The Tao of Travel

Timor: There is liberated, independent, and chaotic East Timor and the Indonesian province of West Timor. I want to see them both, go from one to the other, talk to people, eat their fermented rice and steamed fish, go bird watching.

Angola: The Portuguese landed in Angola in 1575, colonized it, converted some people, plundered it for minerals—diamonds in particular—settled the coast, and ignored the hinterland. The Chokwe people in the interior, who now have their own political party, are among Africa's finest artists, carvers, and dancers. For almost thirty years Angola was engaged in a civil war, but now it is rebuilding, and with its oil reserves it has the money to be independent and prosperous. I would like to see the country before prosperity takes hold.

New Britain Island: A large island off Papua New Guinea, with a small population of indigenous people, secret societies, rare birds, and balmy weather. And if that doesn't work out, I'd travel in the area, to Manus Island (written about by Margaret Mead) and New Ireland.

Sakhalin: I could just make it out, gray and flat, over the windswept channel, from the northernmost port in Japan, Wakkanai. I could have taken a ferry, but I had to travel south, so I filed this away in my mind as a place I wished to see. Once a prison colony, Sakhalin was visited in 1890 and written about by Chekhov. What's the attraction for me? The challenge of bleakness, no city to speak of, hardy people, and a railway.

The Darien Gap: I have traveled around but not overland through this section of jungle that lies between Panama and Colombia. The road is not reliable, and the fact that it is a geographical bottleneck, not to say a barrier, makes it inviting as a place in which I would happily disappear.

The Swat Valley: Once, long ago in Peshawar, I met some locals—tribals—who offered to take me upcountry into Swat, and to see the surrounding area—Taxila and ruined Buddhist monasteries, which comprised ancient Gandhara and its Hellenic art. I said, "Some other time." Now it is the haunt of the Taliban, but perhaps one day...

The American South: I have had the merest glimpse, a long drive around the entire Gulf Coast, from Florida to New Orleans. But that glimpse, and the people I met, made me want to take a trip of six months or so, in rural Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, through Tennessee and the Carolinas—off the highways, into the pinewoods, down the red clay roads.

26. Five Travel Epiphanies

NOW AND THEN IN TRAVEL, SOMETHING UNexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler. Burton traveled to Mecca in disguise, considering it a lark, but when at last he approached the Kaaba this skeptic was profoundly moved. It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected. The discovery of an unanticipated pleasure can be life-changing. ¶ Here are five epiphanies that I have experienced in travel, unforgettable to me, and for that reason they have helped to guide me.

One

I WAS IN Palermo and had spent the last of my money on a ticket to New York aboard the Queen Frederica. This was in September 1963; I was going into the Peace Corps, training for a post in Africa. The farewell party my Italian friends gave me on the night of departure went on so long that when we got to the port, a Sicilian band was playing "Anchors Aweigh" and the Queen Frederica had just left the quayside. In that moment I lost all my vitality.

My friends bought me an air ticket to Naples so that I could catch up to the ship there the next day. Just before I boarded the plane, an airline official said I had not paid my departure tax. I told him I had no money. A man behind me in a brown suit and brown Borsalino said, "Here. You need some money?" and handed me twenty dollars.

That solved the problem. I said, "I'd like to pay you back."

The man shrugged. He said, "I'll probably see you again. The world's a small place."

Two

FOR THREE DAYS in August 1970 I had been on a small cargo vessel, the MV Keningau, which sailed from Singapore to North Borneo. I was going there to climb Mount Kinabalu. While aboard, I read and played cards, always the same game, with a Malay planter and a Eurasian woman who was traveling with her two children. The ship had an open steerage deck, where about a hundred passengers slept in hammocks.

It was the monsoon season. I cursed the rain, the heat, the ridiculous card games. One day the Malayan said, "The wife of one of my men had a baby last night." He explained that the rubber tappers were in steerage and that some had wives.