The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux

Experienced travel writer, John Fox, profiles Paul Theroux’s The Tao of Travel - the first in Wilder’s new series of travel book reviews

In the Preface to his The Tao of Travel, Paul Theroux tells how as a child he often had the yearning to leave home and go far away. ‘Elsewhere was the place I wanted to be,’ he says. But he was too young, so all he could do was read about elsewheres and fantasise about his freedom.

Then, when he was old enough to go, the roads he travelled became the subjects of his own books. Eventually, he realised that the most passionate travellers have also been passionate readers and writers. He himself has gone on to write, along with his many novels, a dozen travels books, among them classics such as The Great Railway Bazaar, The Kingdom by the Sea, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. It would be hard to find a more suitable book to review for this start-up of Wilder’s Armchair Travel.

Theroux has also been an avid reader, and in The Tao of Travel he recognises many writers who have influenced him. It is a smorgasbord of travel writing – with tastings of about a hundred authors, including the famous such as Richard Burton, Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ernest Hemingway, as well as many lesser known ones. For him, it has been an opportunity to comment, reminisce and give some advice (often humorous) to other travellers and writers – and a reading list.

In the first chapter of the book, called ‘Travel in Brief’ there are a number of Theroux’s own one-liners:

From his Dark Star Safari, back-packing from Cairo to the Cape: ‘You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back’.  

From The Pillars of Hercules: ‘In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough’.

From The Happy Isles of Oceania, with his canoe: ‘It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell’.

It was not surprising that Theroux has a lead section on ‘The Pleasures of Railways’, given his classic books on train journeys. As he says, there is no literature on air travel, not much on bus journeys – and, understandably, tales of cruises focus most on interactions with the passengers.

The titles of some other chapters will give you an idea about the themes that the book explores: ‘Murphy’s Rules of Travel’, ‘Travellers on Their Own Books’, ‘The Things That They Carried’, ‘Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable’, ‘Writers and the Places They Never Visited’… But, mindful of Wilders’ own focus, let me pick some examples from ‘Travel as an Ordeal’.

Theroux says that travel books that recount ordeals are the sort that interest him most, because they test ‘the elemental human qualities needed for survival: determination, calmness, rationality, physical and mental strength’.

One of his choices is Geoffrey Moorhouse’s The Fearful Void, published in 1974 – the story of his crossing the Sahara from west to east – a four-thousand-mile journey from the Atlantic to the Nile. He did it, not because he would be the first person to do it, but ‘to explore the extremity of human experience’. Moorhouse did the journey with various nomad guides, though some of them fell away and others were found to be rogues. His sextant broke, he became seriously ill, and he almost died through thirst when they missed an oasis in a sandstorm.

Let me give you the short passage from Moorhouse’s book that Theroux chose. It was when, desperate for water, they came across a group of nomads, who offered Moorhouse a drink from a cooking pot:

‘There was all manner of filth floating on top of that water; morsels of rice from the dirty pot, strands of hair from the guerba (waterbag), fragments of dung from the bottom of some well. But the water itself was clear, and I could sense the coolness of it even as its level tipped in the cooking pot before touching my lips. It was the most wonderful thing that had happened to me in my life.’

Later in the book, Theroux disabuses me, and I guess some others, about an author I had believed in ever since I was a student of American literature many years ago. I had believed that Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was a kind of bible about simple living, self-reliance, being one with nature, and the value of solitude. I had believed that for a period of two years and two months, Thoreau had lived for most of the time alone in a log cabin by a lake. However, Theroux tells us that Thoreau’s cabin was only a mile and a half from his home in Concord, where his mother baked pies for him, did his laundry, and he went home to her most days.

This prompts me to end with Paul Theroux’s ‘The Essential Tao of Travel’:

1. Leave home

2. Go alone

3. Travel light

4. Bring a map

5. Go by land

6. Walk across a national frontier

7. Keep a journal

8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in

9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it

10. Make a friend