Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Map
Copyright
Contents
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere
Abbreviations of Book Titles
1. Travel in Brief
2. The Navel of the World
3. The Pleasures of Railways
4. Murphy's Rules of Travel
5. Travelers on Their Own Books
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?
7. The Things That They Carried
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone
10. Travel as an Ordeal
11. English Travelers on Escaping England
12. When You're Strange
13. It Is Solved by Walking
14. Travel Feats
15. Staying home
16. Imaginary Journeys
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere
18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable
20. Imaginary People
21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited
22. Traveler's Bliss
23. Classics of a Sense of Place
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
25. Dangerous, happy, Alluring
26. Five Travel Epiphanies
27. The Essential Tao of Travel
Acknowledgments
Permissions and Credits
The Tao of Travel
Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
Paul Theroux
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Map
Copyright
Contents
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere
Abbreviations of Book Titles
1. Travel in Brief
2. The Navel of the World
3. The Pleasures of Railways
4. Murphy's Rules of Travel
5. Travelers on Their Own Books
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?
7. The Things That They Carried
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone
10. Travel as an Ordeal
11. English Travelers on Escaping England
12. When You're Strange
13. It Is Solved by Walking
14. Travel Feats
15. Staying home
16. Imaginary Journeys
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere
18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable
20. Imaginary People
21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited
22. Traveler's Bliss
23. Classics of a Sense of Place
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
25. Dangerous, happy, Alluring
26. Five Travel Epiphanies
27. The Essential Tao of Travel
Acknowledgments
Permissions and Credits
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Boston New York
2011
Copyright © 2011 by Paul Theroux
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theroux, Paul.
The tao of travel : enlightenments from lives on the road / Paul Theroux.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-33691-6
1. Travel—Anecdotes. 2. Travelers—Anecdotes. I. Title.
G180.T54 2011
910.4—dc22 2010042022
Book design by Lisa Diercks
The text of this book is set in Miller.
Printed in China
SCP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Permissions and credits follow the index.
Contents
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere[>]
1. Travel in Brief [>]
2. The Navel of the World [>]
3. The Pleasures of Railways [>]
Travel Wisdom of Henry Fielding [>]
4. Murphy's Rules of Travel [>]
5. Travelers on Their Own Books [>]
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling? [>]
Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson [>]
7. The Things That They Carried [>]
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions [>]
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone [>]
Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton [>]
10. Travel as an Ordeal [>]
11. English Travelers on Escaping England [>]
12. When You're Strange [>]
Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson [>]
13. It Is Solved by Walking [>]
14. Travel Feats [>]
15. Staying Home [>]
Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark [>]
16. Imaginary Journeys [>]
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere [>]
18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting [>]
Travel Wisdom of Claude Lévi-Strauss [>]
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable [>]
20. Imaginary People [>]
21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited [>]
Travel Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh [>]
22. Travelers' Bliss [>]
23. Classics of a Sense of Place [>]
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place [>]
Travel Wisdom of Paul Bowles [>]
25. Dangerous, Happy, Alluring [>]
26. Five Travel Epiphanies [>]
27. The Essential Tao of Travel [>]
Acknowledgments [>]
Index of People and Places [>]
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere
AS A CHILD, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight—my little self hurrying off alone. The word "travel" did not occur to me, nor did the word "transformation," which was my unspoken but enduring wish. I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about. The importance of elsewhere was something I took on faith. Elsewhere was the place I wanted to be. Too young to go, I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom. Books were my road. And then, when I was old enough to go, the roads I traveled became the obsessive subject in my own books. Eventually I saw that the most passionate travelers have always also been passionate readers and writers. And that is how this book came about.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, to bear witness to the consequences, tragic or comic, of people possessed by the narcissism of minor differences. Chekhov said, "If you're afraid of loneliness, don't marry." I would say, if you're afraid of loneliness, don't travel. The literature of travel shows the effects of solitude, sometimes mournful, more often enriching, now and then unexpectedly spiritual.
All my traveling life I have been asked the maddening and oversimplifying question "What is your favorite travel book?" How to answer it? I have been on the road for almost fifty years and writing about my travels for more than forty years. One of the first books my father read to me at bedtime when I was small was Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain in Maine.This 1930s as-told-to account described how a twelve-year-old boy survived eight days on Mount Katahdin. Donn suffered, but he made it out of the Maine woods. The book taught me lessons in wilderness survival, including the basic one: "Always follow a river or a creek in the direction the water is flowing." I have read many travel books since, and I have made journeys on every continent except Antarctica, which I have recounted in eight books and hundreds of essays. I have felt renewed inspiration in the thought of little Donn making it safely down the high mountain.
The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. "This is what I saw"—news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. "They're just like us!" or "They're not like us at all!" The traveler's tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience. It's how the first novel in English got written. Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoeon the actual experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, though he enlarged the story, turning Selkirk's four and a half years on a remote Pacific Island into twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island, adding Friday, the cannibals, and tropical exotica.
The storyteller's intention is always to hold the listener with a glittering eye and riveting tale. I think of the travel writer as idealized in the lines of the ghost of Hamlet's father at the beginning of the play:
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end
But most are anecdotal, amusing, instructional, farcical, boastful, mock-heroic, occasionally hair-raising, warnings to the curious, or else they ring bells like mad and seem familiar. At their best, they are examples of what is most human in travel.
In the course of my wandering life, travel has changed, not only in speed and efficiency, but because of the altered circumstances of the world—much of it connected and known. This conceit of Internet-inspired omniscience has produced the arrogant delusion that the physical effort of travel is superfluous. Yet there are many parts of the world that are little known and worth visiting, and there was a time in my traveling when some parts of the earth offered any traveler the Columbus or Crusoe thrill of discovery.
As an adult traveling alone in remote and cut-off places, I learned a great deal about the world and myself: the strangeness, the joy, the liberation and truth of travel, the way loneliness—such a trial at home—is the condition of a traveler. But in travel, as Philip Larkin says in his poem "The Importance of Elsewhere," strangeness makes sense.
Travel in dreams, for Freud, symbolized death. That the journey—an essay into the unknown—can be risky, even fatal, was a natural conclusion for Freud to reach, since he suffered from self-diagnosed Reiseangst, travel anxiety. He was so fearful of missing a train that he appeared at railway stations two hours ahead of time, and when the train appeared at the platform he usually panicked. He wrote in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,"Dying is replaced in dreams by departure, by a train journey."
This has not been my experience; I associate my happiest traveling days with sitting on trains. Some travel is more of a nuisance than a hardship, but travel is always a mental challenge, and even at its most difficult, travel can be an enlightenment.
The joy of travel, and reading about it, is the theme of this collection—and perhaps the misery too; but even remembered misery can produce lyrical nostalgia. As I was rereading some of the books quoted here I realized how dated they were, and how important as historical documents—the dramas as well as the romance of an earlier time. Yet a lot of the old-fangledness of travel ended very recently.
This book of insights, a distillation of travelers' visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others', is based on many decades of my reading travel books and traveling the earth. It is also intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical. In the spirit of Buddha's dictum "You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself," I hope that this collection shows, in its approaches to travel, ways of living and thinking too.
Abbreviations of Book Titles
GRB
The Great Railway Bazaar
OPE
The Old Patagonian Express
KBS
The Kingdom by the Sea
SWS
Sunrise with Seamonsters
RIR
Riding the Iron Rooster
TEE
To the Ends of the Earth
HIO
The Happy Isles of Oceania
POH
The Pillars of Hercules
FAF
Fresh Air Fiend
DSS
Dark Star Safari
GTES
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
WE
World's End
1. Travel in Brief
The Necessity to Move
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
—D. H. Lawrence,
Sea and Sardinia
(1921)
Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is "Out-sickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.
—Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen,
Hans Christian Andersen
(2005)
The Road Is Life
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
—Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
(1958)
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
—James Baldwin,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953)
You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back.—
DSS
A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.—
POH
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.—
FAF
The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still.—
SWS
It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.—
GTES
Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.—
FAF
Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.—
POH
In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.—
POH
In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.—
KBS
Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.—
GRB
All travel is circular ... After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.—
GRB
It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell.—
HIO
No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.—
POH
It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home—indeed, looking for the perfect memory.—
FAF
When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, "Nowhere." Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness.—
OPE
Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.—
GTES
One of the happier and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest.—
GTES
I had gotten to Lower Egypt and was heading south in my usual traveling mood—hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed a perfect place for a long journey.—
DSS
Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges's view, floated beautifully through his poem "Happiness" (
La Dicha
), that in our encounters with the world, "everything happens for the first time" Just as "whoever embraces a woman is Adam," and "whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,"anyone's first view of the Sphinx sees it new: "In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted ... Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal."—
DSS
Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.
—Madame de Staël,
Corinne, ou l'Italie
(1807)
Two Paradoxes of Travel
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
—Carson McCullers, "Look Homeward, Americans,"
Vogue
(1940)
To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.
—Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Russian Literature
(1982)
Solitary Travel
Solitary Travelers: Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.
—Sir Francis Galton,
The Art of Travel
(1855)
Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non sequiturs, shattering your concentration with "Oh, look, it's raining" and "You see a lot of trees here.
"
It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest.—
OPE
In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That's the theory.—
GTES
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.—
OPE
The whole point of traveling is to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but
by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and do not instantly think of you as money on two legs. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans is a liberating event. It can be a solemn occasion for discovery, or more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet.—
GTES
In the best travel books the word "alone" is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. The conceit of this, the idea of being able to report it—for I had deliberately set out to write a book, hadn't I?—made up for the discomfort. Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition.—
OPE
There was no concept of solitariness among the Pacific islanders I traveled among that did not also imply misery or mental decline. Reading as a recreation was not indulged in much on these islands either—for that same reason, because you did it alone. Illiteracy had nothing to do with it, and there were plenty of schools. They knew from experience that a person who cut himself off, who was frequently seen alone—reading books, away from the hut, walking on the beach, on his own—was sunk in
musu,
the condition of deep melancholy, and was either contemplating murder or suicide, probably both.—
HIO
All travelers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There was no hell like a stranger's Sunday.—
WE
Anonymity in Travel
On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me
feel invisible. Yet to be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication.—
KBS
Being invisible—the usual condition of the older traveler, is much more useful than being obvious.—
GTES
The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for someone with a train to catch. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my mustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn.—
OPE
Travelers' Conceits
One traveler's conceit is that he is heading into the unknown. The best travel is a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly what would be the point in going there?—
DSS
Another traveler's conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway round the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere—the truer shout is not "Never again," but "Again and again."—
GTES
Yet another traveler's conceit is that no one will see what he has seen; his trip displaces the landscape, and his version of events is all that matters. He is certainly kidding himself in this, but if he didn't kid himself a little he would never go anywhere.—
KBS
Strangers in Travel
Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move toward an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, improvising the trip.—
GTES
Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.—
GTES
Cities and Travel
One of the pitfalls of long journeys is the tendency of the traveler to miniaturize a big city—not out of malice or frivolity, but for his or her own peace of mind.—
RIR
My ideal of travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cities are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent.—
FAF
Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look offinality breathing
You've arrived
to the traveler.—
POH
"
Athens is a four-hour city," one man said, meaning that was all the time you needed to see it in its entirety. That hourly rate seemed to me a helpful index for judging cities.—
POH
Adventure
Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that people you trust have warned you against.—
FAF
For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have become trophies.—
FAF
Travel and Optimism
It was the poor person's way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action.—
KBS
Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere.
—FAF
Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.—
GTES
Travel and Tradition
Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.—
POH
All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them.—
POH
Observing local rituals while traveling is important, not for
its dubious sanctity, but because the set of gestures in rituals reveals the inner state of the people involved and their subtle protocol.—
GTES
Travel and Politics
Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble.—
POH
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.—
DSS
Sightseeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The non-sightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency, and has to be deported.—
RIR
Travel and Porno
It seemed incontestable to me that a country's pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth, but it contained many clues and even more warnings, especially of its men.—
POH
Landscape in Travel
A landscape looks different when you know the names of things, and conversely, can look exceedingly inhospitable and alien when it seems nameless.—
FAF
It is rare to find silence anywhere in a natural landscape. There is always the wind at least. The rustle of trees and grass, the
drone of insects, the squawk of birds, the whistle of bats. By the sea, silence—true silence—is almost unknown. But on my last day here in Palau's Rock Islands, there was not even the lap of water. The air was motionless. I could hear no insects, nor any birds. The fruit bats flew high, beating their wings in absolute quiet. It seemed simple and wonderful: the world as an enormous room.—
FAF
Africa, seemingly incomplete and so empty, is a place for travelers to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength—binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, making long journeys in expensive Land Rovers, re-creating stereotypes, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction. That's why many travelers in Africa are determined to see it not as fifty-three countries but rather as a single troubled landscape.—
DSS
The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange landscape.—
SWS
Travel as a Waste of Time
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)
Now my mind is made up. The whole journey is a trap. Travel does not broaden you so much as make you sophisticated, "up-to-date," taken in by the superficial with that really stupid look of a fellow serving on a beauty prize jury.
The look of a go-getter also. Worth no more. You can just as easily find your truth staring for forty-eight hours at some old tapestry.
—Henri Michaux,
Ecuador
(1970)
Travel, indeed, struck him as a being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience ... No doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands.
—Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in
Against Nature
by J.-K. Huysmans (1884), translated by Robert Baldick (1959)
You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.—
GTES
The Traveler as a Voyeur
The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.
But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."—
GTES
Travel as Intrusion
It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [
Heart of Darkness],
and one other ... are all the spoil I brought out from the center of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.
—Joseph Conrad, Author's Note,
Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether
(1902)
Travel as Transformation
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
—Mark Twain,
Innocents Abroad
(1869)
There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.
—John Steinbeck, letter, June 1960, in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1975)
The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil. The person who edits and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least I am not the person I was before. The vagabonding through our "America" has changed me more than I thought.
—Ernesto "Che" Guevara,
Notas de Viaje (The Motorcycle Diaries),
in Jon Lee Anderson,
Che
(2010)
The Traveler Must Be Worthy
The traveler must be himself, in men's eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God's heaven, and were it without a religion: he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt; it is enough and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the end of the world.
—C. M. Doughty,
Travels in Arabia Deserta
(1888)
Traveling Makes One Modest
To go back to Kuchuk [a courtesan and dancer in Esna]. You and I are thinking of her, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honors of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others. Ah! Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
—Gustave Flaubert, in
Flaubert in Egypt,
translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)
Travel Writing
Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.
