IN HIS BIOGRAPHY of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, Patrick French writes, "Before leaving England for Indonesia, Vidia put together a 'traveling list.' In its care and restraint, in its honing, it reflected the man and the writer." And it was also a memo to his wife, Pat, to pack his bags so that he would be presentable when he met his mistress, Margaret, who was flying from Buenos Aires to Djakarta to meet him. A partial list: "Suits & trousers and jackets: Travel out in Simpson's grey; Pack — Simpson's beige lightweight; Trousers: M & S cotton, BHS cotton, Oscar Jacobson charcoal lightweight worsted; Underclothes: Pants 4 prs, Socks 4 prs, Pyjamas 1 pr, T-shirts, 2, Sleeveless vests 2. Shirts: 4 cotton (dress); M&S leisure 2, Smedley shirts 2, Smedley roll-neck 3. Shorts: Bathing trunks, Exercise pants, trainers 1 pr perhaps to be worn on journey…"
Freya Stark in Luristan: "a crumpled gown and a powder-puff"
My saddle-bags disclosed in their depths, a crumpled gown and a powder-puff, of which I made the best use I could, and finally emerged to meet my host more or less like a lady.
— The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)
Tapa Snim: A Buddhist Monk's Possessions
When I came back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a bag.
"Do you have another bag?" I asked, because the smallness of this one seemed an improbable size for a long-distance traveler.
"No. These are all my possessions."
Everything, not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the bag was smaller than a supermarket shopping bag.
"May I ask you what's inside?"
Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.
"My bowl, very important," he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.
In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.
In a small plastic box: a spool of gray thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two-inch mirror, a tube of cream to prevent foot fungus, ChapStick, nasal spray, and razor blades.
"Also very important," he said, showing me the razor blades. "I shave my head every fifteen days."
Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a kasaya, a change of clothes. In a document pouch, he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks ("to introduce myself") and a large certificate in Chinese characters he called his bikkhu certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork.
And a Sharp electronic dictionary that allowed him to translate from many languages, and a string of beads—108 beads, the spiritual number.
As I was writing down the list, he said, "And this" — his straw hat—"and this" — his fan.
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing."
"What about money?"
"That's my secret."
And then carefully he placed it on the opened cloth and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.
— PT, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
Joe Polis, Thoreau's Abenaki Guide: "no change of clothing"
He wore a cotton shirt, originally white, a greenish flannel one over it, but no waistcoat, flannel drawers, a strong linen or duck pants, which had also been white, blue woolen stockings, cowhide boots, and a Kossuth hat. He carried no change of clothing, but putting on a stout thick jacket, which he laid aside in the canoe, and seizing a full-sized axe, his gun and ammunition, and a blanket, which would do for a sail or knapsack if wanted, and strapping on his belt, which contained a large sheath-knife, he walked off at once, ready to be gone all summer.
— The Maine Woods (1864)
William Least Heat-Moon: Portable Toilet
FOR HIS 13,000-MILE Blue Highways road trip in his van called Ghost Dancing, Heat-Moon carried a sleeping bag and blanket, a Coleman cooker, a plastic basin and bucket, a portable toilet, a cookstove, utensils, a tool kit, writing materials, a camera, and a "U.S. Navy sea bag of clothes."
William Burroughs: Snakebite Serum and a Hammock
I took a few days to assemble my gear and dig the capital. For a jungle trip you need medicines: snake bite serum, penicillin, enterovio-formo and aralen are essentials. A hammock, a blanket and a rubber bag known as a tula to carry your gear in.
— The Yage Letters (1963)
Pico Iyer: A Book
The most important thing always to have with me in my case is a book: no companion is likely to be richer, stranger, more alive and more eager to be intimate. Pens and notebooks, of course. Pieces of America to give away. A Lonely Planet guide to get angry with and bitterly repudiate. More novels and biographies for eight-hour waits.
I think I spend more time thinking about what I don't want to take with me: assumptions, iPods, cameras, plans, friends (in most cases), laptops, headphones, suntan lotion, résumés, expectations.
— in conversation with PT
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
"MEN WHO GO LOOKING FOR THE SOURCE of a river are merely looking for the source of something missing in themselves, and never finding it," Sir Richard Burton wrote, shrewdly summing up the mental state of the explorer. The great travelers are all sorts, of course. A large number have been depressives or bipolar types capable of serious gloom: Livingstone sulked in his tent for days, Vancouver locked himself in his cabin, Speke shot himself, Scott sometimes wept, Nansen was suicidal and so was Meriwether Lewis. Most suffered from gout. But at their best they are curious, contented, patient, courageous, and paragons of self-sufficiency. Their passion is visiting the unknown.
In the pathology of travel, many journeyers who seem in pursuit of a goal are driven by demons, attempting to flee, often unsuccessfully, some condition of the mind. Burton also said, "Travelers, like poets, are mostly an angry race."
Tobias Smollett is one of the more uproarious travelers, full of opinions and generalizations. I often think that the ill or afflicted traveler sometimes has an advantage, which is summed up by a character speaking in Smollett's comic novel The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker: "People of experience and infirmity, my dear Letty, see with very different eyes from those that such as you and I make use of."
Tobias Smollett: Deep unhappiness, discontent, the epitome of the unhappy traveler. He traveled to the Continent not long after his young daughter died, and his grief shows in his rage. He also suffered from an intestinal disorder, which contributed to his death at the age of fifty.
There is one in every boat train that leaves Victoria, in every liner that leaves New York, in every bar of every hotel all over the world: the unhappy traveler. He is traveling not for pleasure but for pain, not to broaden the mind but, if possible, to narrow it; to release the buried terrors and hatreds of a lifetime; or, if these have already had a good airing at home, to open up colonies of rage abroad. We listen to these martyrs, quarrelling with hotel keepers, insulting cooks, torturing waiters and porters, the scourges of the reserved seat and viragos of the sleeping car. And when they return from their mortifications it is to insult the people and the places they have visited, to fight the battle over the bill or the central heating, again and again, with the zest so sore that we conclude that travel for them is a continuation of domestic misery by other means…