“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where
they're going.” ~ Paul Theroux
“Take the long way home.” ~ Supertramp, 1979
Paul
Theroux, the novelist and travel writer, is sometimes a curmudgeon, sometimes a
cranky realist, and is always impatient with so-called travelers who insist on
getting where they are going the easy way. I’m one of those travelers who would
rather take that easy way and so Theroux is a dubious hero of mine. I don’t
really want to travel as fearlessly as he does: living, somehow, out of one
small bag without bathing for days on end, and enduring, without complaint, any
of the many varieties of sickness travelers can suffer from. But neither do I
want to be a mere tourist; I, too, want to be an authentic traveler.
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| Final preparations for leaving Guam |
So,
I will travel Paul Theroux style if I must—if it is worth it. Last year a
friend of mine—we had been long-time neighbors living on our sail boats on the
island of Guam—invited me to help sail his boat from Guam to Cebu, an island
set back deep in the vast Philippine archipelago. We would leave in the middle
of April, after the trade winds had died down a bit. It would take maybe ten or
eleven days. There would be six of us, so watches would be relatively short and
there would long periods to relax—to read, fish, to sleep, to contemplate the sea.
