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so much as the twists and turns of my thoughts as I tried to make sense of the places I saw. Occasionally, of course—as when I visited a country just once—the two coincide. But in most cases, I revisited a place in different seasons and different moods—sometimes as many as six times—and spaced out my trips in order to give both the countries and myself a chance to change. In addition to my experiences, I therefore include all the other factors that guide one’s feelings for a place—one’s expectations before arriving, one’s thoughts while leaving and, most important, one’s reflections in all those stray hours at home when a place comes back from afar and one tries and tries to puzzle it out. The final destination of any journey is not, after all, the last item on the agenda, but rather some understanding, however simple or provisional, of what one has seen.
    To some extent, of course, this treatment forgoes some of the jolts and intensities and pangs of one’s experiences. I acknowledge that loss, and feel it. In trying to sight-read a place as if it were a text, one can easily fall into pretension, as well as presumption, and in recollecting it in tranquillity, one can dampen or even distort one’s essential feelings: a reader might not guess from the following pages that the country of my dreams is still Japan.
    Yet it seemed to me that the vivid day-to-day account of a journey through Asia, with all its momentary impulses, emotions and excitements, had already been written, and rather well.Readers who wish to savor adventures in the hidden East, recorded with a worldly shrewdness that makes their moments of surrender all the more affecting, can turn to Peter Fleming or Norman Lewis or Robert Byron; those who want a clever and quick-witted jaunt through the Asia of the seventies will find few better companions than Paul Theroux or John Krich; those who seek sensitive and passionate guides to embattled areas of the spirit can visit Ladakh with Andrew Harvey, or Tibet with John Avedon; and those who like to watch the irresistible triumph of sensibility over substance are hereby advised to return, and return again, to S. J. Perelman’s incomparable
Westward Ha!.
    I, however, have tried to take a slightly different tack; rather than showing how one personality acts in different places, I have sought to show how different places act on one personality. For just as we are different people with a mother, a lover, a teacher, a priest, a salesman and a beggar, so we are to some extent assigned different roles by the countries we visit. This may in part be the result of personal circumstance: in one country I found myself an American journalist, in another a former British schoolboy, in yet another a homecoming Indian relative and in a fourth a plain tourist. It may also have to do with the place’s circumstances: in all of Tibet, I found only a handful of locals who could speak English, while in India, there are tens of millions of fluent and loquacious locals more than eager to have their say. But it is also true that places to some extent remake us, recast us in their own images, and the selves they awaken may tell us as much about them as about ourselves. “To survive a war,” as Rambo says in a rather different context, “you’ve got to become a war.” Thus in Thailand, though a teetotaler, I spent most of my evenings in bars, and in Tibet, though not a Buddhist, I devoted all my days to the quiet of mountaintop lamaseries. In Japan, where a foreigner seems always to be an outsider, I found myself turning slightly Japanese—aloof, efficient and lyrical; while in the Philippines, where every visitor is a participant whether he likes it or not, I tended to become as earnest and unguarded as the people I met.
    Logistically too, I tried to stay protean. Those Grand Tourists who follow what might be called the Hiltercontinental circuit, allowing themselves to be whisked from one air-conditionedcoach to the