The Tao of Travel

by Paul Theroux

  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 behaviour 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 (1846)

  Some years later, he also travelled to Europe and the Holy Land. He wrote a mystical poem about the experience, as well as a diary in which he noted the behaviour 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, “Travelling, 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 travellers 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 traveller 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 whisky. They even have trinkets to hand out to natives — but the natives prefer gifts of money or jolts of whisky to trinkets. The trip is eventful: the travellers 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: Travelling 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 travelled 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 coloured 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 thu
nder outer 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 outer 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 travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

  — Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, Life of Johnson

  He talked with an uncommon animation of travelling 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 lustre 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

  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 traveller; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath, and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, 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

  7

  The Things That They Carried

  TRAVEL MAGAZINES ALWAYS MAKE A POINT of telling you the essential thing to carry on your trip, and it used to be a Swiss Army knife — that is, until air travellers were screened, x-rayed, patted down, and presented with a list of forbidden items. Now it is likely to be a cell phone, in my view one of the great impediments to a travel experience. I always take a small shortwave radio, to give me the news and weather of the place I’m in and to keep up with world events. The writer and traveller Pico Iyer says he never travels without a book to read; I am of the same mind. ¶ William Burroughs, a lifetime addict and also a traveller, never went anywhere without a drug of some kind, usually heroin. Kit Moresby, in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, carried evening gowns in her bag in the Sahara Desert. Bowles told me once that he travelled to India and South America in the old style, “with trunks, always with trunks”. Bruce Chatwin, a self-described minimalist in travel, said that all he needed was his Mont Blanc fountain pen and his personal bag of muesli. But his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, claimed Chatwin always took much more. One of his friends, seeing Chatwin’s typewriter and pyjamas and book bags on an Indian train, said, “It was like travelling with Garbo.”

  Edward Lear in Albania, 1848: “some rice, curry powder, and cayenne”

  Previously to starting a certain supply of cooking utensils, tin plates, knives and forks, a basin etc., must absolutely be purchased, the stronger and plainer the better, for you go into lands where pots and pans are unknown, and all culinary processes are to be performed in strange localities, innocent of artificial means. A light mattress, some sheets and blankets, and a good supply of capotes and plaids should not be neglected; two or three books; some rice, curry powder, and cayenne; a world of drawing materials — if you be a hard sketcher; as little dress as possible, though you must have two sets of outer clothing — one for visiting consuls, pashas and dignitaries, the other for rough, everyday work; some quinine made into pills (rather leave all behind than this); a Boyourdi, or general order of introduction to governors or pashas; and your Teskere, or provincial passport for yourself and guide. All these are absolutely indispensable, and beyond these, the less you augment your impedimenta by luxuries the better.

  — Edward Lear in the Levant, edited by Susan Hyman (1988)

  Sir Richard Burton Heads for Mecca in Disguise: “certain necessaries for the way”

  IN ADDITION TO his disguise as “Mirza Abdullah”, he had “a Miswak, or tooth-stick” — a twig for cleaning his teeth; “a bit of soap and a comb, wooden, for bone and tortoiseshell are not, religiously speaking, correct”. A change of clothing, a goat-skin water-bag, a “coarse Persian rug — which besides being couch, acted as chair, table and oratory”, a pillow, a blanket, a large, bright yellow umbrella (“suggesting the idea of an overgrown marigold”), a “Housewife” (needles, thread, and buttons in a pouch), a dagger, a brass inkstand and penholder, “and a mighty rosary, which on occasion might have been converted into a weapon of defence”. (Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, 1855–56)

  Paul Du Chaillu in Equator
ial Africa: “white beads … small looking-glasses … and my guns”

  I foresaw that, from the dread all the coast natives have of the cannibal tribes, I should have difficulty in carrying all my luggage. I therefore determined not to encumber myself with supplies of provisions or anything that could be spared. My outfit consisted only of the following articles: — A chest containing 100 fathoms of prints [cloth], 19 pounds of white beads, a quantity of small looking-glasses, fire-steels and flints, a quantity of leaf tobacco. In addition to which came my greatest dependence, viz, 80 pounds of shot and bullets, 20 pounds of powder, and my guns.

  — Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861)

  C. M. Doughty and Chaucer in Arabia Deserta

  DOUGHTY CARRIED IN his camel’s saddle bags a seventeenth-century edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and he wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta under the direct influence of Chaucer’s style.

  Henry Miller on Coast-to-Coast Travel: A Monkey Wrench