The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

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

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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

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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