Musings on Travel
“ABROAD
Abroad is where we tourists spend,
In divers unalluring ways,
The brief occasional week-end,
Or annual Easter holidays;
And earn the (not ill-founded) charge
Of being lunatics at large.
Abroad, we lose our self-respect;
Wear whiskers; let our teeth protrude;
Consider any garb correct,
And no display of temper rude;
Descending, when we cross the foam,
To depths we dare not plumb at home.
(Small wonder that the natives gaze,
With hostile eyes, at foreign freaks,
Who patronise their Passion-plays,
In lemon-coloured chessboard breeks;
An op’ra-glass about each neck,
And on each head a cap of check.)
Abroad, where needy younger sons,
When void the parent’s treasure-chest,
Take refuge from insistent duns,
At urgent relatives’ request;
To live upon their slender wits,
Or sums some maiden-aunt remits.
Abroad, whence (with a wisdom rare)
Regardless of nostalgic pains,
The weary New York millionaire
Retires with his oil-gotten gains,
And learns how deep a pleasure ‘tis
To found our Public Libraries.
For ours is the primeval clan,
From which all lesser lights descend;
Is Crockett not our countryman?
And call we not Corelli friend?
Our brotherhood has bred the brain
Whose offspring bear the brand of Caine.
Tho’ nowadays we seldom hear
Miss Proctor, who mislaid a chord,
Or Tennyson, the poet peer,
Who came into the garden, Mord;
Tho’ Burns be dead, and Keats unread,
We have a prophet still in Stead.
And so we stare, with nose in air;
And speak in condescending tone,
Of foreigners whose climes compare
So favourably with our own;
And aliens we cannot applaud
Who call themselves At Home Abroad!
”
Why travel? It’s in our DNA!
“Keep moving! Steam, or Gas, or Stage,
Hold, cabin, steerage, hencoop’s cage.
Tour, Journey, Voyage, Lounge,
Ride, Walk, Skim, Sketch,
Excursion, Travel-talk
For move you must!
’Tis now the rage,
The law and fashion of the Age. ”
The word travel derives from the French word travail - labor, pain, childbirth. Travel can be heavenly or hellish. It often involves risks of personal security or health, and the spectre of fear, isolation, homesickness, loneliness, and physical discomfort. Yet as we all know, the worst trips often make the best stories. Some of the greatest travel tales in history are stories of triumph over adversity and hardship by travelers imbued with stupendous courage, perseverance and endurance. And a sense of humour helps too.
The reasons we travel run the gamut from A to Z, from an Addiction to movement, new sights, sounds, tastes, and altered states of consciousness, to a craving for regaining that Zest for life. We travel for emotional and intellectual stimulation, to escape responsibilities, to reinvent ourselves, for emotional growth and healing, for self discovery, for self indulgence, for spiritual exploration and even exile.
Travel alters our state of mind. Travel makes us vulnerable and more open to people and experiences. Travel makes us feel attuned to the phenomenon of Coincidence, Serendipity, The All, or whatever you may call It. Most importantly, travel changes our perception of our own lives and our place in this world, and connects us to other human beings and their cultural histories. “Don’t go to discover the world—go to discover yourself,” suggests writer Susan Parker. And as the Scottish naturalist and vagabond John Muir wrote, We all travel the Milky Way together. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
What Travel Can Do
*Alter our state of mind *Shake up our perceptions and beliefs *Make us vulnerable and dependent therefore more open to people and experiences *Slow down or speed up Time, forcing us to recalibrate our sense of time to be in harmony with the place/experience *Change our sense of self as we take on new roles; develop confidence *Make us may feel more connected or more isolated than usual *Make us feel attuned to the phenomenon of Coincidence, Serendipity, God or whatever you may call it *Change our perception of our own lives.
“As we pack our travel wardrobe, we pack a new attitude, one more open, more vulnerable, more willing to be touched by who and what we see. Romance is originally a word that meant a story, a tale. We want our travels to have a plot, to mean something when we come home. We want travel to make a heroine or hero of us, to change us, and the best travel does.”
“The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. ”
“
One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”
“Loneliness is an essential ingredient for good traveling; it pushes you to take risks you would never dare at home. It’s when you haven’t spoken to a soul for days, when your whole being feels possessed by the rage for company, that even the withdrawn social coward feels an invigorating rush of desperate courage—Jonathan ”
Thoughts on Good Travel Writing
“Great travel writing has to transport you to wherever the writer is; has to bring it to life all around you — its sounds, tastes, textures and scents as well as its appearance. Often it will bring some of the people in that place to lif too, with dialogue and description. But beyond these, great travel writing must also be informed with passion and perspective, must get beneath the surface of the place to touch and reveal its spirit and soul. Such writing must intimately and profoundly involve the writer, must record the writer’s own engagement with a place. The writer must grapple with it, get inside it and then reflect on that encounter, put it all in some kind of larger perspective — so that we come away from the work with an enhanced sense of both who we are and what our planet is really all about. ”
“The ideal travel book should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.”
“The reader of a good travel book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to descriptions of scenery and so forth, but to an interior. A sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that outer one...the ideal book of this kind offer us, indeed, a triple opportunity of exploration—abroad, into the authors brain, and into our own. The writer should therefore possess a brain worth exploring; some philosophy of life...and the courage to proclaim it and put it to the test; he must be naieve and profound, both child and sage. ”
“The ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.. Successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is about on the other. That is, the particular and the universal....If a traveller doesnt visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it. The autobiographical narrative at the heart of a travel book will use many devices of fiction, which is why a travel diary, whose sequential entries are innocent of whats coming next, is less interesting than a full-fledged travel book, which can create suspense and generate irony by devices of concealment and foreshadowing. ”
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself voluntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the read of every funeral I meet —then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. ”
WRITERS ON THE EXPERIENCE OF LEAVING HOME...
