I've been reading a lot of travel literature recently. I've always had itchy feet and the next best thing to going on an another adventure is reading about someone else's. The thing is what to pick? There seem to be so many weird and wacky tales, with even stranger titles, of people heading off to one out of the way place or another, on a seemingly vast array of improbable and inconvenient modes of transport: "My journey into pathos: a trip up the Atlas Mountains, backwards, on a 1920s tricycle with no saddle." for example!
I prefer the old school though, when what's original is within the book and not on its cover. Bill Bryson for one; but that canny observer of the world's little quirks has long since stopped writing about his road trips and has begun to delve into everything else: history, science, Shakespeare and his own past; but I mean even older school than him.
Any aspiring Paul Theroux could certainly do a lot worse than to pick up 'A Broken Road', the recently assembled and published third set of memoirs of Patrick Leigh Fermour. Now, if you're looking for proper adventures on inconvenient modes of transport, try from Holland to Constantinople (it was written in the '30s) on foot, at eighteen years of age!
Though many of the references are antiquated and hard to place at times, it would be difficult to find personal, cultural, topographical or meteorological observations as lovingly and vividly portrayed - one description of a thunderstorm outside the Church of the Forty Martyr's, near Tirnovo, Bulgaria, verges on the four-dimensional.
PLF, as he is referred to, has a wonderful connection with what he writes about and whereas many authors of his time can be regarded as curt and concise in their writing, Leigh Fermour often wanders off on not insignificant tangents, rather like a favourite uncle or professor might do when recounting past adventures. One superbly vivid and emotional account of the possible reasons for falling out with a friend, is quite terrifically frustrating. But I want to go back still further.
"Never work with children or animals" is a piece of age worn lore bandied about by many actors and performances. One that may have been muttered by the lips of Robert Louis Stevenson as he prodded, goaded and cajoled his recalcitrant "she-ass" Modestine across the Cevennes. I should mention titles again here. RLS's "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes", is, to quote the Cuprenol, "exactly what is says on the tin".
Though he wrote this little travelogue over a century ago, Stevenson's account could be a model for all those who have come after him (though many could still learn from his lexical economy). He rejoices in the schadenfreude of his attempts to pack and encourage his walking companion; he opines on all around, often not seeming to enjoy what he's doing very much, to the point that you sometimes wonder why he bothered; but where and when he finds a chink of light, he glories in it. I read the chapter 'A Night among the pines' over porridge one morning and I left for school with a spring in my stride much as RLS must have done after the morning's "inaudible summons" from the "gentle touch of Nature" and as he left money in the grass for his "night's lodging."
It would be impossible, however, to write about travel journalism without a mention of the man on whose journeys we all embarked time and again over the last thirty years, Michael Palin (I am currently devouring his latest, 'Brazil'). While he doesn't draw such poetic pictures as Leigh Fermour, nor is as prosaically sanguine as Stevenson, Palin is the observer's observer.
Undoubtedly he has the bonus of having a photographer and a recording team in tow and producers to organise his itinerary - just so that he's always just in time for that quirky village festival or able to interview prominent poets, artists or political figures. Even so, it is doubtful that anyone could milk as much from such opportunities as Palin.
The gentleness with which he picks up the irony of a transvestite being allowed to hold office in Rio while anyone in shorts is not allowed into the same building is unique to him. As would be the sixth sense to check the skyline of said city and notice Christ Redentor looking down beatifically on a 'sex motel', or the wheelchair-bound old lady in white amongst the crowds at the LGBT parade.
Nor could anyone else make us feel as much of a part of it. We are left mouths agape, much as he is, when he's challenged to comment on contraception by a favela DJ . It's as if our muscles begin to ache, just as his were surely doing, as he lugs shellfish around a Salvadoran market with celebrity chef Dada and in his company we feel equally at home meeting graffiti artists, transvestite public officials, mayors and feisty jungle activists. RLS, in his prologue to 'Travels...' describes every book as "a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it." It feels like we've all been Michael's mates for years.
Discovering Patrick Leigh Fermour was a revelation and his words, together with those of Stevenson and Palin, are an education in how to bring the extraordinary outside world into people's lives. Their secret? Well, whenever he arrives at a new destination, Palin goes on a little amble of orientation, while both Leigh Fermour and Stevenson travelled on foot. On our own two legs we have the time to both observe and opine on what's around us. So, if you're planning to go to Hel (a peninsular in northern Poland) in a hand cart, or head down the proverbial creek without a paddle, stop what you're doing, get off you high horse and walk!
N.B. I am planning to practice what I preach and head off on the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail in the glorious Cevennes (minus donkey), in the Spring holiday, starting around 6th April. If any of you are free, I'd be glad of the company.
Bibliography:
'Brazil', Michael Palin (2013) Pheonix books.
'The Broken Road, The Iron Gates to Mount Athos', Patrick Leigh Fermour (2013) John Murray (Publishers)
'Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes' (1879, my edition published 2013) Printed in Germany by Amazon Distribution, Leipzig
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