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

And then, on a ship from Hong Kong, the tone of the book rises to a new register: "Charlie Chaplin is on board. It is a staggering piece of news. Later on, Chaplin was to say, 'The real function of a person's work is to make it possible for friends like ourselves to cut out preliminaries. We have always known each other.'" Cocteau had never met Chaplin before, but he is dazzled, and after this encounter the book catches fire — not as a travel book but as the account of a new friendship between two stage-struck and bedazzled celebrities, both highly creative and eccentric — and libidinous (Chaplin was traveling with Paulette Goddard). It so happened that Chaplin and Cocteau were exactly the same age, born in 1889 and forty-seven at that point. Chaplin had just made Modern Times, and as a composer (he wrote the song "Smile," for example) he was just as versatile as Cocteau.

They meet often on the ship, drink together, talk often (with Khill translating for Cocteau), appraise Honolulu and San Francisco together, and when Cocteau arrives in Los Angeles, Chaplin puts him in touch with the film world's luminaries, and Cocteau is soon dropping the names King Vidor, Marlene Dietrich, and Gary Cooper. Cocteau won the bet, arriving back in Paris in eighty days. My Journey is a patchy and unsatisfying book, but a glimpse into the hectic life of this ball of fire.

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Wife

AUTHOR OF Tristes Tropiques, one of the great books of travel in the (at the time) hardly known parts of Brazil in the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss studied remote and isolated people. And for 362 pages of this book, one is astonished by his serenity, his resourcefulness, and his capacity to deal with the rigors of jungle travel. And then, on page 363, discussing an infectious eye disease, which caused temporary blindness among the Nambikwara people, he writes, "The disease spread to our group; the first person to catch it was my wife who had taken part in all my expeditions so far." Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss had been with him every step of the way.

Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton

The eminent Victorian Galton (1822–1911) had a consuming interest in everything on earth. His bestseller The Art of Travel (1855) was just one of his many books. A noted scientist ("polymath" is usually attached to his name), he was an inventor, a meteorologist, and an early student of anthropology, psychology, fingerprinting, and human intelligence. His wrote extensively on the subject of heredity, and it is probably his association with the pseudoscience of eugenics (he coined the word) that dimmed his reputation and made him seem a dangerous crank. ¶ As his book shows, Galton was widely read in the travel literature of his time, citing Mungo Park, Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and Samuel Baker on African exploration; Elisha Kane on the Arctic; Leichhardt on Australia; and Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. He mentions his cousin Charles Darwin when discussing the use of animal bones as fuel when firewood is scarce. Along with this extensive reading, in his twenties and early thirties he traveled all over — to Egypt, Turkey, down the Nile, through the Middle East, and just before writing this book, he ranged over what is now Namibia, making maps of the interior. ¶ The Art of Travel is exhaustive on the subject of old-fashioned exploration, and full of tips, such as this: "It is a great mistake to suppose that savages will give their labour or cattle in return for anything that is bright or new: they have their real wants and their fashions as much as we have." The book is also useful as a reference and collection of curiosa, such as how to bivouac on snow and how to patch a water bag. Always scrupulous with details, Galton advises on the best way to roll up shirtsleeves so they won't fall down: "the sleeves must be rolled up inwards, towards the arm, and not the reverse way."

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Qualifications for a Traveller. — If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable, then — travel by all means. If, in addition to these qualifications, you have scientific taste and knowledge, I believe that no career, in time of peace, can offer to you more advantages than that of a traveller. If you have not independent means, you may still turn travelling to excellent account; for experience shows it often leads to promotion, nay, some men support themselves by travel. They explore pasture land in Australia, they hunt for ivory in Africa, they collect specimens of natural history for sale, or they wander as artists.

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Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travellers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, "it is the nose that gives speed to the hound."

Tedious journeys are apt to make companions irritable one to another; but under hard circumstances, a traveller does his duty best who doubles his kindliness of manner to those about him, and takes harsh words gently, and without retort. He should make it a point of duty to do so. It is at those times very superfluous to show too much punctiliousness about keeping up one's dignity, and so forth; since the difficulty lies not in taking up quarrels, but in avoiding them.

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Advantages of Travel. — It is no slight advantage to a young man, to have the opportunity for distinction which travel affords. If he plans his journey among scenes and places likely to interest the stay-at-home public, he will probably achieve a reputation that might well be envied by wiser men who have not had his opportunities.

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."