The Tao of Travel

IF A VACATION REPRESENTS A TRAVELER'S DREAM, the ordeal is the traveler's nightmare. Yet the travel book that recounts an ordeal is the sort that interests me most, because it tests the elemental human qualities needed for survival: determination, calmness, rationality, physical and mental strength. Such books, with their torments, are also more fun: they were among the first travel books I read as a child. No ordeal book is without instances of near madness, hallucinatory episodes, weird fugues, and near-death experiences. ¶ When I was a boy, Donn Fendler was my role model. Later I was enthralled by the accounts of Moorhouse in the Sahara and Thesiger in Arabia, and I had a whole shelf of books about boat sinkings in the Pacific, disasters that ended in many days spent in a rubber dinghy. Dougal Robertson's is the best such account.

Some ordeals bring out the wit in a traveler. The last person you'd expect to find traveling on his own in the Colombian jungle is the needy, addicted, and urbane William Burroughs. But Burroughs was determined to go through hell to find the rare Amazonian drug ayahuasca (or yage), purported to be the ultimate high. He succeeded, as he recounted in The Yage Letters.

An instance or two of ordeal is an element in most great travel books. That is, having a bad time sets such a book apart from the jolly travel romp, giving it a seriousness and depth; as a consequence we begin to understand the person traveling, the real nature of the writer of the book, tested to his or her limit.

Geoffrey Moorhouse: The Fearful Void (1974)

NO ONE HAD ever crossed (or at least written about crossing) the Sahara from west to east, an almost four-thousand-mile journey from the Atlantic to the Nile. Moorhouse decided to do it, less to be the first person to achieve it than to examine "the bases of fear, to explore the extremity of human experience."

"I was a man who had lived with fear for nearly forty years," he writes. Fear of the unknown, of emptiness, of death. And he wants to find a way—a journey—to conquer it. "The Sahara fulfilled the required conditions perfectly. Not only did the hazards of the desert represent ultimate forms of my fears, but I was almost a stranger to it."

Setting off in October 1972, Moorhouse traveled with various nomad guides, but most dropped away or were exposed as rogues. His sextant broke, he became seriously ill, and death by thirst threatened when he missed an oasis in a sandstorm. With the help of his guide Sid'Ahmed, Moorhouse reached Tamanrasset, in Algeria, in March 1973, where, exhausted and sick, he abandoned the trip. He had traveled two thousand miles, most of it on foot, through sand and gravel and howling wind.

In the empty eastern desert in Mali he runs out of water. He recalls that twenty-four hours without water in severe temperatures is the limit of human endurance. Half a day passes—no water. Night falls—and twelve hours pass—no water. They set off at six A.M. and walk and ride most of the morning. Following some camel tracks, they come upon a group of nomads. Fainting with thirst and weakness, Moorhouse is offered a cooking pot.

"There was all manner of filth floating on top of that water; morsels of rice from the dirty pot, strands of hair from the guerba [waterbag], fragments of dung from the bottom of some well. But the water itself was clear, and I could sense the coolness of it even as its level tipped in the cooking pot before touching my lips. It was the most wonderful thing that had happened to me in my life."

After he wrote The Fearful Void, he told an English interviewer for the Guardian, "Doing this journey was a piece of propaganda in a way. It seems to me that every writer's a propagandist, in that he's trying to advance a point of view he believes; and my own point of view is that we're all essentially like each other. We all suffer the same things, we all laugh at the same things, and we all have to recognize this interdependence."

Valerian Albanov: In the Land of White Death (1917)

THE BOOK TELLS of the three-month ordeal in 1914 of Albanov and thirteen crewmen, who left the ice-bound ship Saint Anna in Franz Josef Land in the Arctic and traveled 235 miles, sledging across snow and ice and open water (in homemade kayaks). This is essentially Albanov's diary of the terrible journey. Frostbite, desertion, sudden death, attacks by walruses and polar bears (they shot forty-seven bears), near drownings, and hallucinations: "Aromas of tropical fruit fill the air with their fragrance. Peaches, oranges, apricots, raisins, cloves, and pepper all give off their wonderful scents."