You enjoyed autumn in the city of skyscrapers. What do you expect to find in New York that you have not found on your previous trips?

I do not look for anything special in New York, just to be there and to live the city. When I was working as a journalist, I had the opportunity on three occasions to come here but each time I was unable to. So this is something I have always wanted to do. I do not want to die without having lived in what is, for now, the capital of the western or first world. I might even write something about my experience. It is a truly exciting city, full of energy.

What sensations do you feel when every day, in the cradle of democracy, Greece, there are scenes of protests from the population and when old Europe is encountering serious difficulties to maintain political and economic cohesion?

In this case, crisis is very painful because I really love Greece for its past and present and I am seriously worried about the current situation, because of the way it will negatively influence the future of many people. How can we pass on to our children a society like this? However, I believe the crisis may clear many false values we have upheld and which made us live very comfortably. We must recover the deeper ethical values and condemn the usury system we live in once and for all.

In what way did your Greek colleagues Herodotus, with his account of the Greco-Persian wars, and Thucydides, with his description of the Peloponnesian War, influence your work as a journalist when you were in the midst of the Balkan war or in Ulster ?

The figure of the white hunter no longer exists and today’s hunters are almost butchers

When you are sending urgent articles from a war zone, you do not remember Herodotus or Thucydides. They were historians, they were not chroniclers of a specific event. They have influenced my intellectual formation as have many others, but not as a chronicler.

You have said that when you were writing about your first trip to Africa, ‘you imagined a female reader’. Do you feel like the 21^st century explorer who returns home to recount his adventures?

When my children were small and I returned home from my travels, they would sit down next to me and ask me to tell them about my adventures. Now they are grown men and I no longer live with them. So, therefore, I no longer have anyone to tell directly, which is why I write my books.

Is there any positive legacy from the ‘legend of the white hunter’ in Africa?

The figure of the white hunter no longer exists, amongst other things because hunting has either been banned or is strictly regulated, or has been organised on large farms as a business. So, there is very little adventure. Today’s hunters are almost butchers.

After studying the biographies of the great European explorers and reliving their expeditions, what qualities can today’s generations admire in these men, whether they are British, German, Spanish or Portuguese, and which of their attitudes and prejudices should they avoid?

I am not worried about the Earth global warming; I am just terrified

What was most admirable in the explorers was first, their curiosity and, second, their bravery. These are eternal values which any youth at any time should admire. With regards to prejudices, many of them were racist, they thought that to ‘discover’ meant the arrival of the white man, when there were other men who were already there when they arrived. But those prejudices have been overcome by history itself.

Whales have recovered the Northwest Passage in the Arctic Ocean, the one that you travelled through and described in ‘Mares Salvajes’. Are you worried about Global Warming?

Of course I am in favour of travel insurance

I am not worried about Global Warming; I am just terrified. Consider that we are playing with the survival of the species. If we make the world a place where it is impossible to breathe, we are condemning ourselves to suffocate and disappear. However, all things considered, the dinosaurs disappeared and yet the Earth continues to exist. We are not essential after all.

By using adjectives, you are able to transmit the feelings you have on each voyage, as well as painting the landscapes you travel through. Could a travel book be written taking into account Saramago’s ‘culture without adjectives’?

‘Culture without adjectives’? It depends on the adjectives. I am in favour of adjectives that give substance to the subject, not of those that simply adorn it. This is why I prefer a culture of rich adjectives, substantial ones, rather than one without adjectives, dry as a barren field.

Let´s talk of your reviled ‘tourism plague’. How to be a good tourist when visiting protected sanctuaries of powerful nature and where the precarious situation of the population of a country awakens contradictory feelings in the visitor.

What was most admirable in the explorers was first, their curiosity and second, their bravery; many of them were racist, they thought that to ‘discover’ meant the arrival of the white man

I think tourism helps deprived population to grow. What happens is that if those populations are governed by dictators, they keep the benefits for themselves. Nevertheless, tourism does help conservation because it provides cash. I do not hate tourism, not at all. Why should people not have a right to see faraway places?

Do you think travel insurance is necessary after your experience of suffering malaria in Brazil and the trip that made you write ‘The River of Desolation’?

Of course I am in favour of travel insurance. In fact, I always take out insurance before I leave. At the beginning it did not worry me. In fact, I almost lost my life as a result of not having a hospital that would take me in when I was in Brazil. That taught me a lesson.

go top