A suicide among the ice floes nearing the North Pole; the shrivelled outline of a gecko trapped in a light bulb in Hong Kong; a tryst with one kind of damnation beneath a painting of Judgment Day in Orvieto, Italy. Roger Willemsen’s The Ends of the Earth, unlike most travel books which try to market their destinations, is in the end a delving into the recesses of the self. To discover whether the earth moves under the traveller’s feet while the traveller himself stays suspended in time and space. Willemsen’s voyages cover places that most travellers do not get to see, spanning five continents and records experiences that may or may not happen to everyone. His book moves from the geographical to the personal, with 22 pieces that are arranged in no particular order.
Travel for Willemsen, on occasion, seems to be a slow and steady exploration of some kind of internal hell because few of the places are beautiful or result in happiness—like the hospital ward in Minsk. There are moments, like a couple met in a train in Myanmar who are deeply in love, or another couple encountered in Amu Darya who live on the fringes of civilisation and are pathetically happy to be taken wandering in a jeep. More important, in fact, than the places are the people who inhabit them, or his own travelling companions, partners of the opposite sex who fall out with him or with the location and create their own kind of chaos theory. Sometimes the atmosphere is almost claustrophobic—life at the ends of the earth causes its own confusion with paperwork and political interference.
Willemsen has an eye for detail and local quirks—people at the ends of the earth most often want to sell things because their own lives are so short of material goods. He makes it a point to seek out the brothels of Mumbai and the music man of Kinshasa, who put the place on the map with his Congo rock and then ended up in jail for helping people migrate to France for large sums of money. Nothing is what it seems—a lake described by German writers of the past as beautiful, for instance, evolves into a dried up basin of land. Willemsen’s descriptions are on occasion static glimpses of place—except, outstandingly, the North Pole, which he sees from a cruise ship, with tragic consequences.
What Willemsen does is redefine the necessity of travel—we globe-trot in search of the perfect moments, rushing from one destination to the next and deciding whether we really want to see it at all, as a businessman in his hired limousine does in one of the pieces, careering from temple to temple. Perhaps, Willemsen hints, we should just sit in our armchairs and contemplate our souls seeking redemption, a bent of mind that makes this book perfect for the armchair traveller, dreamers who can spin own their globes to pinpoint the author’s voyages and wonder whether they made the right choice or not by staying at home instead of visiting Patagonia or Toraja. In the end, it may seem to them that own lives and the places they live in, albeit less dramatic, are far happier than the ones Willemsen visited.
