Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..
You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.
Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.
Ô, Wanderess, WanderessWhen did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?
It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. Alaska had enlarged each of us. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska.
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.
Later that day when I walked down this dried-out riverbed, enjoying the last rays of sunshine on my bare skin, I felt a deep inner peace coming up straight from my heart.
Die wertvollste Reise ist die Reise zu unserem Selbst.
Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.
Ô, Muse of the Heart’s Passion,let me relive my Love’s memory,to remember her body, so brave and so free,and the sound of my Dreameress singing to me,and the scent of my Dreameress sleeping by me,Ô, sing, sweet Muse, my soliloquy!
Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.
Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.
Первое, на что я обратил внимание в тот первый день в Бомбее, – непривычный запах. Я почувствовал его уже в переходе от самолета к зданию аэровокзала – прежде, чем услышал или увидел что-либо в Индии. Этот запах был приятен и будоражил меня, в ту первую минуту в Бомбее, когда я, вырвавшись на свободу, заново вступал в большой мир, но он был мне абсолютно незнаком. Теперь я знаю, что это сладкий, тревожный запах надежды, уничтожающей ненависть, и в то же время кислый, затхлый запах жадности, уничтожающей любовь. Это запах богов и демонов, распадающихся и возрожденных империй и цивилизаций. Это голубой запах морской кожи, ощутимый в любой точке города на семи островах, и кроваво-металлический запах машин. Это запах суеты и покоя, всей жизнедеятельности шестидесяти миллионов животных, больше половины которых – человеческие существа и крысы. Это запах любви и разбитых сердец, борьбы за выживание и жестоких поражений, выковывающих нашу храбрость. Это запах десяти тысяч ресторанов, пяти тысяч храмов, усыпальниц, церквей и мечетей, а также сотен базаров, где торгуют исключительно духами, пряностями, благовониями и свежими цветами. Карла назвала его однажды худшим из самых прекрасных ароматов, и она была, несомненно, права, как она всегда бывает по-своему права в своих оценках. И теперь, когда бы я ни приехал в Бомбей, прежде всего я ощущаю этот запах – он приветствует меня и говорит, что я вернулся домой.
Such were our minor preparations for the journey, but above all we laid in an ample stock of good-humour, and a genuine disposition to be pleased; determining to travel in true contrabandista style; taking things as we found them, rough or smooth, and mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond companionship. It is the true way to travel in Spain.
The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.
Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.
It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.
The paradox of love is that to have it is to want to preserve it because it's perfect in the moment but that preservation is impossible because the perfection is only ever an instant passed through. Love like travel is a series of moments that we immediately leave behind. Still we try to hold on and embalm against all evidence and common sense proclaiming our promises and plans. The more I loved him the more I felt hope. But hope acknowledges uncertainty and so I also felt my first premonitions of loss.
It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travelers. The sensible approach would be to the expect the worst, the very worst, that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.
Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.”~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive
From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.”~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive
True friends don't come with conditions.
The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.
The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.
Be a team player, not a bandwagon jumper.
There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.
The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.
We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.
Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.
Travel is costly yes, but it pays dividends too.
There is no such thing as loving a child too much.
Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way
Anyone can choose to have success, but only the patient ones will get rewarded by it. Be relentless in chasing your dreams.
Don't live off your past successes or failures, live for the next big pursuit.
Integrity is something we show, not proclaim.
The only real certainty is that if you get to live, you gotta die. Live life now.
The funny thing about money is that you can't take it with you, so don’t try to.
Hunger gives flavour to the food.
Diet food is not a meal its a medicine.
All worries are less with wine.
Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.
The salt is to the food, what soul is to the body.
A good food is mouthwatering when you see it and finger licking when you eat it.
We love our mother because she cares and also because she cooks.
I drift like a cloud,Across these venerable eastern lands,A journey of unfathomable distances,An endless scroll of experiences...Lady Zhejiang here we must part,For the next province awaits my embrace.Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East,Where do you go?
El reproche y la culpa solo sirven para aprisionarnos y para no dejarnos avanzar.
We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.
Fare well we call to hearth and hallThough wind may blow and rain may fallWe must away ere break of dayOver the wood and mountain tallTo Rivendell where Elves yet dwellIn glades beneath the misty fellThrough moor and waste we ride in hasteAnd wither then we cannot tellWith foes ahead behind us dreadBeneath the sky shall be our bedUntil at last our toil be spedOur journey done, our errand spedWe must away! We must away!We ride before the break of day!
People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.
I mostly want to remind her of the recipes of healing, and give her my own made-on-the spot remedy for the easing of her pain. I tell her, “Get a pen. Stop crying so you can write this down and start working on it tonight.” My remedy is long. But the last item on the list says: “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town – to pack up and go (you can even go tonight). And where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go.
Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! . . . It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.
I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther , that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing on a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than he changing sky.
WONDERLANDIt is a person's unquenchable thirst for wonderThat sets them on their initial quest for truth.The more doors you open, the smaller you become.The more places you see and the more people you meet,The greater your curiosity grows.The greater your curiosity, the more you will wander.The more you wander, the greater the wonder.The more you quench your thirst for wonder,The more you drink from the cup of life.The more you see and experience, the closer to truth you become.The more languages you learn, the more truths you can unravel.And the more countries you travel, the greater your understanding.And the greater your understanding, the less you see differences.And the more knowledge you gain, the wider your perspective,And the wider your perspective, the lesser your ignorance.Hence, the more wisdom you gain, the smaller you feel.And the smaller you feel, the greater you become.The more you see, the more you love --The more you love, the less walls you see.The more doors you are willing to open,The less close-minded you will be.The more open-minded you are,The more open your heart.And the more open your heart,The more you will be able to Send and receive --Truth and TRUEUnconditionalLOVE.
Be a true traveller, don't be a temporary tourist.
Trekking means a travelling experience with a thrilling excitement.
Travelling the road will tell you more about the road than the google will tell you about the road.
Travelling shouldn't be just a tour, it should be a tale.
The thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.
when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS
REJECTION is kind of your negative ILLUSION which has no value but it’s give you a CLUE to go for next level of your ACTION.
Your VISION and your self-willingness is the MOST powerful elements to conquer your goal
If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…
Your traditional EDUCATION is not going to CHANGE your life but the life you are experiencing that can change you. Choose a POSITIVE life STYLE with positive ATTITUDE which could bring you a life with HAPPINESS and WISDOM
Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life
How you think and create your inner world that you gonna become in your outer world. Your inner believe manifest you in the outside
CONFIDENCE is not showing off your VANITY, it’s about to be HUMBLED and KIND to others what are you truly SKILLED and PROFESSIONAL about…
Traveling in a third-world country is the closest thing there is to being married and raising kids. You have glorious hikes and perfect days on the beach. You go on adventures you would never try, or enjoy, alone. But you also can't get away from each other. Everything is unfamiliar. Money is tight or you get robbed. Someone gets sick or sunburned. You get bored. It is harder than you expected, but you are glad you didn't just sit home.
It was exciting to be off on a journey she had looked forward to for months. Oddly, the billowing diesel fumes of the airport did not smell like suffocating effluence, it assumed a peculiar pungent scent that morning, like the beginning of a new adventure, if an adventure could exude a fragrance.
Then a beat-up car lurched into sight towing an even more beat-up car. As the cars came near, I saw that they were connected back to front by a loop made of two seat belts buckled to each other. That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all.
After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again.
While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.
In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.
Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.
For I was reared in the great city, pent with cloisters dim,and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shall thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and al things in himselfGreat universal teacher! He shall moldThy spirit and by giving , make it ask.
Being the people we are, and feeling the way that we do, getting excited about going somewhere new can be terrifying. Of course it is, I get it! But if you don’t travel, you’ll regret it. Your soul will forever be empty.
Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night.
How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.
Ô, the wine of a womanfrom heaven is sent, more perfect than allthat a man can invent.When she came to my bed and begged me with sighsnot to tempt her towards passion nor actions unwise, I told her I’d spare her and kissed her closed eyes, then unbraided her body of its clothing disguise.While our bodies were nude bathed in candlelight fineI devoured her mouth, tender lips divine;and I drank through her thighs her feminine wine.Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.
Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All great people are a bit mad. That’s good to remember. Don’t escape it. Great growth comes from time spent in foreign lands, watching foreign people with foreign cultures. It makes you forget about your own land and race and town for a while. Great growth also comes from rooting yourself into one place from time to time. Unpack your bags, get a nice bed, a book shelf, some friends. Learn to show up, keep in touch, stick around. Growth comes in all sort of forms and shapes, everywhere at all times, and it’s yours to take and consume. Do what ought to be done. Here and now, to get you somewhere — anywhere.
Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,more perfect than all that a man can invent.
A girl who travels will need someone that questions her, not too little, and not too much. She’ll need someone to read her, but also really listen to her. Because she’ll want to do the same. She’ll want a person that shares an interest but at the same time stays genuine to who they are. Not drown in a puddle of narcissism. And not drown in a lake of fascination.
We must seek out that which invigorates us, and engage it at all fronts. Art, music, literature, conversation, travel, nature—whatever it is that keeps the fire of our spirit bright—we must build our life around it; for, without our passions, the years ahead become a burden rather than a gift.
I want more from life. I want to travel, see the world, and meet different kinds of people. I don’t want to stay locked in a small country, living my life halfheartedly the way society expects me to live it. I want to experience things and live to the fullest so I won’t have any regrets. I want more, so much more than they do, and they simply can’t understand it.
It’s the beating of my heart. The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there,I was still the one locking the door every night.Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. ’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personalityand I wanted to keep to myself. and because I haven’t been very impressed lately. By people, or places.Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.
They say no land remains to be discovered, no continent is left unexplored. But the whole world is out there, waiting, just waiting for me. I want to do things-- I want to walk the rain-soaked streets of London, and drink mint tea in Casablanca. I want to wander the wastelands of the Gobi desert and see a yak. I think my life's ambition is to see a yak. I want to bargain for trinkets in an Arab market in some distant, dusty land. There's so much. But, most of all, I want to do things that will mean something.
It is easy when you are young to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough it is your God-given right to have it... I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong in my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing...I came to appreciate that mountains make poor recepticles for dreams.
Without travels, our existence, our memories, our literature, our dreams, our everything would be very poor, very boring, very limited!
As much as I would like to know my path, a part of me is telling me that it is better not too know too many details about the end destination or the obstacles on the journey. If I can only see as much as my headlights will show me, I can travel safely through any kind of weather, knowing that there's life through every sunrise and sunset and when the light is not shining as I'm used to, I can always assure myself that the night sky will show me many fulfilled dreams and hopes portrayed through shining stars, and every now and then reveal me a part of the moon which reflects that everlasting light, whether fully or not, making me aware that the shadow will always have its' mysterious beauty as well in the process of underlying a part of the truth. So let's continue like this, with our eyes set out far away in the galaxy, but with our feet firm in the ground from which we have been raised. Only so will we be able to ground ourselves deeply and reach immeasurable heights, like a tree deeply rooted in mother Earth that stretches its' branches up to the heavens.
If I could walk one week, why not six? If I could walk to London, why not to Paris, to the Alps, to Jerusalem...I would show with money and a pair of strong boots you can get to Rome. Good-bye, all ye vampires of modern travel. Good-bye, insistent cab-men, and tip-loving porters. Good-bye, mis-directed luggage and dusty railway carriages...Good-bye, trains - punctual and unpunctual, I am your slave no longer. I am free. I am FREE.
You're back where you swore yourself you wouldn't beThe familiar shackles you can't tell from your own skinYour head's under water when you learned to swimOn a road to hell, congratulations, you're free...
I was woken early and had breakfast with the guru. We had some spicy Rice Krispies and a spicy biscuit with some really sweet, milky tea. Not the way I normally like it, but I drank it anyway as I didn’t want to offend him. I suppose that is my heart telling me how to act instead of my head again. My arse may get involved later though.
And new physical problems are arising almost daily. I'm getting problems from a painful trapped nerve in my shoulder, where my rucksack strap has been pinching it, and I can't straighten my arm above shoulder level - soon I will be limping like Richard III. By now my back is covered with eczema, the result of a perpetually sodden shirt and rucksack pressed against it day after day in this heat. In one place my pack has rubbed a painful hole in my skin through the eczema; carrying my rucksack was unpleasant before, but now it is purgatory. This eczema must be partly due to eating bad food for so long - I never had this problem at home. I'm expecting my teeth and hair to start falling out before long, and I've got more or less a permanent acid indigestion from eating so much junk. Week after week I've lived on lukewarm Coca-Cola, stale buns and doughnuts, slurps, green bananas, powdered milk and far too many cigarettes. With all the rubbishy food and sugar soft drinks I've been consuming, I'll see the east coast through a hypoglycaemic haze.
Anubis is associated with the mummification and protection of the dead for their journeys through Denver International Airport to the afterlife. He is usually portrayed as being half human and half jackal, and holding a metal detector in his hand ... Anubis is employed by the Department of Homeland Security to examine the hearts of all travellers to make sure they have not exceeded the weight limit for psychological baggage ... He is also shown frisking mummies and confiscating firearms and other contraband. It doesn't take much to tip the scales in favour of a dead body cavity search or an afterlifetime travel ban.
The natural tenderness and delicacy of our constitution, added to the many dangers we are subject to from your sex, renders it almost impossible for a single lady to travel without injury to her character. And those who have a protector in a husband have, generally speaking, obstacles to prevent their roving.
Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to putthings into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out ofour hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will beright. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walksaround and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And whilenone of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'llbe me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me,out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it'sfinally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times tenthousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.
May be the road you travel doesn’t give you the beautiful fate you have always dreamed off! Stop and change the road, no matter how difficult it may be!
