The Tao of Travel

Tonga's archipelago is informally known as the Friendly Isles. Captain Cook initiated the idea, but with the passing years this has seemed more and more like a frivolous sobriquet to beguile visitors, in the manner of bestowing the name Greenland on the land of snow and ice. Tongans are hierarchical, class-obsessed, rivalrous, and, like most islanders, territorial and rightly suspicious of strangers who wash ashore.

The very word "friendly" is loaded, and it is usually just a tourist-industry come-on. I wrote in Fresh Air Fiend, "In my experience, the friendliest people on Pacific islands are those who have the greatest assurance that you are going to leave soon."

"The real enemy, the destroyer of our happiness, is within ourselves," the Dalai Lama once said in a homily. Likewise, the true creator of our happiness is within us. There are contented people in the world, whose easy manner and good cheer persuade the traveler that he or she is in a happy land. Happy times are unforgettable, and sometimes they last for more than a moment. I have had joyful experiences in many places, at particular times. I agree with Burroughs's fish story: happiness is usually retrospective.

There is also another factor, not "I'd like to live here" but "I wouldn't mind dying here." Here are ten instances:

Bali:

I traveled there in the 1970s and after a week in Ubud wanted to quit my job, summon my wife and two children from Singapore, and spend the rest of my life on that fragrant island. My little family resisted.

Thailand:

My recurring fantasy is dropping out and spending the rest of my days in a rural village in northern Thailand, as a paying guest, among hospitable villagers.

Costa Rica:

On a bay in the rural northwestern province of Guanacaste I felt strongly: I will build a house with a veranda and sit there scribbling like O. Henry in Honduras.

The Orkney Islands:

Small, proud, remote, self-contained. Hard-working and well built, with Neolithic ruins and traditional pieties. I went there once and never stopped dreaming about these islands and their fresh fish.

Egypt:

Not Cairo but somewhere else. Maybe I'd live on a houseboat, moored on the upper Nile, toward Aswan.

The Trobriand Islands:

The people are uncompromising but I would make peace, settle on a small outer island, and sail around Milne Bay, as I did in the early 1990s.

Malawi:

I have rarely been happier than I was in the Shire Highlands of rural southern Malawi in 1964, the year of

ufulu,

independence. I had a little house, a satisfying job as a teacher, and the goodwill of my neighbors in nearby villages. Later, I thought, If everything goes wrong in my life, I can always return to Malawi.

Maine:

I think of the coast of Maine as coherent, lovely, well assembled by nature, populated by some of the most decent and reliable people I have ever known.

Hawaii:

Perhaps it really is the tourist paradise of the brochures. I have lived in Hawaii longer than anywhere else in my life, and often when I am with a local person, and it's a beautiful day—the pure air, the fragrance of flowers, the surf up, the usual rainbow arching in the sky—this person will smile and say, "Lucky we live Hawaii."

Alluring Places

In my mind is a list of places I have never seen and have always wanted to visit. I read about them, look at maps, collect guidebooks and picture books. My imagination is full of appealing images—a great thing. The idea of unvisited places, future travel, enlivens the mind and promises pleasure. Here are ten out of many.

Alaska: Huge and thinly populated, one of the last true wilderness areas in the world, with Denali National Park and North America's highest mountain, Denali, at 20,320 feet. I imagine paddling along the coast, taking ferries to the annual Great Aleutian Pumpkin Run, seeing the small towns and the empty places.

Scandinavia: I have never been to Norway, Sweden, or Finland. I'd like to see them in their winter darkness, at their gloomiest and most suicidal, and also go cross-country skiing. Then another trip in the summer, reliving Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night in Sweden, picking cloudberries in northern Norway, and visiting the Lapps.

Greenland: With widely scattered and diverse indigenous populations, many of whom have retained their traditional skills, Greenland (Ka-laallit Nunaat) is inviting. Fridtjof Nansen skied across it in 1883, the first recorded crossing. He stayed among the Greenlanders and recounted how, housebound in the depths of winter, they sat naked, perspiring around a fire. I would also like to see Scoresby Sund, the largest fjord in the world, and hear the patter of the drum made from a polar bear's bladder.