The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

26. Five Travel Epiphanies

NOW AND THEN IN TRAVEL, SOMETHING UNexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler. Burton traveled to Mecca in disguise, considering it a lark, but when at last he approached the Kaaba this skeptic was profoundly moved. It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected. The discovery of an unanticipated pleasure can be life-changing. ¶ Here are five epiphanies that I have experienced in travel, unforgettable to me, and for that reason they have helped to guide me.

One

I WAS IN Palermo and had spent the last of my money on a ticket to New York aboard the Queen Frederica. This was in September 1963; I was going into the Peace Corps, training for a post in Africa. The farewell party my Italian friends gave me on the night of departure went on so long that when we got to the port, a Sicilian band was playing "Anchors Aweigh" and the Queen Frederica had just left the quayside. In that moment I lost all my vitality.

My friends bought me an air ticket to Naples so that I could catch up to the ship there the next day. Just before I boarded the plane, an airline official said I had not paid my departure tax. I told him I had no money. A man behind me in a brown suit and brown Borsalino said, "Here. You need some money?" and handed me twenty dollars.

That solved the problem. I said, "I'd like to pay you back."

The man shrugged. He said, "I'll probably see you again. The world's a small place."

Two

FOR THREE DAYS in August 1970 I had been on a small cargo vessel, the MV Keningau, which sailed from Singapore to North Borneo. I was going there to climb Mount Kinabalu. While aboard, I read and played cards, always the same game, with a Malay planter and a Eurasian woman who was traveling with her two children. The ship had an open steerage deck, where about a hundred passengers slept in hammocks.

It was the monsoon season. I cursed the rain, the heat, the ridiculous card games. One day the Malayan said, "The wife of one of my men had a baby last night." He explained that the rubber tappers were in steerage and that some had wives.

I said I wanted to see the baby. He took me below, and seeing that newborn, and the mother and father so radiant with pride, transformed the trip. Because the baby had been born on the ship, everything was changed for me and had a different meaning: the rain, the heat, the other people, even the card games and the book I was reading.

Three

THE COAST OF Wales around St. David's Head has very swift currents and sudden fogs. Four of us were paddling sea kayaks out to Ramsay Island. On our return to shore we found ourselves in fog so dense we could not see land. We were spun around by eddies and whirlpools.

"Where's north?" I asked the man who had the compass.

"Over there," he said, tapping it. Then he smacked it and said, "There," and hit it harder and said, "I don't know, this thing's broken."

Darkness was falling, the April day was cold, we were tired, and we could not see anything except the black deeps of St. George's Channel.

"Listen," someone said. "I hear Horse Rock." The current rushing against Horse Rock was a distinct sound. But he was wrong — it was the wind.

We kept together. Fear slowed our movements, and I felt sure that we had no hope of getting back that night — or ever. The cold and my fatigue were like premonitions of death. We went on paddling. A long time passed. We searched; no one spoke. This is what dying is like, I thought.

I strained my eyes to see and had a vision, a glimpse of cloud high up that was like a headland. When I looked harder, willing it to be land, it solidified to a great dark rock. I yelped, and we made for shore as though reborn.

Four

WE WERE DRIVING in western Kenya under the high African sky, my wife beside me, our two boys in the back seat. It was not far from here that I had met this pretty English woman and married her. Our elder son had been born in Kampala, the younger one in Singapore. We were still nomads, driving toward Eldoret. Years before, as a soon-to-be-married couple, we had spent a night there.

The boys were idly quarreling and fooling, laughing, distracting me. My wife was saying, "Are you sure this is the right road?" She had been traveling alone for three months in southern Africa. We were in an old rental car. Cattle dotted the hills, sheltering under the thorn trees. We were just a family on a trip, far away.

But we were traveling toward Eldoret, into the past and deeper into Africa, into the future. We were together, the sun slanting into our eyes, everything on earth was green, and I thought: I never want this trip to end.

Five

JUST BEFORE INDEPENDENCE Day in 1964, when Nyasaland became Malawi, the minister of education, Masauko Chipembere, planted a tree at the school where I was teaching in the south of the country. Soon after this, he conspired to depose the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. But Chipembere himself was driven out.

Time passed, and when I heard that Chipembere had died in Los Angeles ("in exile," as a CIA pensioner), I thought of the little tree he had shoveled into the ground. Twenty-five years after I left the school, I traveled back to Malawi. Two things struck me about the country: most of the trees had been cut down — for fuel — and no one rode a bicycle anymore. Most buildings were decrepit too. Dr. Banda was still in power.

It took me a week to travel to my old school. It was larger now but ruinous, with broken windows and splintered desks. The students seemed unpleasant. The headmaster was rude to me. The library had no books. The tree was big and green, almost forty feet high.