The Tao of Travel

The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.

When it had traveled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was set upon a pole in front—a little patch of black and white, for the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax.

André Gide in Africa: Ten months, 1925–26, for Travels in the Congo (1929), the English edition of which includes Voyage au Congo and Le Retour du Tchad.

Gide had traveled at the official invitation of the French government, and yet this did not restrain him from criticizing colonial policies, or reporting on the many abuses of power against the African subjects (whippings, beatings, arson, intimidation), or the French colonial officers' taking advantage of Africans. It must be added that Gide, too, who fancied adolescent boys, indulged himself throughout the trip—and he was traveling with his much younger lover, Marc Allegret. Gide said to a friend that he was "very attracted, if I might dare to say, in a sensual way as well, by the Negro race."

To another correspondent he wrote—and this is true of a great deal of other travelers' experiences—"Everything that I expected to give me delight and which ... persuaded me to undertake the journey has disappointed me—but out of that very disappointment ... I have acquired an unexpected education."

W. Somerset Maugham in Burma: For The Gentleman in the Parlour, twenty-three days to Keng Tung, a few weeks more in Bangkok, but the whole trip, around the world from London, door to door, took nine months in 1922 and 1923.

Edward Abbey: About nine months, for Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968). Not one season but two, in 1956 and 1957, "with adventures from in 1950, 1959 and 1965" (James Cahalan, EdwardAbbey, 2001).

V. S. Naipaul in India: Nine months, for An Area of Darkness: An Experience of India, in which the Trinidad-born author, on his first-ever, 1962 trip to India, understands that he has no place in what he calls "the total Indian negation" and reasserts his feeling of "my own homelessness." He is frequently angry in the book, sometimes enraged, a condition he analyzes after losing his temper. "It was brutal; it was ludicrous; it was pointless and infantile. But the moment of anger is a moment of exalted, shrinking lucidity, from which recovery is slow and shattering."

Richard Burton in Salt Lake City: About three weeks, though his entire North American trip took more than eight months. In Utah he wrote to a friend, "I'm traveling for my health which has suffered in Africa, enjoying the pure air of the prairies, and expecting to return in a state of renovation." Burton had sailed for Canada in April 1860, and after traveling across the United States by stagecoach and on horseback, he arrived in Salt Lake City toward the end of August. He wanted to know about Mormonism, particularly the practice of keeping plural wives. To this end, he spent time with Brigham Young, who had forty-nine wives at the time Burton met him. Burton had studied the practice of polygamy on his first trip to Africa and reached the conclusion that in countries where children had value and were a form of wealth, polygamy made sense. But he wrote in The City of the Saints (1861) that in the United States, "where the sexes are nearly equal, and where reproduction becomes a minor duty," it was inadvisable. His main objection to polygamy was that it was unromantic, merely an "unimpassioned domestic attachment." He went on, "Romance and reverence are transferred from Love and Liberty to Religion and the Church."

Joseph Conrad in the Congo: Six months in 1890, including twenty-eight days on the Congo River. Eventually this one-month river trip (published after his death as Congo Diary) would form the basis of the brilliant and evocative novella Heart of Darkness, which he wrote eight years after returning from the Congo, describing it as "experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case."