Trump on Trump

It’s an incongruous name for a wilderness, “the Karoo.” The nursery-like sound belies the harshness of a vast, arid hinterland separating South Africa’s littoral from its grassland interior. For South Africans, the name is synonymous with bone-dry air, scented heathers, great rock formations, vast skies and even vaster sunsets. The scrubland here is so inhospitable that for centuries it insulated the southern tip of Africa from the rest of the continent. A single people — the Khoi bushmen — were adapted to its desicated conditions: Karoo is their word for “waterless land” that has come down to us as its modern name. In the nineteenth century, the pressures of the outside world began to weigh on this hardy time capsule.

I’m on a high-speed train. Forty years ago, such a statement would have been notable and specific: essentially, it meant you were in Japan or France. Nowadays, being on a high-speed train is barely a geographical indicator at all. Most of Europe has them, from Spain to Italy to Poland. Morocco has high-speed trains. Uzbekistan has high-speed trains. Even Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, Thailand and the USA either have high-speed railways, or will have them in the next year or two. Just about the only country not powering ahead with high-speed rail is the birthplace of the railway — the United Kingdom — a fact that can either make you sob, or despair, or perform a kind of double sob etched with despair. What makes my experience unusual is that my high-speed journey is happening in Laos.