The best books on Long-Distance Journeys

You’ve selected five classic travel books about long-distance journeys. Why do you think narratives in this form are so effective?

There’s something of travel in everything we do—little and big—whether that is going to school, going to university, a relationship, or a walk to the park. These books encompass that, in a bigger way. In doing so they allow us to view these things that happen in our everyday at a distance. I think that’s why we are drawn to them—how, despite them taking place on top of Mount Everest, they might resonate with us as well.

Your first book, In Green, is an account of a very long journey on horseback. Does time spent in the saddle translate to time spent thinking and reflecting?

Lots of people assume that you must have a lot of time alone to think, but actually you have very little. All you’re thinking about is keeping your horse alive: Where’s water? Where’s grazing? Where can we sleep tonight? So, ironically, the busy-ness of every day and the simplicity of fulfilling basic needs take up too much of your mental space.

It’s only later, once the dust has settled, that you start to understand on an emotional level what has been happening to you. The extraordinary detachment from normal life allows us a new way to see things. A journey takes you somewhere, and you never quite come all the way back.

That’s an interesting way of putting it. Perhaps we could talk first about Alexandra David-Néel’s My Journey to Lhasa, which records her 1924 expedition to Tibet, a region that was difficult to access at that time.

Alexandra David-Néel was an incredible human being. She combined a real interest in academia and eastern religious teachings. She was born in Paris in 1868 to some quite austere parents. By the age of 15 she was already following anarchist practices. She learned Sanskrit early on, and by 21 had already converted to Buddhism. This would all come together in this particular journey to Tibet when she was 53.

She set off with her Tibetan adopted son. They were both dressed as pilgrims. He was allowed to be in Tibet, which had recently been granted independence from China. But absolutely no foreigners were allowed in whatsoever. She went incognito, undercover. So she was constantly under threat of being caught out. That is, in the narrative sense, what drives the story. She carries a pistol, a compass, and a few old spoons.

The end point is her reaching Lhasa, where she spends two months. It’s the capital of Tibet, and she was among the first Europeans to ever set foot there. What really struck me was her nonchalance. Her actual physical journey is extraordinary, and she combines huge intelligence and academic passion with a sense of rebellion.

She had a genuine interest. As a Buddhist, she really wanted to reach this place for a spiritual goal. And it was this enormous physical challenge. I found that combination—it being both an intellectual and spiritual goal—really compelling.

The writer Dan Richards often insists that “what’s bad in life is good for the book.” Do you think struggle can strengthen a travel book’s literary quality?

Yes, I think so. I mean, there’s a particular occasion when there’s a massive wipeout. She and her adopted son, Yongden, have gone the wrong way. He’s sprained his ankle and she has to find help. It’s very precarious, because they are so remote, it’s so cold, and she can’t let her identity be discovered. All together, this definitely enriches the story. But what’s so funny about her style is that she doesn’t draw attention to that. It’s just about getting through every day, and having this wonderful relationship with her adopted son and her own spirituality. That’s what’s important to her, and what is so strong about the book.

Next, you’ve elected to recommend Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was his follow-up to Cider With Rosie.

Yes. Cider With Rosie, for those who haven’t read it, is set in old-world Gloucestershire before the motor car. It’s definitely a lost time, sadly. That book is almost a historical artifact. What you do get in this book is the arrival of modernity into this very low-key village. This was obviously taking place all over rural England and beyond. It’s set in 1934, and, as we know, war is coming. But he doesn’t yet know this, and he feels like he has to make life happen.

So he leaves home in Gloucestershire and moves to London where he starts working on a building site, where he starts to learn a bit of Spanish because one of the other builders is Spanish. He learns the Spanish for ‘Will you give me a glass of water?’ and that’s enough for him to think, right, I’m off.

“It’s only later, once the dust has settled, that you start to understand on an emotional level what has been happening to you”

He’s got a bit of cash in his back pocket, and he effectively hitchhikes all the way to Galicia. He arrives there in 1935, then heads down to Zamora, then Toledo, and reaches the sea by September. He’s in Almuñécar in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War breaks out. A British destroyer arrives at Gibraltar, and he’s quite torn. He’s a Brit abroad and he is in danger, he should take the opportunity to go home. But he’s been searching for a story, for life on the road. He does go back to the UK, but then the rest of the book is about him trying to return to Spain—he makes his way back through down through France and through the Pyrenees, to fight.

The backdrop to all this, of course, is the violin. It’s his tool, a simple instrument with which he makes his way financially. It’s so easy to carry, and everyone understands the language of music. They invite him to all these wonderful places.

I always thought of my horse like that. You can’t put a horse on your back, but there’s a wonderful simplicity to it that people respond to.

You said that he was searching for something. Adventure, maybe. Does that tally with your own motivations?

Yes. One of the strange things about writing In Green was working out why I did it. I think that takes time to work out, unless you have an inciting incident in your life that forces you to change. You know—a breakup or a death, something that makes you want to move. I didn’t understand it at the time. After writing and editing the book, I realised I was desperately looking for a story or a purpose, a sense of belonging, because I had been living and working in London feeling very lost without admitting it. That was my motivation to make a story of my own, and that’s why I understand, in a distant way, what drove Laurie Lee.

He had no personal loss or tragedy to write of, he was a happy-go-lucky guy who felt pretty good about life. But he wanted to create something he could call his own. With his violin, he did that, and you get this wonderful journey, the kindness of strangers, this river-like walk that he did. He knitted these things together and you get a book of real discovery in the process.

This often arises as a theme of books about long journeys—the reliance on the goodwill of strangers.

You’re not alone. To think that you are alone is to detach yourself from your surroundings. It’s not a love of serendipity, really. I think what I love about long-distance journeys is that at some stage you will have to ask a stranger, and you are in their hands. Something in that interaction will fuel you. That’s a wonderful thing, because you eventually realise that all these strangers are potential friends, and you are never truly lost. There’s always someone who can point you somewhere or give you a glass of wine.

Maybe this brings us to your next book recommendation, Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia by Penelope Chetwode.

This is a longstanding personal favourite. It’s very simple, very candid, very humble. It’s a 51-year-old woman who, in 1961, sets out through rural Andalusia. Like Laurie Lee’s Gloucestershire, this is an Andalusia that doesn’t really exist any more in the same way. It’s very community-based, and all the villages are linked only by mule tracks. Yet everyone speaks the same language, in a broader social sense.

She’s a teacher, she knows what she wants, she’s very religious. She goes to church almost every single day, and she’s shocked by bad behaviour. It’s just so lovely. It’s so innocent, so fantastic. Compare it to all those epics, macho men going all over the place. Here, suddenly, you have this wonderful woman who finds a horse who also happens to be middle-aged, called La Marquesa—who she has happened to borrow from the Duke of Wellington, as you do—going all over this Don Quixote-like landscape.

What she wants is to write a story of her own, I think. Probably without realising it. It’s interesting how she decided to do it in solitude. And it’s her affinity with horses, and with God and Catholicism, that brought her to Spain. Not long after this journey, her marriage broke down, and I wonder if there was some kind of inner discovery, some new independence, because she proves to herself that she is extremely capable and an extraordinary horsewoman.

But it’s her humility that is so addictive to read. There’s no arrogance there at all. That can be quite rare in travel writing, especially at that time. The ego has a big role to play. But she’s so shy, which makes it accessible, but at the same time you know she knows what she’s doing and what she wants.

There was a moment not so long ago—maybe about ten years ago?—when travel writing seemed to go out of fashion. And I think that was a reaction to that macho aesthetic, the sense of one-man-against-the-world. But you write interestingly about moving “as a herd” with your animals and travelling partner. Was that an intentional reframing?

I think so. Also, it’s ridiculous to talk about one man’s journey, or even one woman’s journey, because you certainly rely on all the people who support you, whether that’s at home or whom you meet on the way, who grant you the ability to make it to the end. Without them you are nothing. In the past, it was the style to make it appear as one man’s victorious mission. But that’s a fallacy. And I find that, if you include all the other aspects of what makes up a person’s journey, it enriches the account. Because you realise these people are not semi-divine.

Although, admittedly, I’m about to lead us into discussion of a book that certainly fits into the solo expedition mould, Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way. Tell us about the journey that features in this book.

Yes. The extent to which you find solitude on a boat is almost unique, liking finding yourself in space.

