JOURNEY'S END

“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers…”

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

I suppose every young writer’s aspirations include traveling and getting paid to write about it. In my case, a freshman encounter with Crime and Punishment kindled a more quixotic desire: to write novels that laid bare the human soul. My stint as a travel writer would come, but later. 

By then, I’d done a lot of traveling on my own dime, or a publisher’s dime in the service of fiction. Of course novels employ observation, description, landscape, and much of the best travel writing can be found in them, beginning with Don Quijote. These skills involve study and practice. As one example among others, while living and teaching in Japan for a couple of years in my twenties, I’d take a notebook to the Kyoto Zoo and render the animals in words, much the way an artist might employ a sketchbook.

My novels tended to be full of travels, so it was odd, perhaps, that the book of mine that turned me into a “travel writer” was a memoir about arrival, finding a home in another place. As the place was in another country, this must have marked it as “travel.”

Its success afforded a break from the struggles that attend fiction. Travel magazines sent me to countries I was happy to write about: Morocco, Myanmar, Vietnam, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico. It was nice to speak on the page in my own voice. I taught for several years at a travel writer’s conference. I wrote a memoir of journeys around Mexico. Readings, tours, reviews, interviews.  

What remains most vivid to me about those travel writing years, though, is an episode that occurred near their end. 

A 27-hour, 1,000 mile bus ride up the Chilean coast from the capital, Santiago, had landed me in San Pedro de Atacama, a small oasis town in the middle of vast desert and salt flats. It was already after dark, and tired, sore and hungry, I wandered the town’s several main blocks looking for a place to eat. 

I passed modern bars and restaurants with large screen TV’s. Sade and Lenny Kravitz pulsed out of big speakers. Menus were written in Spanish and English. Blinking signs for Heiniken, Amstel, Corona revealed mochileros, backpackers, from around the world in black jeans, tank tops, tattoos, sitting at tables and bars. The discomfort of the familiar began to seep in. It seemed I’d landed in some global watering hole. 

Failing to find any place offering regional or Chilean food, I chose one of the  contemporary restaurants. Only after I’d ordered did it occur to me that it was the same meal I’d eaten at a restaurant in California a week earlier, the night before departing on this journey. Hunkered over my arugula salad, fettuccini alfredo, and vino tinto, I realized I was in a travel corridor. I could have been in Berkeley, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Los Angeles. The end of my trip mirrored and recapitulated its beginning. 

On the way to LAX, I’d seen a billboard showing a man floating in a rubber raft in a hotel swimming pool, a cell phone to his ear. It said, “With AT&T, you’re never out of touch.” But what if you wanted to be out of touch? Getting lost was becoming near impossible. There was no longer a faraway place. You had a better chance of encountering the exotic in an ethnic neighborhood other than your own in the town where you lived. McLuhan’ś global village was reality now, but it looked less like a village than a mall. I was on a trip to nowhere. 

(Note: A Google search today tells me that there are 576 Airbnb listings in San Pedro de Atacama, population 4,000.)

Sunk in my thoughts about this, I wondered too if elective travel, journeys for the sake of writing about them, hadn’t become gratuitous when countless numbers of migrants were forced into perilous journeys to escape persecution or poverty. While I traveled south to write appreciatively of what I saw, tens of thousands were driven north from their homes to brave hunger, thirst, drowning or execution. These were today’s adventurers, not the mochileros. 

Yet my young travels, incited by books, had meant so much, had in effect formed me. Writers who traveled brought fresh perspectives, news of the greater world, antidotes to provincialism. Marco Polo’s Asia, DeTocqueville’s America, Jean Rhys’s Paris. Ultimately, as the writer Pico Iyer has noted, we travel in search of ourselves. In the Atacama desert that night, something had changed. 

Several months later, the editor of a major travel magazine invited me to write an article on the burgeoning Mexican resort area south of Cancun, newly dubbed the Riviera Maya. I turned her down. After that, we lost interest in each other, and me in “travel writing”. Gradually I reentered the wilds of fiction, where you’ll often find me these days. 

This isn’t to suggest that, if offered the chance to fly to, say, Paramaribo and write about it, I’d refuse.