Compass Points – Robert Stedman
I’ve often wondered how many books have come out of notes that travelers have written down? Writing about what you saw, felt and thought is a valuable way to record your travels, and keep your memories fresh. Making a record of your travels is a great idea.
THE ADVENTURES OF …
It happened this way with Mark Twain, the famous American humorist and author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While travelling on a liner from San Francisco to Honolulu, Twain kept a travel log that he sent back to his family. So impressed by his adventures, they gave it to the local newspaper. Readers liked what they read. Twain continued his journey and kept up his journal. From it came an American classic – Following the Equator. Twain became just as famous for his travel writing as he did for his fiction and humor.
One of the early European travelers in
Asia who wrote about her experiences, was an English lady, Isabella Bird. In 1879, she travelled by steamer from Japan to Hong Kong, Saigon, down to Singapore and then up the Malacca Strait to Penang. Her book, The Golden Chersones, is today a valuable documentary on life in China, Singapore and Malaysia over 100 years ago.
IT’S THE JOURNEY
Paul Theroux did not set out to make his mark as a travel writer, but circumstances made him so. In the early 1970s, frustrated by the lack of sales generated by his novels, Theroux took a train journey through Asia, which he chronicled. His editor got hold of the notes and published them as The Great Railway Bazaar. The book shot Theroux to fame and continues to sell 45 years later. Although his novels have done well, he is best known as a travel writer. Theroux maintains that,
“the journey not the arrival matters” and that “travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on.”
Keeping a journal requires no more than pen and paper. You can use a laptop, but nothing can beat a soft-cover notebook that you can bend or fold and stick into your pocket. It’s so much easier sitting in a coffee shop in say, Chiang Mai, with a notebook than with a laptop.
WRITTEN RECORD
Keeping a travel journal has real advantages. A few years after you return names and places start to elude you. But the written word will always be there to project the moment anew.
A great account of life in the South Pacific during the latter part of the 19th century comes In the South Seas, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island. Stevenson chartered a sailing schooner and spent several months cruising the South Pacific, looking for a place where he could live in peace and quiet and write. Stevenson sailed from Hawaii to the remote Marquesas Islands and then across the Pacific to Tahiti, Samoa and the Gilbert Islands. He settled in Apia, Western Samoa where he lived out his life and is buried.
AN INSIGHT
During the voyage Stevenson kept a journal, jotting down descriptions of the islands, conversations with the natives, local legends and superstitions. After his death, his journal was found and published by his widow. It’s a masterpiece of travel writing, yet Stevenson never intended to write a travel book.
The great British novelist, Somerset Maugham, gathered all his notes together after more than half a century of writing and published them as A Writer’s Notebook. The book gives an excellent insight on the author and his habits, including bits of information that were to form the plots for his novels. The book begins with random notes that he put on paper when he was18, years before he turned to writing as a profession.
LARGE WORKS
Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain began taking notes when he first entered politics. After his retirement he compiled the history of The Second World
War in six volumes. He certainly could not have achieved the feat had he not kept his own journal throughout the war.
So, take notes when you travel. Who knows, a day may come when your notes become literature.