Word: theroux
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AUTHOR: PAUL THEROUX...
...journey that began, at least symbolically, on a gloomy Sunday in Christchurch, New Zealand. Cooped up in a hotel room so dreary that he drank the contents of the mini-bar, Paul Theroux was continents away from his London home, newly separated from his wife, afraid that he might have cancer (not so, it turned out) and depressed by the prospect of war in the Persian Gulf. "Get me out of here," he said to himself and headed for the wilderness -- because, he wrote, "as long as there is wilderness there is hope...
...result is Theroux's ninth and possibly best travel book, an observant and frequently hilarious account of a trip that took him to 51 Pacific islands, from New Guinea to Easter Island to Hawaii. His goal was to retrace, in part, the bold voyages of early Polynesian seafarers who gave this vast area a common culture, now corrupt and moribund. Theroux took the big hops by plane or ship. But his preferred mode of travel was a collapsible, 16-ft.-long French-made kayak, which he paddled -- carefully -- through dangerous waters infested by crocodiles, sharks and stinging Portuguese...
...Theroux was bothered less by the terrifying fauna than by many of the people he encountered. The ethnic put-downs of The Happy Isles might be considered racist were it not for the fact that the author is clearly an equal- opportunity disdainer. New Zealanders are shabby and provincial, he complains. Aussies are rude, foulmouthed and drink too much. Tongans are lazy, quarrelsome and mean to their children. Samoans are greedy, hostile and obese, perhaps because their junk-food diet consists mostly of "Cheez Balls" and corned beef saturated with hippo fat. (Did their liking for the latter, Theroux wonders...
Food was terrible everywhere in the Pacific, Theroux discovered, although he was bemused by such oddities as omelets made from enormous eggs laid by the megapode birds of Savo in the Solomon Islands. (His verdict: "The yolkiest eggs I had ever seen.") To be sociable, the author occasionally took swigs of kava, the mouth- and mind-numbing intoxicant of the islands, which is made by chewing the root of a plant known as Piper methysticum and then mixing the blob with water. The best kava, connoisseurs assure him, comes from root masticated by pretty teenage girls...