But as this book is intended for the Public, and is therefore necessarily truthful, I must admit that for my own party I traveled single-mindedly for fun.
— The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)
GERALD BRENAN: "THE GIRL WITH THE UNFORGETTABLE FACE"
All I have aimed at is to entertain a few armchair travelers, who may enjoy whiling away a rainy night in reading of how people live in remote mountain villages in the serene climate of the South Mediterranean. One flies over these villages in the air, one sees their strange names on the map, one may even, if one leaves the main road, bump past them in a car, but their life remains as mysterious as that of the girl with the unforgettable face one caught sight of for a moment through the window of a railway carriage. Here is a description of one of those villages.
— South from Granada (1957)
V. S. PRITCHETT: "STAMPING OUT HIS ANXIETIES WITH HIS HEAVY BOOTS"
How did writers and painters manage to live and keep their independence?…The thing to do was to write an original book of travel… I decided to take ship for Lisbon for economy's sake and walk from Badajoz to Vigo, through a part of Spain that was little known and, in patches, was notorious for poverty…
I have described it all in Marching Spain—note the deliberately ungrammatical, protesting, affected title. Though I have a tenderness for the book and think some pages are rather good, I am glad it has been out of print for forty years… It has a touching but shocking first chapter of exhibitionist prose; but despite the baroque writing of the rest, the mistakes of fact, and the declamations, it is original and has vigor. It is the work of a young man worried almost to illness by lack of money and by the future for a lot of the time. As he tramped along he was doing his accounts and stamping out his anxieties with his heavy boots.
— Midnight Oil (1970)
PAUL BOWLES: "THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WRITER AND PLACE"
What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home.
The subject matter of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded. It takes a writer with a gift for describing a situation to do this well, which is perhaps the reason why so many of the travel books that remain in the memory have been produced by writers expert at the fashioning of novels. One remembers Evelyn Waugh's indignation in Ethiopia, Graham Greene deadpanning through West Africa, Aldous Huxley letting Mexico get him down, Gide discovering his social conscience in the Congo, long after other equally accurate travel accounts have blurred and vanished. Given the novelistic skill of these particular writers it is perhaps perverse of me to prefer their few travel pieces to their novels, but I do.
— "The Challenge to Identity" (1958), published in Travels (2010)
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 Walclass="underline" "It was constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), long after Marco Polo's day."