How to tether your camel and other useful tips

Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too, which you could certainly squeeze into a stocking. On Travel and the Journey Through Life is an anthology of one-liners and observations on travel, from the high-spirited and romantic to the moody and downright cynical.

When it comes to travel writing, all roads lead one way or another to Eland, that elegant publisher and gritty survivor. All sorts of brilliant people say nice things about Eland. Colin Thubron, the doyen of travel writers, to cite just one, admires its ‘nearly extinct integrity’ and ‘eccentric passion for quality’. And this is what this little volume offers in spades, along with wit, wisdom, eccentricity and piercing insight that – if you take it literally – will have you switching off your laptop, dumping your phone and heading off into the nearest wilderness, destination unknown, which is just as it should be.

I started dog-earing the pages with some of the most memorable or life-enhancing quotes and then gave up because I was doing it on virtually every one. ‘To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world,’ writes that doughty traveller Freya Stark. ‘Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs,’ says Amin Maalouf. It’s tremendously moreish. The range is dizzying – Heraclitus, Oscar Wilde, Che Guevara, Gandhi, Guy de Maupassant, Montaigne, Václav Havel, Kalahari bushmen, and so it goes on – the observations as broad and alluring as the farthest horizon.

There is the pithy. For a generation besieged by anxiety and mental health issues, can anything beat St Augustine’s two-word life-fix: ‘Solvitur ambulando’ –it is solved by walking? Sixteen hundred years later, it remains the abiding expression of our preternatural need to shake a leg and travel, an inspiration to pedestrians the world over, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin among them.

And then there is the more long-winded, such as this from Mark Twain (despite the last three words sounding vaguely like a Tui holiday advert):

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.

We have the unlikely and unexpected, as with this injunction from the Prophet Mohammed: ‘Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.’ Jesus makes the cut, too, advising his disciples not to take gold, silver or copper on their travels. If people won’t receive them in a house or town, he tells them, ‘shake the dust of it off your feet’. Homer wades in from the Stygian depths of almost 3,000 years ago. ‘Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness?’, an exhausted Odysseus asks the unknown river god.

The practical and prosaic keep company with the artfully literary. ‘Don’t be paranoid – much better to be open and full of trust with people,’ the travel writer Hugh Thomson rightly advises, before plunging in the knife. ‘And the ones who are paranoid always get mugged anyway.’ There are competing views on the merits of travelling alone, top tips, such as taking tea as a universally popular gift, advice on spare pants, packing a harmonica, tethering your camel and shunning luxury like the plague. It is, Paul Theroux reckons, ‘the enemy of observation’.

Don’t think this is all honey-coated, rose-tinted romance. Travel sceptics are well catered for, too. In the words of the American author and journalist Elizabeth Drew: ‘Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.’ And what about this from that Corbynista Cynic, Diogenes: ‘In a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.’

Some of the distilled wisdom is nothing to do with travel, strictly speaking – Rogerson calls the final chapter ‘Wise Tweets for a Postcard Home’ – but who says it doesn’t have a bearing on the ‘journey through life’ of the book’s title? Dorothy Parker writes her way into the anthology with typical pizzazz: ‘Too fucking busy and vice versa.’ Leigh Fermor knew a thing or two about memory and its limitations. His ‘Great Trudge’ from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople as an 18-year-old in 1933 outlived the man who made it to 96. ‘Trivial things light fuses in the memory,’ he wrote in Between the Woods and the Water, the sparkling second volume of his posthumously finished trilogy.

We could do worse than end with George Orwell and a few words that will have Spectator readers cheering the unrepentant, impoverished socialist to the rafters: ‘Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.’