Keeping Journals Helps Women Track the Inner Journey as Well as the Trip

One of the traits that distinguished Freya Stark, the great English traveler, linguist and writer, was the way she “advanced inwardly” as she roamed the world, novelist Lawrence Durrell said. The notion of an inward journey that parallels the outward trip is distinctive in the writings of women travelers, I’ve found, which is partly why it’s important for women to keep a journal.

In studying the works of contemporary male travel writers, Mary Morris, co-editor of “Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers” (Vintage, $14), found that men tended to explore “a world that is essentially external and revealed only glimpses of who they are, whom they long for, whom they miss.” By contrast, I’ve noticed that the travel books and journals of women writers are often full of wonderful, wildly miscellaneous observations that have nothing to do with scenery, history, politics and geology.

“A man either starts his travels with a particular object in mind or, failing that, drives a hobby of his own the whole way before him; whereas, a woman, accustomed by habit, if not created by nature, to diffuse her mind more equally on all that is presented . . . goes picking up material much more indiscriminately,” wrote Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake, a Victorian essayist and traveler.

Those who read the diaries of Margaret Fontaine, another Victorian traveler, can discover such delightful insights as this, written when she arrived in Sicily: “A new epoch was beginning in my life which I attributed almost entirely to having discovered a new and very becoming way of doing my hair!”

I take a long, narrow reporter’s notebook with me on trips. It rarely leaves my hand and usually gets filled with ferry schedules, telephone numbers, lists of things to do, impressions of sights and people, the dates of friends’ birthdays and hackneyed poetry written while waiting for a train or an espresso.

Taking notes is essential for a travel writer, but even it if weren’t my job, I’d do it anyway. Especially when I’m alone in foreign places, I seem to discover things about my behavior, my past and my hopes for the future. All of this goes into my notebook, to be cogitated on later.

Evelyn Hannon, editor of the Canadian online travel magazine Journeywoman.com, thinks our feelings are magnified when we hit the road. When she leaves home for months, she always keeps a journal, which she says serves as her “best friend and Mummy.”

“The most important stuff about what’s going on inside comes out in it,” she says.

Editor and author Morris wrote in a journal throughout a solo trip through Central America in 1978, which became the source of “Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone” (St. Martins, $13), a book she started eight years later. “I never know when something is going to be important,” she said in a recent telephone interview. “If I don’t write it down, it’s gone.”

Even if publication isn’t your goal, a travel journal can be turned into a scrapbook. Hannon always carries Scotch tape so she can affix ticket stubs, hotel business cards and other memorabilia in her notebook, making it a vivid and entertaining record of a trip. Marybeth Bond, co-editor of “Travelers’ Tales: A Woman’s World” and of “A Woman’s Passion for Travel: More True Stories From a Woman’s World” (both Traveler’s Tales Inc., $17.95), stuffs brochures into the back of her journal, which she later adds to her photo album.

Every summer, my schoolteacher mother typed her notes at the end of her trips, which is how I knew where to find every Christopher Wren church in London when I followed her footsteps there years later.

Incorporating mementos of the outward journey--restaurant and hotel cards, packing lists and brochures--into a notebook can later spur you to recall what was going on inside and help you advise friends and family members planning a trip to the same place.

There are other important practical reasons for having a journal. For instance, before I leave home, I write on the cover of mine the addresses and phone numbers of the U.S. embassies and American Express offices in the countries I’m visiting, for quick reference. Editor Hannon stashes five $10 bills and an extra bank card inside the cover of hers, pasting an itinerary over these items to keep them hidden.

Those who think keeping a journal could become a chore should take a tip from Bond, who says she doesn’t always write full sentences. Simply noting “ ‘Monet’s picture of Camille on her deathbed at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris’ brings back the whole room,” she says. Bond also loves to jot down things people say, as I did once in a self-service laundry in Dublin, where the man at the next dryer remarked, “Ireland’s a grand country. Rain is the only fault in it.”

Best of all, perhaps, is the meditative, quiet time you give yourself to keep a journal. Travel photographer Dianne Taylor-Snow, who rarely sleeps past 4 a.m., told me that on a trip to the Amazon several years ago she routinely found a spot on the veranda of the inn where she was staying to write in her journal by oil lamp. “I love the mornings. My thoughts are clear and my memory is good. Those two hours before the rest of the world started stirring were all mine; I didn’t have to share them,” she said in recent phone interview.

Taylor-Snow’s journals may never be published or put in a time capsule, but keeping them was how she found her way through the inward journey, which is what matters most to many women travelers.