—V. S. Pritchett,
Complete Essays
(1991)
Travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography ... The anonymous hotel room in a strange city drives one into the confessional mode.—
GRB
The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows.—
GRB
When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.—
TEE
Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different from
writing a novel: fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act—like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence.—
TEE
On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.—
RIR
One of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing. There has never been a Melville on the moon, or even an Updike.—
FAF
Lawrence's journeys by post-bus or cold late train or on foot are in that great laborious tradition which produced genuine travel books—the eye slowly taking it all in, the aching feet imposing the leisure to observe the common people in the smoky inn kitchen.
—Anthony Burgess, Introduction,
Lawrence and Italy
(1972)
[Henry Miller's
Colossus of Maroussi]
has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the "soul" of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers.
—George Orwell, in the weekly
Tribune,
December 4, 1942, in
Orwell: Complete Works
(1968)
The Speed of Travel
I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot.
—Gardner McKay,
Journey Without a Map
(2009)
Time Travel
The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life.—
GTES
Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present—but the present contains the future.—
KBS
Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past.—
HIO
A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward.—
GTES
Traveling in a Time of Trouble
A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness.—
GTES
Travel and Love
If one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier.—
GTES
Smell a Country to Understand It
[Kipling's] gift is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it).
—T. S. Eliot,
A Choice of Kipling's Verse
(1943)
Travel as a Love Affair
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with ... All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
—Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel,"
Salon
(2000)
Tourism and Sightseeing
The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.
—V. S. Pritchett,
The Spanish Temper
(1954)
He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to the another.
—Paul Bowles,
The Sheltering Sky
(1949)
Tourists don't know where they've been, I thought. Travelers don't know where they're going.—
HIO
In Mumbai: A tourist would have been in a temple or a museum. I had been in a slum.—
GTES
Sightseeing is an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity.—
GRB
Sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but ... it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.—
GRB
Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel ... It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.—
SWS
Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.—
TEE
Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest.—
OPE
Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation's pleasures.—
KBS
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living—indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.—
GTES
It is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor.—
OPE
Tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable.—
HIO
After a man has made a large amount of money he becomes a bad listener and an impatient tourist.—
POH
She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.
—Vladimir Nabokov,
The Original of Laura
(2009)
Departures
There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.—
OPE
Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather.—
GTES
Frontiers
A mushroom-and-dunghill relationship exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries.—
OPE
In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss: like a small policeman directing traffic.—
POH
A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.—
OPE
Looking across the river, I realized I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there—music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people do things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope, the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.—
OPE
A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality.—
DSS
Air Travel
There is not much to say about airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright—from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time
is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, "What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair."—
OPE
Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.—
OPE
Airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked.—
GTES
Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist's, even to the chairs.—
FAF
A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—
GRB
The Return Journey
In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. And it is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.—
RIR
Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That
was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.—
DSS
One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed.—
HIO
2. The Navel of the World
ON EASTER ISLAND, OR RAPA NUI, WHERE I WAS camping and paddling my kayak, traveling for my Happy Isles of Oceania book, an islander said to me, "This is the pito."I said, "Really?" The term is a cognate of the Hawaiian word (piko) for navel. The Easter Islander went on,"Te Pito te Henua,"and explained: Navel of the World. ¶ Perhaps just the delusion you would entertain on a smallish windswept rock in the middle of a cold ocean, two thousand miles from the nearest land. But it seems that the name may have been derived from the birth of a child by a woman who had just arrived on the first canoe, guided by the way-finder Hotu-Matua, the original ancestor and discoverer of Rapa Nui. The ritual cutting of the baby's navel may have been the earliest human ritual performed on the island. The date of this is disputed, but it would have been somewhere around the year 500—amazing when you consider the canoe-building and navigational skills required for such a voyage. W. J. Thomson, in his exhaustive ethnographic study of the island, Te Pito te Henua, claims that this was the name that Hotu-Matua gave to the island on encountering it. Seen from a distance, the singular volcanic formation, the dead cone of Rana Raraku, a lump of bare rock in an empty sea, certainly looks like a petrified bellybutton.
In Delphi, Greece, wandering for The Pillars of Hercules, I was shown a rock and told by a guide in a solemn voice that it was the Omphalos, the Navel of the World. This got me thinking about the belief that one's village or town is the center of the world. I am from Boston, and from childhood heard Boston referred to locally as "the Hub"—usually by headline writers of the Boston Globe. The Hub is actually the short form of "the Hub of the Universe." This hyperbole derives from Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, writing about a Bostonian who says, "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system."
It seems to me a harmless conceit. Here is a list of other earthly navels:
China: The Chinese called (and still call) their country Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, meaning the center of the world.
Arizona: Baboquivari Peak, near Sasabe in Pima County. The Tohono O'odham people regard this mountain as the Navel of the World, the place where, after the great flood subsided, humans emerged to populate the earth.
Cuzco, Peru: In Creation myth the word "Qosqo," in Quechua, means "the Navel of the World," and Cuzco was regarded as such by the Inca.
Jerusalem: The Al Aqsa Mosque ("the Furthermost") is dome-shaped to reflect the belief that it marks the Navel of the World.
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
In my eyes [the berth] is the perfect thing, perfect in conception and execution, this small green hole in the dark moving night, this soft warren in a hard world.
—E. B. White, "Progress and Change,"
One Man's Meat
(1944)
Trains Contain the Paraphernalia of a Culture
The state railway of Thailand is comfortable and expertly run, and now I knew enough of rail travel in Southeast Asia to avoid the air-conditioned sleeping cars, which are freezing cold and have none of the advantages of the wooden sleepers: wide berths and a shower room. There is not another train in the world that has a tall stone jar in the bath compartment, where, before dinner, one can stand naked, sluicing oneself with scoops of water. Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Sri Lankan ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character.—
GRB
Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian
train, the borscht and bad manners on the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: "a morning pick-me-up," as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning.—
OPE
Particular Train Journeys
SOMERSET MAUGHAM IN THAILAND: WHY GET OFF THE TRAIN?
The train arrived at Ayudhya. I was content to satisfy my curiosity about this historic place by a view of the railway station (after all, if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station? In the Pennsylvania Depot is all the mystery of New York and in Victoria Station the grim, weary vastness of London).
—
The Gentleman in the Parlour
(1930)
PAUL MORAND ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: PARIS TO CONSTANTINOPLE IN TWO PARAGRAPHS
The Simplon-Orient dragged its triweekly public through the gloom as usual. The usual French dressmakers and, less elderly, milliners were returning to Constantinople with a new lot of models; at La-roche the perfume of Paris began to fade and the tenacious Oriental odors, rose and peppery bergamot, reasserted themselves. Officials' wives flitted in the corridors with six infant children who wouldn't be properly put to bed this side of Bombay. Officers of the Etat-major, in police caps, strode up the station platforms during the stops, stretching their short, authoritative legs. French hearts are wholly hidden by the multitude of their decorations. The English slept late, whistled in the conveniences, where they stayed in relays until the water and towels ran out. The Israelite-Spanish families from Salonika, returning after clarifying their complexions at Vichy, kept to their bunks all day with their clothes on, stretched on the unmade bedding, between swaying flasks of Chianti hung from the electric light fixtures. Then after a tedium they and the rest of us slept to the rattle of the axles and the steel castanet springs. Snores. We beat on the mahogany panels to drive back the bedbugs. The conductor snoozed at the end of the corridor, on a cushion stuffed with contraband lire, dinars, drachmas, Rumanian leis and pounds, his alpaca tunic stuffed also with little folded papers full of jewels.
The train shook the loose glass of Gothic Swiss railway stations. For twenty-nine minutes the Simplon offered its large iron symphony. Then the banked roads and rice fields of the Piedmont. Then a station leading off into nothing, a great cistern of silence and shadows that was Venice. In the morning a zinc-colored north wind overbent the Croatian corn in the plains. Pigs, striped black and white as with racing colors, betrayed the presence of Serbia; they were apparently devouring the corpse, or rather the wheels and an alarm signal, of a car which lay still derailed in a ditch. After rivers came yet other rivers that we crossed on rickety trestles beside the ruined piers of older bridges which had been destroyed in retreats. At Vinkovci we got rid of the velvet Rumanians, velvet eyes, velvet mustaches, daughters in undershirts plaiting their hair in the gelid darkness by the glimmer of half-frozen candles. After Sofia, pimentos hung drying across the house fronts. Oriental sun beat upon the Bulgar plains, ox-ploughs obtruded a symbolic prosperity as depicted upon the Bulgars' postage stamps and their money. At last, after the desert of Thrace, under a sky full of constellations lacking a polestar, with the disfigured Bear no longer recognizable at the low edge of the horizon, the Sea of Marmara stretched before us through a breach in the Byzantine wall.
—"Turkish Night,"
Fancy Goods—Open All Night
(1922), translated by Ezra Pound
REBECCA WEST EN ROUTE TO YUGOSLAVIA
I raised myself on my elbow and called [to my husband] through the open door into the other wagon-lit: "My dear, I know I have inconvenienced you terribly by making you take your holiday now, and I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all. But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey, and that we should make it now, at Easter. It will all be quite clear, once we are in Yugoslavia."
There was, however, no reply. My husband had gone to sleep. It was perhaps as well. I could not have gone on to justify my certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity.
—
Black Lamb and Gray Falcon
(1941)
JEAN COCTEAU SUFFERING FROM BOMBAY TO CALCUTTA
Intolerable porters demand additional tips. Passepartout [Cocteau's lover, Marcel Khill] threatens them. They run off but return and glue their faces at the windows of the dining car, where one can just manage to collapse—it's the only word—into the seats one each side of the table.
I had no idea that such heat existed and that people could live in this cursed zone. The train starts off, and as we move out, I can recognize the old cannons on which Kim sat astride at the beginning of the book. [The cannon, Zamzama, was actually in Lahore, but this is a detail.]
The fire in India burns the glass, metal and coachwork to a white heat, raises the temperature of the atmosphere till you feel sick despite the electric fans which whip up its sticky paste.
Not having been warned against this torture, we leave the windows open. We doze off and wake up covered with a grey crust and our mouths, ears, lungs, hair full of the ashes of the fire which surrounds our journey. This inferno with insignificant interruptions of douches of cold water which quickly turn into boiling water, and lumps of ice that melt and become hot water, was to be the only knowledge of India vouchsafed to Mr. Fogg and Passepartout...
Nothing stirs. Corn, paddy fields, mud village, agricultural labor of the damned souls in this hell. Turquoise blue and blackjays, occasional coconut palms and trees with fine luscious shadows begin to reappear. Sometimes a deodar stands alone in the desert dealing justice.
Stations. Shirts with tails hanging loose. Umbrellas. Workmen washing and massaging themselves with their fists. Then they stamp on their linen robes and wring them. And the never-ending procession of women beasts of burden. Blind men led by children. The heat is becoming less intolerable. By night it is almost cool. Tomorrow the inferno will be redoubled.
—
Mon Premier Voyage
(1937), published in English as
My Journey Around the World,
translated by W. J. Strachan (1959)
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LEAVING HOME: "AT EVERY STATION I WAS ON THE POINT OF GETTING OFF"
From Nogent to Paris. What a ride! I closed the windows (I was alone in the compartment), held my handkerchief to my mouth, and wept. After a time, the sound of my own voice ... brought me to myself, then the sobs began again. At one point my head was spinning so that I was afraid. "Calm down! Calm down!" I opened the window; the moon, surrounded by a halo of mist, was shining in puddles; it was cold. I thought of my mother, her face all contracted from weeping, the droop at the corners of her mouth...
At Montereau I went into the station restaurant and drank three or four glasses of rum, not to try to forget things, but just to do something, anything.
Then my misery took another form: I thought of returning. (At every station I was on the point of getting off; only the fear of being a coward prevented me.) I imagined the voice of Eugenie, crying, "Madame! It's Monsieur Gustave!" I could give my mother this tremendous joy at once; it was up to me entirely. I lulled myself with this idea: I was exhausted, and it relaxed me.
—
Flaubert in Egypt,
translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)
VLADIMIR NABOKOV IN 1909: "INFORMAL CONTACT BETWEEN TRAIN AND CITY"
When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed house fronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a two-fold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses.
—"First Love,"
Nabokov's Dozen
(1958)
V. S. PRITCHETT: "LARGE THICK COLD OMELETS"
Usually I traveled second or third class on the Spanish trains, for there the Spanish crowd came in and were good company. Often the women traveled with a pet bird in a cage: everyone took their shoes off and when they unpacked their large thick cold omelets, they were careful to offer it first to everyone in the carriage. At the stations, which were often a couple of miles from the towns they served, water sellers calling out "Agua fresca" walked up and down in the red dust of the south and the pale dust of Castile.
—
The Spanish Temper
(1954)
EVELYN WAUGH ON THE TRAIN TO NAIROBI: "MY ILL TEMPER GRADUALLY COOLED"
But my ill temper gradually cooled as the train, with periodic derailments (three, to be exact, between Mombassa and Nairobi), climbed up from the coast into the highlands. In the restaurant car that evening I sat opposite a young lady who was on her way to be married. She told me that she had worked for two years in Scotland Yard and that had coarsened her mind; but since then she had refined it again in a bank at Dar-es-Salaam. She was glad to be getting married as it was impossible to obtain fresh butter in Dar-es-Salaam.
I awoke during the night to draw up my blanket. It was a novel sensation, after so many weeks, not to be sweating. Next morning I changed from white drill to gray flannel. We arrived in Nairobi a little before lunch time.
—
Remote People
(1931)
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS: A MOSLEM FAMILY IN THE COMPARTMENT
At the foot of the Kashmir mountains, between Rawalpindi and Peshawar, the archaeological site of Taxila lies a few kilometers from the railway line. I went there by train, which led to my being the involuntary cause of a minor drama. There was only one first-class compartment of a fairly old type—sleep four, seat six—simultaneously reminiscent of a cattle truck, a drawing room and—because of the protective bars on the windows—a prison. A Moslem family was already in possession, when I got in: a husband, with his wife and two children. The lady was in purdah: although she made an attempt to isolate herself by crouching down on her bunk wrapped in her
burkah
and with her back obstinately turned towards me, the promiscuity eventually appeared too shocking and the family had to split up. The wife and children went off to the "Ladies Only" compartment, while the husband continued to occupy the reserved seats and to glare at me. I managed to take a philosophical view of the incident.
—
Tristes Tropiques
(1955), translated by John and Doreen Weightman
SIMENON: THE MAN WHO WATCHED TRAINS GO BY
That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine. Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer, vaguely improper notions into his head.