But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu...
Of one thing, though, she was sure: "I want to travel," she confessed.Books were making her restless. She was beginning to read, faster, more, until she was inside the narrative and the narrative inside her, the pages going by so fast, her heart in her chest - she couldn't stop... And pictures of the chocolaty Amazon, of stark Patagonia in the National Geographics, a transparent butterfly snail in the sea, even of an old Japanese house slumbering in the snow... - She found they affected her so much she could often hardly read the accompanying words - the feeling they created was so exquisite, the desire so painful.
You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.
Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.
Pico Iyer: “And at some point, I thought, well, I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps.
Savour on the moment, while still waiting for sacred time.
This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.
This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive and feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.
When you are silent on the truth, you have given a transport fare for the lie to travel and spread fast.
Gratitude was never a noun; it's secretly a verb. It is not a place you accept defeat, settle in for broken dreams or call it the best life will get. Gratitude is getting out of laziness, self pity, denial and insecurity, in order to walk through that door God has been holding open for you this entire time.
The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.
The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.
The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.
New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on each side of me as I passed, like two rows of organ-pipes of angelic flesh with cowrie-shell sea vulvas.
By reading books, you lose your old self and you find your new self! To read is to travel from self to another self!
I had begun reading the book on the plane just after take-off. And I realised that something does happen to you when you read fiction above ground: The intensity of each word and phrase is magnified and the world which the writer has created for you takes on a greater dimension than before. After a while, you can't tell fiction from fact.
There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.
...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused.
In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God...If that spirit is life, then I found life...If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three...all I had to do to discover that spirit and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew.
He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his life in journeys of exploration to distant parts and each day has faced danger in order to persevere in excavating the mines of learning and in snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion.
He could sense in her the same spirit that ran in his veins. They were people with independent minds. They were not clerks at desks. They preferred to act. Accomplish something. They were rushing to reach the end. Such people need to be left alone. They are used to the darkness, the silence, the waiting. They belong to the same family. That of leopards.
There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.
Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be?
Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
Czechs simply don’t say they’re going camping or spending time outdoors. They say, in Czech, that they are going “into the nature” as though nature, příroda, is beyond a place in the woods or other forms of terrain, that nature was a state of mind and had the ability to reverse the crippling, chaotic aspects of life.
When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.
Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.
The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.
Alone in the car with my social life all before and behind me, I was suspended in the beautiful solitude of the open road, in a kind of introspection that only outdoor space generates, for inside and outside are more intertwined than the usual distinctions allow. The emotion stirred by the landscape is piercing, a joy close to pain when the blue is deepest on the horizon or the clouds are doing those spectacular fleeting things so much easier to recall than to describe.
Alejandro de Humboldt National ParkOutside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people.One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct. The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles.“The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.
Take time to leave cities, at least once in a year, and go to some natural place, hills, sea, jungles, rivers, where you see nothing but nature… His creations. Where you only hear chirping of birds, clinkering of trees, murmuring of winds, splashes of water in the river, and uproar of waterfalls.
Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.
There was the loud noise of water, as ever, something eternal and maddening in its sound, like the sound of Time itself, rustling and rushing and wavering, but never for a second ceasing. The rushing of Time that continues throughout eternity, this is the sound of the icy streams of Switzerland, something that mocks and destroys out warm being.
Somethings worth having defy logic. They come with obstacles, challenges, battles and long periods of wandering in the dark. Your path won't make sense to your family or friends. People will weigh in with their life rules and fears, but in the end it is your life. That pull you feel is real and often your intuition. It nags at you everyday. Follow it for as far as it takes you because life is too short to dwell on indecision, while you forget to live. Take a chance because if you have a good heart God isn't going to abandon you. He will travel wherever you need to go, in order to find the missing pieces of your soul.
I saw cities, and roads of marvelous construction. I saw cruelty and greed, but I've seen them here too. I saw a people live a life that was strange in many ways, but also much the same as anywhere else.""Then why are they so cruel?" There was an earnestness to the girl's face, an honest desire to know. "Cruelty is in all of us," he said. "But they made it a virtue.
Like my prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors, I hit the road fairly often in my footloose youth. From Yale’s Dramat to Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, from the tantric ashrams of Kathmandu to the libertine scenes of the Côte D’Azur and deep down into the dungeons of New York’s aptly named meat-packing district, I searched and researched sex, love and the politics of pleasure (mostly among humans)...All of that searching and researching climaxed when I met my favorite research subject, who turned into my primary research partner and “prime mate,” my charming Prince Max. Unlike so many sex researchers who fall in and out of love (with their research as well as each other), we’re still researching, still married and, almost three decades later, more in love than ever thanks to a little bit of luck and the Bonobo Way.
Traveling solo is an incredible – life changing – journey, which I can recommend anyone to undertake. It’s the fear of being alone that prevents many people from daring to take the step to go on that journey. But as with many things, within that fear you’ll discover the greatest triumphs.
We are all beautiful instruments of God. He created many notes in music so that we would not be stuck playing the same song. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your journey and play on. Nobody will ever reach ultimate perfection in this lifetime, but trying to achieve it is a full-time job. Start now and don't stop. Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society, tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.
Take care of your car in the garage, and the car will take care of you on the road.
Among all the machines, motorcar is my favorite machine.
I am emotional about engines, if you hurt my car, you hurt my heart.
I am so obsessed with the cars that sometimes I feel like my heart is not a muscle, it's an engine.
I love the wheels, I mean steering wheel.
A man or woman who travels in the end will never be kept. But if you understand that person well enough, they’ll always be by your side. They might have forgotten where their home is in this world - but you might just make them feel like the closest thing to feeling at home. And while they’ll be leaving country after country, this is the way you will never leave their heart.
God sits on a blue throne called the vena cava. There is no need for a temple to communicate or pray to him. His truths travel from his seat over a purple bridge in your heart, also known as your conscience. Your conscience is where his wisdom shines. A crystal embedded within a fold of your pulmonary trunk acts as a transmitter and receiver. God is closer than you think. In your heart, is his truth and light.
Good luck' is like the shadow of a tree, for some time it gives comfort to a traveler but it doesn't go ahead with a traveler.
When you arrive at the destination, never forget where the journey began.
Wherever you are, you have to be joyfully alive.
Life is a long travel. The end of the journey is often unpredictable.
...Our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if you've ever been there, you know the signs don't tell you the exit you're coming up to, they only point out the exits you've just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods--and since you're probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with.
I was so done with looking at life through the eyes of beer-drinking cheese-heads. I wanted to go on that mission trip and look through the eyes of someone from a different culture and see what they saw. I wanted to meet people who didn’t crush the can of what they just drank on their forehead.-Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines
Wouldn't it be amazing if you could travel into the future, see where you messed up, and then go back in time to rearrange things in order to make your future better? You can. If you can foresee regret, you can mind-travel to the future. If you can train yourself to mind-travel effectively, you can intentionally affect your future by doing something about it today.
I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.
On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.
What is infinity? I haven’t a clue.But maybe that’s the whole point I’ve been attempting to explain to you.The fact that it’s not knownOr seenOr heard.Infinity is every person, every being, every bird. Infinity is a simple mystery.It looks like a mystery.Tastes mysterious.Feels like something completely delirious. We cannot imagine what this sound could be.All we can imagine is infinity.
Guess life is really a road marked by crossroads. It's not the long and winding stretches that will hurt you the most. It's the crossroads. You make a bad choice and it's a tumble and a rumble before you get back on your feet again. But you'll get back on your feet. You'll find yourself. And then you'll be off to your next adventure (crossroads, I mean). In my case, I always had a safety net—my faith in God. But then, I'm more like the millions of simple folk who travel this world.
I don’t want anything else bad to happen,” she whispered, her voice choked with tears. “I’m so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I’m guilty of so many things. I’m sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I’m sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.”“I wasn’t alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn’t really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,” Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing.
Simple minded people do things like gossip, lie, spread rumors, and cause troubles. But, I know you're more intelligent.
When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content.
He blushed to see other Frenchmen overcome with joy whenever they met a compatriot abroad. The would fall on each other, cluster in a raucous group, and pass whole evenings complaining about the barbarity of the locals. These were the few who actually noticed that locals did things differently. Others managed to travel so ‘covered and wrapped in a taciturn and incommunicative prudence, defending themselves from the contagion of an unknown atmosphere’ that they noticed nothing at all.
Today, she is standing at the top of a mountain and appreciating the majestic panoramic view of mesmerizing Himalaya. As a kid, she used to look up in the sky and wish for wings to fly up to the mountains. And now after a long wait of many years, she is standing here and living her dream. It’s the moment when she can’t believe her eyes because what she always dreamed of has come alive. She looks with amazement as if she’s witnessing a miracle. It is the moment of her life. She just wants to feel it. There are beautiful clouds below her and there are snow clad mountain peaks emerging from those clouds. The white peaks shining in blue sky among white clouds look like glittering diamonds to her. The view of the large lush green meadow surrounded by mountains under blue sky with a rainbow circling the horizon has put her in a state of tranquility. As the sun starts drowning in the horizon, the sky begins to boast his mystical colours. The beautiful mix of pink, orange and red looks like creating a twilight saga. She opens her both arm and takes a deep breath to entwine with the nature. The glimmering rays of the moon are paying tribute to her by kissing her warm cheeks and her eyes twinkle in bright moon light. She raises her face towards the moon and senses the flood of memories which she wants to unleash. The cool breeze lifts her ruffled hair and blows her skirt up. She closes her eyes and breathes deep as if she wants to let her know that she is finally here and then she opens her eyes and finds herself on the same wheelchair inside a room with an empty wall in front of her eye. Tears rolls down from her eye but these are the tears of Joy because she is living her dreams today. The feelings comes to her mind while waiting for her daughter who is coming back home today after her first expedition of a high range mountain ~ AB
The roads of life are paved wide and skirt the mountains. And these very roads are choked with a steady stream of pathetically pedantic travelers who in reality have no intent of traveling. And if we are to discover the real travelers, much less join them, we will find them out on precarious paths that defy the roads and scale the mountains.
With great passion, observe every details of the sacred journey.
What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering.
Reality. It is sometimes brought through foreign eyes; because if you do not know any better, you cannot see the worse (and vice versa).
How could we have discovered great lands, if we dare not travel?
If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.
Removing yourself from the familiar and opting for the unfamiliar opens up the unknown. And within the unknown there are questions we have never asked ourselves; experiences we have never imagined; lessons we have never had a chance to learn. What we ultimately need when we are stuck within a bubble, is change. Another perspective of seeing and knowing what is possible. Traveling will open that up for you. The world will play its role; all you need to do, is pack your bags and allow it to happen.
In the moment of decision, may you hear the voice of the Creator saying, ‘This is right road, travel on it.
Adventure begins with a thought, decision and action.
I thought, Dad.Could I go to Vietnam for you?Dad, I could do it. I could do it for you. I could go to the places you fought. I could find the bits and pieces of your heart and soul left behind. If I bring them back, would it heal your pain?Dad, you gave me life. You made possible every good thing in my life. Why do you insist on fighting your nightmares and memories and monsters alone?You don’t have to do it alone, Dad. I could help you fight.Dad, you know what?I’ll be back before you find out so you don’t have to be afraid. I’m going to Vietnam.
If walking into the responsibility of caring for eighteen children was difficult, walking out on that responsibility was almost impossible. The children had become a constant presence, little spinning tops that splattered joy onto everyone they bumped into.
Most moderately active children – as long as they have full stomachs – cope well with exotic experiences, but parents should get fit for their trip. Young children will expect their parents to be All Powerful so they would be wise to prepare properly and arrive with toned quads or they might not keep up on the slopes.
Sometimes you have to let go a little bit and travel the path of least resistance but this doesn’t mean that you quit when things get tough, as you are working towards a goal! It just means that you may only be able to see a rough draft of your final destination, right now, and that it’s safe to explore along the way.
I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thought to ask a suitor the same challenging questions my father might have asked him, in a different age.
My motto? Don’t trust someone who is just as cagey as yourself." "What kind of detective are you?” “A lousy one and proud of it. I write, remember?” She looked down at her hand & laughed. “Berretta doesn’t make lighters.” "Why I was a writer! My life revolved around fiction. I could make something up""She looked down at her hand & laughed. “Berretta doesn’t make lighters.” "So they're not Tolstoy, they're a little shorter...Okay, okay a lot. Go ahead, read my mystery series anyway." "A detective has their boundaries especially me. So mine shifted occasionally...okay a lot" “Beat it, Buster. My temper and this mace have a hair trigger.”“Interference could be lethal.” I got right up in his face, hissing, “Don’t push me, I’m hormonal.”I'm not really a lousy detective, just rough around the edges.
A bad leader wouldn't stress the importance of staying together to stop the enemy. You want peace? You can't forgive the enemy, if you can't forgive your men for losing faith. You can't force every one single Union deserter to fight, but I know, only you can inspire every deserter to fight for their cause." - Amelia Raht
I had finally become aware of how much I was capable of, how little I had to lose, and how deep into Douglas's soft sand I had sunk. Magellan's letters, which Douglas had recited, had become part of my being. It was as if I was right there with Magellan, following every curve of his pen as he wrote down his words to his beloved ones confiding his secret. I had become the ink, and the tip was tattooing my path. I was going to follow his dream, but still, I wished I knew why.
I felt that the magical people must be in the hidden back roads and dusty cubby holes of life; on highways, in hostels, and in shabby, smoky cafes. These enchanting people are in trees, around fires and under hand-knit hats and street lamps reflecting gold on rain soaked pavement. They dance while others dangle; they vibrantly sing the songs that get jumbled and stuck in the subconscious of others who only wish to catch tune. They are the rare ones whose uncommon experiences touch your heart through just a wink of their eye, the stories stitched in the holes of their shoes, invoking a longing for the unknown, taking others to a place of missing what they've never even had -- they do not settle, they do not compromise.
