Travel Writers Need Compelling Reasons To Travel

Just think of the greatest adventurers who everBryson family returned from New Hampshire to
lived and the greatest journeys ever undertaken: theBritain, giving down under the thumbs down. Just too
Jews, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Charlesmany snakes per square kilometer I suppose.
Darwin come to mind. All of them had compellingNow we come to the sublime reasons for travel.
reasons for setting off on dangerous journeys intoThere are tales of pilgrimage, such as Shirley
the unknown. What they found (in their cases theMacLaine's account of her walk the length of the
Promised Land, China, America and evolutionSantiago de Compostela Camino in northern Spain,
respectively) soldered them into history and madethe ancient 500 mile pilgrimage route initiated by St
them famous, but also opened the world to travel asJames de Compostela ending at Santiago. 'Camino: a
never before.journey of the spirit' never reaches any conclusions
Travel writing ever since has echoed the odysseysand elicits no discernible greatness of spirit in the
of these great people. Writers still feel it incumbentwriter, but it surely gave Ms MacLaine fodder for a
on them to have some higher purpose to theirbestselling book in the bland genre of Californian
journeys beyond mere self-indulgence or curiosity. Onspiritualism.
the rare occasions when travel writers break this ruleIneffably more substantial is the marvelous book by
they tend to fall ill or become irredeemably crankyWilliam Dalrymple 'From the Holy Mountain' in which
when they sit down to put their experiences onthis handsome young Scot journeys to the places
paper.visited by John Moschos some 1500 hundred years
The range of reasons travel writers dream up tobefore. His beautiful journey through the dying
focus their journeys range from the absurd to theremnants of Byzantium in our own age (he traveled
sublime. Take that outstanding wordsmith Bill Bryson.in 1997) is an unforgettable book by a marvelously
This man literally thought up journeys he could take,intelligent Catholic probing the embers of Eastern
to create fodder for his witty irony and superbOrthodox religion.
humorous descriptions. A walk along the AppalachianBetween the absurd and the sublime reasons for
Trail with an old school friend (do you remembertravel lie many others. In 'African Rainbow' Lorenzo
Katz?) became much more than 'A Walk in theand Mirella Ricciardi traveled along the waterways in
Woods' as it was entitled. It was a humorous rambleAfrica, evidently searching for the ultimate noble
through the American nature tourist culture and asavage in the European mold. They never found him
lambasting of the authorities responsible for theor her but their book was published. It ends up being
national parks of the United States. It did not matteran uneasy journey of a couple to a continent they
that Bryson completed only a tiny part of the trail.didn't understand.
This incredibly long hike (Bryson spends a few pagesIn 'The Great Railway Bazaar' Paul Theroux travels on
embarrassing all the authorities who cannot agree onthe Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the
its exact length) served one purpose and oneGolden Arrow, the Mandalay Express, an odyssey on
purpose only; it gave Bryson something to writegreat trains from London through Europe and Asia,
about.across Siberia. And his eye misses nothing as he
Similarly Bryson's book about rural America entitleddescribes this travel mode of a bygone age and
'The Lost Continent' has a very thin basis to it:these out-of-the-way places, but I always feel that
Bryson vaguely travels the roads his parentsTheroux travels and writes under duress rather than
followed, when they took their children on madcapfrom compulsion, rather like Shiva Naipaul in 'North of
long haul treks across the United States to see theSouth'.
sights (and sites of famous battles and historicalNaipaul visited the insalubrious African countries:
occurrences) and generally scrounged their way alongZambia, Tanzania and Kenya, where Asians have
on a shoestring budget, to the mystification of thebeen personae non grata in the past, and in some
Bryson children. Again Bryson gets his teeth into aplaces still are, to find out what makes Africa tick. Of
subject without much justification. Not that he needscourse no one does know what makes Africa tick,
it, you understand.not even Naipaul.
Bryson made a career of taking whole continents andNever mind that these men seem to have been
wrapping them around his tongue, as in 'Down Under',uncomfortable about their journeys. Both are
his dry yet informative take on Australia. He wentrenowned travel writers, not least due to their
there because he had always wanted to see it and,dogged purposefulness. The point, it seems, is to
as the subtext suggests, he was looking for anhave some intention when moving across the
alternative place to live. He and his family had alreadylandscape. A traveler without intention is merely a
done England and New England. As it happened, thewanderer.