—
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
(1938), translated by Marc Romano and D. Thin
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: TO ARACATACA WITH HIS MOTHER
We were the only passengers, perhaps in the entire train, and so far nothing had been of any real interest to me. I sank into the lethargy of
Light in August,
smoking without pause, but with occasional, rapid glances to identify the places we were leaving behind. With a long whistle the train crossed the salt marshes of the swamp and raced at top speed along a bone-shaking corridor of bright red rock, where the deafening noise of the cars became intolerable. But after about fifteen minutes it slowed down and entered the shadowy coolness of the plantations with discreet silence, and the atmosphere grew denser and the ocean breeze was not felt again. I did not have to interrupt my reading to know we had entered the hermetic realm of the banana region.
The world changed. Stretching away on both sides of the track were the symmetrical, interminable avenues of the plantations, along which oxcarts loaded with green stalks of bananas were moving. In uncultivated spaces were sudden red brick camps, offices with burlap at the windows and fans hanging from the ceilings, and a solitary hospital in a field of poppies. Each river had its village and its iron bridge that the train crossed with a blast of its whistle, and the girls bathing in the icy water leaped like shad as it passed, unsettling travelers with their fleeting breasts.
—
Living to Tell the Tale
(2004), translated by Edith Grossman
JAN MORRIS: ALTERCATION ON THE ZEPHYR
I had pleasant companions at breakfast on the California Zephyr—a girl from Fresno who had never been on a train before, and two railroad buffs who kept me informed about the state of the track. However, I did have one altercation in the dining car. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs I was told that I was entitled to one or the other but not both. I called for the supervisor to expostulate, but I did not get far. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: "You're not from this country. You don't understand the lingo." But the girl from Fresno thought the man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me—only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper's Oxford Marmalade.
—
Contact! A Book of Encounters
(2010)
Travel Wisdom of Henry Fielding
In terms of travel, Henry Fielding was, as a youth, a student at the the University of Leiden, and after he earned a law degree in London he became a circuit judge. His life (1707–1754) was short and turbulent, but he was productive, first as a writer of satirical plays, and after these were declared unlawful he wrote political pamphlets and the great novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). His ill health burdened him: he suffered from asthma, liver disease, gout, and dropsy (edema), which he refers to repeatedly in his Voyage to Lisbon. I feel that his illnesses heightened his sensibilities and contributed to his close observation and the bite of his satire. He set sail for Lisbon looking for health, but the meandering voyage sickened him further and he died soon after he arrived. These paragraphs are from his Voyage to Lisbon, which was published the year after his death.
***
There would not, perhaps, be a more pleasant, or more profitable study, among those which have their principal end in amusement, than that of travels or voyages, if they were writ, as they should be, and ought to be, with a joint view to the entertainment and information of mankind. If the conversation of travelers be so eagerly sought after as it is, we may believe their books will be still more agreeable company, as they will, in general, be more instructive and more entertaining.
***
If the customs and manners of men were everywhere the same, there would be no office so dull as that of a traveler: for the difference of hills, valleys, rivers; in short, the various views in which we may see the face of the earth, would scarce afford him a pleasure worthy of his labour...
***
To make a traveler an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it is necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should have overlooked much of what he hath seen. Nature is not, any more than a great genius, always admirable in her productions, and therefore the traveler, who may be called her commentator, should not expect to find everywhere, subjects worthy of his notice.
4. Murphy's Rules of Travel
A TRAVELER I HAVE ADMIRED FOR MOST OF MY traveling life is the writer Dervla Murphy, who was born in 1931 in Lismore, Ireland, where she still lives. I began reading her in the 1960s, with her first book, Full Tilt (1965). In Singapore in 1969, I met an Englishman who claimed to have met her. He had asked her how she'd managed, as a woman, to travel through Ethiopia, for her book In Ethiopia with a Mule (1968). She replied, "It was simple. I went as a man." ¶ Self-educated (she dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to look after her ailing mother), she mentions in her early memoir, Wheels Within Wheels, that at fifteen she was able to levitate herself. This fascinated me. But when I asked her about it, she told me that many people have written to her to relate similar experiences of levitation. As she grew older she lost this magical gift. And when her mother died, she set off on her Full Tilt journey, riding a bicycle from Ireland to India, suffering many dangers and indignities—snow, near drowning, being stoned by mullahs in Iran.
"By the time I arrived at the Afghan frontier," she writes in that book, "it seemed quite natural, before a meal, to scrape the dried mud off the bread, pick the hairs out of the cheese and remove the bugs from the sugar. I had also stopped registering the presence of fleas, the absence of cutlery, and the fact that I hadn't taken off my clothes or slept in a bed for ten days."
In India, after enduring these hardships—but being Dervla—she worked in a home for Tibetan refugees.
Though she has never married, she had a daughter, Rachel, whom she raised alone and took everywhere, including India, Baltistan, South America, and Madagascar. She writes, "A child's presence emphasizes your trust in the community's goodwill."
She has written twenty-three travel books, including books about England and Ulster. All her travel has been arduous, mainly solitary, and terrestrial, her preferred mode of travel an inexpensive bicycle. She never complains, never satirizes herself or the people she is among, and though her writing often contains infelicities, it reflects the woman herself: downright, patient, truthful, reliable, never looking for comfort but always the rougher experiences of the road; a wanderer in the oldest tradition. I find her admirable in every way, and her advice to travelers, "to facilitate escapism," is full of the wisdom of a life of journeying:
CHOOSE YOUR COUNTRY, USE GUIDEBOOKS TO IDENTIFY THE AREAS MOST FREQUENTED BY FOREIGNERS - AND THEN GO IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
This advice reeks of political incorrectness; it's "snobbish" to draw a clear distinction between travelers and tourists. Yet it's also realistic. The escapist traveler needs space, solitude, silence. Tragically, during my lifetime, roads have drastically depleted that natural habitat. Ads for phony "adventure tours" make me grind my few remaining teeth. For example, "England to Kenya by truck! Overland adventure! See five countries in six weeks!" Who in their right mind wants to see five countries in six weeks? How not to escape ... I always try to get off the beaten track. One favorite place where I did so was a trek from Asmara to Addis Ababa. Things are different now, but most people I encountered then had never seen a white person before. Even on more recent trips, in Russia and Romania—where I took fairly obvious routes that certainly weren't uncharted land—I always stayed away from the tourist trails.
MUG UP ON HISTORY.
To travel in ignorance of a region's history leaves you unable to understand the "why" of anything or anyone. For instance, Castro's Cuba [the subject of Murphy's book The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba, 2008] must baffle visitors uninformed about the five-hundred-year lead-up to Fidel's revolution. Heavy sociological or political research is unnecessary, although if you happen to fancy that sort of thing it will add an extra dimension to your journey. Otherwise, enough of current politics will be revealed as you go along. And in those happy lands where domestic politics don't matter to the locals, you can forget about them.
Before your trip, learn as much as possible about religious and social taboos and then scrupulously respect them. Where gifts of money are inappropriate, find out what substitutes to carry. In Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, a code of conduct toward travelers prevents acceptance of money from guests, so I often buy gifts for children at the local bazaar.
TRAVEL ALONE OR WITH JUST ONE PREPUBESCENT CHILD.
In some countries two adults traveling together may be perceived as providing mutual support, making acceptance by the locals less spontaneous and complete. But a child's presence emphasizes your trust in the community's goodwill. And because children pay little attention to racial or cultural differences, junior companions rapidly demolish barriers of shyness or apprehension often raised when foreigners unexpectedly approach a remote village. I found this to be the case in all my travels with my young daughter, especially when we traveled through Kodagu in southern India.
DON'T OVERPLAN.
At sunrise, it's not necessary, or even desirable, to know where you are going to be at sunset. In sparsely inhabited areas carry a lightweight tent and sleeping bag. Elsewhere, rely on fate to provide shelter: dependence on those you meet en route greatly enhances escapism, and villagers are unfailingly hospitable to those who trust them. I have been welcomed into villagers' homes everywhere I've cycled or walked, and was always grateful for what was typically a space on the floor. "Trust" is a key word for relaxed traveling among people whose different way of life may demand adaptability but should prompt no unease or suspicion.
BE SELF-PROPELLED, OR BUY A PACK ANIMAL.
For long treks far from roads and towns, buy a pack animal to carry food, camping gear, kerosene for your stove if firewood is scarce—and of course your child, should he or she be too small to walk all day.
When organizing such a trek, allow for spending a week or ten days at your starting point, inquiring about the best source of pack animals. Take care to find a reliable adviser as well as a horse trader—preferably an adviser unconnected to the trader. In Ethiopia in 1966, I was lucky to be advised by Princess Aida, granddaughter of the then emperor, Haile Selassie, and half a dozen mules were paraded around the courtyard of a royal palace for my inspection. A decade or so later, in Baltistan, I bought a retired polo pony to carry Rachel, my six-year-old daughter, and our camping gear and supplies, including two sacks of flour, because in midwinter in the Karakorum, the villagers have no spare food. In Peru, as a nine-year-old, Rachel rode a mule named Juana for the first six hundred miles from Cajamarca, but a fodder shortage necessitated her walking the remaining nine hundred miles to Cuzco: poor Juana had become so debilitated that she could carry only our gear.
It's important to travel light. At least 75 percent of the equipment sold nowadays in camping shops—travel clotheslines, roll-up camping mats, lightweight hair dryers—is superfluous. My primary basics, although it depends on the journey, are a lightweight tent, a sleeping bag suitable for the country's climate, and a portable stove.
IF ASSISTED BY A PACK ANIMAL, GET DETAILED LOCAL ADVICE ABOUT THE TERRAIN AHEAD.
And remember, a campsite suitable for you may be a disaster area for a hungry horse or mule. Then you must press on, often to a site hardly fit for humans but providing adequate grazing. People can do the mind-over-matter bit, and resolve never again to let supplies run so low, but an equine helper doesn't have that sort of mind. If there's no fodder at six P.M., the mule cannot have consoling thoughts about stuffing it in at six P.M. the next day. And there is nothing more guilt-provoking than seeing a pack animal who has worked hard for you all day going without sustenance.
CYBERSPACE INTERCOURSE VITIATES GENUINE ESCAPISM. Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, iPod, and all such links to family, friends, and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are and derive your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you. Increasingly, in hostels and guesthouses one sees "independent" travelers eagerly settling down in front of computers instead of conversing with fellow travelers. They seem only partially "abroad," unable to cut their links with home. Evidently the nanny state—and the concomitant trend among parents to overprotect offspring—has alarmingly diminished the younger generation's self-reliance. And who is to blame for this entrapment in cyberspace? The fussy folk back at base, awaiting the daily (or twice daily) e-mail of reassurance.
DON'T BE INHIBITED BY THE LANGUAGE BARRIER.
Although ignorance of the local language thwarts exchanges of ideas, it's unimportant on a practical level. I've wandered around four continents using only English and a few courtesy phrases of Tibetan, Amharic, Quechua, Albanian, or whatever. Our basic needs—sleeping, eating, drinking—can always be indicated by signs or globally understood noises.
Even on the emotional level, the language barrier is quite porous. People's features, particularly their eyes, are wonderfully eloquent. In our everyday lives, the extent to which we wordlessly communicate is taken for granted. In "far-flungery," where nobody within a hundred miles speaks a word of any European language, one fully appreciates the range of moods and subtle feelings that may be conveyed visually.
BE CAUTIOUS - BUT NOT TIMID.
The assumption that only brave or reckless people undertake solo journeys off the beaten track is without foundation. In fact, escapists are ultracautious: that's one of their hallmarks and an essential component of their survival mechanisms. Before departure, they suss out likely dangers and either change their route—should these seem excessive—or prepare to deal with any reasonable hazards.
Granted, there's a temperamental issue here: is a bottle half empty or half full? Why should your bones break abroad rather than at home? Optimists don't believe in disasters until they happen, and therefore are not fearful, which is the opposite of being brave.
INVEST IN THE BEST AVAILABLE MAPS.
And whatever you do, don't forget your compass.
5. Travelers on Their Own Books
THE WRITING OF A TRAVEL BOOK IS, LIKE THE trip itself, a conscious decision, requiring a gift for description, an ear for dialogue, a great deal of patience, and the stomach for retracing one's steps. It is very different from fiction, the inner journey, which is an imaginative process of discovery. In the travel book, the writer knows exactly how the story will end; there are no surprises. The privations of the road become the privations of the desk. Because the travel book is a recounting of the journey, there is always the chance that the traveler will embroider, for effect or merely to stay awake. ¶ In a fit of candor or self-consciousness, many travel writers have felt the need to explain how or why they wrote their books, and in doing so they reveal a great deal about themselves. Here are some travelers reflecting on their work.
HENRY FIELDING: "IGNORANT, UNLEARNED, AND FRESH-WATER CRITICS"
Now from both these faults [plagiarism and hyperbole] we have endeavoured to steer clear in the following narrative: which, however the contrary may be insinuated by ignorant, unlearned, and fresh-water critics, who have never traveled either in books or ships, I do solemnly declare doth, in my own impartial opinion, deviate less from truth than any other voyage extant; my lord Anson's alone being, perhaps, excepted.
—
Voyage to Lisbon
(1755)
SAMUEL JOHNSON: AN HOUR SPENT HATCHING THE IDEA OF A BOOK
I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of Romance might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know not; for here I first conceived the thought of this book.
—
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
(1775)
C. M. DOUGHTY: "THE SEEING OF AN HUNGRY MAN"
We set but a name upon the ship, that our hands have built (with incessant labour) in a decenium, in what day she is launched forth to the great waters; and few words are needful in this place. The book is not milk for babes: it might be likened to a mirror. Wherein is set forth faithfully some parcel of the soil of Arabia smelling of
samn
[clarified butter] and camels ... And I rise now, from a long labour accomplished, with grateful mind and giving thanks to those learned men who have helped me, chiefly in the comparison—no light task—of my Arabic words, written from the lips of the people of Nejd, with the literal Arabic...
As for me who write, I pray that nothing be looked on in this book but the seeing of an hungry man and the telling of a most weary man; for the rest the sun made me an Arab, but never warped me to Orientalism.
—
Travels in Arabia Deserta
(1888)
DAVID LIVINGSTONE: "IT IS FAR EASIER TO TRAVEL THAN TO WRITE ABOUT IT"
As to those literary qualifications which are acquired by habits of writing, and which are so important to an author, my African life has not been favorable to the growth of such accomplishments but quite the reverse; it has made composition irksome and laborious. I think I would rather cross the African continent again than write another book. It is far easier to travel than to write about it.
