by Paul Theroux
More than a year of imprisonment passed before he was able to choose two fellow prisoners, Giuan and Enzo, for his team. With great ingenuity they made ice-climbing equipment (crampons, axes) out of scrap metal, and they stockpiled warm clothes and food. “Life [in prison] took on another rhythm because it had a purpose.” With a copied key and an attitude, they bamboozled the camp guards and broke out, leaving a letter behind for the prison authorities stating their intention and apologizing for the bother they might be causing.
Their climb took them through the lairs of leopards and lions, through dense bamboo forests and fields of lobelia. Enzo was ill; rations were often short; the cold and the necessity to avoid detection were also problems. Yet given the circumstances, they were equipped for the assault on the summit. Without a map, they used their judgement and experience of other climbs. They struggled upward, at times in deep snow, blazing their own trail. On one of their climbs they were in the snow and cold for eighteen hours. Although they were defeated in their attempt to reach Batian, the highest peak, they summited Point Lenana, 16,300 feet, where they left an Italian flag that was later found.
After their arduous climb they descended the mountain, returned to the prison camp, and surrendered. The punishment for escaping was twenty-eight days in solitary confinement, but the British camp commandant, saying he “appreciated our sporting effort”, gave them seven days.
Yes, a sporting effort. But it was something else — a disgust with confinement and a wish, as herded-together prisoners, to reclaim their humanity. “Forced to endure the milieu [of the camp],” Benuzzi says early in the book, “we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality.” Thus Benuzzi and his comrades saw a kind of salvation in the climb, as many people see liberation in travel and the triumph of the will in a singular travel feat.
After the war, Benuzzi wrote his book, Fuga sul Kenya: 17 Giorni di Libertà, which was translated under the less-than-gripping title No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1952).
Benuzzi’s experience parallels that of the German Heinrich Harrer, who was captured in India in 1939 when he was on his way to climb Nanga Parbat. Harrer was interned near Dehra Dun, in sight of the Himalayan foothills, the heights of which (as in the case of Benuzzi’s glimpse of Mount Kenya) inspired him to escape. After repeated attempts he succeeded, in 1944, making his way to Tibet, a tale he recounted in Seven Years in Tibet (1953).
Rowing Across the Pacific
GÉRARD D’ABOVILLE ROWED a twenty-five-foot boat from Japan to Oregon in 1991 and wrote about it in Alone. He had previously rowed a boat across the Atlantic ten years earlier, from Cape Cod to Brittany. This had been done before, but no one had succeeded in rowing across the Pacific alone. He set out late in the season and was pummelled by heavy weather, tumultuous storms, and forty-six-foot waves. There are no islands in the North Pacific. A Russian freighter offered to rescue him. “I was not even tempted,” d’Aboville says. But he repeatedly overturned in the high waves and nearly drowned on his final approach to the coast of Oregon.
After he completed his journey he quietly returned to teaching survival skills in his Outward Bound school in Brittany.
Riding a Horse from Buenos Aires to New York City
AIMÉ TSCHIFFELY (1895–1954), a Swiss, rode ten thousand miles by horseback to New York. He had two horses, Mancha and Gato, and it took him three years, from 1925 to 1928. He crossed the Andes, the Darien Gap, and the length of Mexico, but not until he got to the United States did he have a serious problem: he barely survived being deliberately sideswiped by a lunatic motorist. The whole story is told in his best-selling book, Tschiffely’s Ride (1933).
Swimming the Panama Canal
RICHARD HALLIBURTON (1900–1939) described his swimming the Panama Canal in his second book of travel, New Worlds to Conquer (1929). He had swum the Hellespont in his first book, The Royal Road to Romance (1925). He specialized in travel feats — the first documented winter ascent of Mount Fuji, sneaking into the Taj Mahal at night and bathing in the tank by moonlight, and other efforts — some actual feats, some silly stunts. In Seven League Boots (1935) he travelled through Arabia and Ethiopia, where he met and dined with Emperor Haile Selassie. He has been described as a tormented homosexual and an imaginative traveller and thinker. In his last effort, attempting to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, he was lost at sea and declared dead some months later.
His exuberant books, his purple prose, inspired a generation of youngsters to become travellers. In The Royal Road to Romance he wrote, “Youth — nothing else worth having in the world … and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it? Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability — I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.”
Circling the Poles
BETWEEN 1979 AND 1982, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (aka Ran Fiennes) travelled fifty-two thousand miles around the world on a polar axis, the Transglobe Expedition, with a partner, Charles Burton; the trip was mostly over land. Fiennes also attempted a solo expedition to the North Pole, but crashed through the ice and took his frostbitten self away, abandoning the Arctic. Other Fiennes feats: by hovercraft up the Nile, discovering the lost city of Ubar in Oman, and running seven marathons in seven days, after undergoing double bypass heart surgery. His memoir Living Dangerously (1987) is highly hubristic but a readable account of his exploits.
