Travelling vicariously during a period of self-isolation

With closed borders and self-isolation being the order of the day, the privileged among us can stay indoors and reflect on cancelled travel plans. One saving grace is the time to travel vicariously by reading accounts of other journeys.

The so-called golden age of travel writing is, of course, long gone. There’s no more of that “the natives were friendly, so we spent the night” stuff, thank goodness. Instead, there’s more sensitivity, personal confessions, a greater urge to understand locations on their own terms, and a propensity to define travel in different ways. Some new travelogues attest to just these tendencies.

Quite a few of them focus on Russia and its neighbouring countries. Rory Maclean’s Pravda Ha Ha, for example, deals with Putin country and places such as Estonia, Ukraine, and Hungary. Maclean’s atmospheric, sometimes overwrought prose can read like fiction through the filter of history – apt, because he finds that in Russia, “lies became the glue that held people together”. Many of his exploits have a tinge of the bizarre, such as when he meets Moscow’s “chicken tsar” and samples a hallucinogenic mushroom referred to as “Putin’s pecker”.

Personal impressions

Sara Wheeler takes a very different tack. Her Mud and Stars attempts to show how some of Russia’s most influential writers, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, represented their country in their time and in the present. Staying away from major cities, she sojourns across beet fields and the tundra, and into places such as Pushkin’s estate, Dostoevsky’s first house, and the remains of Tolstoy’s birthplace. In this way, she travels through Russia’s literal landscape to find its emotional counterpart, mixing mini-biographies with personal impressions and accounts of local families.

On other shores, as Brexit negotiations meandered towards an end, some writers from Britain looked wistfully at the Europe they had come to know and esteem over the years. In his Slow Trains to Venice, veteran Times writer Tom Chesshyre composes a love letter to the continent, chugging from Calais to Bruges to Bonn to Krakow and beyond, ending at La Serenissima, the stop-off on the southern route of the Orient Express.

“I wanted, with fresh eyes from my carriage, to see the continent that Churchill and our ancestors liberated,” he writes, with some insularity. “I wanted to get away from deliberations over ‘tariff-free zones’ and seemingly endless political rows about Britain's ‘departure’ from my destination. I wanted also, quite simply, to enjoy the ride.” He succeeded.

Nicholas Jubber’s Epic Continent looks at Europe in quite another light. He travels “in the shadow of Europe’s epic tales,” seeking inspiration in the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf and others. Starting in Greece (but of course), he crosses the Balkans, returns to Britain, visits Scandinavia, and ends in Iceland. He understands that “the stories joined together in so many surprising ways, linking so organically, that the ties between them were like roots criss-crossing under the trunks of a vast, intractable forest”. An insight that too few comprehend.

While Slow Trains to Venice continues the genteel tradition of languorous railway rides, other journeys aim for more. Monisha Rajesh’s Around the World in 80 Trains, a follow-up to her earlier Around India in 80 Trains, tells of a daunting seven-month, over 70,000-kilometre journey with her fiancé across Europe, Asia and the Americas. “Trains are rolling libraries of information,” she discovers, “and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales”.

As Paul Theroux put it years ago in The Great Railway Bazaar, “I sought trains; I found passengers”. In his new travelogue, On the Plain of Snakes, he instead gets behind the wheel of a battered Buick and goes beyond political populist rhetoric to drive along the US–Mexico border, and then into southern Mexican states such as Oaxaca and Chiapas. Somewhat mystifyingly, he refers to himself as “a shifty migrant”, but his worthy aim is to show that Americans and Mexicans are “at two ends of the same road”.

Other writers ventured not across the surface of the world but beneath it. In his typically expressive Underland, which he calls a “deep time journey”, Robert MacFarlane descends into Norwegian sea caves, the Greenland ice cap, Bronze Age funeral chambers, Parisian catacombs and more, asking: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” He looks for answers in myths, memories, and the experiences of those he encounters, unpacking the historic uses of the subterranean: “To shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful”.

Seven joys of travel

In a similar vein, Will Hunt reveals “a human history of the worlds beneath our feet” in his Underground, which combines memoir, analysis and exploration. “I saw that we – all of us, the human species – have always felt a quiet pull from the underground, that we are as connected to this realm as we are to our own shadows,” he explains. Following this urge, he tells of the sights, sensations and people in places such as the ancient tunnels of Cappadocia, deep caves of South America, and abandoned mines of Dakota and Australia.

These books, in various ways, bring out what Thomas Swick once identified as the seven joys of travel. Anticipation, movement, break from routine, novelty, discovery, emotional connection, and heightened appreciation of home.

By now, if you’re still vexed at being confined indoors, you could take a leaf from 18th century aristocrat Xavier de Maistre. Placed under house arrest after a duel, he came up with a digressive, satirical work that explored the objects in his vicinity, such as a bed, armchair, paintings, and books. Approaching them as tourist sites, he makes each one yield ideas, memories and musings. The book’s appropriate title: A Journey Around My Room.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.