Recommended. <>Book: “The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux. <>Movie: “Embrace of the Serpent” by Cirro Guerra.

BOOK: “The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia.” A travelogue by Paul Theroux, first published in 1975. The book recounts Mr Theroux's four-month journey by train in 1973 from London through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and his return via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Reading this when I was in the summer of my high school years pumped up my traveling fix. Very picturesque, moving, active—as though you are actually in a train yourself.

       True, reading the book again in my college years offered more clarity on various subjects: Colonialism, poverty, and ignorance. All these and more were vividly etched in the author’s accounts of sights and sounds he experienced as well as his conversation with other people such as his fellow travelers. 

       Sure, some are fictionalized such as his descriptions of places, situations, and people—especially if you yourself visited those places, albeit on a different time. But those are Theroux’s own thoughts. In fact, this book is a sort of template for my (unpublished) “My Life as a Greyhound,” my own account/journal of America while traveling via Greyhound buses. 📚✍️📚

MOVIE: “Embrace of the Serpent” or “El abrazo de la serpiente.” Colombian drama, directed by Ciro Guerra, and written by Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, and released in 2015. The film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle. With Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist. Both searching for the rare plant “yakruna.”

       Albeit mostly fictionalized, and played by Jan Bijvoet and Brionne Davis, Theo and Evan are real people Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes. The movie is inspired by their travel diaries, which are dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures. Karamakate is portrayed by Nilbio Torres. 

       Theodor Koch-Grünberg (b. 1872; d. 1924) was a German ethnologist and explorer who made a valuable contribution to the study of the Indigenous peoples in South America, in particular the Pemon of Venezuela and other indigenous peoples in the Amazon region extending South-Western Brazil and a large part of the Vaupés region in Colombia.

       Richard Evans Schultes (b. 1915; d. 2001) was an American biologist. He may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany. He is known for his studies of the uses of plants by indigenous peoples, especially those of the Americas. Schultes’ 1979 book “The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers,” co-authored with chemist Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, is considered his greatest popular work.

      Although shot almost entirely in black and white, the photography is enthralling; you could feel the colors of the Amazon—right on opening scene as the camera pans through the virgin rainforest. More than all “Embrace of the Serpent” is an unconventional marvel that sends piercing reminders of the past as we journey to the future, the ills of colonization, and what climate change really is all about. In all these, the movie is all about us, wherever we are. Or Karamakate is us. I feel him in me. 🎬🎭🎬