The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

14. Travel Feats

SPEAKING OF "THE WINTER JOURNEY" — SIX weeks of complete darkness and low temperatures (minus 79°F) and gale-force winds — an experience of which gave him the title for his book The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard reflected on dangerous feats in travel. "Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery."

Maybe there is an answer. When I was preparing to write the introduction to the American edition of Alone, Gérard d'Aboville's account of his single-handed journey rowing across the Pacific, I pressed d'Aboville on his reasons for making this dangerous voyage. He became silent. After a long while he said, "Only an animal does useful things. An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful — not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do."

What separates some feats from others is the way the tale is told. Sir Richard Burton's book about how he, an infidel, traveled to Mecca in disguise is a classic. After Joshua Slocum sailed around the world alone, he wrote a good book about the experience; so did Tschifelly, in Tschifelly's Ride, the story of his trip on horseback from Argentina to New York. Breaking out of a POW camp in Kenya and climbing Mount Kenya would have been a hilarious anecdote, but Felice Benuzzi wrote a detailed account of the feat, and so did Gérard D'Aboville after he rowed across the Pacific Ocean.

Now and then a great feat is forced upon the traveler, as with Captain Bligh's open-boat voyage of 4,000 miles with eighteen men after the mutiny on the Bounty, or Shackleton's heroic rescue of his men, which necessitated his traveling almost a thousand miles through the Southern Ocean in a freezing lifeboat. But these epics of survival were unintentional.

There are many other notable travel feats: a man windsurfed across the Atlantic (M. Christian Marty, in February 1982); a woman windsurfed across the Indian Ocean (Raphaeila Le Gouvello, sixty days in 2006, 3,900 miles, from Exmouth in Western Australia to the island of Réunion); a man skied down Everest in 2000 (the Slovenian Davo Karnicar), and a woman did it in 2006—Kit DesLauriers, who has also skied down the highest peaks on every continent, including Antarctica. Kayakers have gone everywhere, across oceans, around Cape Horn, and made ambitious circumnavigations (Japan, Australia, New Zealand). Some of these are admirable, even heroic journeys, and some are stunts; I am mainly interested in travel feats that have resulted in memorable books.

A Disguised Infidel Penetrates Mecca

IN HIS Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853), Sir Richard Burton claimed he was "the only living European who has found his way to the Head Quarters of the Moslem Faith."

He did it for a reason common to travelers setting off: he was, among other things, "thoroughly tired of 'progress' and of 'civilization'; curious to see with my eyes what others are content to 'hear with ears,' namely Moslem inner life in a really Mohammedan country; and longing, if truth be told, to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described, measured, sketched and photographed."

As with his long trips through Africa and the American West, Burton was happiest when he was in a remote place. "Believe me, when once your tastes have conformed to the tranquility of [desert] travel, you will suffer real pain in returning to the turmoil of civilization. The air of the cities will suffocate you, and the care-worn and cadaverous countenances of citizens will haunt you like a vision of judgment."

The trip, Burton says, took nine months, but in reality it took much longer, because he needed to be fluent in Arabic, knowledgeable in all aspects of Islam, and well versed in the Koran. This had taken years, while he had been a soldier in India from 1842 to 1849. He also needed to be circumcised. This he accomplished, probably in India, before the trip, when he was about thirty. He said that "external" physical evidence that he was a Muslim was essential.

One of the pleasures of the book is that Burton delights in his disguise, as the Afghan dervish Mirza Abdullah. "Little did he suspect who his interrogator was," he remarks of a slave dealer. And he flirts with a pretty slave girl, telling her how beautiful she is. ("They were average specimens of the steatopygous Abyssinian breed, broad-shouldered, thin-flanked, fine-limbed, and with haunches of prodigious size.")

She says, "Then why don't you buy me?"

So as to make himself seem a humble haji (pilgrim), Burton travels in the lowest class on the ship, quietly mocking his fellow passengers. Though he speaks of the rigors of the trip, the discomforts and the heat, he seldom complains. He is on a mission. Three months after he sets out, in the month of July ("sickening heat"), he arrives in Medina and visits the Prophet's tomb.

He moves on to Mecca with the other pilgrims, and achieves the objective of the trip, pretending to pray while examining the enormous stone known as the Kaaba, the heart and soul of Islam, forbidden to the unbeliever.

I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Haji from the far-north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breeze of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.

