Terrified that we were about to be kidnapped, we moved more and more frantically through what possibly were the same half dozen alleyways... IT WAS MUTTERED out of the side of his mouth as if he were offering me his sister, or heroin: "Monsieur, etes-vous un ami de David Bowie?" I was to him an incomplete "Rebel, Rebel," but with my spiked hair, black jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans, and black cowboy boots, I obviously wasn`t bunking royally at Paris`s Royal Monceau Hotel to clinch a big computer deal with France Telecom. So the guy left the rest of the pack keeping a Bowie vigil in front of the Royal Monceau to see if he could get the scoop from a possible adjutant. "Yes, I`m Bowie`s launderer, hairdresser, food taster, bouncer; check one only"; I would have said this if my French had been good enough to sustain more wit than "pourquoi?" Protracted pleading got him the floor Bowie was camping out on - not literally, of Course, but figuratively... Metaphor and gossip are all one`s got as a travel writer. Let`s stick with gossip for a bit. That night in a large, crowded auditorium Bowie bowled over his audience. From my vantage point by the stage I could see all the staples of rock concerts: fainting youths passed over the crowd-control fences onto waiting stretchers ("Young American" felling young Parisians); pugnacious youths hurled back over the barriers they`d surmounted a la Edwin Moses. Once the carnage became repetitive I went backstage where, unhadgered by guards because of my badge, I encountered my rock impresario brother, the badge`s bestower, playing pool in the V.I.P. lounge. Nonchalanting a cue and a glass of champagne and blaseing a space in the room - "pardon, there, Mick Jagger, but rock hype`s rather outre, n`est-ce pas?" - I scratched sublimely from behind the eight ball where hordes, no doubt, wished, yearned, ached, and would have stampeded (had they known) to be. Not world-shattering, all of this, though the events recounted have, of course, anthropological significance for scholars. I originally had wanted and, with my brother at the top of the promotional heap, expected a stint as a Bowie roadie during his 1990 world tout. I had thought that "Professor Roadie" or "Sabbatical Roadie" would shunt me into Vanity Fair or some such glossy, a far cry from journals such as Ideology and Travel and Critical Inquiry, which offer off-prints in lieu of cash and the opportunity to be read by those dullards who don`t watch baseball games every night. I thought that some of those aforementioned metaphors and an allusion or two ("the androgynous Bowie, Woolf-ishly Orlando in his longevity..,") would transform my prose into a sabbatical story fuelled by more than academic nit-picking. But plans to procure me a spot on the Bowie team were halted when it was discovered that I had no skills the troupe needed. Lectures on postmodernism? A little limited but earnest juggling with three tennis balls, something I`d honed in my youth? A university professor piping up in rock`s professional, crisply performing milieu was as sought after as, say, Engelbert Humperdinck. He, at least, was asked to sign the ceiling at the Greichenbeisl restaurant, a 500-year-old enterprise in Vienna that canonized him along with - among others - Beethoven, Bismarck, and Gina Lollobrigida, whose ascension is still remembered fondly by a now graying waiter. So I was forced to forsake the Bowie glitz; anyway, he hasn`t published in Queen`s Quarterly. Besides, the roadie routine, I learned, is murderous, Up goes Bowie`s personal Disneyland; then down it comes after the concert to be shepherded overland to another venue, where it will be re-erected to stand for another few hours only. Awaking early, cruel punishment for an intellectual idler, is standard practice for a roadie. So I decided to stay within the cosy confines of the academy and headed ... to Nairobi, where a broadly conceived plan of scholarship - the socio-cultural situation of universities in diverse places - would allow me to, as they say, smell the coffee; a rich bouquet, indeed, it throws off in Kenya, one of that bean`s luxuriant homes (much more luxuriant than those of the people who tend it). The United Kenya Club is a genteel throwback to the colonial period, one that has never ended if you live in the world of the university professor: an august, civilized realm, a club where waiters are deferential, gardens are well kept and poised opinions are still a tradable currency. University enclaves are more homogeneous than McDonald`s outlets. To move from the faculty, club of a North American university to the United Kenya Club on the campus of the University of Nairobi is to change only the labels on the beer bottles, if such is your demotic drink. The guards at the gate and the bars on the windows at the United Kenya Club are only a more concrete manifestation of privilege for those within the