Paul Theroux Goes to Turkmenistan

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 05.25.07 | 10:56 AM ET

Our favorite curmudgeonly travel writer ventured inside the country last year, before the death of the tyrant known as Turkmenbashi, to have a look around. His account of the trip, and even the “diplomatic incident” he caused, is in this week’s New Yorker, and it’s typically compelling. “I was lucky to get a visa to travel to Turkmenistan in the middle of last year,” he writes, “at a time when Turkmenbashi was still alive, and many of his people cringed at his name, he was jailing dissenters, and his roads were mostly closed to people like me.” An abstract is online.

Theroux’s contributor bio in the print magazine notes that he’s “working on a travel book retracing the journey he wrote about, more than thirty years ago, in ‘The Great Railway Bazaar.’”

That’s good news. The Great Railway Bazaar ranked third on our list of the top 30 travel books of all time. I’d love to read an updated account of a journey along the same route.