Some of the most compelling moments in travel literature occur when things go wrong, when the journey or the traveller breaks down. The term ‘breakdown’ has a series of meanings relevant to travel: most obviously, the breakdown of the travelling vehicle; more interestingly, that of the traveller, through a collapse in mental or physical health; and the breakdown of some wider cultural or social order, perhaps ‘due to widespread transgression of the rules’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In each case, breakdown is not necessarily an end point; it may be a point of departure.

In travel, the most literal form of breakdown is associated with the failure or refusal of a vehicle, mechanical or otherwise, which may be brought on by external pressures such as storms, difficult surface conditions or human interference or noncooperation. Shipwrecks, for example, take place in a wide range of travel chronicles and fictions, including such classics as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719) and more recent titles like Jonathan Raban's Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990). Other literary journeys are broken by the failure of trains, depicted in travel fictions such as Jules Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and in non-fiction such as the personal memoirs of the unreliable Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which were recorded by passengers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Baker 2013). Journeys also break down when horses, elephants and other beasts of burden, human operatives and carriers fail or refuse to cooperate, as, for example, in British India, when elephants strayed and rebelled, and when palanquin carriers asserted themselves in similar ways (Baker 2016). More recently, travels have been punctuated and sometimes terminated by the failure of car or aircraft engines, as, for example, in Colin Cox's book Short Hops across the Atlantic (2009).

The mechanics of breakdown are rarely the whole story. Breakdown gives the author something interesting to write about, providing otherwise smooth and potentially dull stories with ‘somewhere to go’. Though some travel writers have been content to describe comfortable journeys through pleasant places (Guerts 2014), their smooth journeys may be in the minority, since interrupted and broken journeys can be more interesting to read and challenging. At very least, breakdown can draw travellers out of their own comfortable passage, prompting deeper engagement with the places through which they are travelling and the lives they are leading (see Trentmann 2009).