—from the original Introduction to
Missionary Travels in South Africa
(1857)
PAUL DU CHAILLU: "IT IS MUCH EASIER TO HUNT GORILLAS THAN TO WRITE ABOUT THEM"
The long and tedious labour of preparing this book for the press leaves me with the conviction that it is much easier to hunt gorillas than to write about them—to explore new countries than to describe them. During the twenty months which I have passed in the process of writing out my journals since my return to the United States, I have often wished myself back in the African wilds. I can only think that the reader, when he closes the book, will not think this labour wasted.
—Preface,
Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa
(1861); these lines were probably inspired by Livingstone (see above), whom he acknowledges in the text of his book
ANTHONY TROLLOPE ON HOW HE WROTE THE WEST INDIES AND THE SPANISH MAIN:"PREPARATION ... THERE WAS NONE"
Preparation, indeed, there was none. The descriptions and opinions came hot on the paper from their causes. I will not say that this is the best way of writing a book intended to give accurate information. But it is the best way of producing to the eye of the reader, and to his ear, that which the eye of the writer has seen and his ear heard.
—quoted in James Pope-Hennessy,
Anthony Trollope
(1971)
MARK TWAIN ON ROUGHING IT: "VARIEGATED VAGABONDIZING"
This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science. Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. I allude to the rise, growth and culmination of the silver-mining fever in Nevada—a curious episode, in some respects; the only one, of its peculiar kind, that has occurred in the land; and the only one, indeed, that is likely to occur in it.
Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious attar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I call up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom. Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.
—
Roughing It
(1872)
JOHN STEINBECK ON TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY:" ANT-HILL ACTIVITY"
It's a formless, shapeless, aimless thing and it is even pointless. For this reason it may be the sharpest realism, because what I see around me is aimless and pointless—ant-hill activity.
—letter, July 1961, in
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters
(1975)
VALERIAN ALBANOV ON HIS ARCTIC DEATH MARCH: "I SEE THIS DIARY ... THROUGH A VEIL"
Fog all day long, with that dull light that makes one's eyes so terribly painful. At the moment mine hurt so much that I see this diary only as through a veil, and hot tears run down my cheeks. From time to time I have to stop writing and bury my head in my
malitsa
[a heavy, sacklike reindeer-hide sleeping bag]. Only in complete darkness does the pain gradually abate, allowing me to open my eyes again.
—
In the Land of White Death
(1917), first published in English in 2000, translated by Alison Anderson
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD: "I NEVER MEANT TO WRITE A BOOK"
When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn how to say it. Everyone who has been through such an extraordinary experience has much to say if he has any faculty that way.
—Preface,
The Worst Journey in the World
(1923)
D. H. LAWRENCE: "MAKING LITTLE MARKS ON PAPER"
One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are an onyx table and three rocking chairs and one little wooden chair, a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly, in capital letters, of Morning in Mexico. All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book.
It is a pity we don't always remember this. When books come out with grand titles, like
The Future of America
or
The European Situation,
it's a pity we don't immediately visualize a thin or fat person, in a chair or in a bed, dictating to a bob-haired stenographer or making little marks on paper with a fountain pen.
—
Mornings in Mexico
(1927)
HENRI MICHAUX: "HE IS SUDDENLY AFRAID"
Preface: A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here.
—The Author.—
Ecuador
(1928)
FREYA STARK: "I TRAVELED SINGLE-MINDEDLY FOR FUN"
I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know that in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them, I would advise all those who wish to see unwrinkled brows in passport offices to start out ready labeled as entomologists, anthropologists, or whatever other -ology they think suitable and propitious.
But as this book is intended for the Public, and is therefore necessarily truthful, I must admit that for my own party I traveled single-mindedly for fun.
—
The Valleys of the Assassins
(1934)
GERALD BRENAN: "THE GIRL WITH THE UNFORGETTABLE FACE"
All I have aimed at is to entertain a few armchair travelers, who may enjoy whiling away a rainy night in reading of how people live in remote mountain villages in the serene climate of the South Mediterranean. One flies over these villages in the air, one sees their strange names on the map, one may even, if one leaves the main road, bump past them in a car, but their life remains as mysterious as that of the girl with the unforgettable face one caught sight of for a moment through the window of a railway carriage. Here is a description of one of those villages.
—
South from Granada
(1957)
V. S. PRITCHETT: "STAMPING OUT HIS ANXIETIES WITH HIS HEAVY BOOTS"
How did writers and painters manage to live and keep their independence?...The thing to do was to write an original book of travel ... I decided to take ship for Lisbon for economy's sake and walk from Badajoz to Vigo, through a part of Spain that was little known and, in patches, was notorious for poverty...
I have described it all in
Marching Spain
—note the deliberately ungrammatical, protesting, affected title. Though I have a tenderness for the book and think some pages are rather good, I am glad it has been out of print for forty years ... It has a touching but shocking first chapter of exhibitionist prose; but despite the baroque writing of the rest, the mistakes of fact, and the declamations, it is original and has vigor. It is the work of a young man worried almost to illness by lack of money and by the future for a lot of the time. As he tramped along he was doing his accounts and stamping out his anxieties with his heavy boots.
—
Midnight Oil
(1970)
PAUL BOWLES: "THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WRITER AND PLACE"
What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home.
The subject matter of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded. It takes a writer with a gift for describing a situation to do this well, which is perhaps the reason why so many of the travel books that remain in the memory have been produced by writers expert at the fashioning of novels. One remembers Evelyn Waugh's indignation in Ethiopia, Graham Greene deadpanning through West Africa, Aldous Huxley letting Mexico get him down, Gide discovering his social conscience in the Congo, long after other equally accurate travel accounts have blurred and vanished. Given the novelistic skill of these particular writers it is perhaps perverse of me to prefer their few travel pieces to their novels, but I do.
—"The Challenge to Identity" (1958), published in
Travels
(2010)
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?
AN INTENSE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE IS NOT ALways a long one. D. H. Lawrence spent ten days with his wife in Sardinia and wrote a lengthy book about it. Kipling was ashore a few hours in Rangoon and never went to Mandalay, the subject of his famous poem. Ibn Battuta traveled all over the Muslim world of the fourteenth century, rambling for twenty-nine years, and Marco Polo was twenty-six years in China. Is a long trip necessary to the vividness of the experience? ¶ I am always curious to know how long the traveler spent on the road. Sometimes the length of the journey is plain in the title.Ninety-two Days, Evelyn Waugh's 1932 book about his travels in Guiana and Brazil, says it all, and so does Isabella Bird's Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, and Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet. But usually the length of the trip is not immediately apparent and has to be worked out from internal evidence—the mention of a date or a month, the passing of the seasons, or the research of a biographer.
The paradox of the passage of a traveler's time, and its meaning, was summed up beautifully by Doris Lessing in the first volume of her autobiography:
Once I was making a mental list of all the places I had lived in, having moved about so much, and soon concluded that the commonsense or factual approach leads to nothing but error. You may live in a place for months, even years, and it does not touch you, but a weekend or a night in another, and you feel as if your whole being has been sprayed with an equivalent of a cosmic wind.
—
Under My Skin
(1994)
Here are some notable sojourns, from the longest to the shortest:
Sir John Mandeville: Thirty-four years (1322–1356) traveling in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Mandeville may not have existed, or if he did exist, as an English knight, he probably never left England. Although his Travels is full of incident and amazing sights, it is undoubtedly a massive example of literary cannibalism from the work of others: plagiarism, invention, legends, boasts, and tall tales culled from the works of travelers, borrowers, romancers, and other plagiarists.
Ibn Battuta: Twenty-nine years altogether (1325–1354). He went on the haj to Mecca in 1325 and kept going in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. He was the only known medieval traveler who visited the countries of every Muslim ruler of his time, as well as such infidel places as Constantinople, Ceylon, and China. He described both Khan-Baliq (Beijing) and Timbuktu. Known in the Muslim world (and in particular his native Morocco), he came to prominence in English-speaking countries only after a translation of part of his Travels appeared in 1829. Called the greatest traveler the world has ever seen, Ibn Battuta's journeying has been estimated at about 75,000 miles.
He mistook the Niger for the Nile, but nevertheless received an enlightenment one day in 1352:
I saw a crocodile in this part of the Nile [Niger], close to the bank; it looked just like a small boat. One day I went down to the river to satisfy a need, and lo, one of the blacks came and stood between me and the river. I was amazed at such lack of manners and decency on his part, and spoke of it to someone or other. He answered, "His purpose in doing that was solely to protect you from the crocodile, buy placing himself between you and it."
Marco Polo: Twenty-six years in total (1271–1297), seventeen of them in the service of Kublai Khan. In spite of this, Marco seems not to have noticed—certainly he never mentions—that the Chinese drink tea, use printing, and that they'd built the Great Wall.
"Marco Polo was not merely a traveler," Laurence Bergreen writes in Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu,"he was a participant in the history of his times." Bergreen identifies the reality behind some of the marvels (the humanlike "monkeys" in Sumatra were Pygmies, the dark unicorn a rhino, and so forth) and makes a case for Marco's omitting any mention of the Great Wall: "It was constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), long after Marco Polo's day."
Marco does mention Buddhism and describes Buddha, calling him by his Mongol title, "Burkhan," the equivalent of "Enlightened." Nicknamed Il Milione for his reputation as a recounter of marvels (see Chapter 20, "Imaginary People"), he dictated his book to a well-known writer of romances, Rustichello (of Pisa), in 1298 while in prison for two years in Genoa. Rustichello may have overegged some of the events and descriptions, but the Travels (the first printed version appeared in Nuremberg in 1477) is still an astonishing eyewitness account of the then-known world and was regarded in Europe for centuries as a geography of Asia. Columbus carried an annotated copy with him on his voyages, which persuaded him in the Caribbean that he had reached the offshore islands of India, which is how the Indies got its name and why the natives of the hemisphere are known as Indians.
Xuanzang: Seventeen years (629–645). This Tang Dynasty monk, scholar, translator, and indefatigable traveler (his name is also rendered Hsuan-tsang), was twenty-seven when he set off on his journey to the West (the title of the Ming Dynasty novel that dramatized his travels), resulting in The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. This incomparable record of travel contains a precise account of distances, landscapes, commerce, and the numerous cultures, beliefs, and peoples along the Silk Road, to the edge of Persia, to what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Xuanzang's journey of thousands of miles is so well documented it enabled archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to find and excavate these ancient sites (see Chapter 13, "It Is Solved by Walking").
Lafcadio Hearn in Japan: The last fourteen years of his life, from 1890 to 1904. Hearn had traveled before this to the West Indies and elsewhere, and though he was not traveling the whole time he was in Japan, he lived as an alien, collecting grievances and insights into Japanese life, under his new name, Koizumi Yakumo.
William Bartram: Four years, 1773 to 1777, for his pioneering travels in the American South. There he botanized, gathered specimens, and studied the lives and habits of Native Americans for his groundbreaking and influential study of 1791, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions; Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians, often called simply Bartram's Travels, a book read and praised by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Fanny Trollope in America: Almost four years (1827–1831). During that time she was in and out of the Nashoba settlement, an institution for the education of slaves who were hoping to be emancipated, but "one glance sufficed to convince me that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth. Desolation was the only feeling." She removed herself upriver to Cincinnati ("Porkopolis"—pigs in the street), where she put on "theatricals," and then built and opened a "bazaar," renting space to stallholders to sell "fancy goods." When this business failed, she did what many desperate people have done in search of solvency: she wrote a travel book, The Domestic Manners of Americans ("six hundred pages of griffonage"—scribblings), most of it trashing Americans as overfamiliar slobs and hypocrites who did nothing but spit. There is so much spitting in Domestic Manners, she could have called it Great Expectorations.
Yet this clearsighted book (greatly admired by Mark Twain) is not an account of city-haunting and sightseeing in America but a work "describing faithfully the daily aspect of ordinary life." She went on to write many more books, including a number of novels, and though her son Anthony (whom, at age twelve, she left in England) complained in his Autobiography that she was "much from home or too busy to be bothered," Fanny remained an inspiration to him and showed him the way to be a novelist and traveler. We would not have Anthony Trollope's great novels or his masterpiece of travel, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, were it not for his mother's bold example.
Fanny's conclusion about Americans: "I do not like them. I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions."
Henry Morton Stanley crossing Africa: Three years, 1874 to 1877, for Through the Dark Continent. He traveled from east to west, Zanzibar to the heart of Africa and down the Congo River to Matadi and the Atlantic Ocean. A few years later he crossed Africa from west to east, a two-year trip.
Paul Du Chaillu in West Africa: Three years. Born in New Orleans (this is disputed; it might have been Paris) in 1835, he spent part of his youth in West Africa, where his father was a trader. He set off in 1855, when he was twenty years old. "I traveled—always on foot, and unaccompanied by other white men—about 8,000 miles. I shot, stuffed, and brought home over 2,000 birds, of which more than 60 are new species, and I killed upwards of 1,000 quadrupeds, of which 200 were stuffed and brought home, with more than 60 hitherto unknown to science. I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine. Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worth while to speak." He traveled in and around Gabon and halfway up the Ogowe (or Ogooue) River, 300 miles into the African interior, where he confirmed the existence of several species of gorilla (Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, 1861). On a later trip, for another book, he encountered various bands of Pygmies (The Country of the Dwarfs, 1871).
He inspired the travels of Mary Kingsley, H. M. Stanley, Jack London, and many others, and perhaps the fiction of Saul Bellow, whose Henderson the Rain King seems to echo the account of Du Chaillu's being made king of the Apingi in Gabon (see Chapter 21, "Writers and the Places They Never Visited").
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance Expedition: Almost three years, 1914–1917. One of the most moving parts of South (1920), Shackleton's account of this heroic journey, is his sense that there was a mysterious fourth person with him on one of his marches:
When I look back at those days I have no doubts that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, "Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us." Crean confessed the same idea. One feels "the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech" in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
Without crediting it precisely, T. S. Eliot alludes to the phenomenon in a line of The Waste Land:"Who is the third who always walks beside you?" In a footnote Eliot writes that the line "was stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which but I think one of Shackleton's)."
Tobias Smollett in France and Italy: Two years, 1763–1765.