Being Burton, though, another ecstatic experience is his glimpse of a flirtatious pilgrim, a girl he calls Flirtilla.

Close to us sat a party of fair Meccans, apparently belonging to the higher classes, and one of these I had already several times remarked. She was a tall girl, about eighteen years old, with regular features, a skin somewhat citrine-coloured, but soft and clear, symmetrical eyebrows, the most beautiful eyes, and a figure all grace. There was no head thrown back, no straightened neck, no flat shoulders, nor toes turned out — in fact, no "elegant" barbarisms: the shape was what the Arabs love, soft, bending, and relaxed, as a woman's figure ought to be. Unhappily she wore, instead of the usual veil, a "Yashmak" of transparent muslin, bound round the face; and the chaperone, mother, or duenna, by whose side she stood, was apparently a very unsuspicious or complaisant old person. Flirtilla fixed a glance of admiration upon my cashmere. I directed a reply with interest at her eyes. She then by the usual coquettish gesture, threw back an inch or two of head-veil, disclosing broad bands of jetty hair, crowning a lovely oval. My palpable admiration of the new charm was rewarded by a partial removal of the Yashmak, when a dimpled mouth and a rounded chin stood out from the envious muslin. Seeing that my companions were safely employed, I entered upon the dangerous ground of raising hand to forehead. She smiled almost imperceptibly, and turned away. The pilgrim was in ecstasy.

No non-Muslim since Burton has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and lived to tell the tale.

Sailing Alone Around the World

JOSHUA SLOCUM DECIDED to be the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was an experienced sailor — and restless from the time of his youth in Canada, where he had been an inveterate runaway. He found an old thirty-seven-foot sloop, rebuilt and refitted her, named her Spray, and left in 1895 on his voyage, without a chronometer but using dead reckoning. The trip, which took three years and covered forty-six thousand miles, was full of incident, and Slocum's account of the voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World (1899), is a well-told book — vivid, detailed, and very funny, right from the beginning, where he says, "I was born in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20, though I am a citizen of the United States — a naturalized Yankee."

Slocum, self-educated, wrote that "my books were always my friends" — in his library he had Darwin, Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Don Quixote, R. L. Stevenson, and Shakespeare. His book made him famous, and he continued voyaging, as well as lecturing about his exploits. He also spent forty-two days in jail on a charge of molestation (see Chapter 8, "Fears, Neuroses, and Other Mental Conditions"). In the fall of 1909, he left Martha's Vineyard, intending to sail the Spray to the Amazon. Nothing was heard from him after that — he was lost at sea, presumed to have been sunk after having been hit by a steamer, though he (as always using his self-steering device) was snug in his cabin, reading a book, his normal practice when sailing.

In The Cruise of the Snark (1911), which was inspired by Slocum's voyage, Jack London wrote:

Joshua Slocum sailed around the world a few years ago in a thirty-seven-foot boat all by himself. I shall never forget, in his narrative of the voyage, where he heartily indorsed the idea of young men, in similar small boats, making similar voyage. I promptly indorsed his idea, and so heartily that I took my wife along. While it certainly makes a Cook's tour look like thirty cents, on top of that, and on top of the fun and pleasure, it is a splendid education for a young man — oh, not a mere education in the things of the world outside, of lands, and peoples, and climates, but an education in the world inside, an education in one's self, a chance to learn one's own self, to get on speaking terms with one's soul.

No Picnic on Mount Kenya

THE UNUSUAL ITINERARY in this book clearly illustrates one of the principal motives in travel: the wish to escape from boring, nagging, pestiferous people. That wish can inspire long journeys and ambitious travel feats.

In 1943, Felice Benuzzi (1910–1988) was bored and irritated with confinement and his annoying fellow Italians in a British prisoner of war camp outside the town of Nanyuki in Kenya. He was surrounded by "every kind of person… old and young, sick and healthy, crazy and sensible." He says that the lunacies and achievements of the other prisoners could fill a book, and he proves this with examples. But his mind was on other things. From behind the barbed wire of the camp Benuzzi had a view of majestic Mount Kenya: "An ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks — a massive blue-black tooth of sheer rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere, yet floating fairylike on the near horizon. It was the first 17,000-foot peak I had ever seen."

