The Tao of Travel

Travel in dreams, for Freud, symbolized death. That the journey—an essay into the unknown—can be risky, even fatal, was a natural conclusion for Freud to reach, since he suffered from self-diagnosed Reiseangst, travel anxiety. He was so fearful of missing a train that he appeared at railway stations two hours ahead of time, and when the train appeared at the platform he usually panicked. He wrote in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,"Dying is replaced in dreams by departure, by a train journey."

This has not been my experience; I associate my happiest traveling days with sitting on trains. Some travel is more of a nuisance than a hardship, but travel is always a mental challenge, and even at its most difficult, travel can be an enlightenment.

The joy of travel, and reading about it, is the theme of this collection—and perhaps the misery too; but even remembered misery can produce lyrical nostalgia. As I was rereading some of the books quoted here I realized how dated they were, and how important as historical documents—the dramas as well as the romance of an earlier time. Yet a lot of the old-fangledness of travel ended very recently.

This book of insights, a distillation of travelers' visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others', is based on many decades of my reading travel books and traveling the earth. It is also intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical. In the spirit of Buddha's dictum "You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself," I hope that this collection shows, in its approaches to travel, ways of living and thinking too.

Abbreviations of Book Titles

GRB

The Great Railway Bazaar

OPE

The Old Patagonian Express

KBS

The Kingdom by the Sea

SWS

Sunrise with Seamonsters

RIR

Riding the Iron Rooster

TEE

To the Ends of the Earth

HIO

The Happy Isles of Oceania

POH

The Pillars of Hercules

FAF

Fresh Air Fiend

DSS

Dark Star Safari

GTES

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

WE

World's End

1. Travel in Brief

The Necessity to Move

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

—D. H. Lawrence,

Sea and Sardinia

(1921)

Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is "Out-sickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.

—Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen,

Hans Christian Andersen

(2005)

The Road Is Life

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

—Jack Kerouac,

On the Road

(1958)

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

—James Baldwin,

Go Tell It on the Mountain

(1953)

You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back.—

DSS

A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.—

POH

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.—

FAF