In 1966 Sir Francis Chichester had circumnavigated the world, stopping in Australia. The Sunday Times got hold of that and decided to make it a competition: Who will make the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world by boat? There were boats from 32 feet to 47 feet long. Nine men began, only one actually finished the race, and some even died on the way. It’s a mad story, really well articulated in a book called A Voyage for Madmen.

But in this particular book, Moitessier is on this journey. He’s in first place. Everyone at home know the guys’ positions because they do radio updates. My father told me he was at home plotting the sailors’ points on a big world map. It’s a seven-month sail.

Tension is building back in the UK. Everyone is listening. Moitessier is coming near the end, back to Plymouth, where it began. Then he decides not to go to Plymouth and he keeps on going. And he keeps going for three months more, ending up on Tahiti, having gone one-and-a-half times around the world. His account is written up in The Long Way.

The actual winner of the race—because Moitessier didn’t go to the finish line—talks about this gruelling journey. But Moitessier’s account is a meditative experience in which he talks with porpoises and is guided by a seagull. He has a lot of wonderful realisations on the way. Hence him not reaching or finalising his journey in Plymouth, where he was about to get lots of money and become world famous. He thought: No, I don’t want to do it, because I want to “save my soul.” In the book he talks about how we have become our own slaves to society, and how we need to live in a more simple way. It’s a wonderful, meditative account of a mad, mad journey which is about the journey not the goal.

Yes, I suppose in any long-distance journey you have to balance the practical and logistical nature of the everyday with these greater spiritual or existential questions. This is very clear in your final book recommendation, which is Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which was published in 1978. It is, literally, a meditative book.

Yes, the mountains of the Himalayas form a similar backdrop to Moitessier’s oceans. It’s a similar metaphoric situation. And a writer’s dream. He’s going into the mountains, but also into himself.

This book is pretty iconic in the world of travel writing. You have the background of him having recently lost his wife to cancer. It wasn’t an easy relationship, but at the same time, he has lost the person he perhaps loved most in the world. That was his reason for going.

He’s also going because his friend George Schaller, the naturalist, wants to investigate the blue sheep that live in the Himalayas. But Matthiessen is basically going because he wants to think about his late wife and perhaps escape from that reality.

He also seeks the snow leopards. Before Matthiessen, the snow leopard had only been seen twice in this Dolpo region of the Tibetan plateau over the last 25 years. George Schaller was one of the guys who saw it.

In Matthiesson, a bit like Alexandra David-Neel, we have a writer who is very interested in eastern philosophical teaching. He was a Zen Buddhist, and wanted to visit the monastery at the Crystal Mountain. What you get is a real education in Buddhism, and without trying to spoil it for anyone else, it is a meditative journey on death, loss, suffering, healing, breathing, and the snow leopard itself which comes to represent a kind of harmony between what is real and what is not.

Matthiessen was in his forties when he was walking. It certainly weighed on him physically, you get a sense of that. But you get this release with every step he takes, a wonderful kind of cathartic digging. It’s not easy. You can tell it’s not easy. There are regrets, looking back at his late wife and how they treated each other. And he doesn’t get to see, in the physical sense, the snow leopard. But that is almost ,in a sense, what he needed.

There’s this line:

Have you seen the snow leopard?

No! Isn’t that wonderful?

And it’s that sense of release, of detaching from himself.

Perhaps it would be remiss not to mention that both Matthiessen and Moitessier left young children at home while they went on their journeys of self-discovery. Do you think journeys of this type are always a selfish endeavour?

For sure. It’s something I’ve thought about. What’s cool about The Snow Leopard is that he is quite honest about that. The Snow Leopard, I think, was a two month trip. Moitessier was away for ten months, which is slightly different. In Matthiessen’s case, I think you get the sense that he needed the isolation to grieve. Moitessier doesn’t mention his wife.

There’s a fascinating Mathiessen biography, True Nature, that will be out later this year. As a final question, we’ve seen how many of these books are as much spiritual quests as physical journeys. Is that true of all such expeditions, that they are always a proxy for something else?

That’s a really good question. I think spirituality is innate in the steps that you make. I think that moving, walking, travelling unpowered by motor creates some sense of connecting to ourselves and to the land or sea like nothing else. I think it conjures up something that we miss from the everyday. But I don’t think it has to be spiritual in nature necessarily. What you take from it, about yourself or about the world, can be spiritual if you want it to be.