When a book reviewer criticizes a travel book for being negative, I always think of Smollett, who forcibly spoke his mind, as in this observation of the French character:
If a Frenchman is admitted into your family, and distinguished by repeated marks of your friendship and regard, the first return he makes for your civilities is to make love to your wife, if she is handsome; if not, to your sister, or daughter, or niece. If he suffers a repulse from your wife, or attempts in vain to debauch your sister, or your daughter, or your niece, he will, rather than not play the traitor with his gallantry, make his addresses to your grandmother; and ten to one, but in one shape or another, he will find means to ruin the peace of a family, in which he has been so kindly entertained.
—
Travels Through France and Italy
(1766)
C. M. Doughty in Arabia Deserta: Twenty-one months, 1876 to 1878, and it took him ten years to write his masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888).
T. E. Lawrence in Arabia: For The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one year, 1916 to 1917. He wrote the first version of the book in 1919, and lost it when he misplaced his briefcase at a railway station while changing trains. He wrote a second version in 1920, which he rewrote the following year. Eventually a much-shortened version was published in 1926.
This, like other great travel books, is not a travel book in any conventional sense. Subtitled "A Triumph," it is the record of Lawrence's involvement in the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks. But in the tradition of Doughty, whom Lawrence idolized, it describes the moods of the desert, the life of the Bedouin, and the subtleties of Islam, as well as military tactics. Lawrence's own contradictory character is a subject, and he is unsparing with himself.
"I was very conscious of the bundled powers and entities within me; it was their character which hid. There was my craving to be liked—so strong and nervous that never could I open myself friendly to another ... There was a craving to be famous; and a horror of being known to like being known. Contempt for my passion for distinction made me refuse every offered honor." In this same section ("Myself") he adds, "I liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures and adventures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety. Man could rise to any height, but there was an animal level beneath which he could not fall."
Charles Dickens in Italy: Eleven months, to gather material for Pictures from Italy, 1844–45. He needed to get away from London because his sales of Martin Chuzzlewit were poor and casting a pall over his writing. He had been very discouraged by the negative, even hostile reviews of American Notes (1842). He witnessed a beheading in Rome and gave a detailed account of it, including this, the moment of truth:
[The condemned man] immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down, by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head rolled instantly.
The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.
When it had traveled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in front—a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax.
André Gide in Africa: Ten months, 1925–26, for Travels in the Congo (1929), the English edition of which includes Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad.
Gide had traveled at the official invitation of the French government, and yet this did not restrain him from criticizing colonial policies, or reporting on the many abuses of power against the African subjects (whippings, beatings, arson, intimidation), or the French colonial officers' taking advantage of Africans. It must be added that Gide, too, who fancied adolescent boys, indulged himself throughout the trip—and he was traveling with his much younger lover, Marc Allegret. Gide said to a friend that he was "very attracted, if I might dare to say, in a sensual way as well, by the Negro race."
To another correspondent he wrote—and this is true of a great deal of other travelers' experiences—"Everything that I expected to give me delight and which ... persuaded me to undertake the journey has disappointed me—but out of that very disappointment ... I have acquired an unexpected education."
W. Somerset Maugham in Burma: For The Gentleman in the Parlour, twenty-three days to Keng Tung, a few weeks more in Bangkok, but the whole trip, around the world from London, door to door, took nine months in 1922 and 1923.
Edward Abbey: About nine months, for Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968). Not one season but two, in 1956 and 1957, "with adventures from in 1950, 1959 and 1965" (James Cahalan, EdwardAbbey, 2001).
V. S. Naipaul in India: Nine months, for An Area of Darkness: An Experience of India, in which the Trinidad-born author, on his first-ever, 1962 trip to India, understands that he has no place in what he calls "the total Indian negation" and reasserts his feeling of "my own homelessness." He is frequently angry in the book, sometimes enraged, a condition he analyzes after losing his temper. "It was brutal; it was ludicrous; it was pointless and infantile. But the moment of anger is a moment of exalted, shrinking lucidity, from which recovery is slow and shattering."
Richard Burton in Salt Lake City: About three weeks, though his entire North American trip took more than eight months. In Utah he wrote to a friend, "I'm traveling for my health which has suffered in Africa, enjoying the pure air of the prairies, and expecting to return in a state of renovation." Burton had sailed for Canada in April 1860, and after traveling across the United States by stagecoach and on horseback, he arrived in Salt Lake City toward the end of August. He wanted to know about Mormonism, particularly the practice of keeping plural wives. To this end, he spent time with Brigham Young, who had forty-nine wives at the time Burton met him. Burton had studied the practice of polygamy on his first trip to Africa and reached the conclusion that in countries where children had value and were a form of wealth, polygamy made sense. But he wrote in The City of the Saints (1861) that in the United States, "where the sexes are nearly equal, and where reproduction becomes a minor duty," it was inadvisable. His main objection to polygamy was that it was unromantic, merely an "unimpassioned domestic attachment." He went on, "Romance and reverence are transferred from Love and Liberty to Religion and the Church."
Joseph Conrad in the Congo: Six months in 1890, including twenty-eight days on the Congo River. Eventually this one-month river trip (published after his death as Congo Diary) would form the basis of the brilliant and evocative novella Heart of Darkness, which he wrote eight years after returning from the Congo, describing it as "experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."
Rebecca West in Yugoslavia: Three fairly short trips, about five months altogether. The first was on a British Council grant in the spring of 1936, but she was ill much of the time; then in spring 1937 for a few months, and a month in the early summer of 1938. The result was the 500,000-word Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), regarded as the apotheosis of travel writing and self-analysis. One of my favorite passages, from the Epilogue, shows that a travel book can include anything, including—as here—an analysis of the divided self:
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright natures fight in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. This fight can be observed constantly in our personal lives. There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom ... We ignore this suicidal strain in history because we are consistently bad artists when we paint ourselves, when we prettify our wills and pretend they are not parti-colored before the Lord.
Geoffrey Moorhouse in the Sahara: For The Fearful Void, four and a half months in 1972, traveling 3,600 miles, mainly on foot.
In an interview, Moorhouse said, "One reason I did this book is that all the books I've read about rough journeys, from Fuchs's Crossing of Antarctica to Thesiger's Arabian Sands, do tend to exclude the soft, weak, feeble, nasty sides we all have. They all seem to be bloody supermen. You think, Didn't they ever cry, or do something really shitty? As far as I can see, I'm a pretty ordinary bloke, and either they're very different from me, or they're excluding a part of themselves."
Bruce Chatwin: For In Patagonia (1977), four months, from mid-December 1974 to April 1975 (see Chapter 13, "It Is Solved by Walking").
Anton Chekhov in Sakhalin: Three and a half months in 1890, but the book, Sakhakin Island (translated by Brian Reeve), took him three years to write. He traveled from Moscow, by river steamer and horse-drawn coach, noting, "The Siberian highway is the longest, and, I should think, the ugliest road on earth." In an ingenious manner for a travel writer, to find out as much as he could about this remote penal settlement and this island of exile, he carried out his own detailed census, using a printed questionnaire.
"I am profoundly convinced that in fifty to a hundred years' time," he wrote, "they will regard the lifelong character of our penalties [exile, forced labor] with the same perplexity and sense of embarrassment with which we now look upon the slitting of nostrils or the amputation of fingers from the left hand."
And yet a hundred years after he wrote this, the Soviet government was exiling political prisoners to life sentences in the gulag and using them as forced labor. Russians on the outside were neither perplexed nor embarrassed, only afraid. I wrote about one of these prisons in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, when I visited Perm 36. The prison was closed in 1992, a century after Chekhov's stay in Sakhalin.
The people who showed me around this prison in 2007, who knew it in its bad days, would have agreed with Chekhov's verdict in the Sakhalin settlement of Derbinskoye: "There were moments when it seemed to me that I was seeing the extreme and utmost degree of human degradation, lower than which it is simply impossible to go."
Ernest Hemingway in Africa: A little over three months, later writing The Green Hills of Africa. Hemingway reached Mombasa on December 6, 1933, and after his safari and travels upcountry, left there in early March 1934.
W. H. Auden in Iceland: Three summer months in 1936, resulting in Letters from Iceland (1937), which he wrote with the poet Louis MacNeice, who spent one month there, liked the horseback rides, but hated the dried fish: "The tougher kind tastes like toe-nails, and the softer kind like the skin off the soles of one's feet." Because the book is more a scrapbook than a travel narrative, it is a mixture of poetic styles and observations.
William Least Heat-Moon: Three months (March-June 1978), 13,000 miles, on the back roads of America for Blue Highways. Before he set off he had an epiphany: "That night, as I lay wondering whether I would get sleep or explosion, I got the idea instead. A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity."
John Steinbeck, traveling with Charley: Three months in 1960.
D. H. Lawrence in Australia: Three months in 1922. He did not write a travel book but within a few weeks of arriving began a novel, Kangaroo, set in Australia, and finished it by the time he left.
Rockwell Kent's Greenland voyage: Three months in 1929, for N by E(1930). Nearing the coast of Greenland, his boat sank:
The three men stand there looking at it all: at the mountains, at the smoking waterfall, at the dark green lake with the wind puffs silvering its plain, at the flowers that fringe the pebbly shore and star the banks. At last one of them speaks.
"It's all right," he says, "that we should pay for beautiful things. And being here in this spot, now, is worth traveling a thousand miles for, and all that that has cost us. Maybe we have lived only to be here now."
Jean Cocteau: For Mon Premier Voyage, his trip around the world, eighty days in 1934. He had taken up the challenge of the Paris-Soir newspaper to duplicate the Jules Verne trip, and he succeeded, though unlike Verne's, his book is thin, patchy, and thrown together.
Bruce Chatwin in the Australian Outback: Nine weeks, for The Songlines, though he rattled around Sydney and Brisbane for four months.
George Gissing: For his travel book On the Ionian Sea (1901), two months in 1897. The book, well observed and diligent, is about the neglected south of Italy. But poor Gissing was a tormented man, with a weakness for drunken prostitutes, whom he tried to save—in the case of Nell, by stealing (and doing time for it) to support her. A key to his need for travel was a remark he made of himself: "I carry a desert with me."
Shiva Naipaul in Africa: For North of South: An African Journey, two months. At the end of this provocative book, published in 1979, Shiva Naipaul (brother of V. S.) concludes that the states of independent black East and Central Africa are just as miserable and unjust as (then white-dominated) South Africa.
Eric Newby in Nuristan: For the trip recorded in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), one month to get there and one month of hiking.
Toward the end of the trip, Newby and Hugh Carless encountered the explorer Wilfred Thesiger sauntering down a path on rope-soled shoes with some local guides. That evening, over a chicken dinner, Thesiger held court in the fading light.
"England's going to pot," said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. "Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas—wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, twenty guineas apiece, absolute rubbish."
He began to tell me about his Arabs.
"I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing." I asked him about surgery. "I take off fingers and there's a lot of surgery to be done; they're frightened of their own doctors because they're not clean."
"Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?"
"Hundreds of them," he said dreamily, for it was very late. "Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.
"Let's turn in," he said.
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our airbeds. "God, you must be a couple of pansies," said Thesiger.
Peter Matthiessen in Nepal: For The Snow Leopard, two months in 1973 (see Chapter 13, "It Is Solved by Walking").
Jack London slumming in London, 1902: Seven weeks after arriving in England, Jack London had not only lived in, wandered around, and made notes about the poverty-stricken East End of London, but had also finished his account of the experience, The People of the Abyss (1903), a book of travel, socialist polemic, and farce, with a profusion of Cockney accents. London approached the experience as a travel writer rather than a muckraker, writing in his preface, "I went down into the underworld of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer."
Henry David Thoreau in Maine: Six or seven weeks. Between 1846 and 1857 Thoreau took three trips, of a few weeks apiece, to climb Mount Katahdin, to experience the wilderness, to learn about Indian life and language, and to gather information about the flora and fauna. He wrote three magazine articles for and gave lectures on the trips, and these pieces form the basis of his posthumous work The Maine Woods.
Graham Greene in Mexico: Six weeks, for The Lawless Roads (1939), and at the end of the trip he came to detest Mexico and Mexicans: "How one begins to hate these people—the intense slowness of that monolithic black-clothed old woman with the grey straggly hair ... the hideous inexpressiveness of brown eyes ... They just sit about."
Herman Melville in the Marquesas: One month, though he claimed it was four months, in the Typee Valley. En route to the Marquesas, in Honolulu, Melville was horrified by the behavior of the missionaries:
Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!
—
Typee
(1844)
Some years later, he also traveled to Europe and the Holy Land. He wrote a mystical poem about the experience, as well as a diary in which he noted the behavior of guides in Jerusalem, where he spent eighteen days:
Talk of the Guides: "Here is the stone Christ leaned against, & here is the English Hotel. Yonder is the arch where Christ was shown to the people, & just by that open window is sold the best coffee in Jerusalem."
—
Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant
(1856–57)
Elias Canetti in Marrakesh: A month or so in 1954, when he joined some friends who were making a film in Marrakesh. He tagged along, immersed himself in the city, and made notes. He did not publish his book Die Stimmen von Marrakesch until 1967 (translated as The Voices of Marrakesh), because he thought that what he had to say about Morocco, and travel, was trivial. But the slim book is evocative, persuasive, and wise. For example, noticing a gathering of blind beggars chanting, and studying them, he reflects, "Traveling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travelers are heartless."
Thoreau on Cape Cod: A little over three weeks, but in two trips, one in 1849, the other in 1855.Cape Cod, his account of the trip up "the bare and bended arm" of the Cape, from Sandwich to Provincetown, was published after his death, in 1865. Lines from the first chapter ("The Shipwreck") were appropriated and cannibalized by Robert Lowell for his poem "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket," and chapter 5, "The Wellfleet Oysterman," contains the first mention in print of broccoli being grown in the United States.
Graham Greene in Liberia: Twenty-three days. Greene's book Journey Without Maps (1936) is an ingeniously worked-up account of only a little over three weeks in the Liberian bush by an absolute beginner in Africa. Greene admits this early on: "I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa." Amazingly, he brought his young female cousin Barbara along for company. "You poor innocents!" a stranger cried at them in Freetown. He didn't know the half of it.
Out of his element, Greene is gloomy, fidgety, nervous, and Barbara has no discernible skills. But the pitying man in Freetown can see from their helpless smiles and their lack of preparation that theirs is a leap in the dark—Journey in the Dark was one of the rejected titles for the book. How innocent was Greene? Here is an example. Just before arriving in Freetown to start his trip, he confides, "I could never properly remember the points of the compass." Can a traveler be more innocent than that?
