The Tao of Travel

In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. And it is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine.—

RIR

Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That

was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.—

DSS

One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed.—

HIO

2. The Navel of the World

ON EASTER ISLAND, OR RAPA NUI, WHERE I WAS camping and paddling my kayak, traveling for my Happy Isles of Oceania book, an islander said to me, "This is the pito."I said, "Really?" The term is a cognate of the Hawaiian word (piko) for navel. The Easter Islander went on,"Te Pito te Henua,"and explained: Navel of the World. ¶ Perhaps just the delusion you would entertain on a smallish windswept rock in the middle of a cold ocean, two thousand miles from the nearest land. But it seems that the name may have been derived from the birth of a child by a woman who had just arrived on the first canoe, guided by the way-finder Hotu-Matua, the original ancestor and discoverer of Rapa Nui. The ritual cutting of the baby's navel may have been the earliest human ritual performed on the island. The date of this is disputed, but it would have been somewhere around the year 500—amazing when you consider the canoe-building and navigational skills required for such a voyage. W. J. Thomson, in his exhaustive ethnographic study of the island, Te Pito te Henua, claims that this was the name that Hotu-Matua gave to the island on encountering it. Seen from a distance, the singular volcanic formation, the dead cone of Rana Raraku, a lump of bare rock in an empty sea, certainly looks like a petrified bellybutton.

In Delphi, Greece, wandering for The Pillars of Hercules, I was shown a rock and told by a guide in a solemn voice that it was the Omphalos, the Navel of the World. This got me thinking about the belief that one's village or town is the center of the world. I am from Boston, and from childhood heard Boston referred to locally as "the Hub"—usually by headline writers of the Boston Globe. The Hub is actually the short form of "the Hub of the Universe." This hyperbole derives from Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, writing about a Bostonian who says, "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system."

It seems to me a harmless conceit. Here is a list of other earthly navels:

China: The Chinese called (and still call) their country Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, meaning the center of the world.