Paul Theroux
If you are a habitué of luxury cruises to the Caribbean or package tours to the Continent - or any other species of tourism likely to be suffered in brown Rockports or Tilley hat - you should approach Paul Theroux's lively and seditious reader, The Tao of Travel, with a buggy whip and a measure of protective caution.
Or not approach it at all. Because, unless you are a masochist, with your own sinister craving for the whip, you are not going to like it.
Nor should you. For it is not about industrial tourism, with its grotesque pathologies, its massive carbon and socio-ethnic footprint, its hourly tweets and Facebook updates.
It is instead about a simpler, more independent kind of travel: on sailboats, aboard trains, on bicycles, in canoes, on foot; across the desert, upriver, over the mountains, beneath the rain forest, through the shadowy backstreets.
"Luxury is the enemy of observation," Theroux writes, "a costly indulgence that spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet."
Having once walked from Thunder Bay to New York City, and having just returned from a rowing expedition across the Atlantic (a magnificent if harrowing endeavour during which 16 of us rowed day and night for 53 days and, otherwise, lived like gophers in a cabin the size of a Volkswagen van), I found the book everything I hoped for by way of perspective on my own choices as a traveller.
The work is not typical of Theroux's travel writing, but rather a cannibalization of the best passages and epigrams from his dozen travel books. From Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, for example: "Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home."
He presents nifty bits such as this alongside hundreds of absorbing extracts from a panoply of travel writers, among them Marco Polo, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, Jan Morris, Rebecca West, T.E. Lawrence, Sir Richard Burton, Bruce Chatwin, John Steinbeck, Freya Stark.
The book bristles with advice - most provocatively from the likes of Dervla Murphy, an oft-cited infidel who suggests that we "use guidebooks to identify the areas most frequented by foreigners - and then go in the opposite direction." She furthers this heresy with a diatribe against cellphones, laptops and iPods, at least for those on the road: "Increasingly, in hostels and guest houses one sees 'independent' travellers eagerly settling down in front of computers instead of conversing with fellow travellers. They seem only partially 'abroad,' unable to cut their links with home."
The book's most persistent and compelling themes are that we should travel light, travel simply, travel slowly - travel "mindfully," as the Taoists say. If possible, Theroux says, we should travel on trains, "where anything is possible: a great meal, a binge … an intrigue … strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories."
We should, we are informed, travel without companions: "The whole point of travelling," Theroux writes, "is to arrive alone, like a spectre, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis. … Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans is a liberating event. It can be a solemn occasion for discovery, or more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet."
Part of the book's appeal and breadth is that it is occasionally self-contradictory - as on the final pages, where Theroux presents a persuasive if intrinsic case for travelling with the ultimate in company, one's family: "We were driving in western Kenya under the high African sky. … The boys were idly quarrelling and fooling, laughing, distracting me. My wife had been travelling alone for three months in southern Africa and had recently returned. We were in an old rental car. Cattle dotted the hills, sheltering under the thorn trees. We were just a family on a trip, far away.
"But we were travelling toward Eldoret, into the past and deeper into Africa, into the future. We were together, the sun slanting into our eyes, everything on earth was green, and I thought: I never want this trip to end."
Which is as about as rosy a perspective on a journey as one is likely to have … and a languorous co-efficient of Kerouac's dictum that "the road is life," and that we had best keep moving, because there is invariably such a long way to go.
Charles Wilkins is at work on a book about his recent rowing adventure across the Atlantic Ocean..