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

For the first day my hunger was only a more insistent feeling of familiar emptiness; something which, like a toothache, I could partly overcome by an effort of will. I woke in the gray dawn craving for food, but by lying on my stomach and pressing down I could achieve a semblance of relief…

I faced another night, and the nights were worse than the days. Now I was cold and could not even sleep except in snatches…

In the morning I watched Mikhail turn the camels out to graze, and as they shuffled off, spared for a while from the toil which we imposed upon them, I found I could only think of them as food. I was glad when they were out of sight… I lay with my eyes shut, insisting to myself, "If I were in London I would give anything to be here"…No, I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless, and dependent upon cars to take me through Arabia. I clung desperately to this conviction. It seemed infinitely important. Even to doubt it was to admit defeat, to forswear everything to which I held.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World (1922)

CHERRY-GARRARD WAS ONLY twenty-three when he joined Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition in 1912. Scott and four of his men died on the way back from the pole. But before that, in the winter of 1912-13, Cherry-Garrard trudged through the polar darkness and cold (minus 79°F) to find a rookery of emperor penguins. This was "the Worst Journey." After returning to Britain Cherry-Garrard fought in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, where almost a million men died. But he said, "The Somme was a relative picnic compared to the Antarctic." He also said, "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion."

In this magnificent book, in a chapter titled "Never Again," he wrote:

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, "What's the use?" For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air (1999)

IN THE SPRING of 1996, Jon Krakauer, forty-two, on an assignment for Outside magazine, joined a guided expedition to Mount Everest. Just a story about guided climbing, but he found himself in the deadliest Everest season since climbing began there seventy-five years before, on Sagarmatha, Mother Goddess of the World.

Like all ordeal books, this one contains many lessons. The central issue is that you can buy your way up Everest, but to what extent is the hubristic motive in guided climbing an invitation to disaster? A person pays $70,000 (the going rate in 1996) to an expert, on the understanding that the client will successfully reach the summit. The client may be reasonably fit and experienced, or may be (as some clients Krakauer describes) first-timers at high altitudes, with a minimum of know-how. In the latter case, the client might be "short-roped" and yanked up the mountain, photographed at the top, and then dragged down.

Krakauer had dreamed from childhood of climbing Everest, yet was new to bottled oxygen, new to the Himalayas, and had never been anywhere near this height (29,000 feet). But he followed instructions, acclimatized himself, practiced for weeks in workout climbs from base camp, and finally made it to the top. During his descent, he suffered from hypoxia, hallucinations, extreme fatigue, and cold.

The story could have ended there. But there were many others on the mountain (he lists sixteen teams, two of them with more than twenty guides, clients, and sherpas), impatient to get to the top. So Krakauer's difficult but successful climb was only the beginning of the ordeal.

As Krakauer descended, twenty people lined up to climb the narrow ridges that led to the summit. Like Krakauer, they were worn down by oxygen deprivation, disorientation, hunger, thirst, and fatigue — and a storm was approaching. The climbers, undeterred, running late, pushed for the top; and in the thunderstorm that hit, accompanied by lightning, high winds, and blinding snow, chaos ensued. In the cold and the blowing snow, climbers got lost, fell, froze, hesitated, and panicked. Some guides stood by their clients, others abandoned them.

"With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," Rob Hall, one of the guides, had told his clients early on. "The trick is to get back down alive." Struggling to save a faltering client, Hall died on the mountain, and so did the client, and ten others.

Everest does not inspire prudent people to climb its flanks, Krakauer writes: "Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you are too driven, you're likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses."

William Burroughs: The Yage Letters (1963)

DOES THE BURROUGHS book belong here? I think so, as the narrative of a comic ordeal. These funny, informative, even scabrous letters, written to Allen Ginsberg, his lover at the time, were sent from various places in Latin America — Panama, Colombia, and Peru — and seem to be dispatches from a distant land. But I see them as mad memoranda, the ordeal of a man going in ever-narrowing circles. Burroughs hates travel, he hates foreigners, he mocks them unmercifully. What he craves is the ultimate high, and hearing it is to be found in the drug ayahuasca, a potion made from a jungle vine, he goes in search of it and relates his findings in these letters.

The landscape is insignificant, and the details of the trip — the people, the places — are almost beneath notice. He wants to try this drug; he is a man who needs a particular fix. If there were a progression, a sense of time, a mounting idea of discovery, an episodic enlightenment, this might rank as one of the great books about a quest. But it is deflationary and self-mocking, and he makes light of his ordeal.

"The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the Mid-West stateside woods in the summer," Burroughs writes in a typically dismissive way. And later, "Sure you think it's romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth."

Burroughs did find the ayahuasca, and he had his visions, but the rest of the time he was chasing boys, many of whom (he says) stole from him. He took it in stride. "Trouble is," he writes in this cheery anti-travel book, "I share with the late Father Flanagan — he of Boys Town — the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy."

MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT ENGLISH travelers. Why so many? Why do they tend to seek out tropical regions, or the Costa del Sol, or anywhere but England? Even a short residence in England is enough to convince anyone that it is the class system that drives the English to places where class doesn't matter (as long as you're a bwana or a sahib). And for those who have status, it is the dreary climate that does the rest, sending the English looking for better weather. Generally, the history of English travel is the history of people in search of sunshine. D. H. Lawrence was unequivocal, and so was Robert Louis Stevenson, but the rest tend not to admit it.