Lilli and The Hippopotamus: A short review
To be a successful hitch-hiker, Peter writes, "you must cheat and lie. You must live on your wits. You must trip Authority and thumb a nose at Public Opinion. Above all you must enjoy doing all this and more, much more, anything in fact to further your own interests. You must be thoroughly selfish."
He confesses right away "Being a louse, a thorough-going died-in-the-wool louse, is the best thing that can happen to a hitch-hiker". Well, whether it's the best thing or not I don't know, but it certainly works too. In spite of making his fair share of enemies on the way, he builds friendships as well. There is in the end something very romantic in the recklessness of what he's doing.
He's got an English sense of humor too, and as silly as Peter is at times, he still has a way of writing about it that will bring a laugh out of most readers from time to time.
Peter is literally skinflint most of the time. He ended up camped under a tree in Calcutta for lack of any contacts or any place to stay (or any money). Just waiting day after day under this tree, a local guru eventually invites him to a ghetto where the beggars live -- with the warning that it probably wouldn't help him find a lift out of town, but it would keep him fed and housed.
He ends up living some months with beggars in Calcutta because he just couldn't find a lift out of the place, as predicted. I mean he was aiming high, a plane to Singapore, but still it wasn't happening.
In the end he almost makes, well he gets his ride to Singapore, but is turned back at the border and flies right on back on the same plane. Ultimately he gives up and catches a plane back to London to end the whole trip -- he never did make it all the way around the world.
The book is called "Lilli and the Hippopotamus", was published by Secker and Warburg in London, 1958, and written of course by Peter himself. The title isn't at all clear until very late in the book, both Lilli and the Hippopotamus are the objects of Peter's love at some stage in his Indian travels, the former a little more orthodox than the latter.
Well, one thing that sustained Peter on this trip, and that sustains any long
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