Why is it that when Robert Redford-cum-Denys Finch Hatton flies away in the golden glow out of Africa, he is pursuing his destiny? And when I walk away I'm just a chick who's scared of commitment and on the run, who's weird for ignoring Glamour magazine's predictions of my eggs drying up? Learning is an underrated form of liberation.
There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.
The subconscious mind is the guiding force for your entire life.
I believe that life is all about perception and timing. That good things come to those who act and that life’s about more than collecting a paycheck. I believe that the only person you’re destined to become is the one that you decide to be. That if you try hard enough you can convince yourself of anything. That having patience doesn’t make you a hero nor does it make you a doormat. I believe that not showing love proves you’re weak and belittling others doesn’t make you strong. That you are never as far away from people as the miles may suggest. That life’s too short to read awful books, listen to terrible music, or be around uninspiring people. I believe that where you start has little impact on where you finish. That sometimes the best thing you can do is walk away. That you can never be overdressed or overeducated. I believe that the cure for anything is salt water; sweat, tears, or the sea. That you should never let your memories be greater than your dreams. And that you should always choose adventure.
Setting a goal is like to set your destination point in your life GPS which could take you to your desire position as you dreamed about...
Your every positive action in your life will increase your self-esteem and this self-esteem will boost you for more positive action to take you on success
Give yourself a great self-respect to know who you are then your confidence will shine on you
I travel to know the life of great souls in the pages of a book.
What lies ahead is often unknown. But keep traveling.
Find the right paths for your journey. Travel along these paths to your final destination.
I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...
I recounted my adventures, just as I recount them to you now. I told him about Bombay, which glowed in the night like a lamp. I told him about Bangalore, about the beaches of Goa, of Pune, where elaborate retirement homes and ashrams ringed India’s ferociously competitive colleges, and liberals went to experience transcendence without getting their feet dirty. I told him of places you could expand your mind and still be within walking distance of the nearest McDonalds.
Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific?
How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters
Powerful words always travel the whole world!
Sleeping in the simple small cottage rather than hotels... and under the billion stars is one of the breathtaking experience... pause, breath, nothingness moment is what gives meaning to my busy existence, that life is felt in silence, in that moment when what you see before you can no longer be conveyed with words...
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
That year, when the trees burned the fire of late summer into their leaves and the ground mist was a ghost of the river, long and wet and cold, the aunt looked from her windows to the walls around her and imagined another winter inside them. She began to see the world as a bird sees bars, and she scratched her arms beneath her sleeves.
The times on the open road with all the unknown ahead were the times I was happiest and most secure, with people who knew our core and lived solely for the purpose of unmediated experiences and love, from which purpose itself is born. Not the distant idea of life, love and purpose dirtied by constructs.
Some journeys in life can only be traveled alone.
We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.
Cutting my roots and leaving my home and family when I was 18 years old forced me to build my home in other things, like my music, stories and my journey. The last years I have more or less constantly been on my way, on the road, always leaving and never arriving, which also means leaving people. I’ve loved and lost and I have regrets and I miss and no matter how many times you leave, start over, achieve success or travel places it’s other people that matter. People, friends, family, lovers, strangers – they will forever stay with you, even if only through memory. I’ve grown to appreciate people to the deepest core and I’m trying to learn how to tell people what I want to tell them when I have the chance, before it’s too late. …
Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.
I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.
The longer I travel and the more people I meet, the more apparent it becomes that certain people will come and go in your life in order to fill a need. Not as a messiah, not as a savior, but as a light that shines to illuminate the path you are on, to show you what needs to be seen at that point in time. It is entirely up to you to open your eyes and allow yourself to see it. Some will be dim, others will shine bright. A select few will burn like the sun and make you feel a gravity so great that you have no choice but to change the course you are on.You don’t get to pick and choose who it might be and you don’t get to decide how much impact they will have. All you can do is open yourself up to the possibility when it comes, give what you can while it’s there, and be grateful when it leaves. Because life is too short to not burn like the sun. Anything else is a death sentence.
When you look closely to the path you have travel on, you will realise that God was always with you, directing every step you took.
This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don’t know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I’m sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I’ve lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I’ve done here and I’m afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories…
It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.It is psychotic to go.It is psychotic to look.Psychotic to live in a different country forever.Psychotic to lose something forever.The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy.It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.
I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.
Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.
So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.
A selfie has more face and fewer feelings.
When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.
Your dreams are like the market grounds; their locations really matter. If you keep hiding your potentials out of sight, you may be great but unknown! Your influence can travel long distances if only you give them the chances to go where they are needed! Rebrand yourself!
He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.
A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.
Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.
I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.
More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return.
Travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn -- can all act as touchstones when least expected.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.
I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.
If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.
A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.
My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet.
No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.
Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occasionally needs a break from her husband in order to visit Cambodia. Just for a few days!
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
..luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of travelling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living – indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor.
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.
All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
Rule number one: wear loose clothing. No Problem. Rule number two: no alcohol for the next three days. Slight problem. I'll miss my evening glass of wine but figure I can go for three days without and compensate later.And the last rule: absolutely no coffee or tea or caffeine of any kind.Big problem. This rule hits me like a sucker punch and sure would have knocked me to the floor had I not been sitting there already. I'm eying the exits, plotting my escape. I knew enlightenment came at a price, but i had no idea the price was this steep. A sense of real panic sets in. How am I going to survive for the next seventy-two hours without a single cup of coffee?
I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.It was just where I went.
Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have.
Yeah, that’s my experience. Humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like, you forgot the lesson from the last time. Because the first person you encounter kind of bitch-slaps you upside the head in the most wonderful, innocent way and you realize, God, I’m still an asshole. And this guy, by doing nothing except being broke and so incredibly polite—it takes you aback, you realize, I’m still not there yet. I still have like eight miles to go before I can even get into the parking lot of humility. I have to keep going back. It’s like going back to a chiropractor to get a readjustment. That’s me in Africa, that’s me in Southeast Asia. You come back humbled and you bring that into your life. It’s made me much more tolerant of other peoples—and I’m not saying I used to be a misogynist, or I used to be a racist, that was never my problem. But I can be extremely headstrong, impatient, rude. Like, “Hurry up, man. What’s your problem? Get out of my way.” That sentiment comes easy to me. Going to these countries, you realize none of that is necessary, none of it’s cool, it’s nothing Abraham Lincoln would do, and so why are you doing it? Those are the lessons I’ve learned.
There's something in the act of setting out that renews me, that fills me with a feeling of possibility. On the road, I'm forced to rely on instinct and intuition, on the kindness of strangers, in ways that illuminate who I am, ways that shed light on my motivations, my fears.
Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.
Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.
I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices to settle on one thing or another are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel.
David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.
The storm long past, the night sky was beset with stars. Pointing upward, I asked her to pick a point of light and stay with it. Standing up, I eased Sara to her feet. Whispering into her ear, I asked, “Have you ever stood under a star... and felt the earth move under your feet?” - The Judas Syndrome
I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?
I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.
At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.
All of us,' he said, 'have hopes of being poet, artist, discoverer, philospoher, scientist; of possessing the attributes of all these simultaneously. Few are permitted to achieve any of them in daily life. But in travel we attain them all. Then we have our day of glory, when all our dreams come true, when we can be anything we like, as long as we like, and, when we are tired of it, pull up stakes and move on. Travel -- the solitude of the mountains, the emptiness of the desert, the delicacy of the minaret; eternal change, limitless contrast, unending variety.' (Eric Lang)
Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.
Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes.
[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret.
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.
At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.
Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods--haloed most of them--but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments.
the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature
What's supposed to happen, at the end of a quest? Cheers and accolades, Josh knew; people throw their hats in the air, and you glow with pride as they lift you to their shoulders. What else? Medals, speeches and a great feast, and then a ballad about your exploits, and finally, as the fireworks go off overhead, a soft, clean, fresh bed.
Why do you need that thing?" September asked. "None of the airports back home have them.""They do. You just can't see them right," Betsy Basilstalk said with a grin. "All customs agents have them, otherwise, why would people agree to stand in line and be peered at and inspected? We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly. Where you live, the awful machinery is smaller, harder to see. Less honest, that's all. Whereas Rupert here? He's as honest as they come. Does what it says on the box.
With the first jolt he was in daylight; they had left the gateways of King’s Cross, and were under blue sky. Tunnels followed, and after each the sky grew bluer, and from the embankment at Finsbury Park he had his first sight of the sun. It rolled along behind the eastern smokes — a wheel, whose fellow was the descending moon — and as yet it seemed the servant of the blue sky, not its lord. He dozed again. Over Tewin Water it was day. To the left fell the shadow of the embankment and its arches; to the right Leonard saw up into the Tewin Woods and towards the church, with its wild legend of immortality. Six forest trees — that is a fact — grow out of one of the graves in Tewin churchyard. The grave’s occupant — that is the legend — is an atheist, who declared that if God existed, six forest trees would grow out of her grave. These things in Hertfordshire; and farther afield lay the house of a hermit — Mrs. Wilcox had known him — who barred himself up, and wrote prophecies, and gave all he had to the poor. While, powdered in between, were the villas of business men, who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye. Over all the sun was streaming, to all the birds were singing, to all the primroses were yellow, and the speedwell blue, and the country, however they interpreted her, was uttering her cry of “now. ” She did not free Leonard yet, and the knife plunged deeper into his heart as the train drew up at Hilton. But remorse had become beautiful.
…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…
Adventrue rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run.
Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?
What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.
The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.
I wanted to write an adventure story, not, it's true, I really did. I shall have failed, that's all. Adventures bore me. I have no idea how to talk about countries, how to make people wish they had been there. I am not a good travelling salesman. Countries? Where are they , whatever became of them.When I was twelve I dreamed of Hongkong. That tedious, commonplace little provincial town! Shops sprouting from every nook and cranny! The Chinese junks pictured on the lids of chocolate boxes used to fascinate me. Junks: sort of chopped-off barges, where the housewives do all their cooking and washing on deck. They even have television. As for the Niagara Falls: water, nothing but water! A dam is more interesting; at least one can occasionally see a big crack at its base, and hope for some excitement.When one travels, one sees nothing but hotels. Squalid rooms, with iron bedsteads, and a picture of some kind hanging on the wall from a rusty nail, a coloured print of London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower.One also sees trains, lots of trains, and airports that look like restaurants, and restaurants that look like morgues. All the ports in the world are hemmed in by oil slicks and shabby customs buildings. In the streets of the towns, people keep to the sidewalks, cars stop at red lights. If only one occasionally arrived in a country where women are the colour of steel and men wear owls on their heads. But no, they are sensible, they all have black ties, partings to one side, brassières and stiletto heels. In all the restaurants, when one has finished eating one calls over the individual who has been prowling among the tables, and pays him with a promissory note. There are cigarettes everywhere! There are airplanes and automobiles everywhere.
A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea...Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.
In London it had seemed impossible to travel without the proper evening clothes. One could see an invitation arriving for an Embassy ball or something. But on the other side of Europe with the first faint tinges of faraway places becoming apparent and exciting, to say nothing of vanishing roads and extra weight, Embassy balls held less significance.
After a day on Mykines, I changed my mind about life not going on. A sort of life was going on, beating with a reasonalbe version of a pulse, but that life consisted for the most part of travelers like myself. There were maybe a dozen of us -- one third of the island's population. Our tribe could only increase as the Mykines tribe dwindled away, a few falling down steps, most simply emigrating, until there would be, sad to say, only our peripatetic selves. We were the future of all places condemned by remoteness to a lingering, photogenic death.
So now it’s this thing I do.I go away, ever so often, by myself, for myself,to new places with foreign streets I haven’t walked yet,and there I wander, up and down, watching people going places I don’t knowand it always hits me that they’re never alone,always with someone,and I wonder how they would spend a day all on their own in a foreign city with nothing to do and no one to see,and I wonder if they’d be happy.Just simply being free,like I am trying to be.Happy.Just simply being me.
Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.' The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside -- a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.
It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.
To walk through unknown streets in cities where you are merely learning the language is to force yourself into a new state of hypervigilance. You are a traveler, and hopefully not just a tourist, and must appear calm, but maintain your bearings. Not to get too lost, too off course and without alternatives, without an escape plan in the event of a dangerous situation.
The purpose of a pilgrimage is about setting aside a long period of time in which the only focus is to be the matters of the soul. Many believe a pilgrimage is about going away but it isn’t; it is about coming home. Those who choose to go on pilgrimage have already ventured away from themselves; and now set out in a longing to journey back to who they are. Many a time we believe we must go away from all that is familiar if we are to focus on our inner well-being because we feel it is the only way to escape all that drains and distracts us, allowing us to turn inward and tend to what ails us. Yet we do not need to go to the edges of the earth to learn who we are, only the edges of ourself.
Clever and civilized men will not stay homeLeave your homeland and explore foreign fieldsGo out! You shall find replacement for those you have leftGive your all, the sweetness of life will be tasted after the struggleI have seen that standing water stagnatesIf it flows, it is pure, if it does not, it will become murkyIf the lion doesn’t leave his den, he will not eatIf the arrow does not leave the bow, it will not strikeIf the sun stands still in its orbitMan will tire of itGold dust merely soil before excavatedAloewood is just ordinary wood if in the forestTravel by Imam Syafii
What constitutes the pleasure of the traveler is the obstacle, the fatigue, the peril itself. What pleasure can there be in an excursion where one is always sure of arriving, finding ready horses, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the comforts one can enjoy at home. One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the lack of the sudden surprise, the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well regulated, so well meshed, so well labeled, that chance is no longer possible; another century of perfection, and each one will be able to foresee, from the day of his birth, what will happen to him until the day of his death. Human will will be completely annihilated. No more crimes, no more virtues, no more physiognomies, no more originality. It will become impossible to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognize one another, for everyone will be same. Then an immense boredom will seize the universe, and suicide will decimate the population of the globe, for the principal spring of life—curiosity—will have been destroyed forever.