A junior colonial officer in Italian-controlled Ethiopia, he had been captured by British soldiers along with thousands of other Italians and imprisoned in the British colony of Kenya. (Benuzzi does not mention that other Italian prisoners, as forced laborers, helped build the western road out of Nairobi that traverses the Great Rift Valley, as well as a lovely chapel in one of the bends in the road.)

More than a year of imprisonment passed before he was able to choose two fellow prisoners, Giuan and Enzo, for his team. With great ingenuity they made ice-climbing equipment (crampons, axes) out of scrap metal, and they stockpiled warm clothes and food. "Life [in prison] took on another rhythm because it had a purpose." With a copied key and an attitude, they bamboozled the camp guards and broke out, leaving a letter behind for the prison authorities stating their intention and apologizing for the bother they might be causing.

Their climb took them through the lairs of leopards and lions, through dense bamboo forests and fields of lobelia. Enzo was ill; rations were often short; the cold and the necessity to avoid detection were also problems. Yet given the circumstances, they were equipped for the assault on the summit. Without a map, they used their judgment and experience of other climbs. They struggled upward, at times in deep snow, blazing their own trail. On one of their climbs they were in the snow and cold for eighteen hours. Although they were defeated in their attempt to reach Batian, the highest peak, they summited Point Lenana, 16,300 feet, where they left an Italian flag that was later found.

After their arduous climb they descended the mountain, returned to the prison camp, and surrendered. The punishment for escaping was twenty-eight days in solitary confinement, but the British camp commandant, saying he "appreciated our sporting effort," gave them seven days.

Yes, a sporting effort. But it was something else — a disgust with confinement and a wish, as herded-together prisoners, to reclaim their humanity. "Forced to endure the milieu [of the camp]," Benuzzi says early in the book, "we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality." Thus Benuzzi and his comrades saw a kind of salvation in the climb, as many people see liberation in travel and the triumph of the will in a singular travel feat.

After the war, Benuzzi wrote his book, Fuga sul Kenya: 17 Giorni di Libertà, which was translated under the less-than-gripping title No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1952).

Benuzzi's experience parallels that of the German Heinrich Harrar, who was captured in India in 1939 when he was on his way to climb Nanga Parbat. Harrer was interned near Dehra Dun, in sight of the Himalayan foothills, the heights of which (as in the case of Benuzzi's glimpse of Mount Kenya) inspired him to escape. After repeated attempts he succeeded, in 1944, making his way to Tibet, a tale he recounted in Seven Years in Tibet (1953).

Rowing Across the Pacific

GÉRARD D' ABOVILLE ROWED a twenty-five-foot boat from Japan to Oregon in 1991 and wrote about it in Alone. He had previously rowed a boat across the Atlantic ten years earlier, from Cape Cod to Brittany. This had been done before, but no one had succeeded in rowing across the Pacific alone. He set out late in the season and was pummeled by heavy weather, tumultuous storms, and forty-six-foot waves. There are no islands in the North Pacific. A Russian freighter offered to rescue him. "I was not even tempted," d'Aboville says. But he repeatedly overturned in the high waves and nearly drowned on his final approach to the coast of Oregon.

After he completed his journey he quietly returned to teaching survival skills in his Outward Bound school in Brittany.

Riding a Horse from Buenos Aires to New York City

AIMÉ TSCHIFFELY (1895–1954), a Swiss, rode ten thousand miles by horseback to New York. He had two horses, Mancha and Gato, and it took him three years, from 1925 to 1928. He crossed the Andes, the Darien Gap, and the length of Mexico, but not until he got to the United States did he have a serious problem: he barely survived being deliberately sideswiped by a lunatic motorist. The whole story is told in his best-selling book, Tschiffely's Ride (1933).

Swimming the Panama Canal

RICHARD HALLIBURTON (1900–1939) described his swimming the Panama Canal in his second book of travel, New Worlds to Conquer (1929). He had swum the Hellespont in his first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925). He specialized in travel feats — the first documented winter ascent of Mount Fuji, sneaking into the Taj Mahal at night and bathing in the tank by moonlight, and other efforts — some actual feats, some silly stunts. In Seven League Boots (1935) he traveled through Arabia and Ethiopia, where he met and dined with Emperor Haile Selassie. He has been described as a tormented homosexual and an imaginative traveler and thinker. In his last effort, attempting to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, he was lost at sea and declared dead some months later.

His exuberant books, his purple prose, inspired a generation of youngsters to become travelers. In The Royal Road to Romance he wrote, "Youth — nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability — I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic."

