Hard travellin'

Before the world was totally explored and Lonely Planet Guides written about every inch of it, the less adventurous had to satisfy their wanderlust by reading the accounts of real travellers, who often didn’t have a clue where they were going in the first place. I’m not talking here about the mythical or fictional – after all, what real-life adventure could compare with The Odyssey, Gulliver’s Travels or Journey to the Centre of the Earth? No, I mean the first-hand narratives of authentic, flesh-and-blood explorers. You'll find them in the 'Travel Literature' section of any modern bookshop. Here are just a few.

While there are many interesting travel records from the distant past, like those of St Brendan the Navigator (484-587) or the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta (1304-1389), the most famous is certainly Marco Polo's amazing Il milione (1298), a chronicle of the twenty-four years the young Pisan spent in China and his friendship with the powerful Kublai Khan. I’ve heard the book itself described as 'unreliable' (no doubt) and 'boring', which I disagree with totally (how could it be?). But then again, I've only read the abridged Penguin version. If you prefer, you can download the complete work for free from ManyBooks.  

Marco and one of the other Polos receiving a golden tablet from a very 
un-Chinese-looking Kublai Khan.

As a side note, Italo Calvino’s imaginative take on Marco's story, Invisible Cities (1972), has to be one of the most remarkable and beautiful books ever written!

Two Spaniards definitely deserve a mention. One is Bernal Díaz del Castillo, whose Conquista de la Nueva España (1568) is a gripping, often terrifying, account of what it was like to conquer the fearsome Aztec empire with a mere handful of men, horses and guns (well, they did have God on their side…). Whatever you think of Cortés and his gang of pious marauders (Díaz was one of his officers), you’ll have to admit they had some 'cojones bien puestos' to even attempt such a thing. 

Moctezuma welcoming Cortés at Tenochtitlan, before the party got out of hand.

The other is Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, possibly the most incompetent explorer of all time. Seeking gold and 'El Dorado', he landed in the Florida everglades in 1527 and promptly got lost for the next eight years. His Relación is a strange story indeed, in which he nearly dies repeatedly, survives by eating weeds and eventually becomes a kind of shamanic figure to the local Indians.

Cabeza de Vaca

Skipping ahead to 19th-century France and the Romantic taste for all things exotic, it seems to have been a fad among literary types to go off on long expeditions in hot countries and then publish their travel journals. Even the sedentary Flaubert would give it a try, but his Egyptian journals are not nearly as entertaining as the works of his more flamboyant countryman, Pierre Loti. Loti's book about Morocco, Au Maroc, is especially amusing, not least for the luxury in which he travelled. And, obviously, his wardrobe!  

Pierre Loti

As for shamen ('shawomen', in this case), let’s not forget Alexandra David-Neel. After an early career as an opera singer, the young Alexandra set off for Asia in the 1890s, wandered all over India and China and finally Tibet, where she became a respected Buddhist lama. She wrote many authoritative books on Buddhism and Tibetan culture, as well as volumes and volumes of journals and diaries, most notably My Journey to Lhasa (1927).

Alexandra David-Neel with her travelling companion, 

Lama Arthur Yongden, who she later adopted.

But even Alexandra's exploits seem small next to those of Sir Richard Burton. You may know him as the discoverer (with his pal Speke) of Lake Tanganyika, the source of the Nile. But that was only one of his accomplishments. Wikipedia describes him as 'geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat'. In 1853, disguised as an Arab and speaking fluent Arabic, he became one of the few non-Muslims ever to enter Mecca (he had himself circumcised and his skin darkened to play the part). He spoke more than thirty European and Asian languages and between adventures found time to translate the entire Arabian Nights, the Rubaiyat and the Kama Sutra into English. His own voluminous writing (also downloadable for free) is tedious to say the least, but the biography of him by Edward Rice is a real page-turner. Highly recommended!  

The scar on his cheek is from a Somali spear that went in one 

side of his face and out the other, captured in gruesome detail

in the 1990 film ‘Mountains of the Moon’.

The list of literary figures who also produced important travel memoirs includes Laurence Sterne (France, Italy), Charles Dickens (USA), Robert Louis Stevenson (the South Seas, North America, France), Mark Twain (Europe, USA), Herman Melville (Polynesia), Washington Irving (Spain), Henry James (Europe), D. H. Lawrence (Italy, Mexico), André Gide (Africa), Henry Miller (Greece), John Steinbeck (USA) and, of course, Paul Bowles (mostly Morocco).

Bowles' autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), is basically one long travelogue, dragging the reader through Europe, North Africa, Mexico, Sri Lanka, India, Japan and Southeast Asia. Rather exhausting, and not as compelling as his brilliant short stories.

Like I said, these are only a few. Let me know if you have any favourites of your own!

Magic Bob