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

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 time. 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."

THE NONTRAVELER 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 traveling — 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 traveled more than a hundred miles from his birthplace, Königs-berg (now Kaliningrad), where he died. Philip Larkin, who hardly stirred from his home in Hull on the English coast, 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 traveled 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 August, 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 skeptical 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 great fatigues I had lately undergone added to my distemper… My health 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 [edema], 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."