One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.
But in my clutching, it began to slip away. I softened my grasp and the sense of fluidity returned, I rode it like a wave. ...This paradox provoked in me a sense of freedom and relief-relief that what I was always aware of on a faint, subconscious level was a strong and satisfying truth.
Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It's a contention of Heat Moon's - believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he's going to get - that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.
On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funny papers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on.
I think about what the man at the Coney joint said. He was right. We are the people who stay. We stay in our homes and pay them off. We stay at our jobs. We do our thirty and come home to stay even more. We stay until we are no longer able to mow our lawns and our gutters sag with saplings, until our houses look haunted to the neighborhood children. We like it where we are. I guess then the other question is: Why do we even travel? There can only be one answer to that: we travel to appreciate home. (p.97)
There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?
For starters, that’s a rather simple principle of Time Travel right there – and according to the pioneers of time travel, it’s one of the foundation stones of the Theory behind it. It’s something of a paradox – a mind-boggling annotation in the ever-puzzling and ever growing Anals of History. (Some readers may still be thinking that should be ‘Annals’ – however, the author of this work cannot be blamed for what you may think.)
To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparately interwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is a much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, - how many songs and ballards, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this Oriental pile!
When we’ve been travelling around I’ve often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I’ve seen everything I’ve decided that home, wherever that may be, is the place for feelings of peace. And if I can be at peace with myself then that is the most important thing. I think travelling teaches one that.
O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.
Let’s get one thing straight at the beginning. A lunar eclipse simply will not do. You may have seen a partial solar eclipse, but neither will that do. The sun is such a monster that until a few minutes before totality the light from the sun blasts right around the disk of the moon and the Earth is little changed. Annie Dillard wrote that the difference between a partial eclipse and a total one is the difference between kissing a man and marrying him. Just so. So people search out totality, no matter how remote the spot. And so we have come to Svalbard.- from Out in the Cold
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.“Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
But I'm not running away. I'm running toward... toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity. And while I was in Mexico I discovered something intruiging: Once I leave the U.S., I am not bound by the rules of my culture. And when I am a foreigner in another country, I am exempt from the local rules. This extraordinary situation means that there are no rules in my life. I am free to live by the standards and ideals and rules I create for myself.
At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.
I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.
With the selfies, a photographer has finally found his place in a photograph.
His diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.
A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive.
Welcome to the American sector! Feast your eyes on glorious Pluto, her wild frontier, her high standard of living, her rugged, hardworking citizens, her purple mountains majesty! Ride the mighty buffalo! Marvel at the bustling industry of the great cities of Jizo and Ascalaphus! Climb the peaks of Mt. Orcus and Mt. Chernobog!
If Kumar had his way they would leave for Fiji every year just before Thanksgiving and not return until the New Year rang in and the decorations came down. They would swim with the fishes and lie on the beach eating papaya. On the years they were tired of Fiji they would go to Bali or Sydney or any sunny, sandy place whose name contained an equal number of consonants and vowels.
Travel to CubaGenerally Tourist travel to Cuba is prohibited under U.S. law for U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and others subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The hard and fast rules have been relaxed some and exceptions are now made for certain travelers who can show an acceptable reason, to visit the Island Nation in which case a “Tourist Visa" is required and available. US Citizens must have a valid passport with two blank pages available, for entry and exit stamps, at the time of entry into Cuba.United States issued credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba so travelers should plan to bring enough cash with them to cover all the expenses they might incur during their trip. Authorized travelers to Cuba are subject to daily spending limits. See the Office of Foreign Assets Control page of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.The export of Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) is strictly prohibited, regardless of the amount. Travelers may only export the equivalent of $5000 in any currency other than the Cuban convertible peso (CUC). Anyone wishing to export more than this amount must demonstrate evidence that the currency was acquired legitimately from a Cuban bank.Cuba has many Hotels and Resort Areas, most of which are foreign owned; I counted 313 of them. Many are Canadian or European owned with Meliá Hotels International in the lead with twenty-eight hotels in Cuba alone. Being a Spanish hotel chain, it was founded in 1956 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The photo show the internationally known “Nacional Hotel.” Some Cruise Lines including Carnival now offer cruises to Cuba and advise guests as to the entry requirements. Follow Captain Hank Bracker, author of “The Exciting Story of Cuba” on Facebook, Goodreads and his Web Page as well as Twitter. His daily blogs and weekend commentaries are now being read by hundreds and frequrntly thousands of readers. Send suggestions and comments to PO Box 607 Elfers, FL 34680-0607.
An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave - I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing - but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.
I made my first home there and had been happy, because to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underappreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.
What sort of adventures?' I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an event out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.
I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get [to Fitchburg from Concord] first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents ... Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
There is a whole generation of young people just like us wandering around Europe and the rest of the world, trying to find some meaning for why they are alive and what they should choose to do with their time. When Martha leaves and we sit in front of the fire in the living room, I look to Lily until she turns to me and I can see the grief that hides just under the surface of her expression. We are, or at least were, two of those lost souls: wanderers, backpackers, season workers, Wwoofers, Workawayers, travellers: searching the world for something or someplace to hold on to. And we have come home not because we have retired from trying to find answers and are ready to settle into adulthood, but because my death has come upon us fast and unexpected. I am not the first person of this generation of travellers- or any person who lives in this godless, superficial society- to die. But I think that it feels to Lily and to me, my mother too perhaps, that I may very well be.
Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there…
Sometimes you do not need a particular destination to go, you just need a travel; the place you want to go is the travel itself!
In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen. As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious. To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy. I didn’t want to go. Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn’t.
Sunflowers hellos from gate to gate. The hour at the square. Candy, art, books, look. A warmth given. Beauties with rain forest hair Walk by the clock tower. Sunlight of neon, the keys inside their eyes. No storms. Traffic sounds, salt air. Salt that moves the thirst and destroys all the fears.
Something right in the morning can turn into something wrong in the afternoon! Even if you are on the right path, you must still question the rightness of your path! Conditions perpetually change! Update your path and your travel constantly!
We have a set of rules for our faith, our sexuality, our marriages, our dating relationships, for choosing a church—nothing is off-limits. We tell ourselves to always do this, and never do that, and everything will turn out perfectly. Worse than that, we back up our rules with Bible verses and tell everyone else to follow them too.
My own experiences in the wild rank in value just behind the birth of my children, my wedding, and the memorial services and graduations I’ve attended. I am permanently affected by those solitary encounters with land, sky, and water, and all that’s contained within. I don’t really know if I am a better person because of them, but I am happier for them." Letters, The American Scholar, Autumn 2016
It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.
…So, um, you’re from Rochester? Like, New York?” Jersey asked.“Yup, we used to live out there,” Rudger confirmed, nonchalant. “You ever been?”“Naw, the closest I’ve ever been to there would be… well, believe it or not, New Jersey, the place where my parents named me after. It was crowded, polluted and full of crime… I loved it.
[The long ride to Riyadh]When I first travelled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happened to me. That’s probably where the dumb luck came in. Then I began to read the guidebooks, the State Department warnings, the endless elucidation of national norms, cultural cues and insults and regional dangers, and I became wary, careful, savvy. I kept my money taped inside my shoe, or strapped to my stomach. I took any kind of precaution, believing that the people of this area did this, and the people of that province did that. But then, finally, I realised no one of any region did anything I have ever expected them to do, much less anything the guidebooks said they would. Instead, they behaved as everyone behaves, which is to say they behave as individuals of damnably infinite possibility. Anyone could do anything, in theory, but most of the time everyone everywhere acts with plain bedrock decency, helping where help is needed, guiding where guidance is necessary. It’s almost weird.
sometimes we are so lonely that we are more ready to fall in love with the concept of a person than the person in itself. Some people are thirsty for life, while others are hungry for love - and a girl who travels will know that there have been people who have fallen in love with her for the wrong reasons
People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.
Elvira, as befitting one who represented a magazine, registered first and demanded a room and bath. She pronounced it "bawth." The clerk seemed aghast at the request. However, in that hotel, any lady got whatever she asked for. It was her unquestioned right, as a lady. But there was no bath in the hotel, nor running water for that matter. The clerk faltered out something about a nice bowl and pitcher in every room, and said he thought they could provide a foot tub. He was sorry; there was no bath. Elvira couldn't grasp the situation. She thought the clerk was stupid--a hotel without a bath was a contradiction in terms. When she explained that she wanted something for complete immersion, the clerk seemed embarrassed. At his wits' end, he suggested (blushing like fire) that the colored boy could bring up the hog scalder.
Ah, Toulouse, you have travelled too much. You know the gods of a hundred lands, those of the trees and mountains, the sky and sea, the stars and planets, of demons and angels, and even the Master of the Cosmos. But I am speaking of God. There are others, I’m sure, but only one God who created even great Zeus and Rama. Yet travel is like philosophy: a few years of it will perk the eye to differences, which you shall be able to notice with ease. Yet living as I have, travelling to lonely lands and through a thousand metropolises and hidden woods, you rather see the similarities. All becomes one, and God too becomes one. Not the sum of all those gods here, but beyond them, a being few philosophers have truly grasped. He has always been one, but he is severed in our minds. So it is up to us to piece him back together. If our souls possess a clarity beyond what our mortal nature can bestow, we shall see him.
Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets - in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.
And then I saw what I was to see so many times on the journey—a look of longing. “Lord! I wish I could go.” “Don’t you like it here?” “Sure. It’s all right, but I wish I could go.” “You don’t even know where I’m going.”“I don’t care. I’d like to go anywhere.
The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise
It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will - whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection....
It was as if she was a dream, like London, which he could not entirely grasp and of which he was not worthy. He wanted to be part of it but had forgotten how. It seemed extraordinary and strange that this paragon among women had condescended to travel on his ship. In fact, she’d insisted upon it. Her presence was at once otherworldly and familiar, none of which explained why his brain ceased to function when he was in her company.
The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.
Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.
I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled towards a normality that can better accommodate us.
What we seek in travel is neither discovery nor trade but rather a gentle deterritorialization: we want to be taken over by the journey - in other words, by absence. As our metal vectors transcend meridians, oceans and poles, absence takes on a fleshy quality. The clandestineness of the depths of private life gives way to annihilation by longitude and latitude. But in the end the body tires of not knowing where it is, even if the mind finds this absence exalting, as if it were a quality proper to itself.Perhaps, after all, what we seek in others is the same gentle deterritorialization that we seek in travel. Instead of one's own desire, instead of discovery, we are tempted by exile in the desire of the other, or by the desire of the other as an ocean to cross. The looks and gestures of lovers already have the distance of exile about them; the language of lovers is an expatriation in words that are afraid to signify; and the bodies of lovers are a tender hologram to eye and hand, offering no resistance and hence susceptible of being crisscrossed, like airspace, by desire. We move around with circumspection on a mental planet of circumvolutions, and from our excesses and passions we bring back the same transparent memories as we do from our travels.
Wanderlust, the very strong or irresistible impulse to travel, is adopted untouched from the German, presumably because it couldn't be improved upon. Workarounds like the French passion du voyage don't quite capture the same meaning. Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly; it's something more animal and more fickle - something more like lust. We don't lust after many things in life. We don't need words like worklust or homemakinglust.
Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I'll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.
Because I was alone, however, even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.
The Ache That Would Not LeaveBehind the hum and routine of daily living, there lay a persistent and wild longing for something she could not easily put into words. It felt like impulsive adventures and watching the sun rise over unfamiliar mountains, or coffee in a street café, set to the background music of a foreign language. It was the smell of the ocean, with dizzying seagulls whirling in a cobalt sky; exotic foods and strange faces, in a city where no one knew her name. She wanted secrets whispered at midnight, and road trips without a map, but most of all, she ached for someone who desired to explore the mysteries that lay sleeping within her. The truly heartbreaking part was that she could feel the remaining days of her life falling away, like leaves from an autumn tree, but still this mysterious person who held the key to unlock her secrets did not arrive; they were missing, and she knew not where to find them.
I felt that first awareness that there’s a whole set of species whose sounds and calls you’ve never heard—the wonder of realizing that people are growing up with an entirely different sensory experience from yours. This whole country seemed so shiny to me.
Oh, well, it might look like a patterned world, laid out in prim design, but to those living there it could never be so simple. They were as alive as she: that old peasant contriving to outwit the cold; that woman anxiously counting her comical flock lest one goose escape her vigilance; all those who slept, or toiled, or loved under the low-hung roofs or the sharp turrets. Those people out there, if they caught sight of her own face pressed close to the window pane, might be speculating about her. To them she was part of the pattern of the lumbering train with its trail of smoke and little boxlike carriages. Perhaps they envied her, riding at ease to distant Paris. How little they knew of that! How little she herself know what awaited her at the end of the journey!
There are those who travel but never really arrive. Those who visit a place but never know the people. Travel is so much more when you get closer to life and how it is lived here, wherever here may be. I am moving into the unknown to come into being at home wherever I find myself.Individually, inspired, and imaginative.
The French don't snack. They will tear off the endo of a fres baguette (which, if it's warm, it's practically impossible to resist) and eat it as they leave the boulangerie. And that's usually all you will see being consumed on the street. Compare that with the public eating and drinking that goes on in America: pizza, hot dogs, nachos, tacos, heroes, potato chips, sandwiches, jerricans of coffee, half-gallon buckets of Coke (Diet, of cours) and heaven knows what else being demolished on the hoof, often on the way to the aerobic class.
