The White Nile Diaries

Description

'Where is this adventure taking us? I now have no fixed address, don't want one, don't need one. We are floating. Nostalgia for home is vamoose. We have tasted the lotus and we are not going back.' It all began at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, in 1961. Two young Princetonians have returned to New York from South America, where their dream of buying a coffee plantation in the Peruvian jungle evaporated. With the fire for adventure still burning in their veins, they are tempted by a mysterious letter from Kenya and plan a trip across Africa. They buy a white BMW motorcycle and paint the words 'The White Nile' on the tank, to honour the route they will follow. In limpid, elegant prose John Hopkins describes deadly salt flats where tourists vanish without a trace, mysterious Saharan oases and the funerals of young Tunisians killed by the French Foreign Legion. In Leptus Magna he conjures visions of ancient Rome and visits Homer's fabled island of the Lotus Eaters. They escape armed vigilantes in the Tunisian desert, and are chased by the border patrol across Libyan sands. They climb the Great Pyramid at Giza at dawn, endure 'The Desert Express' across the Nubian desert and travel by paddlewheel steamer through the Sudd, a swamp bigger than Britain. But the final adventure, at the idyllic Impala Farm at the foot of Mount Kenya, turns out to be a poisoned paradise. The White Nile Diaries is a riveting coming-of-age journey, a tantalising glimpse into a time when Africa was an oyster for the young, the brave and the free. The places, the people, the writing, and the emotional reverberations hold the reader enthralled.

John Hopkins was a writer who, after graduating from Princeton, lived for many years in Tangier and was a central figure in the bohemian literary crowd of the '60s and '70s, becoming friends with William Burroughs, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles. He wrote several novels, among them Tangier Buzzless Flies and The Flight of the Pelican, and travel memoirs including The Tangier Diaries, The South American Diaries and The White Nile Diaries.

Easy Rider, Ivy League Style. * Le Figaro *