The Tao of Travel

TRAVEL MAGAZINES ALWAYS MAKE A POINT of telling you the essential thing to carry on your trip, and it used to be a Swiss Army knife—that is, until air travelers were screened, x-rayed, patted down, and presented with a list of forbidden items. Now it is likely to be a cell phone, in my view one of the great impediments to a travel experience. I always take a small shortwave radio, to give me the news and weather of the place I'm in and to keep up with world events. The writer and traveler Pico Iyer says he never travels without a book to read; I am of the same mind. ¶ William Burroughs, a lifetime addict and also a traveler, never went anywhere without a drug of some kind, usually heroin. Kit Moresby, in Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky, carried evening gowns in her bag in the Sahara Desert. Bowles told me once that he traveled to India and South America in the old style, "with trunks, always with trunks." Bruce Chatwin, a self-described minimalist in travel, said that all he needed was his Mont Blanc fountain pen and his personal bag of muesli. But his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, claimed Chatwin always took much more. One of his friends, seeing Chatwin's typewriter and pajamas and book bags on an Indian train, said, "It was like traveling with Garbo."

Edward Lear in Albania, 1848: "some rice, curry powder, and cayenne

Previously to starting a certain supply of cooking utensils, tin plates, knives and forks, a basin etc., must absolutely be purchased, the stronger and plainer the better, for you go into lands where pots and pans are unknown, and all culinary processes are to be performed in strange localities, innocent of artificial means. A light mattress, some sheets and blankets, and a good supply of capotes and plaids should not be neglected; two or three books; some rice, curry powder, and cayenne; a world ofdrawing materials—if you be a hard sketcher; as little dress as possible, though you must have two sets of outer clothing—one for visiting consuls, pashas and dignitaries, the other for rough, everyday work; some quinine made into pills (rather leave all behind than this); a Boyourdi, or general order of introduction to governors or pashas; and your Teskere, or provincial passport for yourself and guide. All these are absolutely indispensable, and beyond these, the less you augment your impedimenta by luxuries the better.

—

Edward Lear in the Levant,

edited by Susan Hyman (1988)

Sir Richard Burton Heads for Mecca in Disguise: "certain necessaries for the way"

I

N ADDITION TO

his disguise as "Mirza Abdullah," he had "a Miswak, or tooth-stick"—a twig for cleaning his teeth; "a bit of soap and a comb, wooden, for bone and tortoiseshell are not, religiously speaking, correct." A change of clothing, a goat-skin water-bag, a "coarse Persian rug—which besides being couch, acted as chair, table and oratory," a pillow, a blanket, a large, bright yellow umbrella ("suggesting the idea of an overgrown marigold"), a "Housewife" (needles, thread, and buttons in a pouch), a dagger, a brass inkstand and penholder, "and a mighty rosary, which on occasion might have been converted into a weapon of defence."

(Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah,

1853)

Paul Du Chaillu in Equatorial Africa: "white beads ... small looking-glasses ... and my guns"

I foresaw that, from the dread all the coast natives have of the cannibal tribes, I should have difficulty in carrying all my luggage. I therefore determined not to encumber myself with supplies of provisions or anything that could be spared. My outfit consisted only of the following articles:—A chest containing 100 fathoms of prints [cloth], 19 pounds of white beads, a quantity of small looking-glasses, fire-steels and flints, a quantity of leaf tobacco. In addition to which came my greatest dependence, viz, 80 pounds of shot and bullets, 20 pounds of powder, and my guns.

—

Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa

(1861)

C. M. Doughty and Chaucer in Arabia Deserta

DOUGHTY CARRIED IN his camel's saddle bags a seventeenth-century edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and he wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta under the direct influence of Chaucer's style.

Henry Miller on Coast-to-Coast Travel: A Monkey Wrench