This article was written for an Open University Creative Writing course in May 2009.  It's one of my favourite 'essays' and I put a lot of thought into it.  Unfortunately I didn't answer the question posed - it was meant to be more of 'travel theatre' with characters interacting and the surroundings described.  It therefore scored the lowest marks of my submissions on this course!  Fortunately I made it up with other submissions, but the article itself is still a favourite of mine, and still represents what I think are my best thoughts on travel writing...

THE TROUBLE WITH TRAVEL WRITING

            Why do travel articles always start ‘In Medias Res’?  This technical writing term means ‘In the middle of the action’.  You know the sort of thing I mean:

‘I sat uncomfortably on the rocky ledge.  The snake fixed me with unblinking eyes.  I edged slowly away towards the far end of the ledge, a few feet above the rushing torrent of the Iguana Falls’.  Or:

‘My seven year old son danced for joy in the morning sunlight.  Careful, I warned him.  You may be the youngest person ever to climb Mount Dampprüf, but there’s still a ten thousand foot drop just behind that rock.’  These opening phrases represent what editors call ‘the Hook’, and draw you in to the story.  They persuade you to read on.  You are meant to feel a part of the ongoing action which is then revealed in the rest of the piece.  But the article itself may have little to do with travel, and everything to do with the personality of the writer.  It may be what one might call a ‘Gee Whiz’ article.  In this type of writing, one is invited to appreciate just how clever, how brave, how unusual is the feat which the writer has accomplished: ‘By Dog Cart Across the Sahara.’  This begs the question of what is Travel Writing?  Fascinating articles can be written about the most mundane of journeys.  In the ‘Just Back’ feature recently, I wrote about a difficult voyage in a small boat to Spitsbergen, but other winners have submitted remarkable and engrossing stories about a beach in East Sussex; and a trip on the ferry across the Mersey.  The quality of the writing is therefore important.  Sometimes we may find both quality of writing and an interesting place to read about.  Stevenson’s ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes’ is an example.  The Cevennes remains an unspoilt area of France, but in 1879 it was almost primeval.  Some travel writing therefore appeals precisely because of this.  We recognize that we can never make the journey again.  The beginning and the end of the itinerary is not only geographically distinct, it is separated from us by time, which is a gulf that we can never cross.  ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

If all that we want is the stimulus to visit a place however, then a picture alone will do.  The ‘One Minute Wonder’ feature stimulates the travel palate with a picture, followed by an explanatory paragraph.  This was the reason why I sailed in the Arctic.  My Spitsbergen trip came about after a previous voyage to the spectacular Lofoten Islands which lie north of the Arctic circle, off the western coast of Norway.  My only reason for the voyage was that I had once seen a picture of the Lofotens in my ‘O’ level geography textbook.  Sometimes, all we need is the practical information – how to get there; how much will it cost; are the natives friendly?  ‘Handbag or Moneybelt?’ as another Telegraph feature asks.  If so then Rough Guides, Travel Supplements, and their ilk do the job for us.  But often this will beg the question ‘Why do we travel?’

Have you ever been away from your home for a long time?  I mean weeks or preferably months.  And then returned?  Do you remember the feelings, the sensations?  Wasn’t there a freshness, a richness about that previously ordinary-seeming home?  I remember working away from England and returning in early summer after over a year.  The extraordinary greenness of everything.  From the air, as the plane descended over the Sussex countryside, the intensely thick whiteness of the May-laden hedgerows.  The feeling that one was in a far northern country when twilight was still luminous at an hour where my previous residence had long been pitch black, despite the summer heat.  To travel therefore enriches us twofold: we experience the new, the exotic, the unfamiliar, with its excitements and climate changes.  At the same time we are storing up the enchantment of once again being introduced to what has previously become over familiar, which is our own home.  This may be what T S Eliot meant when he wrote: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’  More prosaically, in Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame wrote with longing and affection for the Mole and his little home, which he found almost by accident after his exciting stay with the Water Rat.

