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

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.

On the No Mercy quest to find a monstrous creature, perhaps a living dinosaur, Mokélé-mbembé, said to haunt a lake in a remote part of the Congolese jungle, O'Hanlon takes an American, Lary Schaefer, who sticks it out for most of the way but finally succumbs and heads home. These departures leave O'Hanlon with the guides and the bearers.

He thrives on conflict, adversity — much of the adversity in the form of insects. He suffers bad bouts of malaria and even a sort of dementia in places, and never fails to anatomize his ailments: "My penis had turned green. To the touch it felt like a hanging cluster of grapes. Swollen tapir ticks as big as the top of a thumb were feeding all down its stem. 'Keep calm,' I repeated out loud, and then I scrabbled at them" (In Trouble Again). And: "Ants, red-brown ants, about a quarter of an inch long, were running in manic bursts down my shirt-front, swinging left and right, conferring with their fellows, climbing over the hairs on my arms… a bagful of ants fastened on my genitals" (No Mercy).

Gusto is O'Hanlon's watchword, though his hearty tone masks a scientific mind, a deep seriousness, and (so he says) a depressive spirit. Perhaps his fear of gloom is another reason why he travels with others. His books are often compared with those of Victorian adventurers, but in fact they are distinctly modern, sometimes hallucinatory, and depending almost entirely for their effect on dialogue. O'Hanlon uses his traveling companions and local guides as foils, for humor, and to extend the narrative.

V. S. Naipaul and His Women

IN THE PROLOGUE to An Area of Darkness, Naipaul mentions difficulties on his arrival in India — paperwork, red tape, and heat — and then says, "My companion fainted." In the U.S. edition of the book, this was changed to "My wife fainted." Patricia Naipaul accompanied him throughout his travels in India, as well as for the three months he was resident in Kashmir, but she is mentioned only that one time. In A Turn in the South, Naipaul's mistress went with him and did all the driving and most of the arranging of hotels, as his biographer reported. This mistress also went with Naipaul on his Among the Believers tour through the Muslim world, though halfway through the Beyond Belief sequel she was replaced by Nadira Khannum Alvi, who later became his wife and uncredited traveling companion.

John McPhee, His Fellow Paddlers, and His Wife

IN SOME OF his travels, McPhee seems to be on his own — in Looking for a Ship (1990) he is the only landlubber on board. But halfway through Coming into the Country, about his travels throughout Alaska, he mentions his "increasing sense of entrapment," and then parenthetically, "(my wife was with me)." The earlier part of the book is full of his traveling companions, four or five of them.

Bruce Chatwin and Friends

CHATWIN, AS HIS letters show, was compulsively gregarious. His apparently solitary travels, for In Patagonia and The Songlines, were often made with a friend or a guide; other trips were made with a male lover or with his wife, Elizabeth. I once mentioned to him that in recounting travel experiences one had to come clean. Chatwin replied with a shrieking laugh, "I don't believe in coming clean!"

Colin McPhee and Jane

IN A House in Bali (1947), his enthusiastic account of living on that island, McPhee is a musicologist bewitched by Balinese music. He builds a house, makes friends, and studies the music. Many of his friends seem to be Balinese boys. In one passage, McPhee is swept into a turbulent stream. He is spotted by some boys onshore:

It was then that I noticed that one of the more boisterous [boys] threw himself into the water, swam to a boulder and jumped over to where I was struggling. He knew by heart every shallow and hollow in the river bed, for he quickly led me ashore… When we reached land, this naked dripping youngster and I stood facing one another. He was perhaps eight, unfed and skimpy, with eyes too large for his face… I offered him a cigarette, but he suddenly took fright and was off into the water before I could say a word.

The boy's name is Sampih. He becomes important to the narrative and to McPhee's life in Bali. McPhee adopts him and mentors him, though he does not mention that the whole time he spent there he was with his wife, Jane Belo, a lesbian, and an anthropologist, the author of a definitive study of hypnotic states in Bali (Trance in Bali), and that it was she who funded his trip.