walls and rejection for the hoi polloi outside them. Out those gates and onto the campus I ran, soon after arriving - not to the library or the lecture by a noted scholar from the U.K. on matters of little importance to anyone, but important to the tax-deductible status of his trip to East Africa. I ran not to jog the memory, but to jog, to run the miles that are circular, that supposedly confirm my leanness will be maintained, narcissism a fuel more potent than Gatorade. Out onto the playing fields of the University of Nairobi - Eton only absent by virtue of its tony apartheid - where I did five or so meandering miles, I ran. None of this brought me nearer to discovering the riot that had erupted elsewhere on and just off the university grounds. Students, disgruntled by the bad food in their cafeteria - it`s not only faculty styles and situations that are transnational trashed the dining room before bolting onto the streets that border the university. There they submitted cars and their occupants to the same rigorous examinations to which they are subjected, overturning the vehicles to examine the springs and engines beneath their glossy sheens. As a result of the riot the university was closed later that same day, and remained so for a few weeks. I was rueful, in part because the one decent weightroom in town was attached to the school`s gymnasium and was therefore closed, a punishment I thought aimed directly at me; however, I couldn`t convince the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi to intervene on my behalf, diplomacy evidently prevailing over need. I was rueful in part, too, because I could have been on the leading edge of a noteworthy event. My headline might have been "Food fight leads to Moi-der." Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya`s president if not for life then until every goddamn shop with his picture on its wall is renovated, chillily and threateningly rebuked the demonstrators. As an eyewitness to those events, I could have had something other than idleness to add to my sabbatical portfolio. The last time I skirted a main event in the name of scholarship was when I got a grant to interview Ivan Illich, the leading figure and spokesperson for non-hierarchical, nonbureaucratic education, at his institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Assuming that Cuernavaca was a one-horse town and Illich would be lounging in the first taverna I entered, I decided to forgo such cumbersome formalities as a letter and/or phone call to discover where the institute was located and, moreover, whether he`d be there. Well, Cuernavaca is a one-horse town, but the numerous donkeys and the abundant motorized vehicles make it a labyrinth. In addition, Minotaur and his minions speak no English. I spent two weeks wandering futilely through Cuernavaca saying "Ivan Illich," querulously, to everyone I was bold enough to approach. It could now be a ritualized form of greeting there, this gringo lamentation, as native now as "whazzapenin" in downtown North America. The day before I was to return home, incidentally, I happened upon the institute nestled in its well-kept grounds. Because it was Christmas Day only a groundskeeper was around; but in order to preserve my integrity as a researcher I asked him the following questions: "Do Illich`s anarchic theories find a corollary in the institutes practice? Isn`t liberation theology an oxymoron? Have Illich`s students become less accepting of his notions in this neo-conservative era?" These questions were put verbatim - I wrote them on the plane from Toronto to Mexico City - to someone who spoke no English whatsoever. "Whazzapenin?" might have been better. He smiled. I invented reasonable, which is to say portentous, answers. I`m happy, though, to dupe myself with fantasies of vital research, importance, and centrality in lieu of the protracted coffees, strolling, International Herald Tribune reading and idling that define the flaneur, the intellectual lounger I have been on my trip. For instance I had an Israeli fantasy, preceded by an Israeli reality, that gave me a good rush of adrenalin. Late one afternoon we - I have a travelling companion - casually slid into the Old City of Jerusalem via the Damascus Gate rather than the Jaffa gate, a geographically negligible, but geopolitically significant shift, or so we thought from having read our Western papers and having talked to our Western friends. The shops in the Arab Quarter were closed because of the daily afternoon strike observed by the shopkeepers to oppose Israel`s rule over the West Bank. We lost ourselves in the claustrophobic lanes where during busy times tourists jostle sellers jostle donkeys in die commercial equivalent of a galaxy`s collapse into a black hole. Terrified that we were about to be kidnapped, we moved more and more frantically through what possibly were the same half dozen alleyways, our sweat glands