The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable

UNWELCOMING PLACES ARE A GIFT TO THE traveling writer. They have always been so, an early example being Ibn Battuta's arrival in Tunis in 1325, at the beginning of his global wandering. He "wept bitterly" because he met with utter indifference: "not a soul greeted me and no one there was known to me." The winter darkness and killing cold of Cherry-Garrard's Antarctica; the cannibals, disease, and general hostility in Stanley's Congo; the devout Muslims tormenting Charles Doughty with howls of "Nasrani!" ("Christian!") in Arabia Deserta — these inhospitable situations gave us great books. Heartwarming interludes, lovable locals, and delicious meals have informed the most tedious travel accounts — the blissful vacation is desirable but not a fit subject for a book.

The early travelers in Africa always kept in mind that the cannibal was a better subject than the missionary. Even the high-minded Mary Kingsley knew that, and spent much more time writing about (and exaggerating) the anthropophagous Fon people in Gabon than the pleasures of her botanizing of the jungle, which (so she said) was the whole point of her West African trip. You don't want to hear about the traveler's fun; what keeps you reading is the traveler's misery, outrage, and near-death experience. Either that or a well-phrased dismissal, as when the English traveler Peter Fleming took a close look at São Paulo and wrote, "São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away."

"Looking for Trouble" might be the subtitle of the most readable, most memorable travel books. When Redmond O'Hanlon published In Trouble Again, my hand leaped to the shelf. No Mercy promised more horror, and another delightful read. So I begin with him.

Making a Deal with the Chief of Boha

In his right hand [the Chief] gripped a spear against the inside of his right thigh, its end on the ground and its winged blade high above his head. His left hand lay on his left thigh, and from his right shoulder there hung a large liana-twine bag full, I presumed, of the royal fetishes…

Twelve spearmen stood at intervals in a circle before him, enclosing a line of three chairs; an old man in a brown shirt, torn gray trousers and red plastic sandals, standing on the Chief's left, tilted his spear towards us and then at the waiting seats…

The Chief inclined his head to his left: the old man, his porte-parole, his word carrier, bent down until his right ear was close to the royal lips; the Chief spoke softly. The audience over, the old man straightened his back, held his spear upright, strode into the center of the circle, filled his lungs, and sang out a speech in Bomitaba…

At the end of the pronouncement there were shouts from some of the spear-men and from other warriors around the square…

"The white man will pay 75,000 francs to the Chief of Boha," [the old man] shouted in French, "and 20,000 francs to the Vice-President of the People's Committee. Then if the Government come with soldiers to take our Chief to prison in Epena they must take their Vice-President away too. The white man will keep faith with our Customary Rights."

"It's far too much!" I said.

The old man nodded. The warrior to the right and behind me lowered his spear and pricked me gently between the shoulder-blades.

"It's a bargain!" I said.

— Redmond O'Hanlon, No Mercy (1997)

Fanny Trollope on American Hypocrisy

Had I, during my residence in the United States, observed any single feature in their national character that could justify their eternal boasts of liberality and the love of freedom, I might have respected them, however much my taste might have been offended by what was peculiar in their manners or customs. But it is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice… You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound to protect by the most solemn treaties.

— The Domestic Manners of Americans (1832)

Elias Canetti: Unfathomable Prices in Marrakesh

In the souks, however, the price that is named first is an unfathomable riddle. No one knows in advance what it will be, not even the merchant, because in any case there are many prices. Each one relates to a different situation, a different customer, a different time of day, a different day of the week. There are prices for single objects and prices for two or more together. There are prices for foreigners visiting the city for a day and prices for foreigners who have been here for three weeks. There are prices for the poor and prices for the rich, those for the poor of course being the highest. One is tempted to think that there are more kinds of prices than there are kinds of people in the world.

— The Voices of Marrakesh, translated by J. A. Underwood (1978)

Edward Lear Being Pestered in Albania

No sooner had I settled to draw… than forth came the populace of Elbassan; one by one and two by two to a mighty host they grew, and there were soon from eighty to a hundred spectators collected, with earnest curiosity in every look; and when I had sketched such of the principal buildings as they could recognize a universal shout of "Shaitan!" [Satan] burst from the crowd; and strange to relate, the greater part of the mob put their fingers into their mouths and whistled furiously, after the manner of butcher boys in England. Whether this was a sort of spell against my magic I do not know… One of those tiresome Dervishes — in whom, with their green turbans, Elbassan is rich — soon came up, and yelled, "Shaitan scroo! — Shaitan!" [The Devil draws! The Devil!] in my ears with all his force; seizing my book also, with an awful frown shutting it, and pointing to the sky, as intimating that Heaven would not allow such impiety.

— Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania (1851)

André Gide: Thoroughly Bored in Bosoum

The absence of individuality, of individualization — the impossibility of differentiating — which depressed me so much at the beginning of my journey, is what I suffer from too much of the landscape. (I experienced this sensation as early as Matadi on seeing the population of children all alike, all equally agreeable, etc…. and again on seeing the huts of the first villages, all alike, all containing droves of human cattle with the same looks, tastes, customs, possibilities, etc….) Bosoum is a place that looks over a wide stretch of country, and as I stand here on a kind of terrace, made of red ochre-colored laterite, gazing on the marvelous quality of the light and admiring the vast undulations of the ground, I ask myself what there is to attract me to any one point rather than to any other. Everything is uniform; there can be no possible predilection for any particular site. I stayed the whole day yesterday without the least desire to stir. From one end of the horizon to the other, wherever my eye settles, there is not a single point to which I wish to go.

— Travels in the Congo (1929)

Rimbaud Having a Bad Day in Harar, Abyssinia

I still get very bored. In fact, I've never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It's a wretched life anyway, don't you think — no family, no intellectual activity, lost among negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly? Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations caused by their idleness, treachery and stupidity!

And there's something even sadder than that — it's the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company.

— letter to his mother, 1886, in Geoffrey Wall, Rimbaud

V. S. Naipaul Disgusted by India

The point that one feels inescapable is the fact of India's poverty; and how deep is one's contempt for those Indians who, finding no difficulty in accepting one standard in India and another outside it, fail to realize this, and are failing to work night and day for the removal of this dreadful insult and humiliation… I wonder, wonder if the shitting habits of Indians are not the key to all their attitudes. I wonder if the country will not be spiritually and morally regenerated if people were only made to adopt the standards of other nations in the business of shitting…

So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who tolerate everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious pettiness which permeates that vast country; goodbye to people who, though consulting astrologers, have no sense of their destiny as men…It is an unbelievable, frightening, sad country. Probably it all has to change. Not only must caste go, but all those sloppy Indian garments; all those saris and lungis; all that squatting on the floor, to eat, to write, to serve in a shop, to piss.

— letter to Moni Malhoutra, 1963, in Patrick French,

The World Is What It Is

Umberto Eco, Hyperbolic in San Luis Obispo

The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. To convey its external appearance, divided into a series of constructions, which you reach by way of a filling station carved from Dolomitic rock, or through the restaurant, the bar, and the cafeteria, we can only venture some analogies. Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overdose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry. Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms. They are an immense underground cavern, something like Altamira and Luray, with Byzantine columns supporting plaster baroque cherubs. The basins are big imitation-mother-of-pearl shells, the urinal is a fireplace carved from rock, but when the jet of urine (sorry, but I have to explain) touches the bottom, water comes down from the wall of the hood, in a flushing cascade something like the Caves of the Planet Mongo.

— Travels in Hyperreality (1995)

Lord Byron on the Black Sea (the Euxine)

There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.

— Byron, Don Juan (1818–24)