“Life is either a great adventure, or nothing.” – Helen Keller
Travel is a hassle.
Even if you’re one of the hardy souls naturally drawn to this magazine, you understand that journeying to far-off lands--or even Dallas--can be a soul-numbing ordeal of long lines, screaming children, and violations of privacy. And that’s just the Barnes & Noble ‘Travel’ section.
But if you find yourself questioning whether travel is still worth it, let me give you some perspective. If nothing else, this column--a regular feature of Adventure Journey we’re calling “The Idiot’s Guide to Adventure”--should be a source of perspective. Or toilet paper on the road less traveled, if it comes to that. We hope it won’t.
Inconvenience is not only a part of adventure, you can make a case that inconvenience is adventure. There’s an image that perfectly encapsulates that idea, and while a picture is usually worth a thousand words, I’ll give you a few hundred for this picture (the exchange rate is pretty rough right now, you know).
The picture is reproduced in Bartle Bull’s engrossing, beautiful coffee table history of the African safari, creatively titled Safari (Viking, 1988). It’s a late nineteenth-century travel poster for the Uganda Railway, and the breathless text prepares you for the adventure to be had:
“The Highlands of British East Africa as a Winter Home for Aristocrats has become a fashion. Sportsmen in search of Big Game make it a hobby. Students of Natural History revel in this Field of Nature’s own Making.”
Dominating the poster is the illustration. The Uganda Railway car has stopped at a lakefront station, apparently just in time for the train to be utterly ravaged by a spectacular menagerie of wild beasts (that vaguely resembles the 2004 Red Sox). Crocodiles and hippos burst out of the water, jaws bared. A lion has cornered a hapless tourist in a flimsy palm tree. Elephants have ripped through the roofs of both the train and the station, and a giant snake has wrapped itself around the dining car. The conductor is trying to convince a pair of hungry hyenas that he’s got a bitter aftertaste. More tourists have fled to the train’s roof, where they are still threatened by marauding leopards, ostriches, and a giraffe intent on crossing over to the carnivorous team. The coup de grace is a gorilla carrying off a beautiful woman, her long hair and legs limp in its arms.
And you thought the NYC subway was bad.
The unlucky passengers who have chosen the Uganda Railway are about to meet horrific deaths at the hands of Uganda’s bloodthirsty wildlife, but instead of that being swept under the Chamber of Commerce rug, it is being highlighted! “You can come and take some beautiful photos and maybe buy a tribal mask or two, but if you’re really lucky, a lion will chew off your arm!” Even more amazing, the insane railway poster works: it makes you want to book a trip to British East and cover yourself in Worcestershire sauce. Even factoring in the probability that I am a delusional adventurer, the poster would get anyone’s juices flowing.
The follow-up poster probably read something like this: “The Highlands of British East Africa are Teeming with Malaria. Be the First to Catch the Most Exotic Disease in the Third World.”
We whiny, fretful travelers can learn from our colonial forefathers. Instead of complaining about the unpleasant aspects of travel, they embraced them. True, if you run into trouble overseas you can’t just mow down offending natives with a rifle like the aforementioned forefathers, but we could all use a dose of their can-do spirit.
So the next time you’re waiting in a molasses airport line, getting coughed on by bratty kids off to see their grandmother in St. Louis, I urge you to invoke the spirit of those noble Uganda-bound travelers. They were about to get eaten and they were loving it!
That spirit is what inspires this column (and maybe this magazine, too, although the editors stress that they won’t be held responsible for any of their readers getting eaten by massive carnivores. Whatever.). Travel is a communal adventure, and we’re all cornered by that lion in the flimsy palm tree. We’re in this together.