The traveling world is parallel to the world of those rooted to one spot; it is the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Things that are taken by most people to have solidity and permanence become relative and subject to time. The church spire, the town hall or courthouse that watches over your days and is an ever-fixed mark to the merchant or the laborer, is to the traveling man only one among many such. The cherished touchstones of your daily life are to him a set of fresh opportunities for passing adventure, a source of profit to be extracted quickly, like gold from a small mountain, before moving on to the next El Dorado.
There are those who travel but never really arrive. Those who visit a place but never know the people. Travel is so much more when you get closer to life and how it is lived here, wherever here may be. I am moving into the unknown to come into being at home wherever I find myself. Individually, inspired, and imaginative.
You don’t know about the other travellers you meet and they in turn have no idea who you are, and that is truly special, for there isn’t any detrimental preconceived notions about the other, and in this space there is room for understanding and healing. When you backpack, for the first time in a long time, you feel like you belong and are connected to not only with the world, but also with your inner self.
Just as much as it is about booking flights, sharing hostel rooms with strangers, and learning to say hello in a variety of languages; travel is about the momentarily times of breakdowns, longing of all the great things back home, and the tears you hold back from each good-bye, which in the entirety, makes up the honest human experience of living.
We were all in that crammed 8 person hostel room for our own personal reasons; whether we were trying to get away from demons of the past or because you realized we were all fucked up in the head a bit and had to cure chaos with chaos; for whatever reason, we met in that hostel lobby, as the only foreigners on the boat, or ended up travelling across a couple of countries together for a few weeks just because I happened to sit next to you on that bus.
Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.
It must be noted however, that there were other Europeans that travelled to other parts of the earth, but because they did not take with them the same Protestant culture of dignity of labour, they did not record the same level of success, growth and development as the early Protestant immigrants had done.
Travel is life-changing. That's the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that "we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls." It's all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found.
Tourism is the great soporific. It's a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there's something interesting in their lives. It's musical chairs in reverse..... All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. The tourists smile at their tans and their shiny teeth and think they're happy. But the suntans hide who they really are-- salary slaves, with heads full of American rubbish. Travel is the last fantasy the 2oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
The best part of traveling is finding yourself.
… everything was fresh, green and particularly beautiful. Afternoon light, filtering between remnants of monsoon clouds, picked out gullies and spot-lit patches of forest and scrub on the convoluted ridges of the rim of the Kathmandu Valley. Or, after a rainstorm, wisps of clouds clung to the trees as if scared to let go. Behind, himals peeked out shyly between the clouds.
Nothing has changed, Claire. You're still as beautiful as you were when we met first and I am still in love with everything about you. We may be worlds apart but this doesn't keep our hearts at distance. I feel your breath in every breath of mine and I hear your heartbeat in every beat of my heart. I traveled to far away lands, rivers, forests, mountains, glaciers, deserts and skyscrapers but wherever I go I find you there. My dreams aren't illusions but visions of a beautiful yesterday; I play with your hair-locks, I kiss your eyes, I embrace your hands and you giggle in my arms blossoming like a flower. My love, you're my only reality, my only fantasy, my only celebration and my only refuge. I have waited a thousands suns and I can wait a thousand more to witness the moment you call out to me. That day you'll find me and even if I don't live up to see that day I will be with you forever, just remember me.
She positions herself on a stool in front of a giant washing machine, watching her garments twirl in flashing patterns of red and white on a sea of black. It subdues her, that clothes can be washed in Boston or Rome and look the same for it, that she can step on an airplane and be anywhere else in the civilized world within a day and wear the same clothes and be the same person. That the small realities stay knitted together!
I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I'd just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart.
I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.
I’d love to be a tabletop in Paris, where food is art and life combined in one, where people gather and talk for hours. I want lovers to meet over me. I’d want to be covered in drops of candle wax and breadcrumbs and rings from the bottom of wineglasses. I would never be lonely, and I would always serve a good purpose.
No sunrises that stop you dead with their unspeakable beuaty, either, he thought. No whales breaching only yards away from the ship, showering your awestruck self with a cold ocean rain. No songs and whiskey belowdecks at night while the wind plucks at the ship's rigging and the ice beats against her hull.
Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot.
Why do people put off travel until retirement? What are they saving it for? I understand that people want to be financially secure first, and pay off pension plans, but why consign the most active years of your life to drudgery? Why would you sacrifice today's freedom for a future that will always remain uncertain, no matter how carefully you plan for it? I'm not saying that everyone sitting in an office right this minute should drop everything and take off for Central Europe. I'm saying that if you want to see the world, plan for it and do it as soon as possible. The experience will give you the inspiration and fortitude you need to survive being a grown up.
If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity.
The calm skies that drifted above us lulled us into thinking this traversée would be smooth, but after several hours, the unsteady sea had taken its toll on me and after a light lunch and a brief swim in the open sea failed to do so, I attempted to remedy my mal de mer with rest. When I awoke, the sun had already set and the cool air and soft light of twilight helped recalibrate my disoriented thoughts. Although my seasickness had subsided, I lay starboard side facing the heavens - that were now a deep shade of purple - so as to not provoke another episode. We set to anchoring behind several large volcanic pillars just a stone’s-throw away from where the Tyrrhenian Sea kissed the east of the island. A handful of wishes scattered the skies as we approached the shores of Aci Trezza. As these stars traced their dying song across the void above, part of me felt ashamed for even entertaining the notion of wishing upon a star, but that voice was speedily silenced by words He had once shared with me in Scotland: “There is always some truth to fiction.
Until that rainy Sunday at the movies 31 years ago, for me, companionship had been a mandate for life’s good times. After Orca, it became a choice. My trip to the theater helped me to distinguish between loneliness (experienced by default), and solitude (choosing when and how to enjoy my own company), as I began a journey of engaging the world on my own terms. Over the years, that journey deepened as I traveled life’s roads with increasing independence and confidence, whether I was attending graduate school at night while working during the day, buying my first house or changing careers.
The trip changed all that. Stirring the murk of a life ill-fitting, Something More was perceptible though without name or form. Something More was the genesis of a map, not one handed to me but rendered with each step taken, a skill seasoned by a cruise gone bad.
Going through the customs dampened them further. Customs inspectors must have a mental twist that makes them suspicious of innocence. Dewy-eyed honeymooners, red-cheeked provincials, and helpless little old ladies lash them into frenzied investigation while slinking Orientals hugging small black bags are passed with scarcely a glance. George and Harriet stood under the letter “R” and watched reproachfully while a muttering little man flung their underclothes and dirty laundry right and left, leaving scattered heaps for them to put back in their suitcases.“I thought the French were supposed to be so polite,” said Harriet indignantly.Maybe it can't be proven statistically, but it’s a safe bet that any given American on his or her first trip to France will at some point remark with indignation that he or she had thought the French were supposed to be so polite.
In these pages, traveling “solo” does not necessarily mean “alone.” The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. “Solo” by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience.
The gift of solo moments is that they are wholly ours. On or off the road, solo moments connect us inward to ourselves with heightened clarity and insight. They also direct our energies out into the world, magnetizing us to new people and experiences we may not have encountered under any other circumstance.
No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.
Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.
Saying good-bye to a city is harder than breaking up with a lover. The grief and regret are more piercing because they are more complex and unmixed, changing from corner to corner, with each passing vista, each shift of the light. Breaking up with a city is unclouded by the suspicion that after the affair ends, you'll learn something about the beloved you wished you never knew. The city is as it will remain: gorgeous, unattainable, going on without you as if you'd never existed. What pain and longing the lover feels as he bids farewell to a tendril of ivy, a flower stall, the local butcher. The charming café where he meant to have coffee but never did.
Lone rangers, that's what we are. We see the world with our naked eyes, unabashed of the greed and ego. Our mind resides on our tongue and we stand for what's right. A little too much fun, and an exciting package. Raving for life and exploring possibilities is our goal. Travel far and wide and into the wild, we will go for it someday. Care so much that even gods would bow down. Love to the hilt and then let go, coz that's what this life is meant for. One life and we will live up to the hilt and leave no regrets. So, when we land into our graves with a satisfied smile, we big farewell to the meanness of this so-called universe.With every journey there is a new lesson learned, every place traveled, explored; makes us in fall in love with the earth. Care less about our whereabouts; we keep the expedition going because we want to go far beyond the civilized, beyond the living, beyond the world of predictability, beyond u and I & into the wild. Feasting the eyes, rejuvenating the senses, every breath we take is a sigh of relief and we make peace. Choosing the roads less traveled, our wandering souls makes our way towards the unknown destination not only to discover ourselves but to discover the wild, nature and the mother earth.
For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need - we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory - a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
For my own Part, when I am employed in serving others, I do not look upon myself as conferring Favours, but as paying Debts. In my Travels, and since my Settlement, I have received much Kindness from Men, to whom I shall never have any Opportunity of making the least direct Return. And numberless Mercies from God, who is infinitely above being benefited by our Services. Those Kindnesses from Men, I can therefore only Return on their Fellow Men; and I can only shew my Gratitude for these mercies from God, by a readiness to help his other Children and my Brethren. For I do not think that Thanks and Compliments, tho’ repeated weekly, can discharge our real Obligations to each other, and much less those to our Creator.
It was a fine feeling indeed to be standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one's face. And I believe it was then, looking on that view, that I began for the first time to adopt a frame of mind appropriate for the journey before me. For it was then that I felt the first healthy flush of anticipation for the many interesting experiences I know these days ahead hold in store for me.
Travel is such a wonderful experience! Especially when you forget you are traveling. Then you will enjoy whatever you see and do. Those who look into themselves when they travel will not think about what they see. In fact, there is no distinction between the viewer and the seen. You experience everything with the totality of yourself, so that every blade of grass, every mountain, every lake is alive and is a part of you. When there is no division between you and what is other, this is the ultimate experience of traveling.
My good friend the Governor said I could settle down at Port Stanley and take things quietly for a few weeks. The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse.
Not town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens ... do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?
So when people asked me why I was moving away from the city of my dreams, I asked them why I wouldn't. It's not about greener pastures. It's never been about that. All it's ever been about is exploring and falling and pulling myself back together. Every time I do, I get stronger. I get faster. I get smarter. I get sweeter, hungrier, and happier. Dreams are mobile, fate doesn't live in one city, and karma is your shadow. I was offered a career opportunity that knocked quietly. It wasn't a million dollar check on my doorstep, it was more like the passing words of a stranger at a bar that change your perspective of the world. Something clicked and I had to accept.
He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't--a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.
Finding the stewardess, Bly asked her about the monkey. The stewardess replied drily, "We have met." Bly was now alarmed to see that the stewardess's arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder."What did you do?" she asked. "I did nothing but scream," the stewardess replied; "the monkey did the rest.
There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states.
I wanted, I told her, to lie under the stars and smell different breezes. I wanted to drink different waters, feel different heats. Stand with my comrades atop the ruin of old ideas. Plant my boot and steel my eye and not run. I said all this to my dead mother, spoke it down through the dirt: there was a conflagration to come; I wanted to lend it my spark.
As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.
Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5)The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is.
Every night we stopped in a cabin where wood had been stacked, matches left, and canned goods laid out for the chance traveler. All the unknown host received in return was a scribbled note giving our thanks, any news we could think of, and our names. This whole system of northern hospitality was a gigantic chain, for while we were eating this man’s beans, he was undoubtedly farther up the trail, eating somebody else’s.
In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears without word, or a place that was not known to be on the road.
There is a difference between arrival and entrance. Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plan touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your luggage. You can arrive a place and never really enter it; you get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over, slowly, in bits and pieces. […] It is like awakening slowly, over a period of weeks. And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are.
I love how the landscape gives the impression of vast space and intimacy at the same time: the thin brown line of a path wandering up an immense green mountainside, a plush hanging valley tucked between two steep hillsides, a village of three houses surrounded by dark forest, paddy fields flowing around an outcrop of rock, a white temple gleaming on a shadowy ridge. The human habitations nestle into the landscape; nothing is cut or cleared beyond what is requires. Nothing is bigger than necessary. Every sign of human settlement repeat the mantra of contentment: “This is just enough.
When you're traveling you need to take care of yourself to get by, you have to keep an eye on yourself and your place in the world. It means concentrating on yourself, thinking about yourself and looking after yourself. So when you travel all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you're at home you simply are, you don't have to struggle with anything or achieve anything. You don't have to worry about the railways connections, and timetables, you don't need to experience any thrills or disappointments. You can put yourself to one side - and that's when you see the most.
THE rule for travelling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind us. The object of travelling is to see and learn; but such is our impatience of ignorance, or the jealousy of our self-love, that we generally set up a certain preconception beforehand (in self-defence, or as a barrier against the lessons of experience,) and are surprised at or quarrel with all that does not conform to it. Let us think what we please of what we really find, but pr
Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. […] Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic.
English has so many words that do not exist in Sharchhop, but they are mostly nouns, mostly things: machine, airplane, wristwatch. Sharchhop, on the other hand, reveals a culture of material economy but abundant, intricate familial ties and social relations. People cannot afford to make a distinction between need and desire, but they have separate words for older brother, younger sister, father’s brother’s sons, mother’s sister’s daughters. And there are 2 sets of words: a common set for everyday use and an honorific one to show respect. There are three words for gift: a gift given to a person higher in rank, a gift to someone lower, and a gift between equals.
What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.
There are different paths to your destination. Choose your own path.
It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.
I am enduring temporary sufferings to fulfill my dearest dreams.
