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

A self-described "old guy from the road," he has had the longest, hardest, most successful career as a foreign correspondent of any I know. Fluent in Spanish, he was head of the AP bureau in Buenos Aires during a turbulent time there. He covered the Bangladesh war, and Southeast Asia, while he was based in Singapore. He was for a time editor in chief of the International Herald Tribune, and for many years was a special correspondent based in Paris. On his first day in Paris he interviewed President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, speaking in fluent French. He has been to virtually every country I can name, and many I have only trailed my fingers upon in atlases.

In addition, Mort has done what many journalists promise they will do but seldom succeed at — write books. His Olives: History of a Noble Fruit won the James Beard Award, and his Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light was a bestseller. He has also written books on journalism, ecology, and Africa, as well as (when he was living on a houseboat in Paris) a travel book, The Secret Life of the Seine. I asked him to provide me with some rules of the road that have served him well in over forty years of writing in distant places.

Always arrive at roadblocks before noon, because in the afternoon the soldiers manning them are invariably drunk and abusive.

Learn French and Spanish, and then some other foreign languages. And learn to say, "Don't shoot, I'm a reporter," in at least a dozen. This might help but is no guarantee of your safety.

Take lots of notes and reread them as soon as possible, before they're lost beyond any deciphering. Or maybe that's just me. Recorders are tiny and reliable now; carry one, and you'll be amazed at what you thought you didn't miss.

If you are left-handed, learn to eat with your right in Islamic and Hindu countries, especially when gathered around a common platter. The left hand is for postprandial hygiene, and you may lose it if you thrust it into someone's lunch.

Carry lots of cash, dollars and euros, but keep it somewhere sneak thieves, bandits, and customs officials are not likely to look. They know about socks and money belts. Get a tailor to sew secret pockets in pant legs or jackets.

It is often insulting to refuse someone's food or water. It can also be seriously painful to accept. If the proffered comestible is merely disgusting, suck it up; if not, find some tactful excuse not to partake. Do not make a face or say, "Eeeyeuw. "

Despite certain novelists' do-it-the-hard-way approach, try to get a visa and cross at border posts. If you are a reporter or a spy or have overriding reasons to skip formalities, use your judgment. Just remember that some countries hang people.

Put together a medical kit, including a range of antibiotics, field dressings, and antiseptics. Take lots of Lomotil or Imodium; few miseries compete with a long plane or bus ride, rebellious bowels, and no WC.

Think carefully about your kit. Binoculars can be handy, but they suggest to authorities that you might be up to no good. Don't wear military khaki, designer camo, or anything bright that prevents your blending in. And forget weapons. You are unlikely to shoot your way out of trouble, especially the trouble you face when armed dudes find you are packing.

On arriving in any distant place, the first thing you should do is learn the quickest way out — times and frequency of buses, trains, or planes. You have to know in advance how to leave.

Travel of Wisdom claude LÉVI-STRAUSS

Lévi-Strauss memorably opened his travel book, Tristes Tropiques, with the line "I hate traveling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions." (An early translation of the book, with a variation of this opening, is A World on the Wane.) He was trained as a philosopher but was one of the great theorists of anthropology and linguistics, an explainer of mythologies, and a describer of structuralism. He began his travels in Brazil, made journeys in India and Pakistan, and taught in the United States. He was a member of the Académie Française and lived to over a hundred (he died in 2009). The following are excerpts from Tristes Tropiques.

***

Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Each impression can be defined only by being jointly related to these three axes, and since space is in itself three-dimensional, five axes are necessary if we are to have an adequate representation of any journey.

***

There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit.

***

Perhaps, then, this was what traveling was, an exploration of the deserts of my mind rather than those surrounding me.

UNWELCOMING PLACES ARE A GIFT TO THE traveling writer. They have always been so, an early example being Ibn Battuta's arrival in Tunis in 1325, at the beginning of his global wandering. He "wept bitterly" because he met with utter indifference: "not a soul greeted me and no one there was known to me." The winter darkness and killing cold of Cherry-Garrard's Antarctica; the cannibals, disease, and general hostility in Stanley's Congo; the devout Muslims tormenting Charles Doughty with howls of "Nasrani!" ("Christian!") in Arabia Deserta — these inhospitable situations gave us great books. Heartwarming interludes, lovable locals, and delicious meals have informed the most tedious travel accounts — the blissful vacation is desirable but not a fit subject for a book.

The early travelers in Africa always kept in mind that the cannibal was a better subject than the missionary. Even the high-minded Mary Kingsley knew that, and spent much more time writing about (and exaggerating) the anthropophagous Fon people in Gabon than the pleasures of her botanizing of the jungle, which (so she said) was the whole point of her West African trip. You don't want to hear about the traveler's fun; what keeps you reading is the traveler's misery, outrage, and near-death experience. Either that or a well-phrased dismissal, as when the English traveler Peter Fleming took a close look at São Paulo and wrote, "São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away."

"Looking for Trouble" might be the subtitle of the most readable, most memorable travel books. When Redmond O'Hanlon published In Trouble Again, my hand leaped to the shelf. No Mercy promised more horror, and another delightful read. So I begin with him.

Making a Deal with the Chief of Boha

In his right hand [the Chief] gripped a spear against the inside of his right thigh, its end on the ground and its winged blade high above his head. His left hand lay on his left thigh, and from his right shoulder there hung a large liana-twine bag full, I presumed, of the royal fetishes…

Twelve spearmen stood at intervals in a circle before him, enclosing a line of three chairs; an old man in a brown shirt, torn gray trousers and red plastic sandals, standing on the Chief's left, tilted his spear towards us and then at the waiting seats…

The Chief inclined his head to his left: the old man, his porte-parole, his word carrier, bent down until his right ear was close to the royal lips; the Chief spoke softly. The audience over, the old man straightened his back, held his spear upright, strode into the center of the circle, filled his lungs, and sang out a speech in Bomitaba…