Much of the best travel writing engages us with the people, the characters, who may in themselves make the journey worthwhile.  A book about climbing a mountain can only be a technical manual with some pretty photographs unless there is more than one climber.  In ‘Touching the Void’, Joe Simpson’s famous survival epic in the Andes of South America, the relationship with his climbing companion Simon Yates is perhaps the most important feature of the book.  No matter what travails Joe went through after he fell into the crevasse when Simon had to cut the rope that bound them together; somehow or other, if only because the author of the book was Joe, you knew that real tragedy, in the shape of his death, was not going to happen.  For me the highlight of the book was not Joe’s miraculous escape after landing on the snowbridge, or crawling over the rocks with a broken leg, but the events that happened before Simon cut the rope.  Surely the most exciting moment happened on the way up?  I know little about the technical aspects of climbing, but there is an episode in a whiteout (frightening enough already), where Joe realises that Simon has fallen through the cornice of snow on one side of an arête.  Joe’s survival depends on his literally throwing himself off the mountain, so that the rope which connects them will straddle the arête.  This appears in the text in a moment, providing a frisson of horror.  Of course, a moment later you realise that they are safe.  Because of the fact that neither can see the other, Joe has a 50:50 chance of making the correct decision as to which side of the ridge he should throw himself down!  This version of climber’s roulette is literally heart-stopping.  Neither did the twists in the relationship end with the end of the expedition.  In fact it might be said to have started from this point on.  When the climbing fraternity learned that Simon had saved his own life rather than allow the two of them to perish, he was pilloried.  Nowadays Simon Yates gives fascinating climbing lectures, with particularly stimulating images of the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, but everybody in the audience is of course waiting for his account of one of the most famous episodes in modern climbing and exploration.  His approach is direct and honest.  ‘I didn’t see what else I could do really,’ he says, in a somewhat deadpan style and accent reminiscent of Jasper Carrott. 

For some of us, T S Eliot’s assurance that returning to ‘know the place for the first time’ is not the be all and end all of travel.  Not all of us are content with staying where we are.  We are all journeying, and all seeking.  Many if not most of us are uncertain what it is we are seeking.  The human experience is an unfolding, continuously written book.  If there is no curiosity then every page would be predictable, dull, without leaven.  Our journey is as much spiritual as physical; philosophical as well as geographical.  In some different cultures we can find lessons in how to live and how to appreciate our lives, and nowhere is this as evident as in the examples of peoples who practice Buddhism.  Peter Matthiessen’s ‘The Snow Leopard’ represents the ultimate travel book for those whose journey is as much spiritual as physical.  For many, what we seek is an illusion, and we return to realise that what we have is as fine as anything that we have seen.  For Matthiessen, the snow leopard that he is seeking proves to be an illusion too.  He never finds one.  But his journey is an arduous one, full of pain, hunger, and discomfort.  It is a journey through the most remote parts of Nepal.  Although his aim is to find and to see a snow leopard, at the end of his journey, the fact that he has failed is unimportant.  In Joe Simpson’s most recent book, the fact that he has failed to climb the north face of the Eiger is unimportant too.  In both cases, what the authors find within themselves is the resolution of their travels.

In my case, my journey in Nepal was hardly to an unexplored area.  The Annapurna sanctuary is a Mecca for a few climbers and many trekkers.  To stand in front of the South face of this famous mountain (Annapurna I) is to remember the suffering of both the original French expedition of 1950, and the later ascent by Chris Bonington’s expedition in 1970, during which his friend Ian Clough died.  One feels humility, compassion, an almost overwhelming sorrow, and a sense of awe that, in front of you stands a wall of snow which comprises two north walls of the Eiger stacked together, with its base standing far higher than even the summit of the Eiger.  My journey was an arduous 5 days trekking from the base of the Modi Khola valley, a small victory for me, but nothing compared with the triumphs of serious mountaineers.  Like the London Marathon, although the winner will accomplish something nobody can emulate, all who participate can win, and win against themselves.  This journey simplifies one’s life.  The only goal is a physical one.  Everything: eating, sleeping, thought, discomfort, must be subjugated to achieving the goal.  Along the way, I learn from direct example, that our three companions, Khadka, Kes, and Buddha, have dedicated themselves to our achievement, and our achievement alone.  At seven in the morning, ice all around, Khadka appears in front of our unheated bunkhouse room in Chomrong, hoists half of our luggage on his back in his cane basket, supported by a headband and says ‘I go quick, get best room’, before he races off to the next teahouse up the punishingly steep paths.  As we ascend, one of the world’s most beautiful mountains, Machhapuchre (Nepali for Fish Tail), rises some 5000 metres above us, like a beacon, for ever leading us further up the valley.  Its twin summits, separated by a razor sharp ridge are holy and unclimbed.  After our three days of descent, at the bottom of the valley in Birethanti, some unseen hand has pulled a veil of cloud across the peaks above us.  Sitting on the verandah of our lodge is a fat lady who has decided that she cannot accompany the rest of her party up the valley.

‘My legs are killing me’ she confides.  Tired after our long trek, we heave the rucksacks around our shoulders to the ground.  Half confidentially, half knowingly, the fat lady inclines towards me.

‘You know,’ she says, ‘You can’t see it now but just behind that little cloud there is a very beautiful mountain called ‘the Fish Tail’.  A trek is never over until the fat lady sings.  I sink into my verandah chair.