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.
History is rich knowledge. In your travel, learn brief history of the place visited.
History is rich knowledge, In your travel, learn the brief history of the place visited. .
In your travel, learn the brief history of the place visited. History is rich knowledge.
When sharing your news, you might come across some disgruntled parent-folk. You know, the kind who snort and say ruefully, "If there's anyplace you want to travel to, go now." Don't let them squelch your joy, dear K: these are the kind of people who never went anywhere before they had babies either.
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.
I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things
A difficult journey is spiritual rewarding.There is a more dependence on God, His supernatural power, grace and divine favour long the travel.
Dare to seize all the opportunities on your paths.
I said, “Je parle français.” Indira gave me a weird look. Or a look that said I was weird. Whichever. The point is, I don’t really speak French, but it’s a useful phrase for confusing people you don’t wish to speak with. However, it’s apparently more useful in Europe, where no one enjoys speaking to the French.
The night skyline was stunning. I could see the Monas and Istiqlal Mosque bathed in brilliant white lights and a dozen other places of cultural and historical significance. It’s an amazing, beautiful world we live in … despite Uncle Google’s abysmal view of American schools, the security checkpoints and vehicle inspections that seem to be everywhere, and the need to be vigilant because of the things we do to each other.
The South Pacific is memorable because when you are in the islands you simply cannot ignore nature. You cannot avoid looking up at the stars, large as apples on a new tree. You cannot deafen your ear to the thunder of the surf. The bright sands, the screaming birds, and the wild winds are always with you.
The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific
Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
Travel is rebellion in its purest form. - we follow our heart- we free ourselves of labels- we lose control willingly- we trade a role for reality- we love the unfamiliar- we trust strangers- we own only what we can carry- we search for better questions, not answers- we truly graduate- we, sometimes, choose never to come back.
So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.
It was as if I was right there with Magellan, following every curve of his pen as he wrote down his words to his beloved ones confiding his secret. I had become the ink, and the tip was tattooing my path. I was going to follow his dream, but still, I wished I knew why” – Celma Ribeiro
Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away.
You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous anymore.
You are too timid for me. You care too much about what other people think. But you know what? Because you are so desperate to win the approval of others, you'll never get rid of their criticisms, no matter how hard you try. You say you want to travel the path, but you don't want to sacrifice anything to that end. Money, fame, power, lavishness, or carnal pleasure - whatever it is that one holds most dear in life, one should dispose of that first.
Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be.
You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be.
Visiting new places andmeeting interesting people – even if "What remained after paying the rent for the Tel Aviv flat, which I shared with a roommate, and the tuition at university was close to nothing – it was the experiences that mattered.
Visiting new places and meeting interesting people – even if "What remained after paying the rent for the Tel Aviv flat, which I shared with a roommate, and the tuition at university was close to nothing – it was the experiences that mattered.
Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.
And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.
Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust. -- from "A Voice
I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.
We have trains to hop, voyages to embark on, and rides to hitch. And then there’s the great American wild—vanishing but still there—ready to impart its wisdom from an Alaskan peak or a patch of grass growing in a crack of a city sidewalk. And no matter how much sprawl and civilization overtake our wilds, we’ll always have the boundless wildlands in ourselves to explore.
When you're (traveling) with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart, because there's no other way to preserve it.
The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Roosevelt sneered.
Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.
We all travelled light, taking with us only what we considered to be the bare essentials of life. When we opened our luggage for Customs inspection, the contents of our bags were a fair indication of character and interests. Thus Margo’s luggage contained a multitude of diaphanous garments, three books on slimming, and a regiment of small bottles each containing some elixir guaranteed to cure acne. Leslie’s case held a couple of roll-top pullovers and a pair of trousers which were wrapped round two revolvers, an air-pistol, a book called Be Your Own Gunsmith, and a large bottle of oil that leaked. Larry was accompanied by two trunks of books and a brief-case containing his clothes. Mother’s luggage was sensibly divided between clothes and various volumes on cooking and gardening. I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam-jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids. Thus, by our standards fully equipped, we left the clammy shores of England.
The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world—a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life.
When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop.
Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.
Eleanor was all apologies, but Sarah enjoyed seeing a bit more of the Czech countryside. You probably couldn't say that you had really seen a country if all you had seen was a city or two. You had to see where the food was grown, what the riverbanks looked like, and what the highway manners of the inhabitants were.
Is China a drug? Like any drug, it depends entirely on the user’s own state of mind. If we’re making metaphors, for old China hands I’d imagine their time here draws parallels with the soaring euphoria and bleak depths of smoking opium, while China for the uninitiated is probably a bit like bath salts: the constantly convulsing nervous system, the paranoia, the god-complex, the rage. I’d liken my own China experience to a decade-long acid trip. It began with liberating my mind from the restraints of Western society. Then I departed on an odyssey that took me tens of thousands of miles across China, experiencing various metaphysical and spiritual states as my journey progressed, punctuated by periods of intense creativity due to my heightened sensory perceptions. To a background score of warped erhu and guzheng, and the looped calls of sidewalk vendors echoing into the void, the kaleidoscopic chaos of this culture surged around me like the Yangtze river – in outer space. Now I’m one with China’s cosmic consciousness. I want to reeducate the communists with love. Or maybe I’m not even here. Maybe I really did perish during my kora around Mount Kailash and none of this ever happened...
I read a lot of travel books before I came here. Fantasised what it would be like. I read Scott’s journal. Those last entries as they froze to death in that tent. ‘Had we lived, I should have made a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’ I got totally caught up in the romance.”“Scott was a self-aggrandising dick.
Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.
The trip doesn’t exist that can set you beyond the reach of cravings, fits of temper, or fears … so long as you carry the sources of your troubles about with you, those troubles will continue to harass and plague you wherever you wander on land or on sea. Does it surprise you that running away doesn’t do you any good? The things you’re running away from are with you all the time.
[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.
So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.
Seconds later, the female security officer grabbed a pair of my father's shorts from the top of the duffel bag, and emptied out the contents of his pockets. A lighter, three nail files, a pocket wrench, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a nectarine fell onto the folding table. I looked at the woman, looked at my father, and then looked around to see if anyone else was watching. "What's the problem?" my father asked the woman. "Sir, I'm going to have to take this lighter away from you," she said. "The lighter?" I asked her. "What about the bomb kit he's carrying around? He could do a lot more damage to a person with that wrench." "I need the wrench!" he shrieked. "For what?" "What if something goes wrong with the plane?
We checked our bags and got on line with some of our fellow passengers. Judging from the looks of them, it was clear that they were members of a different income bracket from the people I preferred to surround myself with. But since I also wasn't from the income bracket I preferred, I held off on voicing my initial feelings of despair.
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'.A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray.Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.
Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may be banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be like, a hospitable home. Where you arrive does not matter so much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there.
When the ancient Romans would conquer a new place or a new people, they would leave the language and the customs in tact – they would even let the conquered people rule themselves in most cases, appointing a governor to maintain a foothold in the region.” Wilson leaned against the whiteboard as he spoke, his posture relaxed, his hands clasped loosely.“This was part of what made Rome so successful. They didn't try to make everyone Romans in the process of conquering them. When I went to Africa with the Peace Corp, a woman who worked with the Corp said something to me that I have often thought about since. She told me 'Africa is not going to adapt to you. You are going to have to adapt to Africa.' That is true of wherever you go, whether it's school or whether it's in the broader world.
I felt as though I owned the whole world. And little wonder, because at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny , as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless.
Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.
But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least.
If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct.
There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of streams.....when, from the mountain-top, she beheld, far off, across the Sea of Marmara the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do.
Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom.
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.
The Chinese say that there is no scenery in your home town. They’re right. Being in another place heightens the senses, allows you to see more, enjoy more, take delight in small things; it makes life richer. You feel more alive, less cocooned.
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply.
Inscribed on it was a verse from the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, the eleventh-century Persian mystic. Reading the words aloud I prepared for a most amazing journey:The sages who have compassed sea and land,Their secret to search out and understand,My mind misgives me if they ever solveThe scheme on which the universe is planned.
Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer’s plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian’s; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl’s ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay.
The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: 'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!
It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.
Travel is a joy, full of surprises. Perhaps some of the most enjoyable times are those where one comes close to disaster: the risks add spice, and make for great stories when you are safely back home again.
Perhaps it's true you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.
As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability -- like not knowing what the hell I'm going to do upon arrival -- makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be when I'm at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.
When you are walking down the road in Bali and your pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is, "Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better.The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, "Are you married?" Again, it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. it's such a relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, "Are you married?" the best possible answer is: "Not yet." This is a polite way of saying, "No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet.
Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.
It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.
To become a writer a person must read constantly, the more varied the writers and their material then all the better. One must also have a lot of life experience, travel to exotic locations and live among the local people. Yet most importantly a writer needs the determination to keep at their writing regardless of what others might say or think about it
In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a few weeks." I'm not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button's touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.
The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.
...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.
On that trip I learnt something very important. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed." (The Beach)
If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody.Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.
W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.
Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train. I am not inspired; nothing so uncomfortable as that. I am never seized with a sudden idea for a masterpiece, nor form a sudden plan for some new enterprise. My thoughts are just pleasantly reflective. I think of all the good deeds I have done, and (when these give out) of all the good deeds I am going to do. I look out of the window and say lazily to myself, “How jolly to live there”; and a little farther on, “How jolly not to live there.” I see a cow, and I wonder what it is like to be a cow, and I wonder whether the cow wonders what it is to be like me; and perhaps, by this time, we have passed on to a sheep, and I wonder if it is more fun being a sheep. My mind wanders on in a way which would annoy Pelman a good deal, but it wanders on quite happily, and the “clankety-clank” of the train adds a very soothing accompaniment. So soothing, indeed, that at any moment I can close my eyes and pass into a pleasant state of sleep.
There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.
Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand.
I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.
But it wasn't till he'd been there nearly two weeks that one morning Paris and its people suddenly became more than a background for his vacation. He was sitting in a café, out on the walk, having a tiny cup of Paris-tasting, Paris-smelling coffee, watching traffic stream by, pleased as always with the countless people on bikes expertly threading their way between and around the cars and buses and trucks. Then a traffic light changed, the stream stopped and waited, and a man on a bike, one foot on the pavement, lifted his arm and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. And he turned real. In that instant he was no longer a quaint part of a charming background; he turned into a real man, tired from pumping that bike, and for the first time it occurred to my friend that there was a reason so many people picturesquely rode bikes through the heavy traffic, and the reason was to save bus fare and because they couldn't afford cars. After that, for the few days that were left to him there, my friend continued to enjoy Paris. But now it was no longer an immense travel poster but a real city, because now so were its people.
After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you.
Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running...' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!
Too often when we say we feel joyful, we’re really feeling manic. There is a frenetic nature to our joy, a whiff of panic; we’re afraid the moment might end abruptly. But then there are other moments when our joy is more solidly grounded. I am not speaking of a transcendental moment, of bliss, but something less.
Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy–lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday’s most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance. For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial. If asked which of the countries they have visited they like best, they are embarrassed–they do not know how to answer. Which one? In a certain sense–all of them. There is something compelling about each. To which country would they like to return once more? Again, embarrassment–they had never asked themselves such a question. The one certainty is that they would like to be back on the road, going somewhere. To be on their way again–that is the dream.
Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.
I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.
It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.
It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.
But that’s the wonderful thing about foreign travel, suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most basic sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.
[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.
When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.
Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?
Far too many people on the spectrum spend most of their days with people who carry around memories of, and are often too overwhelmed by incidents of, prior misinterpretation. This is no fun. In travel you can start over, and reinvent yourself. If somehow a relationship gets weird, you can leave and go to the next town, the next block, or whatever the case may be, and try again.
I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist
There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages...so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.
For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.
Somewhere nere Ogallala, about six hours into that majestic, maddening prairie, I realize that half an hour has passed since I've seen a vehicle in either direction.Oh, I think, as I finally see a pair of headlights draw nigh in the eastbound lane, so this must be where the West begins.
I walked down Paseo del Prado, losing myself to the sights, sounds, and dense magic of the city. There's something weirdly calming about being alone in a big city. It made me feel like the universe was hugely generous, and that my species was so damn smart to have constructed such a beautiful city.
That's because true travel, the kind with no predetermined end, is one of the most selfish endeavors we can possibly undertake-an act in which we focus solely on our own fulfillment, with little regard to those we leave behind. After all, we're the ones venturing out into the big crazy world, filling up journals, growing like weeds. And we have the gall to think they're just sitting at home, soaking in security and stability.It is only when we reopen these wrapped and ribboned boxes, upon our triumphant return home, that we discover nothing is the way we had left it before.
There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita!Thus we have heard. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner… therefore, wander!… The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!
His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed.
That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.
It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.
Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.
I heard a choking sound behind me. When I looked back, Cannoli was hanging from the backpack harness with her hind legs circling frantically in the air. She looked like she was riding a bike just above ground level. "Cannoli," I yelled. I unhooked her and made sure she was breathing on her own. When I tried to get her back in the backpack, she whimpered. I talked to her soothingly yet firmly, then tried again. This time she started howling like I was hurting her. People turned and stared as they walked by. "What are you looking at?" I said to one couple. I suddenly felt true remorse for every time I'd stared at a parent with a toddler throwing a tantrum. I made a vow to be a better aunt to Tulia's kids if I ever made it out of this parking garage. I pleaded with Cannoli one more time.
It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries.
Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner.
There is nothing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be "seedy." Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as "seedy" by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.
