South African Writer Adam Levin on Travel, AIDS and Bruce Chatwin
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.29.06 | 6:35 AM ET
The author of The Wonder Safaris: African Journeys of Miracles and Surprises, among other books, discusses how his battle with AIDS changed his life in a compelling story in the Mail&Guardian by Andie Miller. “It’s a weird irony for me,” he told Miller, “in that when I published ‘Wonder Safaris’ I’d finally achieved my dream, which was to be able to go wherever I wanted. That gave me the credibility to keep travelling and walk the journeys that I wanted to make my life about. And at that point I physically couldn’t walk. So it did force me to think about different journeys.”
Writes Miller:
Levin has spoken out vociferously about the silence that perpetuates the stigma attached to Aids in South Africa, and I wonder what he thinks of the way the late, acclaimed travel writer Bruce Chatwin mythologised his illness and subsequent death from Aids in 1989—exoticising it and claiming that he had contracted a rare blood disease after being bitten by a bat in China.
“It’s a hard one,” says Levin, “because Chatwin’s really one of the people who set me walking. I remember reading What Am I Doing Here? and Utz, and him and [VS] Naipaul are really the people who made me want to be a travel writer. It was a different time, but I do think he was quite calculating.”
Levin is now healthier: “Rehabilitated to a point where I can travel again,” he says. In recent months he’s been to Thailand and India, of which he says: “That’s just so rewarding for me, and such a relief that I can do it. I can’t do it the way I used to. But I did rattle around Rajasthan. Where I used to just hop and skip around any foreign city before, now I had to be driven up to the Amber Fort in Jaipur. But still, what an amazing prize to be able to walk around something.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
