The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

12. When You're Strange

A TRAVELER IS A STRANGER. ONE OF THE DELUsions of the tourist, usually buffered from reality, is that he or she is a friend and even perhaps a benefactor of the locals. "We're putting money into the economy," is a common tourist observation. The traveler, ever the outsider, always moving on, would never say that. "Tourism is a mortal sin," said the film director Werner Herzog. And yet it is the rough traveler, not the tidy tourist, who confronts — and needs the goodwill of — the native of the land. This is often a recapitulation of a recurrent human event in history that has always fascinated me — First Contact, meeting The Other. The most vivid examples come from the history of exploration and discovery. Usually, First Contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him an Indian, because Columbus believed he had reached the coast of India. But consider the opposite: the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching a copy of Marco Polo's Travels on the deck of a caravel.

In the year of contact, 1778, the Hawaiians believed Captain James Cook to be the god Lono. The Aztecs, in 1517, took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, god of learning and of wind. The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, "Are you from the sun or the moon?"

Until I went to live in Africa, I had not known that most people in the world believe that they are the People, and their language is the Word, and strangers are not fully human — at least not human in the way the People are — nor is a stranger's language anything but the gabbling of incoherent and inspissated felicities. In most languages, the name of a people means "the Original People," or simply "the People." "Inuit" means "the People," and most Native American names of so-called tribes mean "the People." For example, the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, call themselves Anishinaabe, "the Original People," and the Cherokee (the name is not theirs but a Creek word) call themselves Ani Yun Wiya, meaning "Real People," and Hawaiians refer to themselves as Kanaka Maoli, "Original People."

As recently as the 1930s, Australian gold prospectors and New Guinea Highlanders encountered each other for the first time. The grasping, world-weary Aussies took the Highlanders to be savages, while the Highlanders, assuming that the Aussies were the ghosts of their own dead ancestors, on a visit, felt a kinship and gave them food, thinking (as they reported later), "They are like people you see in a dream." But the Australians were looking for gold and killed the Highlanders who were uncooperative. The Lakota, who called white men washichus, Nathaniel Philbrick writes in The Last Stand, "believed that the first white men had come from the sea, which they called mniwoncha, meaning 'water all over.'" In an echo of this accurate characterization, and at about the same time, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, "To West Africans, the white men were murdele, men from the sea."

Otherness can be like an illness; being a stranger can be analogous to experiencing a form of madness — those same intimations of the unreal and the irrational, when everything that has been familiar is stripped away.

It is hard to be a stranger. A traveler has no power, no influence, no known identity. That is why a traveler needs optimism and heart, because without confidence travel is misery. Generally, the traveler is anonymous, ignorant, easy to deceive, at the mercy of the people he or she travels among. The traveler might be known as "the American" or "the Foreigner," and there is no power in that.

A traveler is often conspicuous, and consequently is vulnerable. But in my traveling, I whistled in the dark and assumed all would be well. I depended on people being civil and observing a few basic rules. I did not expect preferential treatment. I did not care about power or respectability. This was the condition of a liberated soul, of course, but also the condition of a bum.

Among the Batelela in the Sankuru region of central Congo the word for stranger is ongendagenda. It is also one of the most common names for a male child. The reasoning is that when a child is born — and males matter most among the Batelela — he appears from nowhere and is unknown, so he is usually called Stranger, and this name stays with him throughout his life — Stranger is the "John" of the Sankuru region.

Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines, quotes an Old English proverb: "The stranger, if he be not a trader, is an enemy." In The Valleys of the Assassins, Freya Stark wrote of the nomads in Luristan: "The laws of hospitality are based on the axiom that a stranger is an enemy until he has entered the sanctuary of someone's tent."

Some words for stranger have the meaning of a spirit, as in the case of the New Guinea Highlanders, who could not conceive of the white Australians as anything but spectral ancestors. In Swahili, the word mu-zungu (plural, wazungu) has its root in the word for ghost or spirit, and cognates of the word— mzungu in Chichewa and murungu in Shona and other Bantu languages — have the meaning of a powerful spirit, even a god. Foreigners had once seemed godlike when they first appeared in some places.

The word for foreigner in Easter Island, in Rapa Nui speech, is popaa — so I was told there. But this is a neologism. In an earlier time the Rapa Nui word for foreigner (according to William Churchill's Easter Island, 1915) was etua, which also means god or spirit. It is related to the Hawaiian word atua, though the Hawaiian word for stranger is haole, meaning "of another breath."

Here is a list of countries and languages and their words for stranger.

Maori—pakeha, white man, foreigner.

Fiji—kai valagi (pronounced valangi), white person, foreigner, "person from the sky," as opposed to kai India for Indians and kai China for Chinese.

Tonga—papalangi, a cognate of Samoanpalangi, meaning "sky burster," a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature.

Samoa—palangi, "from the sky," related to the Fijian kai valangi.

Trobriand Islands—dim-dim, for foreigner or white-skinned person; koyakoya for dark-skinned non-Trobriander. Koya is the word for mountain. But there are no mountains in the Trobriand Islands. So a koyakoya is a mountain person — that is, from mainland New Guinea, or simply an off-islander.