Greene and his cousin are not deterred by their incompetence. They seek guidance. They hire porters and a cook. They board the train for the Liberian frontier and start walking around the back of the country. They have twenty-six poorly paid African porters carrying their food and equipment. They have a pistol, they have a tent (never to be used), they have a table and a portable bath and a stash of whiskey. They even have trinkets to hand out to natives—but the natives prefer gifts of money or jolts of whiskey to trinkets. The trip is eventful: the travelers suffer fatigue, Greene falls ill with a serious fever, there are misunderstandings and wrong turns. There is a great deal of foot dragging on the part of the porters. A little over a month after they set off, the Greenes are back on the coast, and in a matter of a week or so (the book skimps on dates) they are on a ship heading back to Britain.
Greene called this short but difficult trip 'life-altering."
Thoreau on rivers: Traveling for A Week on the Concord and Merrimac: two weeks. This was one of the two books (Walden was the other) published in Thoreau's lifetime. The trip itself is a way of speculating on the natural world, the meaning of existence, urbanization, American history, and the nature of friendship. The book did not sell. In 1853, four years after publication, when the 706 unsold copies (of an edition of 1,000) were returned to him by the printer, Thoreau remarked wryly in a letter, "I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, more than seven hundred of which I wrote myself."
D. H. Lawrence in Sardinia: Ten days. The travel book he wrote immediately afterward, Sea and Sardinia, is 355 pages long, and of course full of digressions.
He traveled throughout Italy at the same hectic pace. But Lawrence was so alert, even hypersensitive, he was able to sum up his travel experience with intense feeling, as here, in another travel book about Italy, where he is in Lago di Garda.
I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank.
I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvelous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distil me into itself.
—
Twilight in Italy
(1913)
Stephen Crane in "The Open Boat": A day and a half, from late afternoon on January 1 to noon on January 3, 1897, off the Florida coast. Subtitled "A Tale Intended to Be After the Fact," this story is regarded as a classic in ordeal literature. But the ordeal (Crane and three others splashing fifteen miles to Daytona Beach in a dinghy after their ship, the Cuba-bound Commodore, sank) is a landlubber's exercise in mythomania and hyperbole. Though a literary critic was later emboldened to write, "Captain Bligh's account of his small boat journey ... seems tame in comparison," it is a matter of record that Bligh's treacherous voyage of four thousand miles in a small lifeboat took him six weeks, compared to Crane's thirty-six hours.
Kipling in Mandalay: He never went there, though he was briefly in Rangoon in 1889 and was impressed by the golden stupa of the Shwe Dagon pagoda. "Briefly" meant a few hours, as he explained in From Sea to Sea (1899):
My own sojourn in Rangoon was countable by hours, so I may be forgiven when I pranced with impatience at the bottom of the staircase [of the pagoda] because I could not at once secure a full, complete and accurate idea of everything that was to be seen. The meaning of the guardian tigers, the inwardness of the main pagoda, and the countless little ones, was hidden from me. I could not understand why the pretty girls with cheroots sold little sticks and
HOW
Long did
THE TRAVELER
spEnd TRAVELing?
colored candles to be used before the image of Buddha. Everything was incomprehensible to me.
There are obvious howlers in the poem "Mandalay" (written in 1890 and published in Barrack-Room Ballads): the old Moulmein pagoda is hundreds of miles from Mandalay, and the dawn does not come up "like thunder out er China 'crost the bay," yet the poem is persuasively atmospheric, as in the last verse:
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be—
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder out er China 'crost the bay!
Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson
Some of the wittiest remarks on the subject of travel are Johnson's, and though he hated to leave London, he spoke about wanting to embark on voyages to Iceland and the West Indies; instead, he shuttled up and down England, made a long journey to Scotland in 1773, and a year later spent three months rattling around North Wales. He was one of the most passionate readers the world has known—his dictionary is proof of that. Born in 1709, he was a contemporary of Fielding, whom he called a "blockhead" (and remarked that Tom Jones was "corrupt" and "vicious"). ¶ Through his wide reading, Johnson knew the world much better than most of his contemporaries. He could talk easily about Abyssinia (he had translated Father Jerónimo Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, and his novel Rasselas is set there) and Corsica (Boswell introduced him to the Corsican patriot Pascal Paoli) and the classical Mediterranean. He discussed Tahiti with Boswell, who'd had dinner and discussed circumnavigation with Captain James Cook in London ("and felt a strong inclination to go with him on his next voyage"). Johnson had a neurological disorder that was probably Tourette's, with gout, and with melancholia, yet he stirred himself at the age of sixty-four to travel to the Western Isles of Scotland—far-off and strange—with Boswell, who also published his Journal of the trip.
***
In traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
—Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
***
He talked with an uncommon animation of traveling into distant countries; that the mind was enlarged by it, and that an acquisition of dignity of character was derived from it. He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. "Sir, (said he,) by doing so, you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a luster reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, Sir."
—Life of Johnson
***
It will be observed, that when giving me advice as to my travels, Dr. Johnson did not dwell upon cities, and palaces, and pictures, and shows, and Arcadian scenes. He was of Lord Essex's opinion, who advises his kinsman Roger Earl of Rutland, "rather to go an hundred miles to speak with one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town."
—Life of Johnson
***
Boswell: Is not the Giant's Causeway worth seeing? Johnson: Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
—Life of Johnson
Travel light
We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disincumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags, and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burthen; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself.
—Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
The importance of seeing more at first hand
It will very readily occur, that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveler; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath, and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labors, which neither impregnate the imagination, nor enlarge the understanding. It is true that of far the greater part of things, we must content ourselves with such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are always incomplete, and that at least, till we have compared them with realities, we do not know them to be just. As we see more, we become possessed of more certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider basis of analogy.
—Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
7. The Things That They Carried
TRAVEL MAGAZINES ALWAYS MAKE A POINT of telling you the essential thing to carry on your trip, and it used to be a Swiss Army knife—that is, until air travelers were screened, x-rayed, patted down, and presented with a list of forbidden items. Now it is likely to be a cell phone, in my view one of the great impediments to a travel experience. I always take a small shortwave radio, to give me the news and weather of the place I'm in and to keep up with world events. The writer and traveler Pico Iyer says he never travels without a book to read; I am of the same mind. ¶ William Burroughs, a lifetime addict and also a traveler, never went anywhere without a drug of some kind, usually heroin. Kit Moresby, in Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky, carried evening gowns in her bag in the Sahara Desert. Bowles told me once that he traveled to India and South America in the old style, "with trunks, always with trunks." Bruce Chatwin, a self-described minimalist in travel, said that all he needed was his Mont Blanc fountain pen and his personal bag of muesli. But his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, claimed Chatwin always took much more. One of his friends, seeing Chatwin's typewriter and pajamas and book bags on an Indian train, said, "It was like traveling with Garbo."
Edward Lear in Albania, 1848: "some rice, curry powder, and cayenne
Previously to starting a certain supply of cooking utensils, tin plates, knives and forks, a basin etc., must absolutely be purchased, the stronger and plainer the better, for you go into lands where pots and pans are unknown, and all culinary processes are to be performed in strange localities, innocent of artificial means. A light mattress, some sheets and blankets, and a good supply of capotes and plaids should not be neglected; two or three books; some rice, curry powder, and cayenne; a world ofdrawing materials—if you be a hard sketcher; as little dress as possible, though you must have two sets of outer clothing—one for visiting consuls, pashas and dignitaries, the other for rough, everyday work; some quinine made into pills (rather leave all behind than this); a Boyourdi, or general order of introduction to governors or pashas; and your Teskere, or provincial passport for yourself and guide. All these are absolutely indispensable, and beyond these, the less you augment your impedimenta by luxuries the better.
—
Edward Lear in the Levant,
edited by Susan Hyman (1988)
Sir Richard Burton Heads for Mecca in Disguise: "certain necessaries for the way"
I
N ADDITION TO
his disguise as "Mirza Abdullah," he had "a Miswak, or tooth-stick"—a twig for cleaning his teeth; "a bit of soap and a comb, wooden, for bone and tortoiseshell are not, religiously speaking, correct." A change of clothing, a goat-skin water-bag, a "coarse Persian rug—which besides being couch, acted as chair, table and oratory," a pillow, a blanket, a large, bright yellow umbrella ("suggesting the idea of an overgrown marigold"), a "Housewife" (needles, thread, and buttons in a pouch), a dagger, a brass inkstand and penholder, "and a mighty rosary, which on occasion might have been converted into a weapon of defence."
(Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah,
1853)
Paul Du Chaillu in Equatorial Africa: "white beads ... small looking-glasses ... and my guns"
I foresaw that, from the dread all the coast natives have of the cannibal tribes, I should have difficulty in carrying all my luggage. I therefore determined not to encumber myself with supplies of provisions or anything that could be spared. My outfit consisted only of the following articles:—A chest containing 100 fathoms of prints [cloth], 19 pounds of white beads, a quantity of small looking-glasses, fire-steels and flints, a quantity of leaf tobacco. In addition to which came my greatest dependence, viz, 80 pounds of shot and bullets, 20 pounds of powder, and my guns.
—
Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa
(1861)
C. M. Doughty and Chaucer in Arabia Deserta
DOUGHTY CARRIED IN his camel's saddle bags a seventeenth-century edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and he wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta under the direct influence of Chaucer's style.
Henry Miller on Coast-to-Coast Travel: A Monkey Wrench
There's one thing I'd like to advise anyone thinking of making a transcontinental journey: see that you have a jack, a monkey wrench and a jimmy. You'll probably find that the wrench won't fit the nuts but that doesn't matter; while you're pretending to fiddle around with it someone will stop and lend you a helping hand.
—
The Air-ConditionedNightmare
(1945)
Laurens van der Post: To Nyasaland with Sealing Wax
I have said nothing, though it is traditional on these occasions, about what I had packed in my suitcases ... All I did was to add to my store of khaki clothing, to choose some books for the journey, because they can be difficult to find in Africa, and to lay in a small supply of sealing wax. I was doubtful whether I could get sealing wax at my destination, and I could not risk being without it as I needed it for making secure the samples I hoped to collect on my journey. But all in all I was taking so little that my friends, with their warm and affectionate concern for what is individual and eccentric, quickly created a legend among themselves. Would one believe it, they said, that I had gone off again to Central Africa with a stick of scarlet sealing wax in one hand and a copy of George Meredith's
Modern Love
in the other?
—
Venture to the Interior
(1951)
V. S. Naipaul Among the Believers: Smedley Roll-Neck, Exercise Pants
IN HIS BIOGRAPHY of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, Patrick French writes, "Before leaving England for Indonesia, Vidia put together a 'traveling list.' In its care and restraint, in its honing, it reflected the man and the writer." And it was also a memo to his wife, Pat, to pack his bags so that he would be presentable when he met his mistress, Margaret, who was flying from Buenos Aires to Djakarta to meet him. A partial list: "Suits & trousers and jackets: Travel out in Simpson's grey; Pack—Simpson's beige lightweight; Trousers: M & S cotton, BHS cotton, Oscar Jacobson charcoal lightweight worsted; Underclothes: Pants 4 prs, Socks 4 prs, Pyjamas 1 pr, T-shirts, 2, Sleeveless vests 2. Shirts: 4 cotton (dress); M&S leisure 2, Smedley shirts 2, Smedley roll-neck 3. Shorts: Bathing trunks, Exercise pants, trainers 1 pr perhaps to be worn on journey..."
Freya Stark in Luristan: "a crumpled gown and a powder-puff"
My saddle-bags disclosed in their depths, a crumpled gown and a powder-puff, of which I made the best use I could, and finally emerged to meet my host more or less like a lady.
—
The Valleys of the Assassins
(1934)
Tapa Snim: A Buddhist Monk's Possessions
When I came back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a bag.
"Do you have another bag?" I asked, because the smallness of this one seemed an improbable size for a long-distance traveler.
"No. These are all my possessions."
Everything, not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the bag was smaller than a supermarket shopping bag.
"May I ask you what's inside?"
Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.
"My bowl, very important," he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.
In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.
In a small plastic box: a spool of gray thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two-inch mirror, a tube of cream to prevent foot fungus, ChapStick, nasal spray, and razor blades.
"Also very important," he said, showing me the razor blades. "I shave my head every fifteen days."
Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a kasaya, a change of clothes. In a document pouch, he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks ("to introduce myself") and a large certificate in Chinese characters he called his bikkhu certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork.
And a Sharp electronic dictionary that allowed him to translate from many languages, and a string of beads—108 beads, the spiritual number.
As I was writing down the list, he said, "And this"—his straw hat—"and this"—his fan.
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing."
"What about money?"
"That's my secret."
And then carefully he placed it on the opened cloth and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.
—PT, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Joe Polis, Thoreau's Abenaki Guide: "no change of clothing"
He wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, a strong linen or duck pants, which had also been white, blue woolen stockings, cowhide boots, and a Kossuth hat. He carried no change of clothing, but putting on a stout thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack if wanted, and strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready to be gone all summer.
—
The Maine Woods
(1864)
William Least Heat-Moon: Portable Toilet
FOR HIS 13,000-MILE Blue Highways road trip in his van called Ghost Dancing, Heat-Moon carried a sleeping bag and blanket, a Coleman cooker, a plastic basin and bucket, a portable toilet, a cookstove, utensils, a tool kit, writing materials, a camera, and a "U.S. Navy sea bag of clothes."
William Burroughs: Snakebite Serum and a Hammock
I took a few days to assemble my gear and dig the capital. For a jungle trip you need medicines: snake bite serum, penicillin, enterovio-formo and aralen are essentials. A hammock, a blanket and a rubber bag known as a tula to carry your gear in.
—
The Yage Letters
(1963)
Pico Iyer: A Book
The most important thing always to have with me in my case is a book: no companion is likely to be richer, stranger, more alive and more eager to be intimate. Pens and notebooks, of course. Pieces of America to give away. A Lonely Planet guide to get angry with and bitterly repudiate. More novels and biographies for eight-hour waits.
I think I spend more time thinking about what I don't want to take with me: assumptions, iPods, cameras, plans, friends (in most cases), laptops, headphones, suntan lotion, résumés, expectations.
—in conversation with PT
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
"MEN WHO GO LOOKING FOR THE SOURCE of a river are merely looking for the source of something missing in themselves, and never finding it," Sir Richard Burton wrote, shrewdly summing up the mental state of the explorer. The great travelers are all sorts, of course. A large number have been depressives or bipolar types capable of serious gloom: Livingstone sulked in his tent for days, Vancouver locked himself in his cabin, Speke shot himself, Scott sometimes wept, Nansen was suicidal and so was Meriwether Lewis. Most suffered from gout. But at their best they are curious, contented, patient, courageous, and paragons of self-sufficiency. Their passion is visiting the unknown.
In the pathology of travel, many journeyers who seem in pursuit of a goal are driven by demons, attempting to flee, often unsuccessfully, some condition of the mind. Burton also said, "Travelers, like poets, are mostly an angry race."
Tobias Smollett is one of the more uproarious travelers, full of opinions and generalizations. I often think that the ill or afflicted traveler sometimes has an advantage, which is summed up by a character speaking in Smollett's comic novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker: "People of experience and infirmity, my dear Letty, see with very different eyes from those that such as you and I make use of."
Tobias Smollett: Deep unhappiness, discontent, the epitome of the unhappy traveler. He traveled to the Continent not long after his young daughter died, and his grief shows in his rage. He also suffered from an intestinal disorder, which contributed to his death at the age of fifty.
There is one in every boat train that leaves Victoria, in every liner that leaves New York, in every bar of every hotel all over the world: the unhappy traveler. He is traveling not for pleasure but for pain, not to broaden the mind but, if possible, to narrow it; to release the buried terrors and hatreds of a lifetime; or, if these have already had a good airing at home, to open up colonies of rage abroad. We listen to these martyrs, quarrelling with hotel keepers, insulting cooks, torturing waiters and porters, the scourges of the reserved seat and viragos of the sleeping car. And when they return from their mortifications it is to insult the people and the places they have visited, to fight the battle over the bill or the central heating, again and again, with the zest so sore that we conclude that travel for them is a continuation of domestic misery by other means...
Of these Smollett is the only good example I can think of, and after 180 years, his rage still rings out.
—V. S. Pritchett,
Complete Essays
(1991)
Lady Hester Stanhope: Merely restless, melancholic, and frustrated before she left England in 1810. But in the Middle East, where she spent the rest of her life, she became a megalomaniac—"I am the Queen of them all"—power hungry, imperious, and with a violent temper. Her boast was that no one could slap a servant's face harder than she.
Francis Parkman: Parkman was a physical wreck, from his earliest expedition, for The Oregon Trail (1849), and increasingly thereafter, in his travels and his writing, suffering nervous ailments, lameness, partial blindness, and severe headaches. This might have contributed to the detachment and pessimism in his historical works.
Richard Henry Dana: His eyesight was so poor that he was unable to attend Harvard and instead went on the voyage that resulted in Two Years Before the Mast (1840).
David Livingstone: A manic depressive obsessed with his bowels. He believed that constipation was the cause of most maladies in tropical Africa—headaches, muscular weakness, distraction, and much else. His advice to a prospective traveler in Africa: "With the change of climate there is often a peculiar condition of the bowels which makes the individual imagine all manner of things in others. Now I earnestly and most respectfully recommend you to try a little aperient medicine occasionally" (quoted in Timothy Holmes, Journey to Livingstone, 1993).
Sir Richard Burton: His explosive temper and pugnacity earned him the nicknames "Ruffian Dick" and "Dirty Dick." He had a morbid aversion to darkness, so his wife, Isabel, said: "He hated darkness so much that he would never have the blind down lest he might lose a glimpse of light from twilight to dawn."
Burton was also seriously lacking in social skills. "The fact was that though undeniably brilliant," his biographer Mary S. Lovell wrote in A Rage to Live, "Richard Burton had a blind spot in his social skills ... He either lacked the patience, or he could not be bothered to pretend to like, or work with, people he did not like or respect, no matter what their station or influence. And to these individuals he gave deep offence without hesitation, frequently intentionally."
Captain George Vancouver: Fits of temper and depression, which may have been caused by tuberculosis or a thyroid condition. Prone to a paranoid melancholy, he was ashamed of his humble origins and had to suffer the contempt of snobbish senior officers. In Driving Home, Jonathan Raban convincingly argues that Vancouver "wrote his changing moods into the permanent nomenclature" of the Pacific Northwest coast. After a cheerful period in which he named Discovery Bay and Protection Island, Vancouver fell into "what now appears to have been clinical depression" in the spring of 1792, and saw the landscape as "dreary" and "dismal," and he applied names that reflected his low spirits—for example, the anchorage he named Desolation Sound.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott: Depressive, hypersensitive, lachrymose. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, on the Antarctic expedition, writes in The Worst Journey in the World: "[Scott] was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom ... Temperamentally he was a weak man, and might easily have been an irritable autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks ... He cried more easily than any man I have known."
Fridtjof Nansen: A great skier, Arctic explorer (he made the first crossing of Greenland, led the Fram expedition to the Arctic), oceanographer, zoologist (neuron theory), and diplomat, Nansen was a relentless womanizer and suffered from suicidal melancholia.
Jack London: Alcoholism from an early age (described in his "alcoholic memoir," John Barleycorn), as well as serious physical ailments, kidney disease, gastrointestinal problems, double fistula surgery. London was in pain during much of his travels for Cruise of the Snark and The People of the Abyss, and had frostbite while reporting the Russo-Japanese War. He took morphine and died from a morphine overdose at the age of forty.
William Burroughs: Drug addiction for the whole of his adult life did not stop him from traveling throughout the United States and Mexico, to Europe, Morocco, and elsewhere, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, where he searched for the ultimate hallucinogen, ayahuasca, a trip recounted in The Yage Letters.
Graham Greene: Manic depression, a horror of spiders, and an irrational fear of birds.
Dr. Samuel Johnson: Tourette's-like disease, depression, sloth. In Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, the account of a trip on which James Boswell spent three uninterrupted months traveling with Johnson, Boswell wrote, "He had a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking." As for his physical ailments, "His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance." Johnson blamed his parents, telling Boswell that "we inherit dispositions from our parents. I inherited (said he) a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober."
Henry Morton Stanley: "I was not sent into the world to be happy," Stanley wrote, "I was sent for special work." He succeeded in his exploration, fueled by his inferiority complex, his deep feelings of rejection, his illegitimacy, his masochism and manic attacks. He was tormented by identity confusion, pretending to be American, the son of a wealthy man named Stanley from New Orleans, but in fact he was Welsh, named John Rowlands, a pauper raised in a workhouse in Denbigh. He denied this his whole life, leading him to abandon writing his autobiography.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard: Extreme myopia, clinical depression. Nevertheless, he endured the rigors of the Antarctic for two years, and after serving in battle in World War I wrote his masterpiece, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Later, he was nagged by the thought that he might have saved the life of Captain Scott, and suffered self-reproach. "It was not till long afterwards that the thought of what he might have done—and the fantasy of what others were thinking and saying about him—became a little cloud on the margin of his mind that grew till it covered his whole sky" (George Seaver, Foreword, Worst Journey, 1965).
William Somerset Maugham: "Maugham was an unhappy child who evolved into a deeply melancholic man, 'violently pessimistic,' as he characterized himself and ... in later life suffered frequently from nightmares" (Selina Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, 2009).
Gertrude Bell: Depression, despair over her long epistolary dalliance with a married man, a soldier who remained with his wife and died heroically at Gallipoli in 1915. Bell, who had threatened suicide in letters to the soldier, died of an overdose of barbiturates, an apparent suicide, after a series of family tragedies. She was fifty-eight.
Henry James: An almost permanent state of constipation, which drove him from spa to spa in Europe in search of relief throughout his adult life.
Geoffrey Moorhouse: Fear of solitude, empty spaces, and the unknown. He also had agoraphobia, which he sought to conquer in a crossing of the Sahara from west to east, an ordeal he recounted in his book The Fearful Void (see Chapter 10, "Travel as an Ordeal").
Evelyn Waugh: Paranoia and persecution mania on a voyage to Ceylon, which resulted in his novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, an account of a man's paranoia and persecution mania.
Joshua Slocum: Subject to what he himself described as "mental lapses," one of which, when he was sixty-two, was the sexual assault of a twelve-year-old girl in New Jersey in 1906, for which he was arrested. He pleaded "no contest." Rape was not proven; it was assumed he exposed himself to her. After forty-two days in jail, he was released (see Chapter 14, "Travel Feats").
Freya Stark: At the age of thirteen, in a small town in Italy, where she was living with her single mother, her hair was caught in the flywheel of a weaving machine and she was seriously injured—a torn scalp, part of an ear ripped off. "A trauma of this order, both invasive and disfiguring, at an exquisitely vulnerable moment of adolescence, forever shaped her perception of herself. She was never able to overcome a dread that she might not be attractive to the opposite sex," one of her biographers, Jane Fletcher Geniesse, wrote (Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark). "Her parents' estrangement, her insecure childhood, and the injury that nearly killed her left Freya with a passion to conquer the fears and anxieties that plagued her and drove her to find personal validation through notable achievement." But Jonathan Raban, who traveled with her to the Euphrates in the 1970s, told me, "She had the kind of facial ugliness that eventually ages into monumental grandeur. Her intense egotism was a wonder to behold."
Bronislaw Malinowski: The great pioneering anthropologist in the Trobriand Islands suffered from depression, anxiety, rage, and feelings of rejection. He was seen in his work as objective and wholly focused, and for him the Trobrianders were (as his title depicted them) Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). But in his intimate Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word, published more than forty years later, another Malinowski was revealed. "The natives still irritate me, particularly Ginger, whom I would willingly beat to death," he wrote. "I understand all the German and Belgian atrocities." Or: "Unpleasant clash with Ginger ... I was enraged and punched him in the jaw once or twice." Or: "I am in a world of lies here." In his scholarly work he wrote about Trobrianders as great navigators, canoe builders, and gardeners. But he confided in the diary "my dislike of them, my longing for civilization," and "the niggers were noisy ... general aversion to niggers."
Edward Lear: As the last of twenty-one children, and raised by his much older sister Ann, Lear hardly knew his parents. He suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures from early in his life, frequent melancholia, and a depression he called "the morbids."
Jan Morris: Not a mental condition but a sex change, recounted in Conundrum (1974). James Morris climbed Everest and traveled and wrote about the United States, Oman, South Africa, Venice, Spain, and England. Then, after gender reassignment and surgery in 1972, the newly emergent Jan Morris continued to travel and write, about Wales, Hong Kong, Australia, and the great cities of the world. Rare among travelers, indeed among writers generally, for someone to write and travel as a man and then as a woman. After the operation, I believe her prose style became more breathless and bejeweled.
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone
I HAVE ALWAYS TRAVELED ALONE. WITH THE EXception of large-scale expeditions involving a crew or a team, every other kind of travel is diminished by the presence of others. The experience is shared—someone to help, buy tickets, make love to, pour out your heart to, help set up the tent, do the driving, whatever. Although they do not usually say so, many travelers have a companion. Such a person is a consolation, and inevitably a distraction. "Look at that camel in front of the Lexus, honey—hey, it's the old and the new!" ¶ A man who always travels alone, Jonathan Raban, has this to say on the subject: "Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You've got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you're never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you're traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You're never going to see anything; you're never going to meet anybody; you're never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you" (quoted in A Sense of Place, edited by Michael Shapiro, 2004). Raban has enlarged on this in his essay "Why Travel?" in his collection Driving Home (2010): "You are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions ... Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen."
Underlining this, Kipling wrote in "The Winners," a poem that serves as an epigraph to "The Story of the Gadsby" (1889):
What the moral? Who rides may read.
When the night is thick and the tracks are blind
A friend at a pinch is a friend, indeed,
But a fool to wait for the laggard behind.
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
In an earlier echo of this, Thoreau was succinct on the subject in Walden: "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."
None of the following people agreed with this, and even Thoreau, who never traveled alone, did not follow his own advice.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell
BOSWELL, WHOSE NAME is a byword for an amanuensis, traveled with Dr. Johnson to the Western Isles in the fall of 1773, and both men wrote books about the trip: Johnson's thoughtful Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in 1774, and Boswell's gossipy Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1785, which, taken together, comprise a lively dialogue between two travelers, an inner and an outer journey. So toward the end of the trip, when his patience is wearing thin, Johnson remarks in his book, "The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away." Around the same time, Boswell reports in his Journal how, after listening to a Scotsman talk ignorantly about the Church of England, Johnson says, "Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot."
Henry David Thoreau and Friends
HE WALKED ACROSS Cape Cod with William Ellery Channing, who also boated with him down the Concord and Merrimack rivers; he traipsed and paddled through the Maine woods with his cousin George Thatcher and two Indian guides. He went from Concord, Massachusetts, to Staten Island, New York, alone, but then lived with a family there for two months, before becoming homesick and returning to Concord. He spent a week in Canada on a sort of package tour, on a train full of tourists going from Boston to Montreal (recounted in A Yankee in Canada).
And then there is Walden, the last word in solitude. Or is it all theoretical? Thoreau's cabin was only a mile and a half from his house in Concord, where his adoring mother waited, baking pies for him and doing his laundry; and throughout the Walden experience he went home most days. He had two chairs in the cabin, and as he says, he often went with a group of friends to pick huckleberries.
Sir Richard Burton, to Mecca with Mohammed
PART OF BURTON'S disguise to enter Mecca as the robed and bearded Afghan dervish "Mirza Abdullah" was to have an Arab servant and guide. This was the eighteen-year-old Mohammed El-Basyuni, who was headed to Mecca to see his mother. Burton liked his self-confidence, but the young man was watchful too. At the end of the trip Burton recounts that Mohammed suspected Burton might be an unbeliever. "'Now, I understand,' said the boy Mohammed to his fellow-servant, 'your master is a Sahib from India; he hath laughed at our beards.'"
But there might have been another cause for suspicion (so the Burton biographer Mary S. Lovell writes). It was rumored that Burton, instead of squatting, had stood up to pee, something a good Muslim would never do. And it was also rumored, because the argumentative Burton had many enemies, that he had killed Mohammed for knowing his secret.
Though it had not happened, Burton so enjoyed his image as a hell-raiser that he said he had indeed killed his traveling companion. "Oh, yes," he would say. "Why not? Do you suppose one can live in these countries as one lives in Pall Mall and Piccadilly?"
André Gide and His Lover
FOR HIS TEN-MONTH trip through the Congo and Chad in 1925-26, the fifty-six-year-old Gide brought along his twenty-six-year-old lover, Marc Allegret, who had done most of the preparation for the journey. Though they had been lovers for almost ten years, they were anything but monogamous. "Throughout the trip," writes Gide's biographer Alan Sheriden (André Gide, 1999), "sexual companions of both sexes were freely, abundantly available and Marc discovered his penchant for adolescent girls."
