The Tao of Travel

All I have aimed at is to entertain a few armchair travelers, who may enjoy whiling away a rainy night in reading of how people live in remote mountain villages in the serene climate of the South Mediterranean. One flies over these villages in the air, one sees their strange names on the map, one may even, if one leaves the main road, bump past them in a car, but their life remains as mysterious as that of the girl with the unforgettable face one caught sight of for a moment through the window of a railway carriage. Here is a description of one of those villages.

—

South from Granada

(1957)

V. S. PRITCHETT: "STAMPING OUT HIS ANXIETIES WITH HIS HEAVY BOOTS"

How did writers and painters manage to live and keep their independence?...The thing to do was to write an original book of travel ... I decided to take ship for Lisbon for economy's sake and walk from Badajoz to Vigo, through a part of Spain that was little known and, in patches, was notorious for poverty...

I have described it all in

Marching Spain

—note the deliberately ungrammatical, protesting, affected title. Though I have a tenderness for the book and think some pages are rather good, I am glad it has been out of print for forty years ... It has a touching but shocking first chapter of exhibitionist prose; but despite the baroque writing of the rest, the mistakes of fact, and the declamations, it is original and has vigor. It is the work of a young man worried almost to illness by lack of money and by the future for a lot of the time. As he tramped along he was doing his accounts and stamping out his anxieties with his heavy boots.

—

Midnight Oil

(1970)

PAUL BOWLES: "THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WRITER AND PLACE"

What is a travel book? For me it is the story of what happened to one person in a particular place, and nothing more than that; it does not contain hotel and highway information, lists of useful phrases, statistics, or hints as to what kind of clothing is to be needed by the intending visitor. It may be that such books form a category which is doomed to extinction. I hope not, because there is nothing I enjoy more than reading an accurate account by an intelligent writer of what happened to him away from home.

The subject matter of the best travel books is the conflict between writer and place. It is not important which of them carries the day, so long as the struggle is faithfully recorded. It takes a writer with a gift for describing a situation to do this well, which is perhaps the reason why so many of the travel books that remain in the memory have been produced by writers expert at the fashioning of novels. One remembers Evelyn Waugh's indignation in Ethiopia, Graham Greene deadpanning through West Africa, Aldous Huxley letting Mexico get him down, Gide discovering his social conscience in the Congo, long after other equally accurate travel accounts have blurred and vanished. Given the novelistic skill of these particular writers it is perhaps perverse of me to prefer their few travel pieces to their novels, but I do.

—"The Challenge to Identity" (1958), published in

Travels

(2010)

6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?

AN INTENSE TRAVEL EXPERIENCE IS NOT ALways a long one. D. H. Lawrence spent ten days with his wife in Sardinia and wrote a lengthy book about it. Kipling was ashore a few hours in Rangoon and never went to Mandalay, the subject of his famous poem. Ibn Battuta traveled all over the Muslim world of the fourteenth century, rambling for twenty-nine years, and Marco Polo was twenty-six years in China. Is a long trip necessary to the vividness of the experience? ¶ I am always curious to know how long the traveler spent on the road. Sometimes the length of the journey is plain in the title.Ninety-two Days, Evelyn Waugh's 1932 book about his travels in Guiana and Brazil, says it all, and so does Isabella Bird's Six Months in the Sandwich Islands, and Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet. But usually the length of the trip is not immediately apparent and has to be worked out from internal evidence—the mention of a date or a month, the passing of the seasons, or the research of a biographer.

The paradox of the passage of a traveler's time, and its meaning, was summed up beautifully by Doris Lessing in the first volume of her autobiography:

Once I was making a mental list of all the places I had lived in, having moved about so much, and soon concluded that the commonsense or factual approach leads to nothing but error. You may live in a place for months, even years, and it does not touch you, but a weekend or a night in another, and you feel as if your whole being has been sprayed with an equivalent of a cosmic wind.

—

Under My Skin

(1994)