“Traveling makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
“ Loneliness is an essential ingredient for good travelling; it pushes you to take risks you would never dare at home. Its when you havent spoken to a soul for days, when your whole being feels possessed by the rage for company, that even the withdrawn social coward feels an invigoration rush of desperate courage. ”
“Humor is the traveller’s first line of defense. Travel without humor is like sex without love. You can do it, but whats the point, really?”
““Of course, all journeys have their serendipity, their unrepeatable moments, so we don’t really know what to expect as raisins in the cake. That is, if we assume there’s a cake to begin with. And the raisins can as often prove to be more like icing as they can to be tooth-cracking seeds.””
“That which does not kill us, not only makes us stronger, but makes for the best storytelling. ”
“For those of us who love to travel, every trip is a small romance. It begins with the seduction of seeing ourselves in a new way in a foreign place. We know in our bones that when we stand hidden by sago palms near a glistening bank of the Amazon, crocodiles lurking below with golden eyes, we will be slimmer, stronger, surer and more captivating than when we stand at the office water cooler brushing aside plastic ivy from a cubicle divider... As we pack our travel wardrobe, we pack a new attitude, one more open, more vulnerable, more willing to be touched by who and what we see...Romance is originally a word that meant a story, a tale. We want our travels to have a plot, to mean something when we come home. We want travel to make a heroine or hero of us, to change us, and the best travel does.”
“Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers and travel writers seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns... All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time....The closest one could come to the experience of travel in the old sense today would be to drive in an aged automobile with doubtful tires through Roumania or Afghanistan without hotel reservations and to get by on terrible French.” ”
“ Travel breaks through the crust of old experience and reawakens us to the joys, mysteries, and miracles of everyday life. We see new or long-forgotten glimpses of ourselves in the eyes of strangers met along the way; we find new connections with our own history as we marvel at the creations of people who lived hundreds or thousands of years before us; we reach a deeper understanding of ourselves and others as we encounter cultures that approach life from perspectives far different from our own.”
“The strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There is less risk at home in making a jackass of yourselfyou know the rules. A journey can be either your death or your transformation. ”
“ABROAD
Abroad is where we tourists spend,
In divers unalluring ways,
The brief occasional week-end,
Or annual Easter holidays;
And earn the (not ill-founded) charge
Of being lunatics at large.
Abroad, we lose our self-respect;
Wear whiskers; let our teeth protrude;
Consider any garb correct,
And no display of temper rude;
Descending, when we cross the foam,
To depths we dare not plumb at home.
(Small wonder that the natives gaze,
With hostile eyes, at foreign freaks,
Who patronise their Passion-plays,
In lemon-coloured chessboard breeks;
An op’ra-glass about each neck,
And on each head a cap of check.)
Abroad, where needy younger sons,
When void the parent’s treasure-chest,
Take refuge from insistent duns,
At urgent relatives’ request;
To live upon their slender wits,
Or sums some maiden-aunt remits.
Abroad, whence (with a wisdom rare)
Regardless of nostalgic pains,
The weary New York millionaire
Retires with his oil-gotten gains,
And learns how deep a pleasure ‘tis
To found our Public Libraries.
For ours is the primeval clan,
From which all lesser lights descend;
Is Crockett not our countryman?
And call we not Corelli friend?
Our brotherhood has bred the brain
Whose offspring bear the brand of Caine.
Tho’ nowadays we seldom hear
Miss Proctor, who mislaid a chord,
Or Tennyson, the poet peer,
Who came into the garden,
Mord;Tho’ Burns be dead, and Keats unread,
We have a prophet still in Stead.
And so we stare, with nose in air;
And speak in condescending tone,
Of foreigners whose climes compare
So favourably with our own;
And aliens we cannot applaud
Who call themselves
At Home Abroad!”
“Life has always been about motion. Survival started it all off, but, those of us who have moved beyond food and shelter, feed on observations and images. For us, stability is static. Motion is life. ”
“Celebrating the planet means embracing the heavenly and the harrowing: the important thing is to travel with open eyes and with a large heart and a large mind.”
“Real travellers love things to go wrong. Why else would anyone go to India or Peru in the first place, except for dysentery? The only question is whether it will be bacillary or amoebic...The object of travel for many great writers from Mark Twain to Graham Greene to Paul Theroux is to get yourself in trouble so you have something to write about.”
“Jeffrey Kottler in his book How Travel Experiences Provide Ideal Opportunities for Change suggests...
Nomadism is in our genes, our collective unconscious. A destination is simply a stopping place to immerse yourself in the experimental process of questioning yourself. Memories of the perfect beach will fade. Souvenir tee-shirts will wear out. But you will never forget the stories you have heard from people with such different lives than your own. Unlike at home, during travel, the only place you are supposed to be is where you are. There is an honor associated with being lost as a traveller.
Kottler gives examples of great travellers and their motives for travelling:
EXILE — Lawrence of Arabia
HEROIC — Charles Lindberg/Robert Perry
ADVENTURE — Edmund Hillary
ANTHROPOLOGICAL — Margaret Mead
SPIRITUAL — Buddha
RETREAT — Henry David Thoreau
CONQUEST — Napoleon, Alexander the Great
EXPLORATION — James Cook/Lewis & Clark
SCIENTIFIC — Charles Darwin
LITERARY — Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
COMMERCIAL — Marco Polo
”