“Tao” is a Chinese word meaning “path” or “way,” so “The Tao of Travel” is intended as a guidebook, reading list and a reminiscence. “The Tao of Travel” is woven with excerpts from the author’s own work and from travelers, both familiar and unexpected.
Theroux who celebrates 50 years of wandering the globe, acknowledges that travel has changed, in speed and efficiency, and that most of the world is now connected and known. Indeed, some of the selections quoted are dated and reflect by gone times, but they can still be used as historical documents. However, Theroux denounces the “conceit of Internet-inspired omniscience,” which assumes that there is no longer the need to travel physically when virtual traveling is possible on the Web.
The opening chapter familiarizes us with different aspects of traveling. I like the way Paul Bowles explains the difference between a tourist and a traveler in “The Sheltering Sky” (1949):
“Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.”
Theroux is partial about railways, his favorite mode of transport that enables one to write with ease as well as eat, sleep or walk around.
“A train journey is travel; everything else, planes especially, is transfer, your journey begins when the plane lands,” he writes in “The Great Railway Bazaar.”
Dervla Murphy, an amazing adventurer and travel writer born in Ireland in 1931 where she still lives, prefers riding a bicycle. However, when it comes to long treks far from roads and towns, she suggests buying a pack animal. Murphy traveled across Ethiopia on a mule, disguised as a man, and describes this fascinating trip in her book, “In Ethiopia with a Mule” (1968).
A decade later, when she was in Baltistan, she bought a retired polo pony to carry her six-year-old daughter and the camping gear and supplies, including two sacks of flour, because during winter in the Karakoram, villagers have no spare food. In Peru, she also bought another mule to carry her then nine-year-old daughter from Cajamarca to Cuzco.
“It’s important to travel light. At least 75 percent of the equipment sold nowadays in camping shops, such as travel clotheslines, roll-up camping mats and lightweight hair dryers, is superfluous. My primary basics, although it depends on the journey, are a lightweight tent, a sleeping bag suitable for the country’s climate and a portable stove,” writes Murphy. She also advises travelers not to use mobile phones, laptops and iPods, but to be entertained by immediate stimuli, what she calls: “the tangible world around you.”
“Increasingly in hostels and guesthouses, one sees ‘independent’ travelers eagerly settling down in front of computers instead of conversing with fellow travelers. They seem only partially ‘abroad,” unable to cut their links with home.”
Some travelers spend little time in one place and are nevertheless able to write in length about it. How many people have dreamed of visiting Burma after reading Kipling’s regal poem about Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder out er China ‘crost the bay!
Yet, Kipling never went to Mandalay and spent only a few hours in Rangoon! And, who hasn’t enjoyed the description of the African jungle while reading the “Tarzan” books? Yet, the author Edgar Rice Burroughs never visited Africa. He is even known to have said: “I can write better about places I’ve never seen than those I have.”
Theroux acknowledges that the future of the travel book might very well be the travel blog, especially when describing a feat-in-progress like Jessica Watson, the youngest to sail around the world nonstop, alone and unassisted. The 16-year-old sailor shared her successful experience, in real time, on her blog, which attracted well over a thousand replies after each entry. During her eventful 24,000-mile trip, which lasted seven months, she faced six knockdowns (the mast underwater), 35-foot waves, 70-knot winds and engine failure, but Watson was always in touch with the people following her progress. When she returned home, she was greeted by tens of thousands of people, including the prime minister who hailed 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,” writes Theroux. He also remarks that the tone of her blog was “so sunny” and such an arduous feat, which can best be achieved by someone with a positive frame of mind.
Wilfred Thesiger, considered to have been the last real explorer, finds a well-deserved place in this Tao of Travel. “Arabian Sands,” Thesiger’s account of the crossing of the Empty Quarter on a camel, is a superb travelogue and a masterpiece of the genre. He suffered many ordeals like starvation, but when he describes his hunger, he strikes the right tone and the narrative is so poignantly human:
“I had almost persuaded myself that I was conditioned to starvation, indifferent to it. After all, I had been hungry for weeks…Certainly I thought and talked incessantly of food, but as a prisoner talks of freedom, for I realized that the joints of meat, the piles of rice, and the bowls of steaming gravy which tantalized me could have no reality outside my mind… For the first day my hunger was only a more insistent feeling of familiar emptiness; something 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…” writes Thesiger.
“The Tao of Travel” draws a multifaceted profile of travelers throughout the ages. It is also a source of inspiration, a call to seek and enjoy the beauty of our planet, and most of all, Theroux’s ultimate attempt to embody the essence of travel.
• Leave home
• Go alone
• Travel light
• Bring a map
• Go by land
• Walk across a national frontier
• Keep a journal
• Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in
• If you must bring a cell phone avoid using it
• Make a friend