‘Thank you,’ I whisper back.  ‘At least she came as far as Birethanti,’ I reflect.  The goal of that immaculate summit is just as unrealized for me as it is for her, but in Zen, it is merely a little further away.

Memories of Nepal will always return to me, and in this it is unlike some of my trips and voyages.  ‘Adventure is discomfort remembered in tranquillity,’ is a powerful stimulus to the memory.  The best of journeys take you from the familiar and comfortable, and will be remembered.  Good travel writing may not always lure you into visiting the place which is described, but it will give you a journey to remember, and in metaphysical terms, you will have travelled as a fellow passenger.

Word Count: 2035

Note:  Because this is a text presentation for publication, the usual referencing is not used in the text, but the references are easily identified from the list below.

COMMENTARY

Good travel writing has always fascinated me.  It probably stems from reading adventure books for boys, and the vicarious experience of the heroic explorers remains compelling.  I love the experience of travel, and for many years have dipped into travel supplements in the weekend papers.  When the Saturday (weekend) Telegraph Travel section announced a competition for travel writing I eagerly entered, but after two or three rejections, I began to look at my style of writing, and what it was that I really wanted to say.  I found that, in common with many of the articles within the supplement, there was a well tried formula, where the place or people described always began ‘in medias res’. (Neale, 2006).  Cunning phrases with allusions were used.  When I adopted this approach, and wrote about a voyage I made to Spitsbergen, I won immediately.  I felt that I had hit on a successful formula, but to some extent felt disgusted with myself for playing the game and tricking the reader into reading my piece.  Instead, I wondered what it was that was wrong with much of travel writing.  My editorial contact (Michael Kerr, Deputy Travel Editor) at the Telegraph agreed to look at another piece, and so I wrote the above piece, which is an honest view of what is important in travel writing.  Although I will be sending it to him, I am sure that it is far too honest to be published.  No editor wants to alienate his readership.  Along the way I looked at several other travel magazines, CondeNast Traveller, Wanderlust, and an Indian magazine called Outlook Traveller.  The reason for the latter was an experience I shared with an Indian journalist, Hari Menon, in a remote part of the Indian Himalaya, where he had been commissioned to write an article for the magazine.  Hari writes well, but his article is still formulaic, and full of exaggeration and hyperbole.  He knows that he has to engage his readers however, and his future as a freelance for the magazine depends ultimately on whether some readers take up the suggestion that the Kumaon Himalaya is worth a visit.

An account of travel is a small life story.  It has a beginning and an end.  Inasmuch as travel writing is autobiographical, the important point made by Neale (Neale, 2006) that ‘Your life story is as much about the people you meet as about you’ is one of the most vital and enjoyable aspects of a travel journal.  Indeed, Bill Bryson’s ‘Notes from a small island’ is memorable to me mainly for the beautifully realized (and funny) characters that he depicts along the way.  When reading work like this, the details of the travel seem immaterial.  But the experiences of travel are, by definition, novel, and it is this which must convince and entertain the reader, otherwise the narrative will fail.

Word Count: 477

REFERENCES

‘Adventure is discomfort remembered in tranquillity’.  I have been completely unable to track down this quotation.

Bryson, W (1996).  Notes from a small island.  London, Black Swan.

Eliot, TS  (2004 [1943]).  The Four Quartets: Little Gidding.  London, Faber & Faber.

Grahame, K (1956[1908]).  Dulce Domum, The Wind in the Willows.  London, Methuen.

Hartley, LP (2000 [1953]).  The Go-Between London, Penguin Classics.

McLeod, A (2009) Just back:  Daily Telegraph, 14 March.  Travel Supplement: T28.  (also available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-writing-competition/4979145/Just-back-To-Svalbard-on-stormy-seas.html  (accessed 9.5.09).

Matthiessen, P (1987[1978]).  The Snow Leopard.  London, Penguin Nature Classics.

Menon, H (2008).  Outlook Traveller, December.  Available at: http://www.shaktihimalaya.com/images/press/rare&indulge.pdf (accessed 12.05.09)

Neale, D (2006).  Structure.  In, Anderson L, ed.  Creative Writing.  A workbook with readings.  Milton Keynes, Open University, p146.

Neale, D (2006).  Life Characters.  In, Anderson L, ed.  Creative Writing.  A workbook with readings.  Milton Keynes, Open University, p343.

Simpson, J (1988).  Touching the void.  London, Jonathan Cape.

Simpson, J (2003[2002]).  The beckoning silence.  London, Vintage.

Stevenson, RL (1967[1879]).  Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.  London, Folio Society.