Jupiter's Travels

by Ted Simon

In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see.

In Nice I have a friend who manages a ‘Grand Hotel’ on the Boulevard des Anglais called the Westminster, slightly faded since its Edwardian heyday when expeditions like mine were undertaken by gentlemen. It strikes me as a suitable place from which to say a last Good-bye, and the ‘ departing explorer’ poses for a picture by the potted palm outside the revolving door. We had hoped to line the hotel staff up outside, but the union wouldn’t allow it.

It was far less infected than Nairobi by the trashy images of international business, credit-card culture, bankers’ baloney, ersatz ethnic, Hilton hybrid, and the rest of the fungus that spreads from the airports to rot away the world’s capital cities. The sea trade kept Mombasa alive.

lethargic, presiding over an ever more limited range of food and drink. I ate some sambusas, deep-fried triangular pastry cases stuffed with spiced vegetable which are the Asian equivalent of a hamburger.

Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.

He says he is the army, and I have to pay him a dollar. ‘How do you say in English,’ he says in English, ‘when you have too much in the night?’ ‘Hangover,’ I say. ‘Hamburger?’ ‘No, hangover’ – and I write it out for him. I HAVE A HANGOVER. ‘I have a hamburger,’ he reads, entertaining us both. I begin to like him a little, but I’m still pissed off about the dollar.