Ecuador: A Travel Journal

Avant-garde poet Henri Michaux boarded a steamship bound for Ecuador in December 1927 as "a man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal." He set out to record a journey, but his vivid descriptions, his unexpected leaps of thought, provide a narrative unlike any other. The result, Ecuador: A Travel Journal, is a work of pointed observation and sensual, even hallucinogenic, poetry and prose.
Obsessed not with how a traveler interacts with the world but how the world-the mundane and the fantastic-invades and changes the traveler, Michaux recognized that stepping out of everyday life opens one up to images and reflections otherwise hidden. In Ecuador, Michaux bravely lays out what may be found if one dares to take such a voyage.

A travel classic about learning how to see other people, other forms of life, and other civilizations.

James Finn

Coming upon Ecuador today, one cannot...appreciate the revolutionary things it was when...first published, nor the risk...Michaux took...

Henri Michaux was born into a wealthy Belgian family in 1899. Michaux disappointed his parents by dropping out of medical school to become a sailor. He sailed with the merchant marine throughout Asia and South America and eventually settled in Paris, where his poetry and later his paintings came to be widely admired. Michaux's works include Emergences-Résuregences, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984, and A Barbarian in Asia. He died in 1984 in Paris.