The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. "This is what I saw"—news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. "They're just like us!" or "They're not like us at all!" The traveler's tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience. It's how the first novel in English got written. Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoeon the actual experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, though he enlarged the story, turning Selkirk's four and a half years on a remote Pacific Island into twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island, adding Friday, the cannibals, and tropical exotica.
The storyteller's intention is always to hold the listener with a glittering eye and riveting tale. I think of the travel writer as idealized in the lines of the ghost of Hamlet's father at the beginning of the play:
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end
But most are anecdotal, amusing, instructional, farcical, boastful, mock-heroic, occasionally hair-raising, warnings to the curious, or else they ring bells like mad and seem familiar. At their best, they are examples of what is most human in travel.
In the course of my wandering life, travel has changed, not only in speed and efficiency, but because of the altered circumstances of the world—much of it connected and known. This conceit of Internet-inspired omniscience has produced the arrogant delusion that the physical effort of travel is superfluous. Yet there are many parts of the world that are little known and worth visiting, and there was a time in my traveling when some parts of the earth offered any traveler the Columbus or Crusoe thrill of discovery.
As an adult traveling alone in remote and cut-off places, I learned a great deal about the world and myself: the strangeness, the joy, the liberation and truth of travel, the way loneliness—such a trial at home—is the condition of a traveler. But in travel, as Philip Larkin says in his poem "The Importance of Elsewhere," strangeness makes sense.
Travel in dreams, for Freud, symbolized death. That the journey—an essay into the unknown—can be risky, even fatal, was a natural conclusion for Freud to reach, since he suffered from self-diagnosed Reiseangst, travel anxiety. He was so fearful of missing a train that he appeared at railway stations two hours ahead of time, and when the train appeared at the platform he usually panicked. He wrote in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,"Dying is replaced in dreams by departure, by a train journey."
This has not been my experience; I associate my happiest traveling days with sitting on trains. Some travel is more of a nuisance than a hardship, but travel is always a mental challenge, and even at its most difficult, travel can be an enlightenment.
The joy of travel, and reading about it, is the theme of this collection—and perhaps the misery too; but even remembered misery can produce lyrical nostalgia. As I was rereading some of the books quoted here I realized how dated they were, and how important as historical documents—the dramas as well as the romance of an earlier time. Yet a lot of the old-fangledness of travel ended very recently.
This book of insights, a distillation of travelers' visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others', is based on many decades of my reading travel books and traveling the earth. It is also intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical. In the spirit of Buddha's dictum "You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself," I hope that this collection shows, in its approaches to travel, ways of living and thinking too.
Abbreviations of Book Titles
GRB
The Great Railway Bazaar
OPE
The Old Patagonian Express
KBS
The Kingdom by the Sea
SWS
Sunrise with Seamonsters
RIR
Riding the Iron Rooster
TEE
To the Ends of the Earth
HIO
The Happy Isles of Oceania
POH
The Pillars of Hercules
FAF
Fresh Air Fiend
DSS
Dark Star Safari
GTES
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
WE
World's End
1. Travel in Brief
The Necessity to Move
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
—D. H. Lawrence,
Sea and Sardinia
(1921)
Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is "Out-sickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.
—Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen,
Hans Christian Andersen
(2005)
The Road Is Life
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
—Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
(1958)
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
—James Baldwin,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953)
You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back.—
DSS
A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.—
POH
Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.—
FAF
The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still.—
SWS
It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.—
GTES
Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.—