The Tao of Travel

In terms of travel, Henry Fielding was, as a youth, a student at the the University of Leiden, and after he earned a law degree in London he became a circuit judge. His life (1707–1754) was short and turbulent, but he was productive, first as a writer of satirical plays, and after these were declared unlawful he wrote political pamphlets and the great novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). His ill health burdened him: he suffered from asthma, liver disease, gout, and dropsy (edema), which he refers to repeatedly in his Voyage to Lisbon. I feel that his illnesses heightened his sensibilities and contributed to his close observation and the bite of his satire. He set sail for Lisbon looking for health, but the meandering voyage sickened him further and he died soon after he arrived. These paragraphs are from his Voyage to Lisbon, which was published the year after his death.

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There would not, perhaps, be a more pleasant, or more profitable study, among those which have their principal end in amusement, than that of travels or voyages, if they were writ, as they should be, and ought to be, with a joint view to the entertainment and information of mankind. If the conversation of travelers be so eagerly sought after as it is, we may believe their books will be still more agreeable company, as they will, in general, be more instructive and more entertaining.

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If the customs and manners of men were everywhere the same, there would be no office so dull as that of a traveler: for the difference of hills, valleys, rivers; in short, the various views in which we may see the face of the earth, would scarce afford him a pleasure worthy of his labour...

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To make a traveler an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it is necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should have overlooked much of what he hath seen. Nature is not, any more than a great genius, always admirable in her productions, and therefore the traveler, who may be called her commentator, should not expect to find everywhere, subjects worthy of his notice.

4. Murphy's Rules of Travel

A TRAVELER I HAVE ADMIRED FOR MOST OF MY traveling life is the writer Dervla Murphy, who was born in 1931 in Lismore, Ireland, where she still lives. I began reading her in the 1960s, with her first book, Full Tilt (1965). In Singapore in 1969, I met an Englishman who claimed to have met her. He had asked her how she'd managed, as a woman, to travel through Ethiopia, for her book In Ethiopia with a Mule (1968). She replied, "It was simple. I went as a man." ¶ Self-educated (she dropped out of school at the age of fourteen to look after her ailing mother), she mentions in her early memoir, Wheels Within Wheels, that at fifteen she was able to levitate herself. This fascinated me. But when I asked her about it, she told me that many people have written to her to relate similar experiences of levitation. As she grew older she lost this magical gift. And when her mother died, she set off on her Full Tilt journey, riding a bicycle from Ireland to India, suffering many dangers and indignities—snow, near drowning, being stoned by mullahs in Iran.

"By the time I arrived at the Afghan frontier," she writes in that book, "it seemed quite natural, before a meal, to scrape the dried mud off the bread, pick the hairs out of the cheese and remove the bugs from the sugar. I had also stopped registering the presence of fleas, the absence of cutlery, and the fact that I hadn't taken off my clothes or slept in a bed for ten days."

In India, after enduring these hardships—but being Dervla—she worked in a home for Tibetan refugees.

Though she has never married, she had a daughter, Rachel, whom she raised alone and took everywhere, including India, Baltistan, South America, and Madagascar. She writes, "A child's presence emphasizes your trust in the community's goodwill."

She has written twenty-three travel books, including books about England and Ulster. All her travel has been arduous, mainly solitary, and terrestrial, her preferred mode of travel an inexpensive bicycle. She never complains, never satirizes herself or the people she is among, and though her writing often contains infelicities, it reflects the woman herself: downright, patient, truthful, reliable, never looking for comfort but always the rougher experiences of the road; a wanderer in the oldest tradition. I find her admirable in every way, and her advice to travelers, "to facilitate escapism," is full of the wisdom of a life of journeying:

CHOOSE YOUR COUNTRY, USE GUIDEBOOKS TO IDENTIFY THE AREAS MOST FREQUENTED BY FOREIGNERS - AND THEN GO IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION.