Traveler or Tourist

Library Notes
Rebecca Hyde

            Are you a traveler or are you a tourist?  Paul Theroux, author of “The Pillars of Hercules” and other travel books, is a committed traveler.  His trip around the coast of the Mediterranean by land and sea (never, never by air), resembles more the voyage of Odysseus, buffeted from shore to shore, rather than the measured progress of a modern-day traveler following an itinerary, with ticket and reservations in hand (and choices at a minimum).  Theroux’s travel plan is kept simple:  begin the journey at Gibraltar, stay as close to the coastline as possible, and end up in Morocco, at Ceuta, at the southern Pillar of Hercules.  His mode of transportation depends on what is available (train, bus, ferry, car, boat), and the circumstances:  an American traveling alone through sometimes “rough” country, geographically or politically.  As a Syrian in the Aleppo bazaar put it:  the “best” way to Latakia?  Did he mean the quickest, safest, most comfortable, or the cheapest? 

            Theroux is interested in confronting both his and other people’s expectations and then discovering the reality of a country.  His description is the truth as he experiences it.  It is surprising that most famous monuments along this well-traveled shoreline are given short shrift (the “theme park culture” of Greece, “that land of preposterous myths and sensational litter”).  Surprising but logical.  For Theroux, the setting matters less than the experience, just as the arrival matters less than the journey.  Place becomes a backdrop for the dramatic or the ordinary:  for example, his description of the vandalism of Albania by its people, or the tattered laundry hanging from the nave of a Crusader church in Tartus. 

            Another surprise occurs in the middle of the book, not quite the midpoint of Theroux’s travels.  H e needs an “antidote” to Albania and the tourists on Corfu.  He takes a break and joins a luxury cruise from Nice to Istanbul – a first-time experience for Theroux but not without literary precedent.  Evelyn Waugh, who hated foreign travel, was offered a free cruise.  His account was published in 1930, titled “Labels:  A Mediterranean Journal,” a parody of the Grand Tour.  Theroux takes up that book and others to point out the characteristics of the good travel book:  “The fairest way of judging travel books is by their truth and their wit.”