Paul Theroux - The Tao of Travel - Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

John Steinbeck, traveling with Charley: Three months in 1960.

D. H. Lawrence in Australia: Three months in 1922. He did not write a travel book but within a few weeks of arriving began a novel, Kangaroo, set in Australia, and finished it by the time he left.

Rockwell Kent's Greenland voyage: Three months in 1929, for N by E (1930). Nearing the coast of Greenland, his boat sank:

The three men stand there looking at it all: at the mountains, at the smoking waterfall, at the dark green lake with the wind puffs silvering its plain, at the flowers that fringe the pebbly shore and star the banks. At last one of them speaks.

"It's all right," he says, "that we should pay for beautiful things. And being here in this spot, now, is worth traveling a thousand miles for, and all that that has cost us. Maybe we have lived only to be here now."

Jean Cocteau: For Mon Premier Voyage, his trip around the world, eighty days in 1934. He had taken up the challenge of the Paris-Soir newspaper to duplicate the Jules Verne trip, and he succeeded, though unlike Verne's, his book is thin, patchy, and thrown together.

Bruce Chatwin in the Australian Outback: Nine weeks, for The Songlines, though he rattled around Sydney and Brisbane for four months.

George Gissing: For his travel book On the Ionian Sea (1901), two months in 1897. The book, well observed and diligent, is about the neglected south of Italy. But poor Gissing was a tormented man, with a weakness for drunken prostitutes, whom he tried to save — in the case of Nell, by stealing (and doing time for it) to support her. A key to his need for travel was a remark he made of himself: "I carry a desert with me."

Shiva Naipaul in Africa: For North of South: An African Journey, two months. At the end of this provocative book, published in 1979, Shiva Naipaul (brother of V. S.) concludes that the states of independent black East and Central Africa are just as miserable and unjust as (then white-dominated) South Africa.

Eric Newby in Nuristan: For the trip recorded in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), one month to get there and one month of hiking.

Toward the end of the trip, Newby and Hugh Carless encountered the explorer Wilfred Thesiger sauntering down a path on rope-soled shoes with some local guides. That evening, over a chicken dinner, Thesiger held court in the fading light.

"England's going to pot," said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. "Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas — wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, twenty guineas apiece, absolute rubbish."

He began to tell me about his Arabs.

"I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing." I asked him about surgery. "I take off fingers and there's a lot of surgery to be done; they're frightened of their own doctors because they're not clean."

"Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?"

"Hundreds of them," he said dreamily, for it was very late. "Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.

"Let's turn in," he said.

The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our airbeds. "God, you must be a couple of pansies," said Thesiger.

Peter Matthiessen in Nepal: For The Snow Leopard, two months in 1973 (see Chapter 13, "It Is Solved by Walking").

Jack London slumming in London, 1902: Seven weeks after arriving in England, Jack London had not only lived in, wandered around, and made notes about the poverty-stricken East End of London, but had also finished his account of the experience, The People of the Abyss (1903), a book of travel, socialist polemic, and farce, with a profusion of Cockney accents. London approached the experience as a travel writer rather than a muckraker, writing in his preface, "I went down into the underworld of London with an attitude of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer."

Henry David Thoreau in Maine: Six or seven weeks. Between 1846 and 1857 Thoreau took three trips, of a few weeks apiece, to climb Mount Katahdin, to experience the wilderness, to learn about Indian life and language, and to gather information about the flora and fauna. He wrote three magazine articles for and gave lectures on the trips, and these pieces form the basis of his posthumous work The Maine Woods.

Graham Greene in Mexico: Six weeks, for The Lawless Roads (1939), and at the end of the trip he came to detest Mexico and Mexicans: "How one begins to hate these people — the intense slowness of that monolithic black-clothed old woman with the grey straggly hair… the hideous inexpressiveness of brown eyes… They just sit about."

Herman Melville in the Marquesas: One month, though he claimed it was four months, in the Typee Valley. En route to the Marquesas, in Honolulu, Melville was horrified by the behavior of the missionaries:

Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!

— Typee (1844)

Some years later, he also traveled to Europe and the Holy Land. He wrote a mystical poem about the experience, as well as a diary in which he noted the behavior of guides in Jerusalem, where he spent eighteen days:

Talk of the Guides: "Here is the stone Christ leaned against, & here is the English Hotel. Yonder is the arch where Christ was shown to the people, & just by that open window is sold the best coffee in Jerusalem."

— Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1856–57)

Elias Canetti in Marrakesh: A month or so in 1954, when he joined some friends who were making a film in Marrakesh. He tagged along, immersed himself in the city, and made notes. He did not publish his book Die Stimmen von Marrakesch until 1967 (translated as The Voices of Marrakesh), because he thought that what he had to say about Morocco, and travel, was trivial. But the slim book is evocative, persuasive, and wise. For example, noticing a gathering of blind beggars chanting, and studying them, he reflects, "Traveling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travelers are heartless."

Thoreau on Cape Cod: A little over three weeks, but in two trips, one in 1849, the other in 1855. Cape Cod, his account of the trip up "the bare and bended arm" of the Cape, from Sandwich to Provincetown, was published after his death, in 1865. Lines from the first chapter ("The Shipwreck") were appropriated and cannibalized by Robert Lowell for his poem "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket," and chapter 5, "The Wellfleet Oysterman," contains the first mention in print of broccoli being grown in the United States.

Graham Greene in Liberia: Twenty-three days. Greene's book Journey Without Maps (1936) is an ingeniously worked-up account of only a little over three weeks in the Liberian bush by an absolute beginner in Africa. Greene admits this early on: "I had never been out of Europe before; I was a complete amateur at travel in Africa." Amazingly, he brought his young female cousin Barbara along for company. "You poor innocents!" a stranger cried at them in Freetown. He didn't know the half of it.