The Tao of Travel

BOSWELL, WHOSE NAME is a byword for an amanuensis, traveled with Dr. Johnson to the Western Isles in the fall of 1773, and both men wrote books about the trip: Johnson's thoughtful Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland appeared in 1774, and Boswell's gossipy Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1785, which, taken together, comprise a lively dialogue between two travelers, an inner and an outer journey. So toward the end of the trip, when his patience is wearing thin, Johnson remarks in his book, "The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away." Around the same time, Boswell reports in his Journal how, after listening to a Scotsman talk ignorantly about the Church of England, Johnson says, "Sir, you know no more of our church than a Hottentot."

Henry David Thoreau and Friends

HE WALKED ACROSS Cape Cod with William Ellery Channing, who also boated with him down the Concord and Merrimack rivers; he traipsed and paddled through the Maine woods with his cousin George Thatcher and two Indian guides. He went from Concord, Massachusetts, to Staten Island, New York, alone, but then lived with a family there for two months, before becoming homesick and returning to Concord. He spent a week in Canada on a sort of package tour, on a train full of tourists going from Boston to Montreal (recounted in A Yankee in Canada).

And then there is Walden, the last word in solitude. Or is it all theoretical? Thoreau's cabin was only a mile and a half from his house in Concord, where his adoring mother waited, baking pies for him and doing his laundry; and throughout the Walden experience he went home most days. He had two chairs in the cabin, and as he says, he often went with a group of friends to pick huckleberries.

Sir Richard Burton, to Mecca with Mohammed

PART OF BURTON'S disguise to enter Mecca as the robed and bearded Afghan dervish "Mirza Abdullah" was to have an Arab servant and guide. This was the eighteen-year-old Mohammed El-Basyuni, who was headed to Mecca to see his mother. Burton liked his self-confidence, but the young man was watchful too. At the end of the trip Burton recounts that Mohammed suspected Burton might be an unbeliever. "'Now, I understand,' said the boy Mohammed to his fellow-servant, 'your master is a Sahib from India; he hath laughed at our beards.'"

But there might have been another cause for suspicion (so the Burton biographer Mary S. Lovell writes). It was rumored that Burton, instead of squatting, had stood up to pee, something a good Muslim would never do. And it was also rumored, because the argumentative Burton had many enemies, that he had killed Mohammed for knowing his secret.

Though it had not happened, Burton so enjoyed his image as a hell-raiser that he said he had indeed killed his traveling companion. "Oh, yes," he would say. "Why not? Do you suppose one can live in these countries as one lives in Pall Mall and Piccadilly?"

André Gide and His Lover

FOR HIS TEN-MONTH trip through the Congo and Chad in 1925-26, the fifty-six-year-old Gide brought along his twenty-six-year-old lover, Marc Allegret, who had done most of the preparation for the journey. Though they had been lovers for almost ten years, they were anything but monogamous. "Throughout the trip," writes Gide's biographer Alan Sheriden (André Gide, 1999), "sexual companions of both sexes were freely, abundantly available and Marc discovered his penchant for adolescent girls."

Redmond O'Hanlon and His "Small Column"

ONE OF THE greatest talkers, one of the most likeable of men, with a stomach for hard travel and a wonderful ear for dialogue (he is also an alert listener), O'Hanlon is anything but a loner. "Muko, at the head of our small column," he writes of one of the marches described in No Mercy (1996). "Small column" just about sums up the O'Hanlon manner of travel. He is never alone. His is not conventional travel, and hardly solitary, but more in the nature of an expedition, the misery shared by many disillusioned friends, martyrs to companionship.

For the trip recounted in Into the Heart of Borneo (1983) he traveled with the poet James Fenton (the trip was Fenton's idea), and the book profits greatly from Fenton's wit. For his South American trip O'Hanlon asked Fenton whether he wished to go to the Amazon and visit the fierce Yanomami people. In the book itself, In Trouble Again (1988), Fenton is quoted as saying, "I would not come with you to High Wycombe." And so O'Hanlon persuades Simon Stockton, a worldly-wise-guy Englishman who, halfway through the trip, maddened by the heat, the insects, the mud, and the hideous food, throws a wobbly and goes home.