matching our paces until we finally met two much less prepossessing tourists ambling about fearing, it seemed, nothing whatsoever. We sheepishly followed them as they led us out of the enclave. This event is in stark contrast to my fantasy, a blithely proposed trip to Bir Zeit University on the occupied West Bank. Disappointed by the lack of a discernible alternative culture on Israel`s campuses, I thought I would penetrate to the heart. of the heart of the Palestinian intellectual uprising to discover what a mobilized, committed community looks and feels like. Bir Zeit would be awash in Palestinian colours, strategy meetings, and the wit that is blunted into slogans once rallies begin. I would meet people who were, no doubt, disciples of Edward Said, the Palestinian literary and political theorist, and could discourse at length on the stereotyped identities imposed on Palestinians. Incisive articles would follow about the redefinition of roles in a university under siege, a university trying to throw off its oppressor`s yoke. The truth is, however, that we barely lasted in Israel. Bir Zeit University was closed, so, after a few car laps of the country, we decided that working on a kibbutz would be the perfect way to be engage, to divest ourselves of touristic baggage and infiltrate Israel benignly but also meaningfully. At the clearing house for volunteers -or at least the one that caters to the non-religious kibbutzes - we patiently waited while a 20-year-old with "I smoke dope" all over his face and demeanour tried to convince the recruitment officer that he`d never even heard of the stuff, and could he have another chance at another kibbutz where he`d be as fresh as a Jaffa orange. The argument ended in a draw, with the officer offering a place if the volun. teer could get a note from kibbutz-the-first attesting to his working skills and determination. We were then ushered in and seemed, 1 am sure, overwhelmingly sober and adult by comparison. Our dream was of an Israeli garden in which we`d cooperatively stack the oranges so Israel could stock its tills. Selflessness, community ... but brusquely the guy in charge assigned us to a kibbutz in northern Israel, told us `No dope," signed us up for insurance, said pay 140 shekels, be there tomorrow, and contact so-and-so, head of volunteers at said kibbutz. The only faster office visit 1 have had was with a plastic surgeon who removed a cyst from my face in the time it took me to ask him whether there would be pain andlor a scar. The three stitches, before they were removed, gave me such a rugged look that 1 predict gratuitous stitching and scarring will be the style wave of the future. There was nothing cosmetic about the kibbutz assignment we were given. A drive along some unspoiled stretches of the Mediterranean and into groves aplenty ended at the only spot in Israel with a certifiable pollution problem, a pulp and paper mill tantalizingly close to the ocean; a section of it, unfortunately, with enough additives to make a brief dip comparable to a swim in the Love Canal. The Dead Sea had a rival. The mill had recently had a fire, giving the air the same pungent flavour as Cairo`s, as if rapprochement with Egypt had been taken to extremes. The only oranges and grapefruits we saw were at kibbutz meals that made summer-camp fare seem like cordon bleu cooking. A tour of volunteer housing infested with phalanxes of cockroaches left us in no doubt that our fantasy of an idyllic kibbutz would remain as much of a fiction as the actual experience we so adamantly refused. Work, something anathema to me all these years (remember Huysman`s credo, "Live, no, I let my servants do that for me"), I would have reluctantly committed myself to; even getting up early (here defined as any time before 10 a.m.), eating en masse - all could have been countenanced as an adventure, a bracing experience I was prepared, if only for the novelty of it, to embrace. Smell, some sociologists and anthropologists have convincingly argued, is a manifestation of bourgeois disquiet over status. Well, the toilet bowl doesn`t have to have Listerine swirling around, but the noxious smell of sulphur and a yellowish tinge to the air do not make for a promotional film on kibbutz life. We said goodbye, drove straight to the Haifa docks, and boarded a boat for Rhodes. That the boat turned into a vomitorium, its beguiling crew blissfully avoiding the oral output of its passengers, did not undermine the pleasure of our renunciation. Tourists, for all the hyped promises they are offered, are a brutalized lot. Everywhere Berlitz et al. direct them with a dictatorial eye. Note how many tour books martinet-like move ones eyeballs left and right, up and down along specific streets, at specific buildings. Be attentive! Take a picture! Of a monument, say, such as the pillars of Luxor Temple: "Strollers staying on boats or in the renowned Winter Palace never tire