Read Online Blinding Light by Paul Theroux - Free Book Online

be an adjunct to the public relations industry.” The magazines demanded pretty pictures and gusto and undiluted praise, in order to encourage advertisers and build income. It was how they prospered.
    Real travel was risky, uncertain, difficult, and not very comfortable. What these magazines called travel were in fact beach holidays. For the upscale magazines it was the fake sophistication of gourmandising or the indolence of a luxury cruise—self-indulgent, undemanding, pleasurable, lots of sunshine, swimming, moonlight. Steadman had been hired because he was a real writer with a reputation, the author of a travel classic; but he realized that as an open-minded and wealthy traveler he was feared by the hosts, whose pretensions he would ridicule, and disliked by the magazines, which felt he would drive away advertisers. It took almost two years for Steadman to understand that he had no future in this business. He returned to struggling with his novel: work in stoppage.
    And later, with the reading of Burroughs’s
Yage Letters,
he yearned to take a trip to Ecuador—to visit a shaman; to experiment with
yaje,
which was also known as ayahuasca, “vine of the soul”; to revisit the drug that Burroughs had praised in his obscure book; to rediscover a true story and perhaps find the inspiration to go on with his novel. He needed fuel. He read the other recommended books—the ethnobotanical work of Richard Schultes and the more mystical Reichel-Dolmatoff. The drug literature was respectful, more about spirit and ritual and cultural roots than about thrills. But all the botanists mentioned the risks.
    He had not guessed that this, too, had become part of the tourist industry, but now he knew that the people in the van, on this trip—Sabra, Wood, Hack, Janey, and Manfred—were like the people who were looking for the perfect mai tai on Maui, or the best snorkeling spot on the Great Barrier Reef, or the greatest nude beach on St. Barts. He knew now that they had trekked to see gorillas and gone bird watching in Botswana, been to Cambodia and Bhutan and Thailand, across the Patagonian pampas, down the Zambezi, up the Sepik. “I’ve got a Bontoc head ax. There’s drops of blood on it.” Scuba diving off Palau, they had been surrounded by sharks. Easter Island. The Andamans. Gauchos. Mudmen. Ifugao. Pygmies. Sea Dayaks. “Headhunters.”
    â€œIndia sucked except for the Ayurvedic massage in Kerala.”
    Trophies, all of them. And this—the trip to Oriente, the visit to a shaman in a jungle village, the search for a true
ayahuasquero
and the trance-drink itself—was another trophy for these romantic voyeurists.
    â€œWhat are you planning to do here?” Ava had asked the others at breakfast.
    â€œSame thing as you guys.”
    What Steadman believed he had elaborately devised as an original trip, using obscure anthropological texts and the works of ethnobotanists—a trip he hoped would help make his reputation as a traveler in search of enlightenment—had become nothing more than the highest-priced package vacation, a drug tour. Without her having said a word, he knew that Ava was also dismayed by the presence of the others on the tour. What he had hoped would be an adventure seemed no more than a school outing.
    Yet he was determined to see it through. The trip had just begun; the others might panic and bail out. It happened—luxury cruise ship passengers got seasick, a woman on a press trip in Mexico was raped in her hotel room, and on the Trinidad junket a male travel writer from New York handed a woman travel writer from Seattle an envelope full of clumsy Polaroids he had shot of himself, nude, in a full-length mirror. And then the man had threatened her when she said she would turn them over to the police. Drama was still possible on this trip, but Steadman doubted that it would serve him. At times, being with Ava in this state of detachment was