A Conversation with Pico Iyer: Part Five
On January 26, I had the honor of hosting a conversation with the poignant, provocative, and peripatetic author Pico Iyer at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. This event, sponsored by Adventurer Collection member Geographic Expeditions, launched Pico’s North American tour for his new book, The Man Within My Head. The evening turned into an exhilarating exploration of places and lessons cherished by both of us. We hope you will enjoy this edited transcript of our conversation. For reading ease, we are publishing it in five parts. This is the fifth and final part of our conversation.
DG: Is there one quintessential travel experience that embodies for you the value and the potential of travel? Can you think of something?
PI: I can. Do you mind my telling a story? I hope I haven’t told it before and I’m not becoming like the party bore reciting the same thing time after time.
DG: I’d love to hear it.
PI: I vividly remember when I went to southern Yemen a few years ago. Actually, by chance, I’d been there at the age of two in 1959 in the little port of Aden. In 1959 Aden was the largest port in the world outside Manhattan because it was the place where all the British ships stopped for refueling as they traveled between Britain and India. But when I went back to Aden a few years ago, it was really the most broken, desperate place I think I’ve ever seen: no shops, no houses, no playgrounds, goats foraging in the main street. When the occasional car would stop at a red light, sunken-cheeked old women would come and hammer on the windows asking for a handout. There’s nothing there because it had been through 40 years of war. I finally found a hotel on the beach, but every time I went into the hotel, I had to walk through a security machine as at our airports. I walked out onto the beach as soon as I arrived and it was absolutely empty. Then I noticed on one side of me, five armed men with AK-47s. On the other side of me, five armed men with AK-47s. Nobody enjoying the beach, but ten men on guard, I suppose protecting me from southern Yemen. As you know, and everybody in this room knows, in places like that of desperate need, you get humbled by the kindness. Everybody there couldn’t have been friendlier, they were fascinated with America, but also they were just extending themselves to me because they could see that I was the only tourist there. They were offering to show me around or share their stories or keep me company, so I had a very rich couple of days there.
Then when it came time for me to fly out—I was going on Yemenia, which is not a part of the Star Alliance or the One World system—somebody came to me in the hotel lobby and said, ‘’Oh, by the way, your flight’s been cancelled." And I said, “For how long?” And he said, “Three or four days,” but the way he said that, I thought probably three or four years, possibly three or four lifetimes. I felt there was no way of getting out of Aden, and my wife was waiting to meet me the next day in Greece and my bosses were anxiously waiting for my report from there, so I had to leave. I found out from a very, very kind lady in the Yemenia office that the only way I could leave Yemen was to drive right across the heart of the country—this was 9 o’clock in the evening—a six-hour drive for a flight that would leave the next morning from northern Yemen at 6 a.m. Now this was not good news to me because northern Yemen and southern Yemen had been at war with one another for a long, long time. It was not good news to me because I happened to know that the main traditional source of income in these places was the kidnapping of foreigners. And it was also not good news to me because I knew there was barely a road there. But I finally found—and it was getting very late now for a six-hour drive, check-in was at four in the morning—this old man who was, I suppose, so needy that he was ready to get in the car and drive me—for what would be a pittance for us but was a lot of money for him—all the way across the country. He could barely look over the driver’s wheel. He’d probably never been behind a driver’s wheel before.
We set off into the darkness. At first there were the lights of trucks coming at us and then it was pitch black. We were up in the high places of Yemen, which are very, very high and absolutely dark except for the tower houses eerily shining, the medieval tower places that looked like they’re ready for full-out sieges. I looked on one side of the car and it was a sheer precipice. Then it began to rain and we began swerving this way and that way. Then we turned around a corner and suddenly there was a clatter of seven teenage boys with Kalashnikovs gathering around the driver. I showed them the passport and he paid them off, I guess, and we drove on a bit. Then there was another group of boys with more guns around the next corner, and then another boy. It was a perfect example of what we were just talking about: very soon I realized there is nothing I can do to bring this to a happy ending, to control this, to make this go as I would like. I just have to pray or to surrender or close my eyes, or all of the above.
The rain was falling more and more heavily, it was getting darker and darker, and suddenly, in the middle of this emptiness, he stopped and just walked out into the night. I was sitting in the back seat. He strolled back about 15 minutes later, and, of course he and I had no words in common, but I pointed angrily at my watch and he opened his hand to disclose a bar of chocolate and a can of Coke. He was worried on my behalf that I had missed my dinner and he’d gone out and somehow found dinner for me and nothing for himself.
We kept on driving and just as the first call to prayer was coming up, we arrived in the capital, the huge oil drums in the middle of the empty streets just like in south-central LA. It really seemed like a war zone. We got to the terminal with minutes to spare. I gave him his money and raced into the terminal. I checked in and four hours later, there I was in Dubai, where they’re selling Maseratis in the airport, with the Armani café and ski slopes in the shopping malls, a seven-star hotel not far away. Most of all I’m thinking that this poor man has to make all the drive back. Who knows if he would make it. Who knows what he would have to go through without me, having to pay off those boys. I’m not sure he’d ever made that trip before. So what for me, again, was a story I would share with you many years later was for him an everyday occurrence. What for me was so dramatic and terrifying, he had known probably 96 percent of the days of his existence.
