Last summer, after hiking all day on unsure paths, I found myself lost in the Carpathian Mountains of central Romania. My map of the area was brand new, but the trails seemed to have not been updated since before the Communists were in power. I had no water, an empty stomach and my feet had been tenderized by the rough trail. After almost stepping on an angry little snake, I started scanning the ground and noticed that there was fresh bear excrement everywhere. That’s when I asked myself, “What the #@$%*& are you doing here?” 

Endless travel is a romantic notion, but mostly for those who’ve never left home. People who do travel understand that it’s not all ancient castles, fast moving trains, beautiful sunsets, exotic women and drunken merriment. Travel also means long waits, uncomfortable beds, mysterious illnesses, angry locals, crappy weather and petty crime. Instead of smooth sailing, these people know that travel has peaks and troughs, like an angry sea.

My trough was being lost in the Romanian wilderness. After a slightly terrifying night, I eventually reached my destination, a small monastery on the peak of a craggy mountain. It was worth the previous night of discomfort, but the same question stuck with me. Why travel?Alain De Botton tries to answer that question in his book “The Art of Travel” (2002). Botton is an Englishman, an intellectual and the author of several books that tangle personal experience, social commentary and philosophical observations. After receiving a pamphlet in the mail advertising a resort in Barbados, Botton was inspired to explore the reasons why people travel and the methods they choose to do so. “We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go,” he writes.

“The Art of Travel” is the perfect book to read while on an airplane or waiting for a bus. The 249 pages of text are interlaced with photographs of foreign places, paintings by Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, drawings by John Ruskin, poems by Charles Baudelaire and quotes from numerous other artists, authors and philosophers. It’s eye candy for the wandering soul. He uses these images and excerpts to illustrate and support his thoughts on travel.

Each chapter includes a destination and a guide. The destinations range from the author’s neighborhood, in which he shows the potential of traveling close to home, and exotic destinations, like Barbados, Madrid, and the French countryside. The guides that Botton elects to teach readers about travel are the same authors and artists who provide images for the book. A jaunt to Provence is guided by Vincent van Gogh, who spent some his most formative years in this pastoral region of France. Botton uses van Gogh to explore how artistic renderings of faraway places can entice even the most sedentary bodies to pack their bag and go. “We tend to seek out corners of the world only after they have been painted and written about by artists,” he writes.

According to Botton, travel should aid people in becoming better human beings. The potential is there, he believes, and “journeys are the midwives of thought.” Before my existential crisis concerning travel, whenever someone asked me variations of the “Why travel?” question, I always deferred them to the words of Mark Twain, who wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Botton would agree, but he would add that not only does travel allow you to learn about other people, it’s also conducive to learning about yourself.

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are,” he writes.

People are often inspired to travel based on the examples and accounts of ancient explorers. Botton introduces a German explorer by the name of Alexander von Humboldt. In 1799, von Humboldt set sail from Spain on a journey to South America. After several years of detailed observations, von Humboldt published a thirty-volume account of his travels called “Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.” Von Humboldt is the guide for a chapter that explores the difficulty in finding undiscovered places in the world. The premise is, if each corner of the world has been explored and documented, what’s left to see? Plenty, according to Botton. People just need to look closer and view things from their own perspective. In doing so, they will be able to see everything in a new light.

“The Art of Travel” is a gentle, enjoyable book to read. The most important point Botton makes, and perhaps the thesis of the book, is “the notion that the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to.” According to this theory, it was my mind-set, and not the presence of man-eating bears, that ruined my time in Romania. Perhaps Botton is right, or perhaps I should have explored regions a little closer to home.