of passing this ancient monument" (according to Berlitz`s guide to Egypt). Well, strollers can stroll very few other places; and they are relentlessly besieged by hordes of felucca drivers, caleche drivers, store owners and their families. The hawkers we more relentless and numerous than the flies; persistent men and boys in dirty robes make any outing an exercise that degenerates from a few "Thanks, no" to some brusque "No"s to innumerable "Fuck off`s. Begging for baksheesh or hustling their decrepit animate or inanimate objects, the workforce determinedly ignores the fact that the guy before has been rebuffed. Nor can Berlitz be deterred as bliss oozes from its semantic pores: "Living right next to things incredibly ancient never loses its thrill." Living right next - which means an intimacy far beyond the more mundane "living next" - to the Pyramids, say, would mean proximity to mounds of camel and horse shit, not to mention "horse shit" of the kind that the people who rent the horses producing one brand of the horse shit indulge in as they try to sell you a "good" horse, evading the fact that the saddle is usually placed on the horse`s neck because it`s the beefiest part of a nag that eats less well even than its attenclant specifically, and Cairo`s poor generally. Only at the Mena House Oberoi, a large restored hunting lodge with newly added high walls, American currency based and American priced, can you live right next door to the pyramids and not lose the thrill ... because it startlingly has some of the most wonderful Indian food this side of the Punjab. Living next to the Pyramids at the Mena House also means access to a golf course some writer in the New York Times travel section picked as one of the 10 most exotic vacations in the world. I`d put pinochle in Pittsburgh before that golf game made notable not by the duffer`s triangular stone backdrop -keep your eye on the ball - but by a caddy-to-player ratio that`s roughly 50-to-1: six guys simultaneously handing you a sand wedge to ease Egypt`s unemployment problem, while you stew in your Sahara of a bunker on the only fairway in the land. Even venturing into a more literal Sahara, which stretches from the western edge of the pyramids through Libya, you probably wouldn`t find your oasis of space or a meditational hush. Legs clutching the aforementioned nag`s neck, I "rode" into the desert with my companion and a youthful guide bluntly instructed to get us away from it all. Steering us through sand dunes as if they were recognizable city streets, he propelled us away from the pyramids ... to a group of shrill Bedouins who, once they spotted us, grabbed what we soon ascertained were Hallmark cards and ran toward us. A frocked 40-legged shopping mail was exactly what I didn`t want to see. My skeletal beast did not heed my command to charge so, after routing them with obscenities -my own satanic verses, if you will - I relieved my horse of its heavier-than-itself burden and made for our guide to attempt to augment his diet with his horsewhip. The frightened kiss hasty retreat with the three horses left me and my companion our only tranquillity in Egypt`s spaces, an hour`s walk back to the pyramids during which we threw stones at the camel drivers who swooped down to offer us a lift. Tourism is best for those who have practised skills with facial muscles. Big smiles must be muscled when greeting the various functionaries - drivers, bellhops, waiters - who, you tenuously think, will get you and whatever it is you want to ingest, buy, or preserve safely through unknown territory. Then there`s the outraged-and-Fm-calling-my-consulate-uniess-you-stop-screwing-me face, an especially easy formation, probably almost encoded now, for North Americans and Germans when said functionaries seem deliberately and certainly unconcernedly to malfunction. Only the surfeit of travel selling, packaging, and writing as well as the constellation of values that makes travel the equivalent of the most prized scouting badge can explain the success of a game that pushes people around the globe chasing disruption presented as cultural attainment. Travel has enmeshed itself in that privileged place literature and the arts so powerfully held and still, to some extent, hold. Kilimanjaro, like Hemingway, is something to be valued, the rarefied atmosphere having achieved the status of a rare book or, rather, a classic. Ditto Bali, which to vacationers sounds as unbourgeois as Baudelaire; the Marshall Islands, as arcane a place as Melville`s mind; the Peloponnesus, as rough a ride as a Pynchon novel. Sanctimoniousness now abounds about travel: "It`s good for you"; "It expands your mind"; "It makes you more tolerant" These nostrums are chanted like mantras by teachers of literature and their pupils, and have now been appropriated by travel agents and their customers. In a memorable scene in Max Ophuls`s film Letter from an Unknown Woman, two