Mecca, Saudi Arabia: The Kaaba, the most sacred site in Islam, is also said to be the Navel of the World. An Islamic text: "Forty years before Allah created the heavens and earth, the Kaaba was a dry spot floating on water, and from it the world has been spread out" (quoted in Rivka Gonen, Contested Holiness,2003).
Mexico: Pacanda Island, on Lake Patzcuaro in Mexico, has made a claim to be the Navel of the World.
Colombia: To the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples, who call themselves the Elder Brothers of humanity, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range is called the Center of the World.
Faroe Islands: Torshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, was often called the Navel of the World by its most famous local author, William Heinesen (1900–1991), whose passionate nationalism perhaps led him to this delusion. He spoke Faroese but wrote in Danish.
Ayutthaya, Thailand: Wat Phra Si San Phet, built in 1448 by King Boromtrilokanath in this ancient former capital (1350–1767) of Siam, was called the Center of the World.
Bodh Gaya, India: It is said that this holy site is the place where the Buddha sat when he was enlightened, which is called Vajrasana, meaning Diamond Throne. It was believed that when the universe is finally destroyed, this will be the last place to disappear and the first place to re-form when the universe begins again.
Perm, Russia: Nine thousand Permians voted in an Internet poll to have a monument built on a spot to be designated Navel of the Earth.
3. The Pleasures of Railways
NO MODE OF TRANSPORTATION INSPIRES MORE detailed observation than the railway train. There is no literature of air travel, not much of one for bus journeys, and cruise ships inspire social observation but little else. The train is effective because anyone who cares to can write (as well as sleep and eat) on a train. The soothing and unstressful trip leaves deep impressions of the passing scene, and of the train itself. Every airplane trip is the same; every railway journey is different. The rail traveler is often companionable, talkative, even somewhat liberated. Perhaps that's because he or she can walk around. This person, this mood, is what psychologists call "untethered" — such strangers are the best talkers, the best listeners.
Train Travel — the Main Line
Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. Anything is possible, even the urge to get off. — GRB
There seemed to me nothing more perfect in travel than boarding a train just at nightfall and shutting the bedroom door on an icy riotous city and knowing that morning would show me a new latitude. I would leave anything behind, I thought, for a sleeper on a southbound express. — OPE
Half of jazz is railway music, and the motion and noise of the train itself has the rhythm of jazz. This is not surprising: the Jazz Age was also the Railway Age. Musicians traveled by train or not at all, and the pumping tempo and the clickety-clack and the lonesome whistle crept into the songs. So did the railway towns on the route: how else could Joplin or Kansas City be justified in a lyric? — OPE
Ghosts, as old people seem to the young, have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness — traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. — GTES
No good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough. — OPE
I had been in Latin America long enough to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendors of the continent. — OPE
The great challenge in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal — show up and hop on. — GTES
There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like the one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows — the branches pushed at the glass like mops and brooms — what kind of train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut. — KBS
The nostalgia of railway buffs is dangerous, since they hanker for the past and are never happier than when they are able to turn an old train into a toy. — KBS
The best story about Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third-class ticket line. When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, "Do you know who I am?" The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, "In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a third-class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?" — DSS
A train isn't a vehicle. A train is part of the country. It's a place. — RIR
The train offers the maximum of opportunity with the minimum of risk. — GRB
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I were on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. The train can reassure you in awful places — afar cry from the anxious sweats of doom airplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the long-distance bus, or the paralysis that afflicts the car passenger. If a train is large and comfortable you don't even need a destination; a corner seat is enough, and you can be one of those travelers who stay in motion, straddling the tracks, and never arrive or feel they ought to. — GRB
Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse.
— William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1957)
Talking on Trains
The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candor from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again. — GRB
The Romance of the Sleeping Car
The romance associated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupboard with forward movement. Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous vision, a grand tour's succession of memorable images across a curved earth — with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea — is possible only on a train. A train is a vehicle that allows residence: dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer. — GRB