The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  All travelers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There was no hell like a stranger’s Sunday.—WE

  Anonymity in Travel

  On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me feel invisible. Yet to be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication.—KBS

  Being invisible—the usual condition of the older traveler, is much more useful than being obvious.—GTES

  The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for someone with a train to catch. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my mustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn.—OPE

  Travelers’ Conceits

  One traveler’s conceit is that he is heading into the unknown. The best travel is a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly what would be the point in going there?—DSS

  Another traveler’s conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway round the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere—the truer shout is not “Never again,” but “Again and again.”—GTES

  Yet another traveler’s conceit is that no one will see what he has seen; his trip displaces the landscape, and his version of events is all that matters. He is certainly kidding himself in this, but if he didn’t kid himself a little he would never go anywhere.—KBS

  Strangers in Travel

  Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move toward an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, improvising the trip.—GTES

  Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.—GTES

  Cities and Travel

  One of the pitfalls of long journeys is the tendency of the traveler to miniaturize a big city—not out of malice or frivolity, but for his or her own peace of mind.—RIR

  My ideal of travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cities are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent.—FAF

  Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look of finality breathing You’ve arrived to the traveler.—POH

  “Athens is a four-hour city,” one man said, meaning that was all the time you needed to see it in its entirety. That hourly rate seemed to me a helpful index for judging cities.—POH

  Adventure

  Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that people you trust have warned you against.—FAF

  For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have become trophies.—FAF

  Travel and Optimism

  It was the poor person’s way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action.—KBS

  Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere.—FAF

  Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.—GTES

  Travel and Tradition

  Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.—POH

  All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them.—POH

  Observing local rituals while traveling is important, not for its dubious sanctity, but because the set of gestures in rituals reveals the inner state of the people involved and their subtle protocol.—GTES

  Travel and Politics

  Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble.—POH

  In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.—DSS

  Sightseeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they’ve all been seen, it’s time to go. The non-sightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency, and has to be deported.—RIR

  Travel and Porno

  It seemed incontestable to me that a country’s pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth, but it contained many clues and even more warnings, especially of its men.—POH

  Landscape in Travel

  A landscape looks different when you know the names of things, and conversely, can look exceedingly inhospitable and alien when it seems nameless.—FAF

  It is rare to find silence anywhere in a natural landscape. There is always the wind at least. The rustle of trees and grass, thedrone of insects, the squawk of birds, the whistle of bats. By the sea, silence—true silence—is almost unknown. But on my last day here in Palau’s Rock Islands, there was not even the lap of water. The air was motionless. I could hear no insects, nor any birds. The fruit bats flew high, beating their wings in absolute quiet. It seemed simple and wonderful: the world as an enormous room.—FAF

  Africa, seemingly incomplete and so empty, is a place for travelers to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength—binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, making long journeys in expensive Land Rovers, recreating stereotypes, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction. That’s why many travelers in Africa are determined to see it not as fifty-three countries but rather as a single troubled landscape.—DSS

  The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange landscape.—SWS

  Travel as a Waste of Time

  Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841)

  Now my mind is made up. The whole journey is a trap. Travel does not broaden you so much as make you sophisticated, “up-to-date,” taken in by the superficial with that really stupid look of a fellow serving on a beauty prize jury.

  The look of a go-ge
tter also. Worth no more. You can just as easily find your truth staring for forty-eight hours at some old tapestry.

  —Henri Michaux, Ecuador (1970)

  Travel, indeed, struck him as a being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience ... No doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands.

  —Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in Against Nature by J.-K. Huysmans (1884), translated by Robert Baldick (1959)

  You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.—GTES

  The Traveler as a Voyeur

  The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

  But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, “An aimless joy is a pure joy”—GTES

  Travel as Intrusion

  It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [Heart of Darkness], and one other ... are all the spoil I brought out from the center of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.

  —Joseph Conrad, Author’s Note, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether (1902)

  Travel as Transformation

  Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

  —Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)

  There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.

  —John Steinbeck, letter, June 1960, in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975)

  The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil. The person who edits and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least I am not the person I was before. The vagabonding through our “America” has changed me more than I thought.

  —Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Notas de Viaje (The Motorcycle Diaries), in Jon Lee Anderson, Che (2010)

  The Traveler Must Be Worthy

  The traveler must be himself, in men’s eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God’s heaven, and were it without a religion: he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt; it is enough and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the end of the world.

  —C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

  Traveling Makes One Modest

  To go back to Kuchuk [a courtesan and dancer in Esna]. You and I are thinking of her, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honors of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others. Ah! Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

  —Gustave Flaubert, in Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

  Travel Writing

  Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.

  —V. S. Pritchett, Complete Essays (1991)

  Travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography ... The anonymous hotel room in a strange city drives one into the confessional mode.—GRB

  The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows.—GRB

  When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.—TEE

  Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different fromwriting a novel: fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act—like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence.—TEE

  On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler’s tale.—RIR

  One of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing. There has never been a Melville on the moon, or even an Updike.—FAF

  Lawrence’s journeys by post-bus or cold late train or on foot are in that great laborious tradition which produced genuine travel books—the eye slowly taking it all in, the aching feet imposing the leisure to observe the common people in the smoky inn kitchen.

  —Anthony Burgess, Introduction, Lawrence and Italy (1972)

  [Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi] has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the “soul” of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers.

  —George Orwell, in the weekly Tribune, December 4, 1942, in Orwell: Complete Works (1968)

  The Speed of Travel

  I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot.

  —Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map (2009)

  Time Travel

  The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life.—GTES

  Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present—but the present contains the future.—KBS

  Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past.—HIO

  A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward.—GTES