"Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent or praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe."
So begins "The Book Bag" by W. Somerset Maugham as the author equates the need for books to the addict's need for drugs. The narrator especially cannot conceive of why a traveller might venture out without a large supply of reading material at the ready. Having learned his lesson once while imprisoned by illness in a hill-town in Java without enough to read, he now carries a bag of books with him everywhere in his travels through colonial outposts. 
I'm getting my own small collection of books together to read as a night-cap in the sleeper compartment of a train or in the small hours of a morning in an unfamiliar hotel room in Far North Queensland. And what better books to read than Thea Astley's whose writing oozes with North Queensland's sultry beauty and unique strangeness and its collection of misfits and prodigals from the south, hippies, drunkards, and outright "screwballs".
But reality beats fiction any time and the people one meets while travelling could easily fill another book. On buses, there is no escaping those who want to tell you their life stories. Then there are the bus captains who seem to be trained to be sit-down comics. There was one driver who used to say at every comfort stop, "Now don’t forget the number of the bus. Write it on the back of the person in front and don’t let them out of your sight."
Trains give you space and time for some inner travel as well but there's still the personality, the tension, the romance of all travel – of waiting-rooms and tea-rooms and the music of the rackety lurch.
"Take a step out of your house ... Enormous space is near ..."