I sometimes rented a car and drove from event to event in Europe; a road trip was a great escape from the day-to-day anxieties of playing, and it kept me from getting too lost in the tournament fun house with its courtesy cars, caterers, locker room attendants, and such — all amenities that create a firewall between players and what you might call the 'real' world — you know, where you may have to read a map, ask a question in a foreign tongue, find a restaurant and read the menu posted in the window to make sure you're not about to walk into a joint that serves only exotic reptile meat.
The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface--as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans combined--it's the largest geographical feature in the world. Its awesome 165,384,000 square km (up to 16,000 km wide and 11,000 km long) have an average depth of around 4,000 meters. Half the world's liquid water is stored here. You could drop the entire dry landmass of our planet into the Pacific and still have room for another continent the size of Asia. One theory claims the moon may have been flung from the Pacific while the world was still young.
To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street.
It takes time to see the desert; you have to keep looking at it. When you've looked long neough, you realise the blank wastes of sand and rock are teemming with life. Just as you can keep looking at a person and suddenly realise that the way you see them has completely changed: from being a stranger, they've gradually revealed themselves as someone with a wealth of complexities and surprising subtleties that you're growing to love.
From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations.In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)
I thought back to Europe, where this journey began, then to Berkeley and even Madison, where the plans were first hatched. I thought about how the road led through Amsterdam, Paris and Greece, how for Guy and Sarah it continued through Central Asia, and how for me it detoured through East Africa. I thought about how many people had started off on this same journey, and how few had made it this far. I thought about how, of all the possible destinations this was the farthest outpost, the most remote spot of all - Kathmandu was the end of the road.
Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.
The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, acclaimed as the most brilliant and perceptive reporter of his time, writes in "Travels with Herodotus" that with every new town visited, with every new foreign word learnt, the traveller experiences small, almost imperceptible personal changes. Wherever you go becomes part of you and the person who returns home is never the same as before departing. Knowing new people is in many ways like travelling, and those who you meet along your road become part of your existence too.
I had a heady dream of loving her, as if she were an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.
A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place—a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city.
What I like best about traveling is exploring new places, cultures, and cuisines, and learning to look at the world through a different lens. Travel really is the world’s best teacher. And actually, veganism offers the same thing. Becoming vegan completely changed my worldview and enabled me to connect with nature and with my fellow earthlings in a way I never had before. By combining travel with veganism, I’m able to view the world through a whole new window and experience places in a way that most other tourists don’t.
Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far).
My love for languages and my love for travel really go hand in hand and feed off of each other. There’s no better way to learn a language than by immersing yourself in a culture where it’s spoken, and there’s no better way to immerse yourself in a culture than by learning to speak the local language.
Oh don't be pompous and gloomy,darling," chided Amalfi. "There are thousands of places just as lovely as this. And as peaceful.""That's where you are wrong," said Tyson,leaning his elbows on the warm stone. "I've seen a lot of the world, A hell of a lot of it!But there's something special about this island Something that I haven't met anywhere else Do you know what is the most familiar sound in Zanzibar?-laughter! Walk through the streets of the little city almost any time of day or night, and you'll hear it. People laughing. There is a gaiety and good humour about them that is strangely warming to even such a corrugated, corroded and eroded heart as mine and this is the only place that I have hit upon where black and white and every shade in between 'em appear to able to live in complete friendliness and harmony, with no colour bar. It's living proof and a practical demonstration that it can be done.
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Life is short and the older you get, the more you feel it. Indeed, you begin to realize how short life is. Almost everyone has at least one friend who left the planet too soon. People lose their capacity to walk, run, think, and experience life. I realize how important it is to use the time I have to see as much of the world as I can.
As we sat in the sun, drinking tea made from maple leaves (seasoned with apple and apricot), as we meandered through the 19th Century European park that leads toward the tiny lane on which our favourite tatami tea house is hidden – Don had come here ten months earlier after his Japanese father in law died - I thought how distinctive Don’s relaxed and responsive spirit can be. I’d walked these same streets with other friends for twenty seven years now, many of them celebrated travelers; they’d fired questions at me, shot out theories, spun this notion about Japan and that judgment.Don, by comparison, hung back. He seemed eager to take in as much as he possibly could. He didn’t have agenda or preoccupation, and in that regard appeared to rejoice in the rare traveler’s gift of allowing the day and the place to take him where they wanted him to go.
Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort...
Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.
The night sky is filled brimful as a night sky can be, lit brightly as it is with clusters of planets and pulsating stars and marriages of galaxies, all of it within a wobble of dust and gas and debris unseen. There are the Dippers Little and Big tonight, a lovely Pleiades, and a throbbing red star out like a tiny heart. This is the stuff of which we are made, I say to Son, all that is of us above us. We stand together looking upward, our mouths hung open as if to swallow what's above down and into us. Looking out at the past in its far distance, where from there, he we are not.
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I know, in my soul, that a love for travel is a gift and not a hindrance. It feels like a burden when the bucket list is bigger than the bank account, but a thirst for more of the world is not something to apologize for. Denying its presence feels like denying something good in me, something God put there. Wanderlust has a reputation as the epitome of unrequited love, something the young and naive chase after because they don’t yet realize it’s as futile as a dog chasing its tail. Turns out, ever-burning wanderlust is a good thing.
The idea and experience of travel can mean many things: it involves movement of some kind, sometimes through unknown places, at other times just between home and the world. Journeys can also be inward, marking rites of passage or a growth into a new dimension. We travel in search of profit, pleasure or curiosity, to labour and survive, to flee from tyranny or sorrow, and into real and imagined utopias.
I learnt a lot from the simple lives our friends lived. I saw them living with so much less than we, as westerners, were used to. I couldn't even begin to imagine how to prepare a meal for four people using a bucket, one saucepan and a wok. More than likely, I would have been outraged if asked to do so. I can hear myself saying words to the effect of, ‘Bugger off! Let’s just get take out.’ Anyone who knew me would have known better than to ask.
All I have is a life's worth of school days. What came before school I can't remember. You can only sketch so many desks and teachers and chalkboards. You can only come home to so many dinners and homework assignments and nights of taking the garbage out. You can only go to so many museum field trips before you start to wonder, Is this it?
At a time when so many people are just checking things off a bucket list, other travelers are finding that they want more. Going Local explores the whys and how to’s of really experiencing an area and its culture through the people who live there. Includes a plethora of real life travel stories from experts and everyday people alike.
The general kind and soft customs of Mustang were soon to strike me as exceptional. Apart from occasional disputes between husband and wife, which like family rows all around the world bring raised voices, I never heard a person scream or shout; Even the children had very civilised manners. In fact the only person I knew to consistently angry in Lo Mantang was myself, and Tibetans consider bd temper a Western characteristic. Take for example the reactions of European to missing his train; he will invariably swear under his breath. Who in our can stand frustration without giving vent to anger? I soon had to master my own temper, having raised my voice against one of the innumerable people who stopped to stare at me and my smal party, I was told by a peasant: ‘’I cannot understand; you are a great man, how is it that small things like myself deserve your wrath?’’ After that I learned to be tolerant, realising that by getting mad I was only debasing myself, and that it was stupid to be bothered by trivialities.
The moon, almost full, shines high in the sky in front of me. I roll down the window and rest my arm on top of the door frame. The night air blowing in softly through the open window feels cool on my face. For the moment, all seems right with the world.
There is nothing quite like a real political whiz. Some adopt an inscrutable, almost somnolent demeanour and make you beg for their wisdom, while others come at you like a whirlwind. The effect in both cases is the same: even when you think they must be extracting certitude from guesses or cucumbers from sunbeams, you are captive, not only to the verbal artistry but to the weight of the movement, the sense that on these matters to which you are now privy the course of history depends, Politics being civil war by other means, it is fought with the same volumes of smoke and passion and ruthless brutality, and it leaves some of the same psychic wounds. All political environments - democratic, republican and monarchical - have this much in common: it is never more than a short walk in any direction to find someone who disagrees with the last person you spoke to, or who envies or disapproves or wants to thwart him, or who feels thwarted, threatened or misused by him.As our conversation in the Four Seasons concluded, my friend stubbed out the butt of his cigar. I still had three inches to smoke. I left with it and later that evening I met a consultant, also from the Democratic side, who tried to put me wise to the first man’s failings. To be frank, I was left not knowing whom to believe. The consultant told me that these days he thinks it impossible for the US political system to throw up people or parties of true character, vision or integrity. (A businessman from the Republican side once told me the same thing.) Rather, the system is now ideal for hacks, ‘yes men’ and fodder for lobbyists. Political thinking has become institutionalised and incapable of solving the country’s problems. The press has lost character in proportion to the politician, and accepts their values and arguments almost without question. He thought universal national service with a non-military option might be one way to spread the burden and rekindle a sense of shared responsibility.
When I opened the curtains in the morning I saw the intersection of two six-lane highways. It was a comfortable, well equipped, practical sort of place, as Holidays Inns tend to be. You can be happy at a place like this so long as you stay away from the coffee. And the restaurant, if you want to be sure. Perhaps not happy, but not unhappy. Or if unhappy, at least not threatened. A good motel creates a kind of stasis for the soul in transit. One should leave no worse than one arrived: that is the minimum requirement.
I only had to drop acid once to know that Timothy Leary was right about questioning authority.Motorcycling is like life. There's nothing solid about it. Something not even the asphalt under your tires.Time on a motorcycle is unlike time spent anywhere else. There are moments lost in the landscape, seconds devoted solely to balance, and long stretches spent spiraling inward.
There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel)
and so I opened my eyes and I opened my mind and I saw something I never would have noticed on a bicycle unless I was going very, very fast down a very long hill. Because of the speed of the bus and how I was exerting no effort, the telephone wires on the side of the road, sagging between poles, went up and down with the same rhythm as my heartbeat.
I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from.
His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision "Hi, I'm a surgeon" as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. "What do you do?" is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties, mechanics, navigators, weather-readers, fishermen, adventure travelers, storytellers.
I bought the wrong face soap. Why? Because it says smooth face cleanser on it. I put it on my face and I'm fairly certain it's lotion. I also bought something that says "Body soufflé." What is that? Is it a lotion? Is it shower gel? Am I supposed to eat it?
By allowing the group of people whom we call “our loved ones” to continually expand, we realize that this group is actually limitless. It is only narrow-mindedness and a superficial convention that makes us divide people into friends and strangers. The world-traveler soon learns to see in every person he interacts with a potential friend .
The world-traveler must, on the one hand, be ready (and actually seek) to visit a tribe in the Solomon Islands or stay with Tibetan nomads; on the other hand, he has to be prepared, when it is required, to wear his suit to attend a classical music concert in a big metropolis. Just as an important part of exploring Brazil is to visit its shantytowns, it is an indispensable part of understanding the French culture to eat at a gourmet restaurant in Paris.
Legs: the symbol of my solitude, my individual path, my uniqueness. Arms: the symbol of togetherness, my connection to others, my belonging to the human race. My legs make me who I am; they create my solitary path. My arms make me who I belong to; they connect me to the world.
The merchant increases the speed of the city. The musician slows it down. The merchant intensifies the urban stress, the noise, the chaos. The musician makes you slow down, find your center. This holds true in all cities and countries.
What a pity that the Earth, in spite of modern transport, still remains unknown to most. We are all extraterrestrials on Earth! Soon after we set out to explore the world, we realize that we have been living on an unknown planet all along. Paradoxically, the moment one becomes a world-traveler, he simultaneously becomes an extraterrestrial exploring an alien planet.
Many of us do not believe that it is truly possible to see the whole world in the same way as we travel and see, say, Italy or Spain. However, if we pretend for a moment that there are no borders separating one country from another, if we actually realize that these borders are nothing but imaginary lines drawn on maps and in historians’ heads, we may easily come to view our planet as one country, one destination – as the moon or Mars were when we first set out to explore them.
No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.
We believed Paris was the start of us. It's the kind of city that makes you think of beginnings, or even juicy middles. Paris is a book to savor, in whole or in part, at any time and in any season. At age ninety or at thirty-four, you can open any chapter and read from there.
My journey through the Congo had its ow unique category. It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly wasn't pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel. At every turn I faced challenges, difficulties and threats when in the Congo. The challenge was to assess and choose the option best suited to making progress. But there were moments when there were no alternatives, or shortcuts or clever ideas. At these times, ordeal travel became really no ordeal at all.
On a hike, the days pass with the wind, the sun, the stars; movement is powered by a belly full of food and water, not a noxious tankful of fossil fuels. On a hike, you're less a job title and more a human being....A periodic hike not only stretches the limbs but also reminds us: Wow, there's a big old world out there.
In the evening, the tarantella dancers will come to the hotel; perhaps they'll dance and sing in the courtyard that is dripping with wistaria blooms and pungent with citrus perfumes. They wear gay costumes, these who sing and dance for us to keep alive the romance of other days; and they are full of that joy in living which seems the gift of these siren shores.
I would advise the curious reader to keep in mind the old adage “truth is stranger than fiction.” Expect the most outlandish, fantastic and unbelievable elements of this story to be true, and the more low-key elements to be fudged.
I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo’s outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.
This is stupid. Very, very stupid. I don't even have a tear-stained dog to wave bye to me. But I told everyone I was gonna do this, so I gotta do it... or I will be living a life of feminist-sounding somedays. And I will be more responsible, powerful, and amazing afterward. I will be able to do anything and not self-consciously stare at elevator numbers when the doors close. I will look the other person in right the eye and nod hello.
Then his friend said, 'If you fly you will save a day.' He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day. I ask you what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day traveling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it form what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spend, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend.
The artificial preservation of local identities is essential to tourism. In other words, the tourist represents both the attempt to transcend all borders and identities and the simultaneous attempt to fix the identities of non-Western subjects within its gaze.