lovers sit cosily while -a functionary raises and lowers various exotic settings that serve as a backdrop for the couple. The Alps and the sea frame their gilded evening, the glamorousness of their brief affair. But whether travelling or staying put, they would still have had their ecstatic moment. And so we, too, have our goings and comings masked variously on maps. It`s not that travel should not be undertaken. It`s not that books shouldn`t be read. It`s that an intellectual enema is needed when institutions and industries inflate locales, real and imaginary. Not only travel agents and travel guides, but many travel writers trickle treacle into their prose. It`s not that they mean their places to serve as your honeymoon, it`s that too much is made to seem vital, compelling, significant. It`s the "experience-of a-lifetime" sale of cruises, discos, and dining directed at tourists. Rooms are catalogued to capture a country ("small quirky studio shuts out vast cruel New York"); farmers allowed to yield a tradition ("slow deliberate steps trod in the path of generations"); food eaten to indicate poverty or prosperity ("from bowl to mouth the chopsticks fork a gravy train!`). A travel writer becomes an instant expert, a vital recorder, hoarder, your agent in the field sifting through opulence or hardship for the picture you`ll want to take, a picture you hope is unique but also representative. I`m always astonished by how many people want to see the already seen, the monuments, natural and man-made, more familiar to us than the dry cleaner down the street. Imagine a foray, there, to the dry cleaner. The heat, the specialized machines, the latency in other peoples clothes, starch, bleach. You already know the Vatican even though you`ve never been to Italy, the Wailing Wall even though you`ve never been to Jerusalem. To go to those places involves viewing rather than discovery; the weight of our culture has made them the already seen. But the dry cleaner`s - most likely operating without clerics, dogma, and tour buses - can provide a sense of awe, a sense of mystery, unobtainable in more sanctioned, more supposedly august realms. Perhaps, too, one can get a great photograph, one redolent of significance: mysteriously clad workers discreetly sorting discreetly expensive underwear at Yuppie Cleaners, Toronto, say. I hope that being taken to the cleaners world-wide has had nothing of the profound in it. That, you see, would ensnare me in the perspective, style, and stance of the kind of travel writer I fulminate against. Like the voice in most documentaries, the tone demanded of travel writers seems to be pedagogical, knowledgeable, tutoring. They are guides in whose lack of context or comfort, in whose discoveries or banalities are lessons. Everywhere travel writers go they no doubt feel like Prince Charles or Princess Di, depending on ones shoe size and taste in clothing, primed to see and regurgitate a country`s vital characteristics. I`m just as happy, anyway, to give way to those with intentions. I hate travelling, really: cramped quarters, linguistic and monetary fumbling, fellow.travellers slotting you according to your national origins. There are, of course, vintage moments, about as many as there are at home. Paris, for instance, is for sitting in cafes staring, staring at legs paraded so that I wouldn`t be able to identify a face even in a police line-up. There`s joy in knowing that the only protracted pleasure desire produces comes from the likelihood of refusal; and Parisian hauteur provides plenty of opportunities for that. There`s a lesson to be drawn from the cultivation of perversity, but I dislike writing as much as travelling and would rather not elucidate it. Yet travel and writing have a kind of after-the-fact cachet, of course. To have been to Cairo is much better than to be there; to have crafted a deliciously poised sentence is much better than to be crafting one. Writing and travelling also provide reciprocal support for one another, shoring up whatever self the drifter in you tries to drift away from. What am I doing here? There? Anywhere? Collecting material so that there`s no mere expenditure here, there, anywhere. Why write? Well, it companions cruising adequately enough. The designation "writer" isn`t too hard to lug around; loitering can be one of its attributes. There`s lots of time to rest on a sabbatical and do those things that will perhaps circuitously end up filling pages. Remember the loony writer Jack Nicholson played in The Shining? His output over weeks and weeks is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in various typographical configurations. In his single-mindedness, he has become demented. Better to let yourself wander through the byways of the world and the byways of the word. Errant travelling, erroneous prose: these are the stock in trade of the travel writer. No wonder there are so many of us these days.