The Tao of Travel

Many distinguished visitors to Hav recorded their impressions: Chekhov, Lady Hester Stanhope, Ibn Battuta, and Marco Polo—the greatest and most literate of travelers. But also we learn that later visitors included Noël Coward, Coco Chanel, Thomas Mann, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, and Sir Richard Burton. Marco Polo remarked on Hav as "a place of strange buildings and rites, not like other places." The elaborate architecture is described, with quotations from Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and others.

The narrator says, midway through the book, "The meaning of Hav is easy."

In terms of politics, art, war, and climate, Hav is the essence of the Mediterranean, a cultural confusion, layer upon layer, Greek, Turk, Italian, the great glittering talkative mass of conquerors and imperialists and evangelists—and writers: Edward Lear, James Joyce, Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence.

"But then the advantage of going native in Hav is that nobody knows what native is ... you can take your choice!"

In this believable book, Jan Morris, the writer who has been everywhere, has created out of her travels and her reading a sunny, polyglot nation that is claimed by many nationalities, but in its very complexity is a fragility. It is, incidentally, also a way of showing how the somewhat despised Kretevs—those ancestors of the Welsh, of whose nation Jan Morris is a proud member—have been overwhelmed. Though the book is partly a satire on the multicultural Mediterranean, it is also a capriccio—one of the few successful ones I know in fiction—goodhearted, learned, and enlightening.

I asked Jan once what was going through her head as she was writing it. She said, "I wrote Last Letters from Hav because I had come to realize that I had never scratched more than the surface of any place or period I'd ever written about, and it was intended to be an allegory of civic and historical complexity—though nobody ever read it that way."

17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere

"YOU MUST HAVE EATEN SOME WEIRD STUFF," I am frequently told. I quite liked fufu (mashed yams) in Nigeria, and snake and turtle in China; I drew the line at owlet, because I felt sorry for those vexed-looking birds roosting in a cage, waiting to be chosen for a meal. One night I bought one at a restaurant, at the chef's suggestion. And I set it free, much to his consternation. Cow's tendon in soup, looking like shreds of Tupperware, was not tasty. ("If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an airplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it," Prince Philip once said, and was booed.) I ate some sparrows in Burma and reported on them in The Great Railway Bazaar. Alligator tail on the Zambezi was fairly common, served in stew or as steaks. "Carrion and garbage of every kind can be eaten without the stomach rejecting it," Francis Galton wrote in the chapter "Revolting Food That May Save the Lives of Starving Men" in The Art of Travel. "Life can certainly be maintained on a revolting diet."

I was prepared for a life of travel food by the cold lumpy oatmeal my mother served me on winter mornings. "You can't go to school until you finish it!" Tears of disgust sprang to my eyes as I sat, repelled by the sight, and I retched when I tried to swallow even a little bit. My Italian grandmother, who immigrated to America when she was a small girl, served us familiar-looking greens in salad, and when we asked about these slightly bitter leaves, she admitted that they were dandelions (soffione) she had dug up that morning. Many hard-up Italians in America foraged for dandelions.

"Objectively, nothing's more disgusting than eating milk or cheese," my son Marcel said to me one day when we were discussing this subject. Most Chinese agree, but nearly all are physically unable to digest the stuff, being lactose intolerant. (Many Chinese believe that the so-called white race has an odd cheesy smell.) The writer and traveler Ted Hoagland told me, "My exotic foods include bobcat, porcupine liver, and squirrel, but muskrat was the best." And my traveling friend Larry Mill-man has eaten dogs from Greenland to Micronesia, and remarked on the varieties of canine cuisine.