Any Old Place with You
About this book
from dust jacket:One August evening, on a park bench in Manhattan, William K. Zinsser turned to a willowy blonde at his side and suggested that darkest Africa would make a rather challenging spot for a honeymoon.She agreed without a whimper.And so William and Caroline were married. Love and travel were thus joined together, as they are throughout this book, for the Zinssers feel that you can't have one without the other.They sailed for Lisbon on the Bahama, a vessel of ambiguous nationality, which began to deteriorate just outside New York Harbor. First the deck chairs disappeared, followed by the deck steward. Then the ping-pong table was dismantled. When the ship began bypassing ports where it was scheduled to stop, the passengers vented their anguish in petitions denouncing the captain. At last, the Bahama faltered toward land. One man said it looked like Dakar; another said Miami; Mr. Zinsser ventured Melbourne, Australia. To everyone's surprise -especially the captain's - it was Lisbon. The Zinssers fled down the gangplank and set out for their next stop: the Belgian Congo.They traveled through Ruanda-Urundi in a car until, in the middle of nowhere, the muffler and exhaust pipe fell off; in Kenya, they spent a night a mere knife's throw (Mau Mau knife, not Zinsser knife) from a terrorist encampment; they fearlessly tracked a lion until they discovered the lion was tracking them; they crossed the Sudanese desert where Kitchener once fought the Dervishes; and they did a lot of other things not recommended by marriage counselors.But Zinsser brought his bride back alive - and the following year they ventured even farther. They found the long lost ruins of Angkor in the Cambodian jungle, and they flew to rural Siam on a one-horse airline (they saw the very horse). In Hong Kong, they sought out fabled Mr. Cheung, tailor to Kelly Glant, the famous Amelican movie star. Again they lived to tell the tale. In fact, Mr. Zinsser tells it in this book, with an exemplary combination of wit, merriment, and fascinating detail that might have escaped all but his practiced reporter's eye.