A FORTUNE-TELLER TOLD ME

A straightforward literary travel guide that takes us through Bangkok, Malacca, and other points east.

Terzani (an Italian correspondent for Der Spiegel and other European publications) opens his account with an odd anecdote: in 1976, a fortune-teller in Hong Kong warned him that under no circumstances should he fly in 1993, “not even once.” Taking the soothsayer at his word, he chose instead to take a leisurely tour of South Asia by train and car, and thereby “was obliged 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’.” As it turned out, the fortune-teller was right: a German correspondent who took his place on the air circuit died in a helicopter crash. Duly chastened, the author reflected on his narrow escape (and other matters of life and death) as he traveled throughout the region, taking in the sights in Thailand, Singapore, and Ho Chi Minh City (and briefly venturing as far afield as Mongolia, Russia, and Italy). Terzani is a trustworthy enough narrator (albeit somewhat given to spiritual musings of a vaguely New Age bent), and he takes us through such little-explored landscapes as the Bolovens plateau of Cambodia (“the most heavily bombed region in the history of the world”) and Nanning (a Chinese city in which “the impatience between Chinese and foreigners is mutual, and in the Chinese it is now mixed with envy, anger, and an ever less concealed racial aspiration to settled old scores with outsiders”). This is a well-written account, but undistinguished from the usual run of travel narratives—even when Terzani salts his standard guidebook descriptions with (equally standard) PC denunciations of Western materialism.

Solid if unexciting fare.