The White Nile Diaries

''Where is this adventure taking us? I now have no fixed address, don''t want one, don''t need one. We are floating. Nostalgia for home is vamoose. We have tasted the lotus and we are not going back.''

It all began at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, in 1961.

Two young Princetonians have returned to New York from South America, where their dream of buying a coffee plantation in the Peruvian jungle evaporated. With the fire for adventure still burning in their veins, they are tempted by a mysterious letter from Kenya and plan a trip across Africa. They buy a white BMW motorcycle and paint the words ''The White Nile'' on the tank, to honour the route they will follow.

In limpid, elegant prose John Hopkins describes deadly salt flats where tourists vanish without a trace, mysterious Saharan oases and the funerals of young Tunisians killed by the French Foreign Legion. In Leptus Magna he conjures visions of ancient Rome and visits Homer''s fabled isla