by Paul Theroux
Traveling in a Time of Trouble
A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness.—GTES
Travel and Love
If one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier.—GTES
Smell a Country to Understand It
[Kipling’s] gift is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it).
—T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943)
Travel as a Love Affair
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with ... All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
—Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel,” Salon (2000)
Tourism and Sightseeing
The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.
—V. S. Pritchett, The Spanish Temper (1954)
He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to the another.
—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, I thought. Travelers don’t know where they’re going.—HIO
In Mumbai: A tourist would have been in a temple or a museum. I had been in a slum.—GTES
Sightseeing is an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity.—GRB
Sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but ... it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.—GRB
Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel ... It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.—SWS
Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.—TEE
Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest.—OPE
Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation’s pleasures.—KBS
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living—indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.—GTES
It is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor.—OPE
Tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable.—HIO
After a man has made a large amount of money he becomes a bad listener and an impatient tourist.—POH
She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (2009)
Departures
There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.—OPE
Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather.—GTES
Frontiers
A mushroom-and-dunghill relationship exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries.—OPE
In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss: like a small policeman directing traffic.—POH
A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.—OPE
Looking across the river, I realized I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there—music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people do things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope, the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.—OPE
A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country’s central reality.—DSS
Air Travel
There is not much to say about airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright—from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Timeis brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, “What I’d really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.”—OPE
Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor.—OPE
Airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked.—GTES
Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist’s, even to the chairs.—FAF
A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—GRB
The Return Journey
In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. And it is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.—RIR
Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the stra
nge, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. Thatwas just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.—DSS
One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed.—HIO
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About the Author
Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.