From the shelves of the Paco library

In the preface to his collection of travel writings, When The Going Was Good, Evelyn Waugh wrote (the year was 1945), “My own traveling days are over, and I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future…There is no room for tourists in a world of ‘displaced persons’. Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelops us) and feel the world wide open before us.”

The world has, indeed, become in so many ways a crazy quilt of armed camps and bureaucratic obstacles, and the advances in communications technology over the last seventy-five years have perhaps watered down much of the “otherness” that once distinguished the far places from the cozy hearths of our own homes. But we can still savor the recorded experiences of those curiosity seekers who gallivanted about the globe before the advent of monolithic ideologies - and (now) religious extremism – began to knit certain countries and regions into outposts of hostile paranoia, unappreciative of the vagabond spirit (and always on the lookout for western hostages).

Richard Halliburton, in 1925, published his first travel book, The Royal Road to Romance, a best-seller that recounted his submission to wanderlust, and a description of the adventures that befell him in the vast territories he ranged, from Europe to China, and many points in between. Halliburton was in his mid-twenties when he embarked on his travels, and the work contains both the virtues and flaws of a “young man’s” book; however, the boundless enthusiasm and iron determination found in these pages – in addition to the variety and interest of incidents - more than compensate for the occasionally purple prose.

Halliburton climbed the Matterhorn and Fujiyama, visited the hauntingly beautiful site of Ankgor Wat, slipped past the sentries at Gibraltar to take photos (strictly forbidden by the British) from the summit of the Rock, carried on a running battle with train conductors on three continents, and was robbed by pirates after a day of gambling at Macao (the gang having been led by a young woman). The stories are replete with the author’s self-deprecating acknowledgement of his many inadequacies, as indicated in this account of a panther hunt in India:

Several days after I reached Dhamtari, Doctor Lapp had left the mission on one of his rounds of medical inspection…That very twilight a panther dared to come within a stone’s throw of our house, slaughter a calf and drag it into a glade half a mile away…Here was my chance to assume the rôle of a great defender of the weak, even though I had never before wielded any firearm more deadly than a bow and arrow. Not knowing one from the other I chose Dr. Lapp’s elephant-gun, since it was the most ferocious-looking in the collection, and accompanied by the owner of the calf, about eight o’clock staggered under my weapon’s weight to a tree that stood some three hundred feet from the carcass…The cramped position in the tree was becoming unendurable, and I was just on the point of abandoning the hunt when the bearer seized my arm and stared into the jungle. A shapeless black form emerged, and slinking close to the ground moved serpent-like toward the bait…Once beside the body he paused to reconnoiter, and I fired. One could have heard the rifle’s roar in Calcutta. The recoil knocked me completely – along with the native – out of the tree. I thudded to the ground on one side, the bearer on another, and the elephant-gun on a third. In three terrified leaps the panther was back in the jungle. I had not killed him, and my self-condemnation knew no bounds. To investigate the possibility of a blood-trail the bearer and I walked over to the carcass, and found that instead of slaying the panther in the best accredited Daniel Boone style, I had shot a large hole straight through the ample side of the dead calf.

Halliburton wrote several more travel books and – sadly, but perhaps fittingly – vanished at sea during an attempt to sail a Chinese junk from Kowloon to San Francisco in 1939.