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Author Carl Hoffman has written extensively about some of the most technological and advanced forms of transportation on the planet. Whether it be Burt Rutan's quest for space, or Larry Ellison's quest for the America's Cup, Hoffman enjoys how people express their creativity with machines.
So, it comes as a bit of a surprise that his new book, The Lunatic Express, features no carbon fiber, no breakthrough designs or alternative fuels. Instead, Hoffman sets off on a trip around the world using only the most dangerous and decrepit forms of transportation he finds along the way.
He travels the Andes in buses more famous for cliff dives than on-time arrivals. In India, he packs himself onto trains so overcrowded there are as many people sitting on the roof as there are in the seats. For a trip across the islands of Indonesia, he skips the ease of a short flight, opting instead for a questionable ferry like the ones that sank several years earlier killing more than a thousand people. In his defense, Indonesian air-safety records aren't exactly inspiring, either.
But as Hoffman details so eloquently in his book, this is how most of the world's population travels. The complaints we hear at the airline ticket counter are petty compared to what most people must contend with when they need to get to work or visit family. The Lunatic Express isn't about the interesting ways tourists traipse across foreign countries and the frustrations they experience. It's about the people who must contend with danger and discomfort every day to simply get from place to place, and the incredible kindness they so often display despite what they have to endure.
Wired.com: So much of what you write about is the latest and greatest in transportation. How did you get the idea of traveling around the world with the most uncomfortable and dangerous?
__Carl ____Hoffman: __The book mostly came out of a trip I made to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006, and I wrote about this crazy American bush pilot who had linked up with the Kabilas who were running the Congo. At the end of that trip, I had been taken with two things. One, on a plane ride I took -- it was just this little airline, and it was packed with people, and they were all hot and sweaty and scared looking. It was as far removed from Singapore Airlines first class as you could get. Second, I'd see all these people piled into trucks. You have 100 people packed into the back, bumping down this dirt road in the middle of nowhere in the Congo. And I'd seen that all over the world.
I have been traveling all over the world from South America to Central America, the Sudan to Asia, and everywhere I went I noticed that there are huge quantities of people on the move. They are packed into minivans and packed into buses and on the roofs of trains. And not just a few people, but millions of people.
And also for years I've been an aficionado of the "bus plunge" story, the 100-word filler in the newspaper that says, "Peruvian bus plunges off cliff, 50 people die."
I wondered, "what if you went around the world in that way?" It seems like it would be a fun adventure, but more importantly a window into the world. And sort of a window into the world as it is, not how we want it to be. And my life was in disarray at the time, so that didn't hurt.
__Wired.com: __You've written quite a bit about advanced transportation and cutting-edge transportation. Do you enjoy more of the latest and greatest or are you more a connoisseur of the rickety and the old?
__Hoffman: __They're two totally different things. The things that I've written about are people doing the kind of "break new ground" with machines that are essentially tools. Whether it's breaking a land speed record or a sailing record, or whether it's trying to travel to the moon and Mars in the case of Elon Musk or Burt Rutan, it's about people and human ambitions.
There's a little boy in me of course that's fascinated by bells and whistles and cool machines, but what really turns me on is what people want to do with them. And I see those machines as just expressions of human creativity. Some people paint pictures and make sculptures and other people make machines and use technology to express themselves. Elon Musk has a dream of going to Mars, so Falcon 1 was his first expression of actually trying to make that a reality.
Old things have a charm of their own. They tend to be nostalgic and have heart and soul. You can sit in a train car, rattling along and think of all the history and all the people who have been on that train car. You can feel that and touch that. It's really about people and about stories, the graciousness and connections and the human emotions.
One of the most fantastic things on the trip was the paddle-wheel steamer, though it's been changed over to diesel, in Bangladesh. It was 200 feet long and had these twin paddle wheels on either side. It was long and low and dented and rusted. It had been plying the river for 100 years. The mechanics of the wheel and watching the water churn through them while you're traveling through the ends of the earth in extreme heat…. It was fantastic.
I also like the train from Bamako, Mali, to Dakar, Senegal. It was just so awful and horrible and bad. I've never seen a train like that in my life. It was so beaten up and so ragged and full of holes and mud. It was so slow, we went about 10 miles per hour, that was the fastest we went. But it was just fantastic. At that speed, and it's 100 degrees, you can sit with your feet dangling out of a doorway, just talking to people. Just clinking and clanging of the tracks through the African country side.
__Wired.com: __As people read this book, and they're sitting on a crowded plane during a business trip or just got home from a long commute on the freeway, do you want to give people the impression that our transportation woes are light in comparison compared to other places?
__Hoffman: __Our transportation woes are insignificant compared to the rest of the world. There's no question about it. Until the Staten Island Ferry sank a few years ago in New York Harbor, nobody had been killed on an American ferry in almost a hundred years. A thousand people die annually on Bangladesh ferries. Now of course, it's partly sort of a game of numbers, there are 20,000 ferries in Bangladesh. And they're each carrying so many, so it's sort of a numbers game.
Statistically, the rest of the world travels in a much more dangerous way. And it's not just danger -- we're talking about great discomfort. Danger and heat and noise and pollution, not knowing when some conveyance is going to leave exactly or when it will arrive, or if it will get there at all. Those are things people are subject to every day all over the world. That said, I often find myself much more frustrated in America than I ever was traveling for the book or traveling other times in parts of the world, just because your expectations are so different.
When a plane is 20 minutes late out of D.C., you're really frustrated, you've got a meeting to get to in California. Your plane is a little late, and then you've got somebody sitting in the seat next to you, and you're in the middle seat, so you're frustrated with that. And they don't give you a meal anymore, you have to buy your drink. All those things, because you have such high expectations of efficiency and comfort and safety, make us frustrated.
In most of the world, you just sort of throw your hands up and say, "Whenever it arrives, it arrives. Whenever we get there, we get there." It's just a complete attitude shift. The people who have to make the trips, they're not shouting, "This thing is a few minutes late." Their whole lives are a few minutes late. Everything about them is not on a schedule.
It's also important to remember that if you stand on a corner in New York or D.C., and you want to get a taxi, you can stand there for 15 minutes. Or, if you want to take a bus somewhere or a train somewhere, you have to plan your schedule around it. Whereas in most of the world, you walk out onto any corner in Mumbai or Dhaka, there are thousands of pedicabs angling to pick you up, for pennies. You jump in one of those and for 50 cents you go right where you need to go. And then there's a boat to get you somewhere else. There's always a bus or a ferry or a cab or a rickshaw or a cart. Because it's an unregulated world, transportation is cheap and plentiful. It's just dirty, crowded and unsafe.
__Wired.com: __After all that, was there anything you looked forward to getting back to back home?
Hoffman: Nothing. I suppose if you have to be somewhere for a meeting, you can't take five-day sea voyages, or 48-hour train trips. But there's no form of American transportation I particularly yearn for. When I'm here in D.C. I drive myself everywhere. But if there were auto rickshaws here, and I could walk out my apartment door and just take one step off the curb and jump into an open auto rickshaw that took me for 50 cents across town, I'd burn my car tomorrow.
Images: Carl Hoffman