HongKong—gweilo, "ghost man," a prettier way of saying "foreign devil," since a ghost is menacing, something to fear.

Japan—gaijin. The word is composed of two characters, gai, meaning outside, and jin, person. This appears to be a contraction for gai-kokujin, "outside-country person," thus an outsider in the most literal sense — racially, ethnically, geographically.

China—wei-guo ren is the neutral term, a person from a foreign country. But yanguize, "foreign devil," is also common, and there are words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose."

Arabic—ajnabi, "people to avoid"; also ajami, meaning foreigner, barbarian, bad Arabic speaker, Persian; also gharib, stranger, "from the west."

Kiribati—I-matang. Traveling by kayak within the huge atoll of Christmas Island (Kiritimati), I heard this word often. I-matang is generally used to mean foreigner (there were four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it is "the person from Matang," said to be the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people. The word implies kinship. By the way, it is an actual place — Madang, on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, thought by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people.

Mexico—gringo. The word seems to have come from griego, a Spanish term for a Greek. The Diccionario Castellano (1787) defines gringo as a word used in Málaga for "anyone who spoke Spanish badly," and in Madrid for "the Irish." It implies gibberish. The many popular theories (among them, that it may be derived from hearing the disenchanted Irish soldiers who'd joined the Mexicans singing "Green Grow the Rushes Oh!" during the Mexican-American War in the mid-1840s) are fanciful and unconvincing. The earliest recorded use of gringo in print is in the Western Journal (1849–1850) of John Woodhouse Audubon (son of John James, and also an artist), who traveled by horseback through northern Mexico on his way from New York to witness the Gold Rush in California. In Cerro Gordo ("a miserable den of vagabonds") Audubon and his fellow travelers were abused: "We were hooted and shouted as we passed through, and called 'Grin-goes' etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water."

Being Frank

I HEARD THE word faranji, for foreigner, in Ethiopia when I was on my Dark Star Safari trip, and remembered farang in Thailand, ferangi in Iran, and firringhi in India and Malaysia (though orang-puteh, for white person, is more common in Malaysia). What's the connection?

When Richard Burton took his first trip to Abyssinia — recounted in First Footsteps in East Africa— he wrote, "I heard frequently muttered by the red-headed spearmen the ominous term 'Faranj.'" Burton went on to say that the Bedouin in Arabia "apply this term to all but themselves." In his time, even Indian traders in Africa were called faranji if they happened to be wearing trousers (shalwar), since trouser-wearing was associated with outsiders. In his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), he wrote, "The convert [in Arabia] is always watched with Argus eyes, and men do not willingly give information to a 'new Moslem,' especially a Frank."

In The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), Freya Stark says, "The aim of the Persian government is to have [the people of Luristan] dressed á la Ferangi in a year's time." Later on, in a valley "stood the castle of Nevisar Shah to which no Frank, so they told me, had ever climbed."

These words, all related to farang, are cognates of "Frank," though the people who use the word don't know beans about Franks. The Franks were a Germanic tribe who peregrinated western Europe in the third and fourth centuries. But the name, of which "French" is a cognate, probably gained currency from the Crusades of the twelfth century, when Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God. In the Levant and ultimately as far as East Africa and Southeast Asia, a Frank was any Westerner.

Even in Albania: "Immense crowds collected to witness the strange Frank and his doings," wrote Edward Lear about himself, in his Albanian journal in 1848. A form offaranji, the word afrangi is regarded as obsolete in Egypt, though it is still occasionally used, especially in combination. In Egypt, a kabinet afrangi is a Western, sit-down toilet.

Almost the entire time I spent in Harar, Ethiopia — where the poet Rimbaud had lived — I was followed by children chanting, "Faranji! Faranji! Faranji!" Sometimes older people bellowed it at me, and now and then as I was driving slowly down the road a crazed-looking Harari would rush from his doorstep to the window of my car and stand, spitting and screaming the word into my face.

Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson

In spite of being weak and tubercular — wraith like in his John 0/ Singer Sargent portrait — Stevenson traveled widely. Mostly he traveled for his health, searching for clement weather to ease his infected lungs, but also for the romance of the experience:

I would like to rise and go

Where the golden apples grow.

He rambled on the Continent, crisscrossed the United States, sailed around the Pacific, and ended up in Samoa, where he died (1894) and is buried. He was well read and undoubtedly knew Montaigne, who wrote in his essay "Of Vanity": "But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey. What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake." Stevenson seems to paraphrase this in his first quotation:

***

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life a little more nearly, to get down off this feather-bed of civilization, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

— Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879)

***

A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.

— The Cévennes Journal:

Notes on a Journey Through the French Highlands (1978)

***

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

— "Virginibus Puerisque"

***

Herein, I think, is the chief attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is being borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humor moves them, at unfrequented stations.

— "Ordered South"

***

There lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk… It is very curious, ofcourse, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.

— "The Silverado Squatters"

***

There's nothing under heaven so blue,

That's fairly worth the traveling to.

But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable

prospects and adventures by the way.

— "The Silverado Squatters"