The Tao of Travel

Henry David Thoreau in Maine: Six or seven weeks. Between 1846 and 1857 Thoreau took three trips, of a few weeks apiece, to climb Mount Katahdin, to experience the wilderness, to learn about Indian life and language, and to gather information about the flora and fauna. He wrote three magazine articles for and gave lectures on the trips, and these pieces form the basis of his posthumous work The Maine Woods.

Graham Greene in Mexico: Six weeks, for The Lawless Roads (1939), and at the end of the trip he came to detest Mexico and Mexicans: "How one begins to hate these people—the intense slowness of that monolithic black-clothed old woman with the grey straggly hair ... the hideous inexpressiveness of brown eyes ... They just sit about."

Herman Melville in the Marquesas: One month, though he claimed it was four months, in the Typee Valley. En route to the Marquesas, in Honolulu, Melville was horrified by the behavior of the missionaries:

Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!

—

Typee

(1844)

Some years later, he also traveled to Europe and the Holy Land. He wrote a mystical poem about the experience, as well as a diary in which he noted the behavior of guides in Jerusalem, where he spent eighteen days:

Talk of the Guides: "Here is the stone Christ leaned against, & here is the English Hotel. Yonder is the arch where Christ was shown to the people, & just by that open window is sold the best coffee in Jerusalem."

—

Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant

(1856–57)

Elias Canetti in Marrakesh: A month or so in 1954, when he joined some friends who were making a film in Marrakesh. He tagged along, immersed himself in the city, and made notes. He did not publish his book Die Stimmen von Marrakesch until 1967 (translated as The Voices of Marrakesh), because he thought that what he had to say about Morocco, and travel, was trivial. But the slim book is evocative, persuasive, and wise. For example, noticing a gathering of blind beggars chanting, and studying them, he reflects, "Traveling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travelers are heartless."

Thoreau on Cape Cod: A little over three weeks, but in two trips, one in 1849, the other in 1855.Cape Cod, his account of the trip up "the bare and bended arm" of the Cape, from Sandwich to Provincetown, was published after his death, in 1865. Lines from the first chapter ("The Shipwreck") were appropriated and cannibalized by Robert Lowell for his poem "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket," and chapter 5, "The Wellfleet Oysterman," contains the first mention in print of broccoli being grown in the United States.

Graham Greene in Liberia: Twenty-three days. Greene's book Journey Without Maps (1936) is an ingeniously worked-up account of only a little over three weeks in the Liberian bush by an absolute beginner in Africa. Greene admits this early on: "I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa." Amazingly, he brought his young female cousin Barbara along for company. "You poor innocents!" a stranger cried at them in Freetown. He didn't know the half of it.

Out of his element, Greene is gloomy, fidgety, nervous, and Barbara has no discernible skills. But the pitying man in Freetown can see from their helpless smiles and their lack of preparation that theirs is a leap in the dark—Journey in the Dark was one of the rejected titles for the book. How innocent was Greene? Here is an example. Just before arriving in Freetown to start his trip, he confides, "I could never properly remember the points of the compass." Can a traveler be more innocent than that?