An existential challenge of travel writing

One parallel between travelling and drug taking, which I failed to catalogue in my thesis, is their respective literature’s failure rates. Regardless of whether we have just taken our first tab of LSD, or had our first Roman holiday, experiences that changed our lives are likely to appear trite and empty to others. It takes an incredible author indeed to deliver a travelogue that doesn’t come across as self-absorbed. Recounting our adventures – be they experienced in our head or on horseback - without sending our audience to sleep is equally difficult.


(For instance, I can sit in the departure lounge at Tullamarine waiting for my Thai Air flight to Bangkok and admiring the giant windowpanes, and their beautiful beams of light. I can try to capture the peace and relief of this place where the only thing left in getting to our destination is actually take the flight there. I could describe the child receiving a basic vocabulary lesson from his Southeast Asian mother, or the belly button of the attractive hippy doing a yoga routine in the afternoon light. Yet to anyone not about to take a holiday, this place is probably as romantic as a hospital Emergency Room waiting room. The exception, I think, is children, who are more often appreciative of the extraordinary. Like when eating in flight meal - this quasi space food, come jail food, come Jetsons food is actually cool because we are also eating it thousands of kilometres above, say, the Fricking Ocean!)

Maybe that is not true, however. The best travel writers I can think of - Donald Richie, Bill Bryson, and Alex Kerr to name a few - are deeply preoccupied with their own travel experiences. Richie inflicts us with the unfolding drama of his crumbling marriage in The Inland Sea, Bryson with his obesity while trekking the Appalachian Trail and Kerr’s disappointment in Japan’s fall from grace is palpable. These are not accounts of travels where the destination is in the forefront, unlike Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium and John Pilger’s Hidden Agendas, which are awesome. Yet while Imperium is a deeply personal memoir-travelogue, it does not normally come to mind when I think of travel writing. Rather, it is in a different category – one that we could possibly call ‘World writing’.

When we talk about travel writing, we really do seem to be focusing on the subject, much more than the object. Yet good travel writing can’t just be a matter of depicting oneself as a traveller who is worth emulating. I really don’t want to be a Japanese cinema buff with his marriage on the rocks such as Richie, or an overweight American like Byrson, or in love with a country that’s slowly destroying all that is beautiful about itself, as is Kerr.

Something else is happening that allows the above travelogues to be self-absorbed and yet still fraking good, and I think that ‘something’ is authenticity. Earnestness might be nauseating, but genuineness, combined with great writing, is indeed sexy.

Image by retro traveler