The Ultimate Everest Experience
GÖRAN KROPP (1966–2002) biked seven thousand miles from Stockholm to Nepal (via Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan) and then climbed Everest, making an unsuccessful assault (without oxygen) and finally a successful summiting (at the same time as the Into Thin Air disaster, described by Jon Krakauer; see Chapter 10, “Travel as an Ordeal”). Afterward Kropp biked back to Sweden, being assaulted on the way by xenophobes and stone-throwing people. All the details are in his account of the trip, Ultimate High: My Everest Odyssey (1997). Kropp died from a fall while rock climbing in Washington in 2002.
Walking from Cape Town to Cairo
EWART GROGAN TREKKED from Cape Town to Beira, Mozambique, in 1898, and continued from Beira north through Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Sudan, and reached Cairo in early 1900. His account of the journey is From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North (1900). He was said to have done this in order to impress the father of Gertrude Coleman-Watt with his manliness and determination. He later married her.
Walking Around the World
FFYONA CAMPBELL (BORN 1967), restless, despised by her father, needing approval, feeling rejected, walked the length of Britain from John o’ Groats to Land’s End at the age of sixteen. She followed this up by walking across the United States, coast to coast, becoming pregnant on the way by a member of her backup team; before getting an abortion in New Mexico, she accepted lifts and lied about that to the press. Later she came clean. She also walked across Australia, and through Africa, Cape Town to Tangiers. An amazing, contrary, opinionated, and admirable woman, Campbell recounted her experiences in three books: The Whole Story, On Foot Through Africa, and Feet of Clay. She recently described herself (in Outside magazine) as “a retired pedestrian”.
Youngest to Sail Around the World Nonstop
PERHAPS THE FUTURE of the travel book is the travel blog, with all its elisions, colloquial tropes, and chatty stream of consciousness. It is obvious from the circumnavigation of the Australian Jessica Watson that the great advantage of the travel blog — especially one reporting a feat-in-progress — is the way in which anyone with a computer can be in touch. The highs and lows of such a trip can be experienced and shared by the world in real t
ime. What this trip demonstrated was the exuberance, resilience, and modesty of this sixteen-year-old sailor and her successful voyage.
Jessica Watson (born 1993) is the youngest person to have sailed nonstop, alone, and unassisted around the world. She left Sydney, Australia, on October 18, 2009, on Ella’s Pink Lady, a thirty-four-foot sailboat, and arrived back on May 15, 2010. Had her trip taken four more days, she would have turned seventeen.
The 24,000-mile trip was very difficult and eventful — six knockdowns (the mast underwater), towering seas (35-foot waves), 70-knot winds, engine failure, torn sails, and occasionally dampened spirits. But Jessica was never out of touch, posting messages most days, and after each of the blog entries she usually received well over a thousand replies from well-wishers. The followers of her blog grew dramatically as she neared her home port. She posted videos, updates, photos, and news; her website even sold merchandise (caps, posters, etc.) online to fund her trip. In the manner of blogging, her circumnavigation had an interactive element, as she chatted back and forth with the people monitoring her progress.
The tone of her blog is so sunny, it is obvious that such a difficult feat can best be achieved by someone with a positive frame of mind, reminding me that difficult travel is essentially a mental challenge.
Here is Jessica, halfway through her trip, in January 2010: “The picture below is of my very cool new t-shirt which was a present from Mum in my latest food bag. I had to share it with you guys as my crew aren’t doing a very good job of sharing my excitement!” And the accompanying photo shows her wearing a T-shirt with the message “One Tough Cookie”.
On her arrival home, she was greeted by tens of thousands of people, including the prime minister, who called her a hero. Likable to the last, she disagreed, saying she wasn’t a hero, “just an ordinary girl who had a dream and worked hard at it and proved that anything is possible”.
15
Staying Home
THE NON-TRAVELLER SEEMS TO ME TO EXIST in suspended animation, if not the living death of a homely routine or the vegetative stupor known to the couch potato. From an early age I longed to leave home and to keep going. I cannot imagine not travelling — stuck home all the time, in the confinement of a house or a community or a city. ¶ Yet some people never leave — distinguished writers and thinkers, chained to their desks, their towns, making a virtue of it. In his entire eighty-year life, Immanuel Kant never travelled more than a hundred miles from his birthplace, Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), where he died. Philip Larkin, who hardly stirred from his home in Hull on England’s Humber estuary, said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back home the same day.” Needless to say, he lived for much of his life with his mother.
