count on statistical probability and bet all their money on the red. Not me: I bet on the black again. Has the ball itself not winked at me?
And then, the idea of not flying for a whole year was an attraction in itself. A challenge, first and foremost. It really tickled me to pretend an old Chinese in Hong Kong might hold the key to my future. It felt like taking the first step into an unknown world. I was curious to see where more steps in the same direction would lead. If nothing else, they would introduce me, for a while, to a different life from the one I normally led.
For years I have travelled by plane, my profession taking me to the craziest places on earth, places where wars are being waged, where revolutions break out or terrible disasters occur. Obviously I had held my breath on more than one occasion – landing with an engine in flames, or with a mechanic squeezed in a trapdoor between the seats, hammering away at the undercarriage that was refusing to descend.
If I had dismissed the prophecy and carried on flying in 1993, I would certainly have done so with more than the usual pinch of anxiety that sooner or later strikes all those – including pilots – who spend much of their lives in the air; but I would have carried on with my normal routine: planes, taxis, hotels, taxis, planes. That divine warning (yes: ‘divination’, ‘divine’, so alike!) gave me a chance – in a way obliged me – to inject a variant into my days.
The prophecy was a pretext. The truth is that at fifty-five one has a strong urge to give one’s life a touch of poetry, to take a fresh look at the world, reread the classics, rediscover that the sun rises, that there is a moon in the sky and that there is more to time than the clock’s tick can tell us. This was my chance, and I could not let it slip.
But there was a practical problem. Should I stop working for a year? Take leave of absence? Or carry on working despite this limitation? Journalism, like many other professions, is now dominated by electronics. Computers, modems, fax play a paramount role. Snappy, instantaneous television images transmitted by satellite have set new standards, and print journalism, rather than concentrating on reflection and the personal, limps after them in the effort to match the invincible immediacy (and with it the superficiality) of TV.
During the days of the Tiananmen massacre, CNN was broadcasting live from the square in the centre of Peking, and many of my colleagues preferred to stay in their hotel rooms and watch television rather than go out and see what was happening a few hundred yards away. That was the quickest way of keeping up to date, of following events. Moreover, their editors were seeing – thousands of miles away – the same images on their screens; and those images became the truth, the only truth. No need to look for another.
How would my editors react to the idea of having an Asia correspondent who, on a whim, took into his head not to fly for a whole year? What would they think of a man who in 1993 suddenly became a journalist from the beginning of the twentieth century, one of those who would set off at the outbreak of a war and would often arrive when it was already over?
My chance to find out came in October 1992, when one of the two editors-in-chief of Der Spiegel passed through Bangkok. One evening after dinner, without much beating about the bush, I told him the story of the Hong Kong fortune-teller and announced my intention of not travelling by plane in 1993.
‘After what you’ve told me, how can I ask you to fly to Manila and cover the next coup d’etat, or to Bangladesh for the next typhoon? Do as you think best,’ was his reply. Magnificent as usual, my faraway masters! They saw that this caprice of mine might give rise to a different kind of story, one that might offer the reader something the others lacked.
Der Spiegel’s reaction obviously took a load off my mind, but still I did not finally commit myself to the plan. The prophecy would take effect at the beginning of the new year, and I intended to make my decision at the very last moment, the stroke of midnight on 31 December, wherever I might find myself.
Well, I was in the Laotian forest. My celebratory feast was an omelette of red ants’ eggs. There was no champagne to see the New Year in; instead I raised a glass of fresh water, and solemnly resolved not to yield for any reason, at any cost, to the temptation of flying. I would travel the world by any possible means as long as it was not a plane, a helicopter or a glider.
It was an excellent decision, and 1993 turned out to be one of the most extraordinary years I have ever spent: I was marked for death, and instead I was reborn. What looked like a curse proved to be a blessing. Moving between Asia and Europe by train, by ship, by car, sometimes even on foot, the rhythm of my days changed completely. Distances became real again, and I reacquired the taste of discovery and adventure.
Suddenly, no longer able to rush off to an airport, pay by credit card and be swept off in a flash to literally anywhere, I was obliged once again to see the world as a complex network of countries divided by rivers and seas that required crossing and by frontiers that invariably spelt ‘visa’ – a special visa, what is more, saying ‘surface travel’, as if this were so unusual as to cast suspicion on anyone who insisted on it. Getting from place to place was no longer a matter of hours, but of days or weeks. I had to avoid making mistakes, so before starting out I pored over maps. No longer were mountains beautiful, irrelevant frills seen from a porthole, but potential obstacles on my way.
Covering great distances by train or boat restored my sense of the earth’s immensity. And above all it led me to rediscover the majority of humanity whose very existence we well-nigh forget by dint of flying: the humanity that moves about burdened with bundles and children while the world of the aeroplane passes in every sense over their heads.
My undertaking not to fly turned into a game full of surprises. If you pretend to be blind for a while, you find that the other senses grow sharper to compensate for the lack of sight. Avoiding planes has a similar effect: the train journey, with its ample time and cramped space, re-animates an atrophied curiosity about details. You give keener attention to what lies around you, to what hurtles past the window. In a plane you soon learn not to look, not to listen: the people you meet, the conversations you have, are always the same. After thirty years of flying I can recall precisely no one. On trains, on Asian ones at least, things are different: you share your days, your meals and your boredom with people you would otherwise never meet, and some of them remain unforgettable.
As soon as you decide to do without planes, you realize how they impose their limited way of looking at things on you. Oh, they diminish distances, which is handy enough, but they end up diminishing everything, including your understanding of the world. You leave Rome at sunset, have dinner, sleep a while, and at dawn you are in India. But in reality each country has its own special character. We need time if we are to prepare ourselves for the encounter; we must make an effort if we are to enjoy the conquest. Everything has become so easy that we no longer take pleasure in anything. To understand is a joy, but only if it comes with effort, and nowhere is this more true than in the experience of other countries. Reading a guidebook while hopping from one airport to another is not the same as the slow, laborious absorption – as if by osmosis – of the humours of the earth to which one remains bound when travelling by train.
Reached by plane, all places become alike – destinations separated from one another by nothing more than a few hours’ flight. Frontiers, created by nature and history and rooted in the consciousness of the people who live within them, lose their meaning and cease to exist for those who travel to and from the air-conditioned bubbles of airports, where the border is a policeman in front of a computer screen, where the first encounter with the new place is the baggage carousel, where the emotion of leave-taking is dissipated in the rush to get to the duty-free shop – now the same everywhere.
Ships approach countries by slowly and politely entering the mouths of their rivers; and distant ports become long-awaited goals, each with its own face, each with its own smell. What used to be called airfields were once a little like that. No more.
