Richard Boyle on travel, travellers, tourists, and everything in between.
One of my favourite travel writers, who happens to belong to the Indian diaspora, is Oxford-born Pico Iyer, the son of Brahmin Raghavan N Iyer, a philosopher and theosophist, and the religious scholar Nandini Nanak Meht. I have met Pico twice – in 2006, when he came to Sri Lanka to write a feature on the country’s political situation for Time magazine, and in 2008, when we both participated at the Galle Literary Festival.
Pico has written a number of travel books, many of them concerning Southasia, including The Lady and the Monk (1992), Falling Off the Map (1994), Cuba and the Night Quartet (1995), Tropical Classical (1998), Global Soul (2000) – ‘an astonishing and amusing view of the globalisation of East and West, as the author beholds how cultures fuse without completely losing their identities’ – Video Night in Kathmandu (2001) – ‘on the often bizarre effects of Western influences on the Far East’ – Sushi in Bombay, Jetlag in LA (2002), and The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008).
Of all his writings, what captured my attention most was a perceptive quotation from his Foreword to Wanderlust (2000), a collection of travel writings: ‘We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.’
Another quotation that caught my eye was a comment on the difference between tourist and traveller: ‘Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveller”, perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home”, while a traveller is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo” – or Cuzco or Kathmandu. It’s all very much the same.’
These quotations inspired me to search for other quotable views on travel down the centuries. For instance, an early commentator on the subject was philosopher Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC, whose ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step’ has become a classic, and has even resulted in a modern rendering – ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance’ – by an unknown wit. Lao Tzu was also responsible for other pithy quotes such as ‘The further one goes the less one knows’ and ‘A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving’.
The Roman poet Horace, writing in the last century BC, had doubts about the value of tourism: ‘They change their clime, not their frame of mind, who rush across the sea.’ On the other hand, St Augustine of Hippo opined four centuries later: ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.’
Moving forward to the 17th century, Francis Bacon in his Essays explains the difference between young and old travellers: ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.’
The latter part of the 18th century was called the Age of Johnson, so it is not surprising that Samuel Johnson was responsible for several memorable travel quotes as reported by his biographer, James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson. One concerns the need for the traveller to be mentally well-prepared: ‘So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge’, and, ‘A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.’ However, my favourite Johnson quote – and the world’s it seems – is ‘Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see,’ which was written about the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
The 19th century was fertile. ‘It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,’ declared Henry David Thoreau in 1854, not realising that 150 years later, that’s exactly what some people would find worthwhile. Francis Kilvert, Welsh vicar and diarist, derided his countrymen (and some countrywomen too I suppose) when he wrote in 1870: ‘Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’
Robert Louis Stevenson confessed in Travels with a Donkey (1879): ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ However, Stevenson’s best-known quote is ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour’ from Virginibus Puerisque (1881).
The 20th century began to produce references with meaning for the contemporary traveller. For example, Noel Coward’s ‘But why, oh why, do the wrong people travel, when the right people stay at home?’ is a sentiment well understood today.
Since the 1960s, there has existed a belief that personal growth should ideally be gained in travel, but as George Moore comments in The Brook Kerith (1916), ‘A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it’.
‘Travel broadens the mind’ is a proverb dating from the early 20th century. GK Chesterton’s 1921 comment on it is a significant travel quote, too: ‘They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind.’
Katherine Mansfield revealed her need for ultimate planning when she wrote in her diary in 1922: ‘Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.’
Antoine de St Exupery’s ‘He who would travel happily must travel light’ rubs shoulders well with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Let your memory be your travel bag’. Henry Miller’s ‘One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things’ harmonises with Marin Buber’s ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’.
My penultimate reference, by Nancy Mitford from The Pursuit of Love (1945), is prejudiced and chauvinistic, so it must stand on its own: ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’
Which leaves me to reveal what I think is the most succinct travel reference of all time: ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’ Despite its currency, the origins of the phrase are uncertain. Possibly it was resurrected in modern times from Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (c.1440): ‘So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are.’ Perhaps it was engendered by the spirit of the Sixties. Carl Franz’s People’s Guide to Mexico (1972) contains the phrase, for instance.
— Richard Boyle is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian.
Kathmandu is half way between Delhi and Calcutta, and less than half way between Delhi and Dhaka. On this track, the Himalaya is seen as a faraway line of snow mountains. It is when you fly into Kathmandu or Paro airports that you dip into the mountains themselves, and the individual peaks loom large.