the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

took a year to record music in out-of-the-way villages in the Atlas and Anti-Atlas Mountains of Morocco. He stayed as firmly on the ground as possible. "I lil\e terra firma," he told me, quoting an old joke "The more firma, the less terra." He understood a hotel room as a place to sleep and dress, its cost the main consideration. Traveling with Bowles, Tennessee Williams once complained that, "For reasons of economy (Bowles'), we put up at a perfectly ghastly hotel called the EI Far-Har ... Spectacular view: every possible discomfort!" If Paris was inexpensive in his day, Tangier was rock-bottom cheap, especially with Bowles' knack for shoestring living. He financed his travels writing music and literature, doing travel pieces for Harper's Bazaar, Holiday and Mademoiselle, when the short stories and novels weren't paying. He even sold his papers to university libraries. Bowles wasn't one to travel light either; no backpack for him. He traveled with 15 suitcases, huge trunks so filled with dapper clothes that once a customs agent accused him of planning to open a shop. He walked everywhere, threading through the ancient cities, marching for hours into the desert. He listened. He learned languages. "One of the marks of a real traveler, for me, is trying to get inside the head of the other. " "How do you do it7" I asked. "Months and months of conversation. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Yes, no, why, ah? I think that's the only way." His was always a traveler's life. After a childhood dominated by a tyrannical father, Bowles' first trip was a wild declaration of independence. In 1929, he dropped out of college and took off for Europe. He was 19 when he landed in France with US$24. You could live in Paris for a buck-fifty a day back then. He stayed six months, tramped through the Black Forest and the Alps. Every night he washed out his one shirt and tacked it to the hotel room door to dry. He had his first sex with a girl and his first sex with a guy. It was a traveler's first trip. Once he started, he didn't stop. There were only three years he stayed put before 1969. Two years in the US, writing music, and one year in Morocco, writing a novel. He went everywhere, for any reason, One of his poet friends called his impulse a "wild-goose chase to Central America, Ceylon and Morocco, [a] romantically outdated quest for the EI Dorado of a doomed exoticism," Escape is good. Passion is better, Bowles' first glimpse of the North African coast was a turning point fueled by passion (and prophecy): "It was as if some interior mechanism had been set in motion by the sight of the approaching land, Always without formulating the concept, I had based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the earth's surface contained more magic than others. Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic I should probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind, Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets, would give me wisdom and ecstasy-perhaps even death." Hardship was also the point. "I'm such a masochist when it comes to the tropics and their curses that I enjoy everything as soon as the first horror has worn off or become a habit," he wrote to a friend frolll Central America in 1945. Another time, he said of Mexico, where he'd just survived a bout with jaundice: "This is a charming country if one is full of vigor. Otherwise it easily turns into an almost perpetual nightmare. If I hadn't had previous years of Morocco and other hostile spots to prepare me more or less, by this time I think I should be completely mad. The way of staying sane is simply that of accepting, accepting, one horror after another, and being thankful to be sti ll alive." On that day in Tangier, I asked him for one last story, the worst trip he'd ever taken, Worst trip stories are the adventure traveler's vein of gold. His old eyes lit up. ."Aah' The worst, absolutely the worst was on a ship between India and Sri Lanka. I had a cabin. Most of the people didn't have. Most of the people on this shi,p were Indians, I guess, And they had their animals with them. And it was a rough crossing and they were all lying on deck, the human beings and the animals. They were all very sick. All together. And they were rolling around, the human beings and the animals, against each other. Aaw! 68

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