives in Washington, D.C., where his three children make fun of him on a pretty constant basis. He is a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and Wired magazines, and his stories about travel and technology also appear in Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Men's Journal and Popular Mechanics.

Reviews

Travel and technology journalist Hoffman (Hunting Warbirds) had two motives for penning this tour of the world's most life-threatening modes of transportation, including trains in India, buses in South America, and trucks in Afghanistan: to expose the "parallel reality," obscured by the tourism industry, of millions for whom "travel was still a punishing, unpredictable, and sometimes deadly work of travail"; and for thrills. By the first measure-showing how much of the world gets from place to place-Hoffman is commendably fascinating: his depiction of the horrors people endure just to see family members or get to work is unforgettable. Unfortunately, Hoffman's secondary motive dominates much of the ruminating prose, and it's hard to sympathize with his middle-aged family-man angst when he's subjecting his teenage daughter to a 24-hour ride across South American mountains in a bus with no bathroom. Elsewhere, a powerful description of the Indian train system segues into a tepid quasi-love affair. Readers with the patience to avoid some self-indulgent side-tracks will find much to reconsider during their next tough commute.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

You have to wonder who in their right mind would voluntarily fly on an airline with one of the world’s worst safety records, or ride on a commuter train on which passengers die on an alarmingly regular basis. The answer is obvious: for most of the world’s travelers, Hoffman tells us, travel is no luxury. The majority of today’s travelers are not tourists; they travel because they must—usually for work—and they are routinely forced to endure incredibly unpleasant circumstances. Hoffman, being an adventurous travel writer, thought it might be instructive to take a few months and travel the world the way most of its nontourist population does: on the least safe airlines, the most crowded buses, through some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places on the planet. The result is a thoroughly fascinating book, full of shocking stories and plenty of things to make your skin crawl (cockroaches, anyone?). This is one travel book whose audience is restricted to armchair travelers; let’s face it, would we really want to follow in the author’s footsteps? --David Pitt

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Mumbai: The city’s cattle class train commute has put a big question
mark over the future of a brilliant sixteen-year-old girl. Raushan
Jawwad, who scored over 92 percent in her class X examination a
few months ago, lost both legs after being pushed out of a crowded
local train near Andheri on Tuesday.
—Times of India, October 17, 2008
 
Seven
 
The 290th Victim
 
“Everything in that book is true,” said Nasirbhai. It was almost
100 degrees, the humidity of the Bay of Bengal pressing
down, and he was wearing a white dress shirt over a sleeveless
undershirt, pleated black slacks, and black oxford shoes. Small
scars were etched around brown eyes that studied me from a
wide, inscrutable face; a big stone of lapis studded one finger,
and a silver bracelet dangled from his wrist. He had a barrel
chest and his hands hung at his sides, ready, waiting— never in
his pockets. He looked immovable, like a pitbull, like a character
from another time and place, and in a way he was. “That
book” was Shantaram, the international best-selling novel written
by Australian Gregory David Roberts, who’d escaped from
prison in Oz and found his way to Bombay two decades ago,
where he’d become deeply involved with its criminal gangs and
Nasir— who always carried the honorific bhai, “uncle.”
 
“We met in the 1980s,” Nasirbhai said, standing on a corner
in Colaba, one of Mumbai’s oldest neighborhoods and its tourist
epicenter, the streets lined with vendors selling tobacco and sandals
and newspapers and bangles, pedestrians as thick on the
sidewalks as attendees at a rock concert. Roberts was famous
now, a Mumbai legend, and through a friend of a friend had
connected me to Nasirbhai, who agreed to take me deep onto
the commuter trains of the most crowded city on earth, where
the day’s simple commute was a matter of life and death. “Traveling
on these trains is very risky because they are so full,” Nasirbhai
said. “But people must be at work, they must not be late
or their boss will fire them. They must get to their destination, so
they lean out of the doors, hang on to the windows, climb on top
of the train. They risk their life to get to work every day.”
 
By population, the city— just nineteen miles across, with 19
million souls— was bigger than 173 countries. The population
density of America was thirty-one people per square kilometer;
Singapore 2,535 and Bombay island 17,550; some neighborhoods
had nearly one million people per square kilometer. A
never-ending stream of Indians was migrating to Mumbai,
which was swelling, groaning, barely able to keep pace. In 1990
an average of 3,408 people were packing a nine-car train; ten
years later that number had grown to more than 4,500. Seven
million people a day rode the trains, fourteen times the whole
population of Washington, D.C. But it was the death rate that
shocked the most; Nasirbhai was no exaggerating alarmist. In
April 2008 Mumbai’s Central and Western railway released the
official numbers: 20,706 Mumbaikers killed on the trains in the
last five years. They were the most dangerous conveyances on
earth.
 
Copyright (c) 2010 by Carl Hoffman.  
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0767929802
• ISBN 13: 9780767929806
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304