The Tao of Travel

I said I wanted to see the baby. He took me below, and seeing that newborn, and the mother and father so radiant with pride, transformed the trip. Because the baby had been born on the ship, everything was changed for me and had a different meaning: the rain, the heat, the other people, even the card games and the book I was reading.

Three

THE COAST OF Wales around St. David's Head has very swift currents and sudden fogs. Four of us were paddling sea kayaks out to Ramsay Island. On our return to shore we found ourselves in fog so dense we could not see land. We were spun around by eddies and whirlpools.

"Where's north?" I asked the man who had the compass.

"Over there," he said, tapping it. Then he smacked it and said, "There," and hit it harder and said, "I don't know, this thing's broken."

Darkness was falling, the April day was cold, we were tired, and we could not see anything except the black deeps of St. George's Channel.

"Listen," someone said. "I hear Horse Rock." The current rushing against Horse Rock was a distinct sound. But he was wrong—it was the wind.

We kept together. Fear slowed our movements, and I felt sure that we had no hope of getting back that night—or ever. The cold and my fatigue were like premonitions of death. We went on paddling. A long time passed. We searched; no one spoke. This is what dying is like, I thought.

I strained my eyes to see and had a vision, a glimpse of cloud high up that was like a headland. When I looked harder, willing it to be land, it solidified to a great dark rock. I yelped, and we made for shore as though reborn.

Four

WE WERE DRIVING in western Kenya under the high African sky, my wife beside me, our two boys in the back seat. It was not far from here that I had met this pretty English woman and married her. Our elder son had been born in Kampala, the younger one in Singapore. We were still nomads, driving toward Eldoret. Years before, as a soon-to-be-married couple, we had spent a night there.

The boys were idly quarreling and fooling, laughing, distracting me. My wife was saying, "Are you sure this is the right road?" She had been traveling alone for three months in southern Africa. We were in an old rental car. Cattle dotted the hills, sheltering under the thorn trees. We were just a family on a trip, far away.

But we were traveling toward Eldoret, into the past and deeper into Africa, into the future. We were together, the sun slanting into our eyes, everything on earth was green, and I thought: I never want this trip to end.

Five

JUST BEFORE INDEPENDENCE Day in 1964, when Nyasaland became Malawi, the minister of education, Masauko Chipembere, planted a tree at the school where I was teaching in the south of the country. Soon after this, he conspired to depose the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. But Chipembere himself was driven out.

Time passed, and when I heard that Chipembere had died in Los Angeles ("in exile," as a CIA pensioner), I thought of the little tree he had shoveled into the ground. Twenty-five years after I left the school, I traveled back to Malawi. Two things struck me about the country: most of the trees had been cut down—for fuel—and no one rode a bicycle anymore. Most buildings were decrepit too. Dr. Banda was still in power.

It took me a week to travel to my old school. It was larger now but ruinous, with broken windows and splintered desks. The students seemed unpleasant. The headmaster was rude to me. The library had no books. The tree was big and green, almost forty feet high.

27. The Essential Tao of Travel

Leave home

Go alone

Travel light

Bring a map

Go by land

Walk across a national frontier

Keep a journal

Read a novel that has no relation to the place you're in

If you must bring a cell phone avoid using it

Make a friend

Acknowledgments

FOR SUGGESTIONS, IMPROVEMENTS, and moral support, I would like to thank Jin Auh, Larry Cooper, Roger Ebert, Patrick French, Forrest Furman, Harvey Golden, Ted Hoagland, Pico Iyer, Tim Jeal, Joel Martin, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Jan Morris, Dervla Murphy, Jeffrey Meyers, Simon Prosser, Jonathan Raban, Mort Rosenblum, Oliver Sacks, Andrea Schulz, Nicholas Shakespeare, Alexander Theroux, Joseph Theroux, Louis Theroux, Marcel Theroux, Juliet Walker, and Andrew Wylie. And special thanks, with love, to my wife, Sheila.

Permissions and Credits

The author is grateful for permission to reproduce excerpts from the following works:

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Pan Macmillan, London. Copyright © Nirad C. Chaudhuri, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Pan Macmillan UK.