The final part of the story is that when I got back at the end of that trip to Santa Barbara, I was sitting in my room in this place of great gated comfort and I was thinking, how can I possibly put this place of privilege even in the same sentence as Yemen? They don’t seem to belong to the same planet. I was literally sitting at my desk thinking about this when my mother raced in and she said, “That crazy place you just went to is in the news. It’s in all the headlines right now. We’re being told it’s a center of evil.” I had gone to Yemen five weeks before 9-11 and on 9-11 we were suddenly reminded that Yemen is where Osama bin Laden’s home village is. It’s a famous hotbed of Al-Qaeda terrorists—hence all the security in my hotel. It was the site of the previous attack against the United States, the blowing up of the USS Cole in Aden harbor, right outside my hotel 10 months previously. Instantly we were being told that in some ways it was our moral duty to wipe this place off the face of the earth. There’s a truth to that, because it is full of mischief-makers who have murderous designs on us and it is one of the most incendiary, anti-American places in parts. But of course just by virtue of being there, I remembered all the people I’d met—their faces, their voices, their longings for America. I think many of them probably had relatives in New York, maybe even in the World Trade Center, people who couldn’t have been nicer, couldn’t have been more sympathetic to America, and couldn’t have been more human.
I think that’s the main difference. If you’re sitting in Santa Barbara and you hear the word Yemen, Yemen translates to a government, Al-Qaeda, or certain interests that are hostile to our own. As soon as you get off in Yemen, or any country in the world, Yemen means that kid who’s smiling at you, that person who’s offering you a can of Coke or a myriad other things. First it becomes human, second it becomes impossible to hate, and third it becomes something much more nuanced and complex than any of our ideological assumptions, on Right or Left, can begin to do justice to.
That’s a long story and it’s one of myriad—and everybody in this room has many such stories—but it just reminded me that it was a really uncomfortable trip, but I was so grateful for the rest of my life that when somebody says the word Yemen, I can think about the man who showed me around the cemetery where his parents and all his siblings had died in war. I could think about that old man who drove me, and I could think about the woman in the Yemenia office. Yemen would never have that reductive meaning for me. I probably got much more out of that trip than when I’d been to Paris or Venice or one of those places that are much more seductive in obvious ways.
DG: If there were a button that said “publish,” I would just push that button.
PI: I think most of the people in this room actually are seeking out these kinds of unusual places for these same reasons. I’m not saying anything that everybody here doesn’t know or hasn’t experienced already, I suspect.
DG: A tad more eloquently perhaps than most of us would say it. It was beautiful and I think just to reference GeoEx, that’s exactly why they do what they do. GeoEx is all about getting people out into the world so that they bring back that sense of connection and understanding. What you just said was a beautiful encapsulation of all of the difficulties and riches and contrasting feelings that we have when we travel, when we’re put in difficulty and suddenly someone does something that shocks us with its kindness that we never expected. The context changes automatically and suddenly you think, I have such a better understanding of that place that I’ll carry with me the rest of my life now. I loved what you said about Yemen. That it’s a hot button for so many people and for you it’s this complicated mosaic of people and encounters and deprivations and riches.
PI: Thank you. It’s a story but much more important, it’s a question or it’s a challenge. In fact, the story and the drama and the adventure are the least important aspect of it. It’s what one carries with one forever, the Yemen that keeps on turning in one’s head, which has not just to do with the real country but the reminder of what it speaks for—and many other countries, too—and what I have never had to encounter or only had to encounter one day of my life instead of every day. That’s always a tonic thing.
DG: Everything in that story was wonderful to me, but I’ll never forget the chocolate bar. I’ll never look at chocolate bars the same way again. What an amazing moment.
PI: And we had no words in common, as I say, but we formed a very strong sense of fellowship, as you can imagine, over the course of that night. I think we were both so relieved when we made it to the capital. He was probably relieved when I safely made it to the terminal and was able to pay him. I’m hoping he got back safely.
DG: He’s still driving in your head and always will be.
PI: And he may be remembering that crazy foreigner who inflicted that trip on him.
DG: I’m going to ask you one last question, going back to the original question I asked so long ago. I want to show you this picture—this is Pico’s new book [ The Man Within My Head ] and this is the author photo on his new book. What do you see when you look at that picture?
PI: Professional photographer! I found this wonderful photographer in Toronto a few years ago who has the great gift of making you feel absolutely relaxed and you forget he’s there. He’s just the nicest, sweetest person ever. We talk just like I’m talking to you and then suddenly he says, “I’ve taken a hundred photos.” He catches something that is very hard for photographs to catch, and then if, cunningly, you only choose the best one of all those pictures, you can give a totally unrepresentative view, like here.
This angle is more reflective. It’s looking sideways rather than out.
No one’s ever going to ask me this question again, which is a register of what a great question it is. Hmm. It looks meditative, balanced. Somebody once asked me, “Why do you travel?” I said, “In search of ambiguity.” A few years later I saw an interview with Graham Greene and they asked him just before his death, “Why do you travel?” He said, “In search of ambiguity,” so if nothing else I’m in good company. These eyes look very much pitched towards ambiguity, not ready to come to conclusions, and ready to see what’s coming next. Maybe a little wary, but I hope not.
DG: Very much more open to the world than this one [on Video Night in Kathmandu ].
PI: Thank you for noticing that. I wouldn’t have guessed, but you’re right, I hope. Even though this [first] one thought he was open to the world.
DG: He was.
PI: Yes, but in a different way.
DG: When I look at that picture and when I look at you, and I think I speak for everybody here, I see someone I admire tremendously, for their eloquence, their open-heartedness, their open-mindedness, their incredible humanity. We love what we see. Thank you very much.
PI: Thank you, Don.
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