The Tao of Travel

The most damaging criticism of the Spanish taste for bullfighting is rather different: the bullfight suffers from the monotony of sacrifices, and it is one more example of the peculiar addiction to the repetitive and the monotonous in the Spanish nature. Many foreigners who have known Spain well have noted this taste for monotony. The drama of the bullfight lies within the drama of a foregone conclusion ... The fate of the bull is certain.

In another place, at Guadix in southern Spain, he marvels at a panorama of rock and mountain:

It is a land for the connoisseur of landscape, for in no other European country is there such variety and originality. Here Nature has had vast Space, stupendous means, and no restraint of fancy. One might pass a lifetime gazing at the architecture of rock and its strange coloring, especially the coloring of iron, blue steel, violet and ochreous ores, metallic purples, and all the burned, vegetable pigments. These landscapes frighten by their scale and by the suggestion of furrowed age, geological madness, malevolence and grandeur.

The Matter of Wales by Jan Morris

A CULTURAL STUDY, a history, combining topography, language, national character, and travel, lovingly anatomized, Morris's 1984 book describes "not only a separate nation, but a distinctly separate and often vehement idea." Here is Morris's disquisition on Welsh rocks and stones:

The substance of Welsh nature is largely rock, for some four-fifths of the surface of Wales is hard upland, where the soil is so thin that stones seem always to be forcing their way restlessly through, and it feels as though a really heavy rain-storm would wash all the turf away. The softness of the valleys, the calm of the low farmlands are only subsidiary to the character of the country: the real thing, the dominant, is hard, bare, grey and stony.

This means that the truest Welsh places offer experiences as much tactile as visual, for everywhere there are stones that seem to invite your stroking, your rolling, your sitting upon or, if you happen to be a druid or a survivor from the Stone Age, your worshipping. There are thrilling clumps of jagged stones on hilltops, and stark solitary stones beside moorland roads, and stones gleaming perpetually with the splash of earth-dark streams, and stone walls which seem less like walls than masonry contour-lines, snaking away across the mountain elevations mile after mile as far as the eye can see.

The Saddest Pleasure by Moritz Thomsen

"IT HAS BEEN forty-five years since I took a trip whose object was pleasure," Moritz Thomsen writes before leaving his farm in the Ecuadorian coastal province of Esmeraldas (which he wrote about in The Farm on the River of Emeralds). He was an older Peace Corps volunteer—fifty when he joined—and a rare one: he never went home. He decided to travel down the Amazon, "because there is an emptiness in my life that needs to be filled with something fresh and moderately intense."

He makes rules for himself in the travel: "Dollar meals if I can find them; five dollar hotels, if they still exist. No guided tours, no visits to historical monuments or old churches. No taxis, no mixed drinks in fancy bars. No hanging around places where English might be spoken." He takes his time, floating from river to river, stopping at the Amazon ports of Manaus and Belém and finally reaching Bahia on the coast. After all the bad food and discomfort and illness, and his witnessing the distress and poverty and the fallen world that is Amazonia, he concludes, "There are no solutions anymore; the continent will never recover." In his oblique and humane and self-deprecating way, he is the ideal guide. Though he credits me as the source of his title (a line from my novel Picture Palace), the quotation is actually from Madame de Staël, in Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807): "Travel is one of the saddest pleasures of life."

Coming into the Country by John McPhee