Thomas Merton, who travelled widely in his early life, entered a Trappist monastery at the age of twenty-six, and for the next twenty-seven years seldom uttered an audible word, having taken a vow of silence. He did not leave his monastery in Kentucky until 1968. Invited to a conference in Bangkok, on this first encounter with the wider world after all those years of seclusion, he accidentally electrocuted himself in his hotel room. Edgar Allan Poe spent a few youthful years in Britain. Thoreau never left the United States. Emily Dickinson was more or less housebound. Yet all these people wrote brilliantly of other lands. Something about staying home, staying inside, or going in circles can stimulate a mind in the manner of conventional travel.
In fiction, the character with the most convincing philosophical objection to travel is the decadent Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884). He makes an elaborate plan for a trip to London, but overcome with sloth, satiated (and “somewhat stupefied”) with the Dickensian atmosphere of the English-style pub in Paris, he reflects on the tedium of the Channel crossing and decides to stay put: “After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizenry, and even cutlery, were all about him? What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments?”
Henry Fielding’s Voyage to Lisbon
FIELDING, LOOKING FOR a rest cure and a mild climate, sets out from London for Lisbon toward the end of June 1754; and after hundreds of pages, toward the end of July, he is still off the coast of England, becalmed. In the delay and idleness he grows irritable and confides his irritation to his journal. He called himself a “great, tattered bard”, and was highly sceptical of “voyage-writers”, as he explains in his long preface to the published Journal.
This seems a superb Fielding farce, the absurdity of setting out and going nowhere — he’ll never make it! Much of the book is satirical, ironic, blustering, and his ailments so numerous and debilitating, it is like self-satire, or at least comic exaggeration. Only forty-seven, he is plagued by “lingering imperfect gout … [and] besides being lame, I was very ill with the great fatigues I had lately undergone, added to my distemper … my health was now reduced to the last extremity … I went into the country [Bath] in a very weak and deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy [oedema], and an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated, that it had lost all muscular flesh … I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders.”
Still in England, he recovers with a regimen of tar-water treatments and then, with “the first dawnings of my recovery I had conceived of removing to a warmer climate”. He rejects Avignon and decides on Lisbon for convalescence, leaving home in a lugubrious frame of mind. “On this day, the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a mother-like fondness.”
His book is a chronicle of delay and frustration. It’s true that Fielding ultimately arrives in Lisbon, but the greater part of the voyage is spent at various anchorages and moorings on the English coast, the winds too light to bear the ship away, so Fielding and his party go ashore and stay in public houses and inns to pass the time. The contentious and tyrannical captain cruises back and forth from Ryde to Portland to Spithead, awaiting a favourable wind and complaining.
“The captain now grew outrageous, and declaring open war with the wind, took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of it, and in its teeth.” This tactic fails; they are soon back on the English coast. Fielding fills his journal with reflections on eating, on the difference between seamen and landlubbers, on tyranny and officialdom, on his quarrels with the captain and the customs officers, on mythology. He writes that if his disquisitions can serve as a remedy for “the most inveterate evils at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some purpose”.
Never less than adversarial, the captain believes that he is “under the spell of witchcraft” and spends less and less time on his ship, going ashore or to other ships to socialize, as Fielding — fading again — is attended by doctors.
Toward the end of July, the wind picks up and proves helpful, and a full month after setting off, Fielding is at last on his way, at sea. The rest of the voyage is brisk. Next day they are “thirty miles to the westward of Plymouth”, and the day after in the Bay of Biscay, and becalmed, then in a gale: “Our voyage was retarded.” Several days after the gale they are off the Portuguese coast and soon at Lisbon. The actual voyage is so abbreviated as to seem an anti-climax: “About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho’ at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffee-house, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea.”
He hoped to regain his health in Lisbon, but the last lines of the Journal are ominous, and seem like a premoniti
on of his own death. Horace: “This is the end of the story, and the journey” (hic Finis chartaeque, viaeque).
Fielding died in Lisbon a little over two months after arriving, in October 1754. The book was published posthumously in 1755.
Xavier de Maistre: Travelling Around His Room
A JOURNEY ROUND My Room is one of the curiosities of travel literature. De Maistre (1763–1852), born in Savoy, peripatetic as a soldier and landscape painter, ended his life as a naturalized Russian subject. Arrested in Italy while serving in the Austro-Russian army, he was put under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days, where he wrote this book of forty-two chapters. He hadn’t planned to publish it, but when his brother Joseph, a political philosopher, read it, he persuaded Xavier to do so, and the book appeared in 1794. It has been described as “a delightful chat with the reader, filled with delicate observations, in which an artless grace, humour, and spontaneous wit are wedded to a gentle and somewhat dreamy philosophy”. In fact, it is parody, self-mockery, and willfully eccentric, a deliberate attempt to stave off the boredom of confinement, calling this a “new mode of travelling I introduce into the world”. Hyperbolic (one chapter describes “Latitude and Topography”), it is also a disquisition on the meaning of ordinary things.