Redmond O'Hanlon and His "Small Column"
ONE OF THE greatest talkers, one of the most likeable of men, with a stomach for hard travel and a wonderful ear for dialogue (he is also an alert listener), O'Hanlon is anything but a loner. "Muko, at the head of our small column," he writes of one of the marches described in No Mercy (1996). "Small column" just about sums up the O'Hanlon manner of travel. He is never alone. His is not conventional travel, and hardly solitary, but more in the nature of an expedition, the misery shared by many disillusioned friends, martyrs to companionship.
For the trip recounted in Into the Heart of Borneo (1983) he traveled with the poet James Fenton (the trip was Fenton's idea), and the book profits greatly from Fenton's wit. For his South American trip O'Hanlon asked Fenton whether he wished to go to the Amazon and visit the fierce Yanomami people. In the book itself, In Trouble Again (1988), Fenton is quoted as saying, "I would not come with you to High Wycombe." And so O'Hanlon persuades Simon Stockton, a worldly-wise-guy Englishman who, halfway through the trip, maddened by the heat, the insects, the mud, and the hideous food, throws a wobbly and goes home.
On the No Mercy quest to find a monstrous creature, perhaps a living dinosaur, Mokélé-mbembé, said to haunt a lake in a remote part of the Congolese jungle, O'Hanlon takes an American, Lary Schaefer, who sticks it out for most of the way but finally succumbs and heads home. These departures leave O'Hanlon with the guides and the bearers.
He thrives on conflict, adversity—much of the adversity in the form of insects. He suffers bad bouts of malaria and even a sort of dementia in places, and never fails to anatomize his ailments: "My penis had turned green. To the touch it felt like a hanging cluster of grapes. Swollen tapir ticks as big as the top of a thumb were feeding all down its stem. 'Keep calm,' I repeated out loud, and then I scrabbled at them" (In Trouble Again). And: "Ants, red-brown ants, about a quarter of an inch long, were running in manic bursts down my shirt-front, swinging left and right, conferring with their fellows, climbing over the hairs on my arms ... a bagful of ants fastened on my genitals" (No Mercy).
Gusto is O'Hanlon's watchword, though his hearty tone masks a scientific mind, a deep seriousness, and (so he says) a depressive spirit. Perhaps his fear of gloom is another reason why he travels with others. His books are often compared with those of Victorian adventurers, but in fact they are distinctly modern, sometimes hallucinatory, and depending almost entirely for their effect on dialogue. O'Hanlon uses his traveling companions and local guides as foils, for humor, and to extend the narrative.
V. S. Naipaul and His Women
IN THE PROLOGUE to An Area of Darkness, Naipaul mentions difficulties on his arrival in India—paperwork, red tape, and heat—and then says, "My companion fainted." In the U.S. edition of the book, this was changed to "My wife fainted." Patricia Naipaul accompanied him throughout his travels in India, as well as for the three months he was resident in Kashmir, but she is mentioned only that one time. In A Turn in the South, Naipaul's mistress went with him and did all the driving and most of the arranging of hotels, as his biographer reported. This mistress also went with Naipaul on his Among the Believers tour through the Muslim world, though halfway through the Beyond Belief sequel she was replaced by Nadira Khannum Alvi, who later became his wife and uncredited traveling companion.
John McPhee, His Fellow Paddlers, and His Wife
IN SOME OF his travels, McPhee seems to be on his own—in Looking for a Ship (1990) he is the only landlubber on board. But halfway through Coming into the Country, about his travels throughout Alaska, he mentions his "increasing sense of entrapment," and then parenthetically, "(my wife was with me)." The earlier part of the book is full of his traveling companions, four or five of them.
Bruce Chatwin and Friends
CHATWIN, AS HIS letters show, was compulsively gregarious. His apparently solitary travels, for In Patagonia and The Songlines, were often made with a friend or a guide; other trips were made with a male lover or with his wife, Elizabeth. I once mentioned to him that in recounting travel experiences one had to come clean. Chatwin replied with a shrieking laugh, "I don't believe in coming clean!"
Colin McPhee and Jane
IN A House in Bali (1947), his enthusiastic account of living on that island, McPhee is a musicologist bewitched by Balinese music. He builds a house, makes friends, and studies the music. Many of his friends seem to be Balinese boys. In one passage, McPhee is swept into a turbulent stream. He is spotted by some boys onshore:
It was then that I noticed that one of the more boisterous [boys] threw himself into the water, swam to a boulder and jumped over to where I was struggling. He knew by heart every shallow and hollow in the river bed, for he quickly led me ashore ... When we reached land, this naked dripping youngster and I stood facing one another. He was perhaps eight, unfed and skimpy, with eyes too large for his face ... I offered him a cigarette, but he suddenly took fright and was off into the water before I could say a word.
The boy's name is Sampih. He becomes important to the narrative and to McPhee's life in Bali. McPhee adopts him and mentors him, though he does not mention that the whole time he spent there he was with his wife, Jane Belo, a lesbian, and an anthropologist, the author of a definitive study of hypnotic states in Bali (Trance in Bali), and that it was she who funded his trip.
Eric Newby and Wanda
IN A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Newby traveled with Hugh Carless. In Slowly Down the Ganges, The Big Red Train Ride, and Through Ireland in Low Gear, he took his wife, Wanda, and in these three books he continually describes her expostulating in her Slovenian accent, "Horrick, vye you are saying zat to me?" But he is often funny and has a sharp eye for detail.
Rudyard Kipling and Carrie
WIDELY TRAVELED, NEVER alone. Known for his jingoism and his bombast, Kipling was, in fact, an enigmatic and melancholy figure. He was marked by his lonely childhood, spent in a cruel household ("the House of Desolation," he called it) in England, away from his parents in India (from the ages of five to eleven; see his story "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"). He never mentions his wife, Carrie, who was American, a Vermonter, but she was always at his side. Much of his work is based on travel, especially in India, South Africa, and the United States, and his book of travel pieces, From Sea to Sea (1899), is superb.
Graham Greene and Companions
BEGINNING WITH HIS first travel book, Journey Without Maps, his long walk through the hinterland of Liberia, which he took (leaving his wife and children at home) with his cousin Barbara, Greene always had a traveling companion or a driver or a lover on board. He could not cook, drive a car, or use a typewriter, so he was helpless alone. Greene seemed to require the mateyness of another person—his friend Michael Meyer, who traveled with him through the Pacific, or later in his life the priest Father Duran, who appears in Monsignor Quixote. Greene claimed to be manic depressive, sometimes suicidal, and lonely. He had numerous love affairs, many of them passionate. He remained married to the same woman, Vivien Greene, the whole of his life, but never went anywhere with her.
D. H. Lawrence and Frieda
LAWRENCE ALWAYS TRAVELED with his wife, Frieda von Richthofen (her cousin was the Red Baron), beginning with their elopement in 1912, two months after they met (she was then married to Ernest Weekly, a French professor). Although they quarreled constantly, they lived in and traveled through Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Australia—and he wrote books based on his travels in all these places, notably Mornings in Mexico and Sea and Sardinia, sometimes mentioning Frieda, usually not.
Somerset Maugham and Lover
ON HIS LONGEST trips—to China, which yielded On a Chinese Screen, and to Southeast Asia, which resulted in The Gentleman in the Parlour —Maugham traveled with his lover, Gerald Haxton, though he does not disclose the fact, largely because he was married to Syrie, who resented his two-timing her with this young American drunkard, and because at the time he was traveling, the 1920s and 1930s, homosexuality was a crime in Britain. But Maugham had a terrible stammer, and he needed someone to converse with locals and bring back colorful stories and dialogue for his books. "Master Hacky" was just the man to help. Also Maugham loved him deeply. After Haxton died, Maugham traveled with Alan Searle, a greedy young Londoner who had sent him fan letters and became his lover and literary executor.
Rebecca West and Henry
PROBABLY NO TRAVEL book is fuller of the expressions "My husband said..." or "My husband told me..." than Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1941), Rebecca West's account of her various trips through Yugoslavia, and since it is a book of some 1,200 pages, the words "my husband" appear numerous times. He was a banker, named Henry Andrews, and full of theories and explanations, which she approvingly recounts in the book.
John Steinbeck and Elaine
STEINBECK TRAVELED WITH his dog in Travels with Charley, as he said, but (though he never mentioned them) he had many conjugal visits en route: his wife, Elaine, met him every few weeks on the road to cheer him up. We know this from the letters that were published after his death; for example, on October 10, 1960: "I'm glad you came out and it was a good time, wasn't it? It took the blankness off a lot" (Life in Letters). This "blankness" he speaks of is never disclosed in the jolly book.
Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Friends
AS A YOUNG man he traveled alone, walking across Europe from Holland to Turkey in 1933, a trip he described many years later in two books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). He is justly famous for having written one of the most evocative books about the Caribbean, The Traveler's Tree (1950) (see Chapter 23, "Classics of a Sense of Place"). He makes no bones about traveling in a group, and in fact has a felicitous way of describing this: "My companions, from beginning to end, were two friends: Joan, who's English, and Costa, who is Greek. Both of them, whittled now to shadows, are constantly present in the following pages."
Edward Abbey and Family
A GREAT HERO of loners and wanderers, high-plains drifters and monkey-wrenchers (eco-saboteurs), Abbey, a contradictory soul, craved the company of others, usually fellow boozers. But he had a way of pretending to have been solitary, being selective in the retelling of his experiences. In Desert Solitaire, where he celebrates solitude and his lonely communing with nature in southern Utah, he does not mention that for one five-month period he was living in a trailer with his third wife, Rita, and young son. Whole chapters of the book, such as "The Moon-Eyed Horse," "very likely never happened at all," his biographer, James Cahalan, wrote.
Wilfred Thesiger and Friends
OFTEN THOUGHT OF as the solitary nomad of the Empty Quarter, Thesiger could not bear to be alone. In his Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, Alexander Maitland writes, "As for Thesiger's pursuit of 'the peace that comes with solitude,' by his own admission he found solitude unbearable. His friend John Verney [a painter] described him as someone who 'hates being left alone for more than a minute. He may travel in remote parts of the world, but always accompanied by a crowd of tribesmen, porters or whatever and has probably spent fewer hours in total solitude than, like most painters, I'm accustomed to spend in a week. By solitude, Thesiger appears to have meant something like the 'clean' space of desert undefiled by modern communications or modern transport, and the harmonious traditional life he found among the tribes who lived there." In later life Thesiger lived with an African family in northern Kenya. They demanded money, cars, and radios, and he paid up, not minding that he was being fleeced as long as they kept him company.
Jean Cocteau, Passepartout, and Charlie Chaplin
PART STUNT, PART challenge by Paris-Soir, but primarily a literary opportunity, Cocteau (1889-1963) claimed that he could travel at least as well as Phileas Fogg and make it around the world in eighty days. He set off in March 1946, accompanied by his lover and part-time secretary Marcel Khill, whom he called Passepartout in the book Mon Premier Voyage (1937). He had met Khill in 1932, when Cocteau was forty-three and Khill twenty (though he looked fifteen, Cocteau said). The book was translated as My Journey Round the World. In an introduction to a new edition, the actor and writer Simon Callow wrote: "[Khill] and Cocteau met at the house of a Toulon naval officer ... who had 'discovered' him working on a chain gang; he was dispensing opium, thus uniting in his person two of Cocteau's keenest appetites."
The book, a breathless diary, was dedicated to André Gide. In the course of traveling through Malaya, Cocteau puns in French on the name Kuala Lumpur, calling it "Kuala l'impure," but it is clear that he is too bored, fatigued, and preoccupied to care much about the places he is breezing through, mere glimpses of Egypt, India, Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, with slapdash diary entries.
And then, on a ship from Hong Kong, the tone of the book rises to a new register: "Charlie Chaplin is on board. It is a staggering piece of news. Later on, Chaplin was to say, 'The real function of a person's work is to make it possible for friends like ourselves to cut out preliminaries. We have always known each other.'" Cocteau had never met Chaplin before, but he is dazzled, and after this encounter the book catches fire—not as a travel book but as the account of a new friendship between two stage-struck and bedazzled celebrities, both highly creative and eccentric—and libidinous (Chaplin was traveling with Paulette Goddard). It so happened that Chaplin and Cocteau were exactly the same age, born in 1889 and forty-seven at that point. Chaplin had just made Modern Times, and as a composer (he wrote the song "Smile," for example) he was just as versatile as Cocteau.
They meet often on the ship, drink together, talk often (with Khill translating for Cocteau), appraise Honolulu and San Francisco together, and when Cocteau arrives in Los Angeles, Chaplin puts him in touch with the film world's luminaries, and Cocteau is soon dropping the names King Vidor, Marlene Dietrich, and Gary Cooper. Cocteau won the bet, arriving back in Paris in eighty days. My Journey is a patchy and unsatisfying book, but a glimpse into the hectic life of this ball of fire.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Wife
AUTHOR OF Tristes Tropiques, one of the great books of travel in the (at the time) hardly known parts of Brazil in the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss studied remote and isolated people. And for 362 pages of this book, one is astonished by his serenity, his resourcefulness, and his capacity to deal with the rigors of jungle travel. And then, on page 363, discussing an infectious eye disease, which caused temporary blindness among the Nambikwara people, he writes, "The disease spread to our group; the first person to catch it was my wife who had taken part in all my expeditions so far." Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss had been with him every step of the way.
Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton
The eminent Victorian Galton (1822–1911) had a consuming interest in everything on earth. His bestseller The Art of Travel (1855) was just one of his many books. A noted scientist ("polymath" is usually attached to his name), he was an inventor, a meteorologist, and an early student of anthropology, psychology, fingerprinting, and human intelligence. His wrote extensively on the subject of heredity, and it is probably his association with the pseudoscience of eugenics (he coined the word) that dimmed his reputation and made him seem a dangerous crank. ¶ As his book shows, Galton was widely read in the travel literature of his time, citing Mungo Park, Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and Samuel Baker on African exploration; Elisha Kane on the Arctic; Leichhardt on Australia; and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. He mentions his cousin Charles Darwin when discussing the use of animal bones as fuel when firewood is scarce. Along with this extensive reading, in his twenties and early thirties he traveled all over—to Egypt, Turkey, down the Nile, through the Middle East, and just before writing this book, he ranged over what is now Namibia, making maps of the interior. ¶ The Art of Travel is exhaustive on the subject of old-fashioned exploration, and full of tips, such as this: "It is a great mistake to suppose that savages will give their labour or cattle in return for anything that is bright or new: they have their real wants and their fashions as much as we have." The book is also useful as a reference and collection of curiosa, such as how to bivouac on snow and how to patch a water bag. Always scrupulous with details, Galton advises on the best way to roll up shirtsleeves so they won't fall down: "the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way."
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