The Long Way Round

This is a photo essay about the space between places — the hours on a bus, a deck, a platform, a verge, that most travel writing treats as the cost of arriving somewhere. It is assembled from crossings on four continents and its argument is that the transit is frequently the trip.

Deck class

Twenty-two hours on the deck of a Jadrolinija ferry down the Dalmatian coast, and the passengers sort themselves before the boat has cleared the harbour: families to the seating saloon, backpackers to the sun deck with sleeping mats, and a group of men who have clearly done this many times to a stretch of covered deck aft that nobody else knows about. There is a photograph here at four in the morning when the lights of Hvar go past and half the deck sits up to look.

The Ilala on Lake Malawi does the same thing over three days. The Marion Dufresne does it over twenty-eight, in the Southern Ocean, with scientists instead of tourists. The sorting is identical and it happens within an hour every time.

The long bus

Between Ouarzazate and Merzouga, or between Cusco and Copacabana, or on the eleven hours from Hanoi to Hà Giang, a sleeper bus produces a specific kind of image that a car cannot: the window as a frame that you do not control, moving at a speed you did not choose, through a landscape you would otherwise have driven past faster.

The photographs that work from a bus window are almost never the landscape. They are the reflection, the condensation, the hand on the seat back in front, the driver's shrine on the dashboard with its plastic flowers and its photograph of someone. The bus is a room with a view rather than a viewing platform.

The photographs that work from a bus window are almost never the landscape. They are the reflection, the condensation, the shrine on the dashboard.

Waiting

A ferry terminal in Bodø at six in the morning in January. A bus station in Bishkek where the departure board is a man with a clipboard. The apron at Funafuti twenty minutes before the siren. Waiting is the dominant activity of overland travel and it is almost entirely absent from the photography of it.

It is also when people talk. Every extended conversation on any of these journeys happened during a delay, and the delay was in each case the reason. There is a version of travel photography that treats the schedule as the enemy and a better one that treats it as the mechanism.

Rail

The Bergen Railway over the Hardangervidda, above the treeline in snow, with the carriage lit and the window black except where the snow catches the light from inside. The Kandy to Ella line with the doors open and eleven people in each doorway. The overnight from Yaoundé to Ngaoundéré. The Transgabonais.

Trains photograph differently from every other form of transport because the camera is stable and the world is not, which means long exposures work in a way they do not on a road. The best frame in this set is thirty seconds out of a Norwegian window at 1,200 metres and it is almost entirely abstract.

The argument

The flight to a destination and the taxi from the airport are designed to be forgotten, and they succeed. Everything slower is designed by nobody in particular and remembered in detail. That is not a moral point about carbon, although it could be; it is an observation about what the mind does with duration.

Take the ferry. Take the night train. Take the road over the pass rather than the tunnel under it, and take the local bus at least once in every country, because it is where you will be the only person who chose to be there and everyone else will be going to work.