Think carefully about your kit. Binoculars can be handy, but they suggest to authorities that you might be up to no good. Don't wear military khaki, designer camo, or anything bright that prevents your blending in. And forget weapons. You are unlikely to shoot your way out of trouble, especially the trouble you face when armed dudes find you are packing.
On arriving in any distant place, the first thing you should do is learn the quickest way out — times and frequency of buses, trains, or planes. You have to know in advance how to leave.
Travel of Wisdom claude LÉVI-STRAUSS
Lévi-Strauss memorably opened his travel book, Tristes Tropiques, with the line "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions." (An early translation of the book, with a variation of this opening, is A World on the Wane.) He was trained as a philosopher but was one of the great theorists of anthropology and linguistics, an explainer of mythologies, and a describer of structuralism. He began his travels in Brazil, made journeys in India and Pakistan, and taught in the United States. He was a member of the Académie Française and lived to over a hundred (he died in 2009). The following are excerpts from Tristes Tropiques.
***
Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is in itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.
***
There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit.
***
Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable
UNWELCOMING PLACES ARE A GIFT TO THE traveling writer. They have always been so, an early example being Ibn Battuta's arrival in Tunis in 1325, at the beginning of his global wandering. He "wept bitterly" because he met with utter indifference: "not a soul greeted me and no one there was known to me." The winter darkness and killing cold of Cherry-Garrard's Antarctica; the cannibals, disease, and general hostility in Stanley's Congo; the devout Muslims tormenting Charles Doughty with howls of "Nasrani!" ("Christian!") in Arabia Deserta — these inhospitable situations gave us great books. Heartwarming interludes, lovable locals, and delicious meals have informed the most tedious travel accounts — the blissful vacation is desirable but not a fit subject for a book.
The early travelers in Africa always kept in mind that the cannibal was a better subject than the missionary. Even the high-minded Mary Kingsley knew that, and spent much more time writing about (and exaggerating) the anthropophagous Fon people in Gabon than the pleasures of her botanizing of the jungle, which (so she said) was the whole point of her West African trip. You don't want to hear about the traveler's fun; what keeps you reading is the traveler's misery, outrage, and near-death experience. Either that or a well-phrased dismissal, as when the English traveler Peter Fleming took a close look at São Paulo and wrote, "São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away."
"Looking for Trouble" might be the subtitle of the most readable, most memorable travel books. When Redmond O'Hanlon published In Trouble Again, my hand leaped to the shelf. No Mercy promised more horror, and another delightful read. So I begin with him.
Making a Deal with the Chief of Boha
In his right hand [the Chief] gripped a spear against the inside of his right thigh, its end on the ground and its winged blade high above his head. His left hand lay on his left thigh, and from his right shoulder there hung a large liana-twine bag full, I presumed, of the royal fetishes…
Twelve spearmen stood at intervals in a circle before him, enclosing a line of three chairs; an old man in a brown shirt, torn gray trousers and red plastic sandals, standing on the Chief's left, tilted his spear towards us and then at the waiting seats…
The Chief inclined his head to his left: the old man, his porte-parole, his word carrier, bent down until his right ear was close to the royal lips; the Chief spoke softly. The audience over, the old man straightened his back, held his spear upright, strode into the center of the circle, filled his lungs, and sang out a speech in Bomitaba…
At the end of the pronouncement there were shouts from some of the spear-men and from other warriors around the square…
"The white man will pay 75,000 francs to the Chief of Boha," [the old man] shouted in French, "and 20,000 francs to the Vice-President of the People's Committee. Then if the Government come with soldiers to take our Chief to prison in Epena they must take their Vice-President away too. The white man will keep faith with our Customary Rights."
"It's far too much!" I said.
The old man nodded. The warrior to the right and behind me lowered his spear and pricked me gently between the shoulder-blades.
"It's a bargain!" I said.
— Redmond O'Hanlon, No Mercy (1997)
Fanny Trollope on American Hypocrisy
Had I, during my residence in the United States, observed any single feature in their national character that could justify their eternal boasts of liberality and the love of freedom, I might have respected them, however much my taste might have been offended by what was peculiar in their manners or customs. But it is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and practice… You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound to protect by the most solemn treaties.
— The Domestic Manners of Americans (1832)
Elias Canetti: Unfathomable Prices in Marrakesh
In the souks, however, the price that is named first is an unfathomable riddle. No one knows in advance what it will be, not even the merchant, because in any case there are many prices. Each one relates to a different situation, a different customer, a different time of day, a different day of the week. There are prices for single objects and prices for two or more together. There are prices for foreigners visiting the city for a day and prices for foreigners who have been here for three weeks. There are prices for the poor and prices for the rich, those for the poor of course being the highest. One is tempted to think that there are more kinds of prices than there are kinds of people in the world.
— The Voices of Marrakesh, translated by J. A. Underwood (1978)
Edward Lear Being Pestered in Albania
No sooner had I settled to draw… than forth came the populace of Elbassan; one by one and two by two to a mighty host they grew, and there were soon from eighty to a hundred spectators collected, with earnest curiosity in every look; and when I had sketched such of the principal buildings as they could recognize a universal shout of "Shaitan!" [Satan] burst from the crowd; and strange to relate, the greater part of the mob put their fingers into their mouths and whistled furiously, after the manner of butcher boys in England. Whether this was a sort of spell against my magic I do not know… One of those tiresome Dervishes — in whom, with their green turbans, Elbassan is rich — soon came up, and yelled, "Shaitan scroo! — Shaitan!" [The Devil draws! The Devil!] in my ears with all his force; seizing my book also, with an awful frown shutting it, and pointing to the sky, as intimating that Heaven would not allow such impiety.