Writer Theroux regales Camden with travel tales

CAMDEN – Paul Theroux won’t tell you the best hotels to stay at in Bangkok or the five-star restaurants of Rome. The famous travel writer and novelist says he doesn’t go to those kind of places when he’s researching a book.

“I’m not interested in comfort. Travel is not about having a good time,” Theroux said Sunday night to the 300 people who turned out to hear him at the Camden Opera House. “It’s about having a thoroughly bad time. I want to find out how the real people live.”

Theroux, who may be best known for his travel book “The Old Patagonian Express” and novel “The Mosquito Coast,” spent one year at the University of Maine in 1959, but Maine winters were not to his liking. In recent years, he acquired a Penobscot Bay island where he spends summers. He winters on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii, where, among other pursuits, he keeps bees.

Theroux protests that the poet John Dunne was wrong when he penned, “No man is an island.” He declared, “I am an island!”

Midcoast author Tom DeMarco introduced Theroux, quipping that “Paul takes you to places you want to take off your list.”

Still, through his distinctive prose, Theroux has managed to lure in armchair and avid travelers alike and transport them to far-flung and not-so-exotic parts over the years. Readers find themselves hooked by his vivid descriptions of landscapes, travel conveyances and the people he meets.

In “The Great Railway Bazaar,” his first best seller in 1975, Theroux traveled by train from London to China and returned through Russia via the Trans-Siberian Express. In “The Old Patagonian Express,” published in 1979, he took a train from Boston to Chicago and kept on hopping trains until he wound up in Esquel, Patagonia, close to the southern tip of South America.

“The whole culture of a country is embodied in a railway carriage,” he explained. “It’s a great way of meeting people and learning about them.”

For “The Happy Isles of Oceania,” Theroux explored South Pacific atolls and islands in a collapsible kayak. Along the same line, the Massachusetts native once rowed around Cape Cod in a small open boat.

Theroux advises aspiring travel writers to “go to a place out of touch. Spend two years there. One of the worst things you can do is go home again. Travel is about being disconnected. It’s the only way to get 100 percent into a place.”

In his latest travel book, “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town,” the 63-year-old travel writer makes a four-day journey between two African towns. His choices of transportation were a bus or convoy of cattle trucks. He picked the latter because the trucks had to stop to feed, water and rest the cargo.

“If you’re 60, people look at you differently while you are riding on the back of a truck in Africa,” Theroux remarked. “I don’t like being conspicuous.”

Theroux’s most famous novel is undoubtedly “The Mosquito Coast,” which was made into the 1986 movie starring Harrison Ford, Helen Mirren and River Phoenix. The story is about a family that immigrates to the jungles of Central America, where the father is intent on building an ice-making plant.

“There is nothing better than writing a novel,” Theroux reflected, adding, “Travel is also an inner journey like writing a novel, only you’re doing it on foot.”

Chuck Veeder can be reached at veederandlongtin.com.