The Tao of Travel

by Paul Theroux

I came to realize that I travelled best when I travelled no faster than a dog could trot.

  — Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map (2009)

  Time Travel

  The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. — GTES

  Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present — but the present contains the future. — KBS

  Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past. — HIO

  A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward. — GTES

  Travelling in a Time of Trouble

  A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveller; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveller into an eyewitness. — GTES

  Travel and Love

  If one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier. — GTES

  Smell a Country to Understand It

  [Kipling’s] gift is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it).

  — T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1943)

  Travel as a Love Affair

  For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with … All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

  — Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel”, Salon (2000)

  Tourism and Sightseeing

  The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.

  — V. S. Pritchett, The Spanish Temper (1954)

  He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveller. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.

  — Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)

  Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, I thought. Travellers don’t know where they’re going. — HIO

  In Mumbai: A tourist would have been in a temple or a museum. I had been in a slum. — GTES

  Sightseeing is an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity. — GRB

  Sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but … it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled. — GRB

  Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel … It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits. — SWS

  Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain. — TEE

  Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. — OPE

  Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation’s pleasures. — KBS

  Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of travelling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living — indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor. — GTES

  It is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor. — OPE

  Tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable. — HIO

  After a man has made a large amount of money he becomes a bad listener and an impatient tourist. — POH

  She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.

  — Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (2009)

  Departures

  There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy. — OPE

  Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather. — GTES

  Frontiers

  A mushroom-and-dunghill relationship exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. — OPE

  In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss: like a small policeman directing traffic. — POH

  A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God. — OPE

  Looking across the river, I realized I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there — music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people do things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope, the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America. — OPE

  A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country’s central reality. — DSS

  Air Travel

  There is not much to say about airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to g
o home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright — from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, “What I’d really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.” — OPE

  Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armour. — OPE

  Airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked. — GTES

  Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist’s, even to the chairs. — FAF

  A train journey is travel; everything else — planes especially — is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands. — GRB

  The Return Journey

  In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. And it is personal. Even if I were travelling with you, your trip would not be mine. — RIR

  Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back. — DSS

  One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed. — HIO

  2

  The Navel of the World

  ON EASTER ISLAND, OR RAPA NUI, WHERE I WAS camping and paddling my kayak, travelling for my Happy Isles of Oceania book, an islander said to me, “This is the pito.” I said, “Really?” The term is a cognate of the Hawaiian word (piko) for navel. The Easter Islander went on, “Te Pito te Henua”, and explained: Navel of the World. ¶ Perhaps just the delusion you would entertain on a smallish windswept rock in the middle of a cold ocean, two thousand miles from the nearest land. But it seems that the name may have been derived from the birth of a child by a woman who had just arrived on the first canoe, guided by the way-finder Hotu-Matua, the original ancestor and discoverer of Rapa Nui. The ritual cutting of the baby’s navel may have been the earliest human ritual performed on the island. The date of this is disputed, but it would have been somewhere around the year 500 — amazing when you consider the canoe-building and navigational skills required for such a voyage. W. J. Thomson, in his exhaustive ethnographic study of the island, Te Pito te Henua, claims that this was the name that Hotu-Matua gave to the island on encountering it. Seen from a distance, the singular volcanic formation, the dead cone of Rana Raraku, a lump of bare rock in an empty sea, certainly looks like a petrified belly button.

  In Delphi, Greece, wandering for The Pillars of Hercules, I was shown a rock and told by a guide in a solemn voice that it was the Omphalos, the Navel of the World. This got me thinking about the belief that one’s village or town is the centre of the world. I am from Boston, and from childhood heard Boston referred to locally as “the Hub” — usually by headline writers of the Boston Globe. The Hub is actually the short form of “the Hub of the Universe”. This hyperbole derives from Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, writing about a Bostonian who says, “Boston State House is the hub of the solar system.”

  It seems to me a harmless conceit. Here is a list of other earthly navels:

  China: The Chinese called (and still call) their country Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, meaning the centre of the world.

  Arizona: Baboquivari Peak, near Sasabe in Pima County. The Tohono O’odham people regard this mountain as the Navel of the World, the place where, after the great flood subsided, humans emerged to populate the earth.

  Cuzco, Peru: In Creation myth the word “Qosqo”, in Quechua, means “the Navel of the World”, and Cuzco was regarded as such by the Inca.

  Jerusalem: The Al Aqsa Mosque (“the Furthermost”) is dome-shaped to reflect the belief that it marks the Navel of the World.

  Mecca, Saudi Arabia: The Kaaba, the most sacred site in Islam, is also said to be the Navel of the World. An Islamic text: “Forty years before Allah created the heavens and earth, the Kaaba was a dry spot floating on water, and from it the world has been spread out” (quoted in Rivka Gonen, Contested Holiness, 2003).

  Mexico: Pacanda Island, on Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico, has made a claim to be the Navel of the World.

  Colombia: To the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples, who call themselves the Elder Brothers of humanity, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range is called the Centre of the World.

  Faroe Islands: Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands, was often called the Navel of the World by its most famous local author, William Heinesen (1900–1991), whose passionate nationalism perhaps led him to this delusion. He spoke Faroese but wrote in Danish.

  Ayutthaya, Thailand: Wat Phra Si San Phet, built in 1448 by King Boromtrilokanath in this ancient former capital (1350–1767) of Siam, was called the Centre of the World.

  Bodh Gaya, India: It is said that this holy site is the place where the Buddha sat when he was enlightened, which is called Vajrasana, meaning Diamond Throne. It was believed that when the universe is finally destroyed, this will be the last place to disappear and the first place to re-form when the universe begins again.

  Perm, Russia: Nine thousand Permians voted in an Internet poll to have a monument built on a spot to be designated Navel of the Earth.

  3

  The Pleasures of Railways

  NO MODE OF TRANSPORTATION INSPIRES MORE detailed observation than the railway train. There is no literature of air travel, not much of one for bus journeys, and cruise ships inspire social observation but little else. The train is effective because anyone who cares to can write (as well as sleep and eat) on a train. The soothing and unstressful trip leaves deep impressions of the passing scene, and of the train itself. Every airplane trip is the same; every railway journey is different. The rail traveller is often companionable, talkative, even somewhat liberated. Perhaps that’s because he or she can walk around. This person, this mood, is what psychologists call “untethered” — such strangers are the best talkers, the best listeners.

  Train Travel — the Main Line

  Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night’s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian short stories. Anything is possible, even the urge to get off. — GRB

  There seemed to me nothing more perfect in travel than boarding a train just at nightfall and shutting the bedroom door on an icy riotous city and knowing that morning would show me a new latitude. I would leave anything behind, I thought, for a sleeper on a southbound express. — OPE

  Half of jazz is railway music, and the motion and noise of the train itself has the rhythm of jazz. This is not surprising: the Jazz Age was also the Railway Age. Musicians travelled by train or not at all, and the pumping tempo and the clickety-clack and the lonesome whistle crept into the
songs. So did the railway towns on the route: how else could Joplin or Kansas City be justified in a lyric? — OPE

  Ghosts, as old people seem to the young, have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness — travelling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. — GTES

  No good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough. — OPE

  I had been in Latin America long enough to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendours of the continent. — OPE

  The great challenge in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal show up and hop on. — GTES

  There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like the one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows — the branches pushed at the glass like mops and brooms — what kind of train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut. — KBS