Reading the trail

It isn't for nothing that the word "travel" used to mean "to toil, labor" circa 1300. If you're on my side of the fence, you will perhaps agree that it still is a laborious undertaking. With the supossed luxury of chartered flights and cruises aside, which shows itself to me only in travel magazines if you want to know, covering tracks of land via the great unwashed route is the real way to do it.

Imagine getting on a Sahara Desert train that is usually reserved for smokestack products. Insanely difficult, but poetic. All great travel writers fancy about lighting out for the territory ahead ala Huckleberry Finn. They once dreamed of being in a traveling circus I suspect. Mark Twain, for example. And, let me see, that guy who had a habit of strutting around with a cane. And that other guy. I don't remember.

A bright night sky is poetry. Or the stirring dust on account of the dew lifting up one late morning. But, at the flip side of these images, the bright night sky you see from the deck of a ship is also a herald of a storm. And the stirring dust, of losing your breakfast one very late morning. The trail ceases to be poetry, but a book that you ought to read for a guide.

A lot of bad professions has been made illustrious by good advertising. Being a travel writer is one of them. Tim Lefell, book author and editor of PerceptiveTravel.com, wrote about the myths of being a travel writer.

It is, as you might say, the unvarnished truth of the profession. I wish I had read it before it came to me to be one. If I had known that I would someday take to traveling stoop-headed from some witty observations, I should have opted to be a village idiot instead and not worry about details.