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.
In Myanmar a plaintive pop singer captivates Frater. "Her anguish had a kind of Wagnerian resonance," he writes. The song, he finds out, is Mummy, My Car Has Broken Down. Rain comes off the leaves of the palm tree, he observes, "in an interesting tonal way."
Frater takes his comedy where he can find it. As often as not, he turns up in the midst of lethal political conflicts or surveying the miseries of failed postcolonial states crippled by disease, poor education, bad roads and bleak economic prospects. Palm trees are not enough.
One of his more fascinating chapters describes, with a certain relish, several of the 40 tropical diseases that flourish in the torrid zone. He listens in fascination as a French doctor tells of transporting a woman to a hospital with an ax in her head.
More often than not, corrupt leaders preside over misery with serene indifference. Frater pays a visit to one of them, the King of Tonga, who speaks vaguely of earning billions by extracting natural gas from seawater. "He wore a gold Rolex on either wrist and, occasionally, would glance at both to indicate I was asking dumb questions in two time zones, or lapse into one of his famous transcendental silences," Frater writes. The audience is brief.
Frater has a wonderful plan for a tropical afterlife. He would like his ashes to be buried under a palm tree. "That would not only help nourish one of the world's most bountiful trees, but perhaps even allow me to wander eternally through the Torrid Zone," he writes.
Fleets of bobbing coconuts go on voyages lasting for years, riding the ocean currents for thousands of kilometers before washing up on dry land. Frater's best trip may lie ahead of him. He certainly deserves it.
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
RSS