It's the heat and the humidity. Alexander Frater settles that question early on in Tales From the Torrid Zone as he wanders, in seven-league boots, across the earth's fat, sweaty midsection, swatting flies and mosquitoes all the way. That's not even the half of it. Along with the palm trees and the beaches and the relentless heat, the tropics also feature "extreme weather, geological instability and a whole host of ghastly afflictions," Frater writes.
And yet he counts himself a "tropophiliac," a lover of warm, wet countries, where disease, poverty, political chaos, decay and inertia are the rule rather than the exception. He cannot help himself.
"I sat and listened to a fitful southerly trade leafing through palm fronds, heard the occasional whump of a falling coconut and knew again the pleasing sense of being parked in one of the world's lay-bys," he writes after a hard day in Fiji. "Those of us born in the tropics have lassitude bred into our very bones, and now, yielding to it, I felt the old waypoints — sunrise and sunset, the rhythm of the tides — quietly reimpose themselves."
This is clear evidence of what the French call the coup de bambou, a mild mania for the tropics that grips Frater and animates his diverting, loose-limbed tour of the earth's hot zones.
As a travel writer for The Observer in London, Frater has set foot in some 70 of the 169 countries and territories that lie wholly or partly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the two belts on either side of the Equator. Some he counts as home. The son and grandson of Presbyterian missionaries, originally from Scotland, he grew up in present-day Vanuatu, and at least half of his book deals with the islands scattered like loose change across the South Pacific.
His unstructured itinerary also takes him up the Amazon, down the Irrawaddy, across the ocean to Zanzibar and onward to dozens of other remote locations, where he observes, describes and ponders. Part memoir, part travelogue, Tales From the Torrid Zone is a pleasing grab bag of a book, a jumble of funny encounters, strange sights, forgotten history and really bad food.
Frater, a genial tour guide and a stylish writer, makes excellent company. He maintains his composure on decrepit airplanes spewing oil and gasoline. He dines complacently on stewed flying fox. Best of all, he keeps his eyes open. In an airport in Vanuatu, while conversing with a manic American, he spies an elegantly dressed woman approaching the check-in counter with a sleeping piglet in a basket. When the piglet wakes up, "making noises like a fire alarm," its owner calmly pops a Ferrero Rocher chocolate in its mouth.
In a bar on the island of Paama, he looks up long enough from his book to take in a terrific fight around the pool table, which he recounts economically.
"A huge woman grasped a billiard cue in a two-handed axman's grip, and, as if splitting a log, brought it down on the bald head of an old, wrinkled man," he writes. "He went 'Ungh!' and slumped to his knees. Both sexes began trading blows, the females punching harder and meaner and lower. Soon the males began limping back to the table where the women, impassive, joined them; quietly they resumed their game."
Frater can listen too. On the island of Pentecost, a local entrepreneur extols the virtues of the local beverage made from kava root. Drinking kava, he claims, has allowed his grandfather to live to the age of 200. That means that Grandpa is almost old enough to have seen Captain Cook, Frater points out. "I think he has mentioned him," the man replies coolly.
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