Crichton - Travels

Startling and informative. I was swept away not only by [Crichtons] richly informed mind but his daring curiosity.

New York Times Book Review

Crichtons curiosity and self-deprecating humor animate recitals of his adventures.

Publishers Weekly

A fetching, candid reconnoiter of the psychological and spiritual contours of a fertile, challenging mindscape. These forays are evocative analogues of Crichtons sometimes turbulent inner evolution over the last twenty-five years. Just the ticket for those who would escape, for once, to themselvesand perhaps know risk for the first time.

Chicago Sun-Times

Crichton can give his narratives such an amusing self-deprecating twist that its hard not to be enchanted. Most significantly, Travels chronicles Crichtons inward exploration.

Houston Post

Curious, sensible, [and] irreverent. Crichton comes to see his travelsboth in mind and through countryas ways of getting in better touch with himself.

Los Angeles Times

Travels is about getting unstranded, about going to the ends of the earth and the edges of experience in order to see oneself for the first time. His chronicle has the twin virtues of being entertaining and, in the best sense of the word, unsettling.

Washington Post Book World

His sense of wonder and awe, his gentle encouragement toward direct experience, and his simple yet graphic prose will stir the wanderlust in many a reader.

Booklist

Satisfying. Memorable. What a traveler [Crichton] is!

Kirkus Reviews

FIRST VINTAGE EBOOKS EDITION, MAY 2012

Copyright 1988 by Michael Crichton

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1988. Subsequently published in paperback in the United States by Ballantine Books, New York, in 1993, and by Perennial, a division of HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, in 2002.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Way In from The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated from the German by Robert Bly. Copyright 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.

Portions of this work were originally published in Conde Nast Traveler and Esquire.

Vintage eISBN: 978-0-307-81649-8

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r2

Contents

Preface

For many years I traveled for myself alone. I refused to write about my trips, or even to plan them with any useful purpose. Friends would ask what research had taken me to Malaysia or New Guinea or Pakistan, since it was obvious that nobody would go to these places merely for recreation. But I did.

And I felt a real need for rejuvenation, for experiences that would take me away from things I usually did, the life I usually led.

In my everyday life, I often felt a stifling awareness of the purpose behind everything I did. Every book I read, every movie I saw, every lunch and dinner I attended seemed to have a reason behind it. From time to time, I felt the urge to do something for no reason at all.

I conceived these trips as vacationsas respites from my ongoing lifebut that wasnt how they turned out. Eventually, I realized that many of the most important changes in my life had come about because of my travel experiences. For, however tame when compared with the excursions of real adventurers, these trips were genuine adventures for me: I struggled with my fears and limitations, and I learned whatever I was able to learn.

But as time passed, the fact that I had never written about my travels became oddly burdensome. If youre a writer, the assimilation of important experiences almost obliges you to write about them. Writing is how you make the experience your own, how you explore what it means to you, how you come to possess it, and ultimately release it. I found I was relieved, after all these years, to write about some of the places I have been. I was fascinated to see how much I could write without reference to my notebooks.

There were also some episodes from medical school that I had always intended to write about. I had promised myself I would wait fifteen years, until they were thoroughly ancient history. To my surprise, I find I have waited long enough, and so they are included here.

I have also included experiences in the realms that are sometimes called psychic, or transpersonal, or spiritual. I think of this as inner travel, to complement the outer travel, although that distinctionbetween what is internal sensation and what is external stimulusoften blurs in my mind. But Ive found the effort to disentangle my perceptions useful in a way I had not anticipated.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clotheswith all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. Thats not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.

I eventually realized that direct experience is the most valuable experience I can have. Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural worldour traditional source of direct insightsis rapidly disappearing. Modern city-dwellers cannot even see the stars at night. This humbling reminder of mans place in the greater scheme of things, which human beings formerly saw once every twenty-four hours, is denied them. Its no wonder that people lose their bearings, that they lose track of who they really are, and what their lives are really about.

So travel has helped me to have direct experiences. And to know more about myself.

Many people have helped me with this book. Among those who read early versions of the manuscript and gave me comments and encouragement were Kurt Villadsen, Anne-Marie Martin, my sisters, Kimberly Crichton and Catherine Crichton, my brother, Douglas Crichton, Julie Halowell, my mother, Zula Crichton, Bob Gottlieb, Richard Farson, Marilyn Grabowski, Lisa Plonsker, Valery Pine, Julie McIver, Lynn Nesbit, and Sonny Mehta. Later drafts of the text were read by the participants themselves, who offered valuable suggestions and corrections.