Circling the Poles

BETWEEN 1979 AND 1982, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (aka Ran Fiennes) traveled fifty-two thousand miles around the world on a polar axis, the Transglobe Expedition, with a partner, Charles Burton; the trip was mostly over land. Fiennes also attempted a solo expedition to the North Pole, but crashed through the ice and took his frostbitten self away, abandoning the Arctic. Other Fiennes feats: by hovercraft up the Nile to discover the lost city of Ubar in Oman, and running seven marathons in seven days, after undergoing double bypass heart surgery. His memoir Living Dangerously (1987) is highly hubristic but a readable account of his exploits.

The Ultimate Everest Experience

GÖRAN KROPP (1966–2002) biked seven thousand miles from Stockholm to Nepal (via Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan) and then climbed Everest, making an unsuccessful assault (without oxygen) and finally a successful summiting (at the same time as the Into Thin Air disaster, described by Jon Krakauer; see Chapter 10, "Travel as an Ordeal"). Afterward Kropp biked back to Sweden, being assaulted on the way by xenophobes and stone-throwing people. All the details are in his account of the trip, Ultimate High: My Everest Odyssey (1997). Kropp died from a fall while rock climbing in Washington in 2002.

Walking from Cape Town to Cairo

EWART GROGAN TREKKED from Cape Town to Beira, Mozambique, in 1898, and continued from Beira north through Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Sudan, and reached Cairo in early 1900. His account of the journey is From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North (1900). He was said to have done this in order to impress the father of Gertrude Coleman-Watt with his manliness and determination. He later married her.

Walking Around the World

FFYONA CAMPBELL (BORN 1967), restless, despised by her father, needing approval, feeling rejected, walked the length of Britain from John o' Groats to Land's End at the age of sixteen. She followed this up by walking across the United States, coast to coast, becoming pregnant on the way by a member of her backup team; before getting an abortion in New Mexico, she accepted lifts and lied about that to the press. Later she came clean. She also walked across Australia, and through Africa, Cape Town to Tangiers. An amazing, contrary, opinionated, and admirable woman, Campbell recounted her experiences in three books: The Whole Story, On Foot Through Africa, and Feet of Clay. She recently described herself (in Outside magazine) as "a retired pedestrian."

Youngest to Sail Around the World Nonstop

PERHAPS THE FUTURE of the travel book is the travel blog, with all its elisions, colloquial tropes, and chatty stream of consciousness. It is obvious from the circumnavigation of the Australian Jessica Watson that the great advantage of the travel blog — especially one reporting a feat-in-progress — is the way in which anyone with a computer can be in touch. The highs and lows of such a trip can be experienced and shared by the world in real time. What this trip demonstrated was the exuberance, resilience, and modesty of this sixteen-year-old sailor and her successful voyage.

Jessica Watson (born 1993) is the youngest person to have sailed nonstop, alone, and unassisted around the world. She left Sydney, Australia, on October 18, 2009, on Ella's Pink Lady, a thirty-four-foot sailboat, and arrived back on May 15, 2010. Had her trip taken four more days, she would have turned seventeen.

The 24,000-mile trip was very difficult and eventful — six knockdowns (the mast underwater), towering seas (35-foot waves), 70-knot winds, engine failure, torn sails, and occasionally dampened spirits. But Jessica was never out of touch, posting messages most days, and after each of the blog entries she usually received well over a thousand replies from well-wishers. The followers of her blog grew dramatically as she neared her home port. She posted videos, updates, photos, and news; her website even sold merchandise (caps, posters, etc.) online to fund her trip. In the manner of blogging, her circumnavigation had an interactive element, as she chatted back and forth with the people monitoring her progress.

The tone of her blog is so sunny, it is obvious that such a difficult feat can best be achieved by someone with a positive frame of mind, reminding me that difficult travel is essentially a mental challenge.

Here is Jessica, halfway through her trip, in January 2010: "The picture below is of my very cool new t-shirt which was a present from Mum in my latest food bag. I had to share it with you guys as my crew aren't doing a very good job of sharing my excitement!" And the accompanying photo shows her wearing a T-shirt with the message "One Tough Cookie."

On her arrival home, she was greeted by tens of thousands of people, including the prime minister, who called her a hero. Likable to the last, she disagreed, saying she wasn't a hero, "just an ordinary girl who had a dream and worked hard at it and proved that anything is possible."