We'd all be lucky in life if we had the chance to experience an unexpected adventure, and then make our way back safely to a place of comfort. Sometimes the only way we can appreciate our home and the simple happiness it has to offer is to be away from it for a while.
Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:“Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound...Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly." The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly.
In the travellers’ world, social media have enlarged the generation gap. The internet has brought a change in the very concept of travel as a process taking one away from the familiar into the unknown. Now the familiar is not left behind and the unknown has become familiar even before one leaves home. Unpredictability – to my generation the salt that gave travelling its savour – seems unnecessary if not downright irritating to many of the young. The sunset challenge – where to sleep? – has been banished by the ease of booking into a hostel or organised campsite with a street plan provided by the internet. Moreover, relatives and friends evidently expect regular reassurance about the traveller’s precise location and welfare – and vice versa, the traveller needing to know that all is well back home. Notoriously, dependence on instant communication with distant family and friends is known to stunt the development of self-reliance. Perhaps that is why, amongst younger travellers, one notices a new timidity.
As I travelled south through Europe everything got bigger. This applied to nice things like fruit-the nectarines and tomatoes were about six times as large in Greece as they were in Britain for example. But the principle also applied to unpleasant things, like spiders, and worms, and all other nameless and horrifying insects and arachnids of Greece.
I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a houseful of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but not it's a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women's progress as a gender. I'm damn proud of us. Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.
Before, some places just seemed too far, too difficult to reach, but once you start traveling, you never want to stop. You want to hear other people's stories, see where they live, eat their food. You realize--and of course it's a cliche, but like many cliches, it's true--the way we are all interconnected.
The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it's in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves. Suckers.
With Martyn, I hold forth some of the philosophies I've been honing since beginning my travels in Ireland almost two years ago, about universal health care and the travel practices of American youth, about my country and the way I was indoctrinated to believe that America was number one in everything, but actually people in other countries have what we have--and sometimes better--about my obligations as a daughter, about the ways that I have put my faith in all the wrong things and now I am hopelessly lost but at the same time realizing that's okay so maybe that means I'm not lost at all, just searching.
The problem is, these days you have to listen to too many parts of your body. Sometimes I go with my gut feeling, some say go with what your heart says - it's only a matter of time before my appendix will have an opinion. This is probably why there are so many helplines these days. No one knows who to bloody listen to!
Travelling the dusty highways in the early evenings, just as the light began to fade, I would look out along the perpendicular dirt tracks that joined the road at intervals. They undulated away gently into the distance; slow streams of people in twos and threes and fours walked them, through the haze, talking easily, making their way back from wherever lay beyond. I longed to take every one of these turnings, to step out along every track in the morning, to return at dusk, to see what lay over each of these horizons and to share in the stories of those that returned from them. My trajectory, and that of each one of us, was that of a meteor, shedding millions of tiny sparks of possibility with every passing second, each with the capacity to ignite a flash of experience, but nearly all of which quickly burned up and vanished as it was left behind. The fire that moved forward was the flame of our lives.
One week after New Year's Day in 2006, I was on a flight to Aceh…As we walked down the steps on to the tarmac, the air felt humid and tropical, familiar and almost Balinese. It felt like going home. As the heavy air embraced me, my first inclination was to relax into it, but yet this was not home and my entire body remained on edge.
Singapore is what your city could become if everyone obeyed the rules, did their jobs diligently, and just shut up. When your city gets to be this paragon of efficiency and discipline, would you still want to live there? Singapore is a model city, which is terrific if you happen to be a model human.
If real, regular, normal, boring life, (when you're at home every day, seeing the same people, doing the same things) is like sitting at home on the floor surrounded by toys... traveling feels to me like going to Toys R Us with your toy box and getting to trade stuff in and buy new things and explore whole new ideas.
Hoping to apply what few marketable skills I'd acquired in school, I used my undergraduate's Hebrew to check into options in Israel. I was eager to travel, open to adventure, but as a non-Jew, I found that my possible motives were a cause for concern. In more than one interview I was asked a question that I would eventually hear word for word from Malpesh himself: Are you some sort of missionary? To my prospective employers I tried to explain that if I was to convert anyone it would only be to a nebulous wishy-washy agnosticism, but this honest answer did not earn me many callbacks.
Because travel was an area of my life where I felt most vital, I wanted to continue to invest in that, too. I had quit a full time job, drained my retirement account to invest in a long-held dream, and used the realization of that dream to enter a void with no guarantees. I didn’t want financial struggle to be the sole outgrowth of the risks I had taken. More than money, I had put my belief systems on the line.
Putting the dream in motion involved significant personal downsizing, moving three times to trim housing expenses and continuing to freelance. I sold one piece to The New York Times Magazine, many more to The Courant, and another to The St. Petersburg Times.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the United States – that included chaotic overall of airline security – and the exploding tensions in Nepal, friends thought it ill-advised for me to board a flight to Kathmandu. Yet my existence at home felt so tenuous and unpredictable that political unrest in Asia barely registered. Also, it seemed more important than ever for me to keep going, not only overseas but also in the direction of a more satisfying life. Somehow the two felt connected.
In 2006 I had begun the discernment process for locating my rightful geographic home. By the time my corporate pink slip arrived I had spent two years researching and taking recon trips to five different cities in southern California. Having crossed them off my list, in February 2008 I visited Sarasota, Florida, at the urging of a friend who winters in a neighboring town. Though Florida had never been on my radar, only minutes in Sarasota I knew I’d found home.
The cruise was the conduit for what would become my third book. While I was traveling and writing for ctnow.com, women across the United States and from the Caribbean emailed not to ask about my geographic journey but my existential one. “How do you find the courage to travel on your own?” they wondered. “How do you keep from getting lonely? Don’t you feel self-conscious eating out alone?” After the first 30 emails like these I thought, There’s a book here. It would be eight years before I published Postcards and Pearls: Life Lessons from Solo Moments on the Road. But the inspiration for publication came during the cruise.
My post-cruise sabbatical would spark the idea for my first book, Cheaper Than Therapy: How to Keep Life’s Small Problems from Becoming Big Ones – The Lesson of the Paper Clips. How? In my data entry job all I did for 20 hours a week was paper clip printouts of computer screens. For three years. I loved it.
Wandering is not limited to geography. Also an altered state of consciousness, it allows a disembodied self to drift on currents of collective awareness with minimal attachment to the physical world. This state of wander tapped imaginative faculties that opened me to a freedom of being only previously experienced through travel.
During those days of whirling about the globe, I had an epiphany: travel was the only area of my life where I had no expectations. I anticipated nothing while fully engaging each moment. What bred adventure, surprise and deep experience was not knowing, surrendering to now and letting go of control.
What would happen if, once back home, I stayed open to possibilities rather than attach to specific outcomes? What if I dreaded no potential storms? Ruminated over no past transgression? I knew how. For decades the reflex kicked in with each plane ride. The more I pondered these questions – How could I cultivate the habit of taking life as it comes? How can I immerse myself in living, like I’m on vacation on all the time, without boarding a plane or crossing a border? – the more I recognized the arbitrariness of the dichotomy between life and travel.
Once back home I would adjust my lens to the resolution through which I perceived the people and provinces of the globe. My daily commute, the supermarket check out line, neighborhood walks, pedestrian tasks of any job would inspire me as much as the stir of white linen canopies in Venice’s Piazza San Marco; the velvety dunes of the eastern Sahara; Bali’s kaleidoscope of color; my Vietnamese sisters.
The answer is neither job, nor paycheck; it is authentic, holistic work born from states of awareness and being. Through the coalescence of joy, wonder, enthusiasm, appreciation, experimentation, perpetual curiosity, exploring new avenues, welcoming surprise and wandering, I have begun the next leg of my journey; I have brought the spirit of the traveler home.
A great diving scene. Worth the read just for that:“Randy! You have the best eyes for bubbles. Find my missing diver.” Paul leaned over the boat and yelled at the people waiting in the water. “Hey! Where’s . . .” He examined the faces. It didn’t take long to figure out who was missing. His heart spiraled to his feet. “Oh, no, no, no!” He didn’t hesitate to jump to action. He yelled out orders as he put his gear on in record time. “Get back on the boat. Now!” “I see bubbles! Over there, ‘bout fifteen meters,” Randy called before anyone had a chance to do anything.Paul stood on the back of the boat, all geared up and holding an extra tank with a regulator already attached. He looked to see where Randy pointed and took a giant stride into the water. He didn’t bother to surface before starting the fastest descent he’d ever made.
Alone, I relished the bird songs, the drone of hushed conversation from neighboring tables, and the gentle lapping of waves sliding on the shore. I didn't feel the passage of time. There was no destination propelling me forward, no past and no future. Each glorious moment was replaced by the next.
In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.
I paid for two seats at the back of the car to give my thighs breathing space. The gangly man sitting next to me used the extra space to spread his legs as widely as possible, leaving me squeezed once again against the window. I was livid. Months of travelling cheek-by-jowl in cars had instilled in me a new-found loathing of men’s legs, which, like air, seem constantly to expand to fill the space available. I’m amazed they’re not all buried in Y-shaped coffins.
He returned to his seat and sat down; the road is so long, so long; he had to get through these spaces where stations clustered about the track amidst the black night like some black coffin set with candles. He thought that minute was flying after minute, mile after mile, everything was moving — even he was moving — but to where?("Adam")
What I’ve learned from my travels is that people are more alike than they are different. Yes, I may have a different home or lifestyle than a mom living in Shanghai, but deep down we are still mothers who hope for the best in our children. I always find so much in common with those I meet on my travels – and that provides a genuine connection that cultural differences can’t erase.
What I’ve learned in my travels is that people are more alike than they are different. Yes, I may have a different home or lifestyle than a mom living in Shanghai, but deep down we are still mothers who hope for the best in our children. I always find so much in common with those I meet on my travels – and that provides a genuine connection that cultural differences can’t erase.
I was scripting for a series on the Arts programme which was shown very late on a Sunday evening, and I was sent off to get the low down on several up and coming musicians who would be featured each week. To the music world, they may have been up and coming, I would have preferred them to be down and going and preferably out of range.
For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey.
We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the center of the wilderness, someone will soon come along to look over your shoulder and tell you how to play your cards. This was the principle of Method C. We unrolled our sleeping bags and stretched out under the wing, completely uncaring.
Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee.
The problem with the 11:11 Phenomenon is getting anybody interested in it that hasn't experienced it themselves. Other phenomena, such as U.F.Os or crop circles, are able to be seen. We can debate them. But seeing and being guided by 11:11 is hard to convey to those uninitiated in its ways.
The places we visited were always richer and always more intricate than one could imagine. I loved to find out about the world, the good and the bad, in this way. For me, observing things with my own eyes was the only way. My wanderlust was also a wonderlust.
Few of us could speak the other's language, but all of us had by now discovered the lodge's unique 'outside toilet'…which transcended all national barriers. The lodge owner wouldn't let you use it unless you promised to lock yourself in with a special key. Everybody thought this odd, but they understood his concern once inside. The loo was just two parallel blocks of wood laid either side of a big hole in the floor. You went in, squatted down on the blocks, felt the gust of chill air wafting up your nether regions, looked through legs, and watched the bottom fall out of your world for a sheer drop of two thousand feet! The reason for locking the door was obvious. Any unwitting interloper who swung it inwards when you were squatting over that hole was certain to knock you off your perch and straight down it. And that would be a one-way trip to oblivion. With your trousers round your ankles
Here's what I love about travel: strangers get a chance to amaze you. Sometimes a single day can bring a blooming surprise, a simple kindness that opens a chink in the brittle shell of your heart and makes you a different person when you go to sleep--more tender, less jaded--than you were when you woke up.
Here's what I love about travel: strangers get a chance to amaze you. Sometimes a single day can bring a blooming surprise, a simple kindness that opens a chink in the brittle shell of your heart and makes you a different person when you go to sleep--more tender less jaded--than you were when you woke up.
Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.
As a romantic ideal, turbulent, impoverished India could still weave its spell, and the key to it all - the colours, the moods, the scents, the subtle, mysterious light, the poetry, the heightened expectations, the kind of beauty that made your heart miss a beat - well, that remained the monsoon.
I went to Africa to work. Finding myself and falling in love were not items on the agenda. Those were the stuff of daydreams, borne of long, icy Canadian winters. At age 30, I felt I already knew my priorities, talents and limitations. The year in Africa forced me to question all of these assumptions.
At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.
What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to reach America and its promise of an enriched life so I knew we had a country rich in opportunity, but I also met those brilliant Jews already in America who had been denied that promise.
As we lifted off, China growing ever more distant from the window-seat, the endless ocean opening up before us, I was torn between the excitement of something new and leaving that which I'd grown to love. In that moment, I understood we may never come back; that we were floating there suspended between two worlds, above the world. There was no logic in where we would go from here, nor any limitation. We had each other, and we knew now of what adaptation we were capable. Their faces flashed through my mind, and I wondered if we'd ever find a country like that again, or if we'd ever be as open with new friends, knowing now what it was like to leave them. Like a first love lost. I hoped we'd have the courage to love Germany so that the day we'd leave our hearts would also break. For what is life except that kind of attachment? And isn't it true that one can live in a place all their life, surrounded by comfort and familiarity, and never feel this longing? As the last view of China slipped off the horizon, I promised myself that I would always dare to love, squeezing Patrick's hand, and seeing that in our love for each other, we'd always have the strength to let go.
Life is not being sure what will come next or how it will come. We guess at everything we do. We take leap after leap in the dark and that's the joy of living and the beauty of faith. When we grow tired, when we sit still, that's when we begin to die.... One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you'll get some idea of what historians face.
The sun was beginning to set and the water was sparkling in the low light as the onshore breeze that had built up through the heat of the day rippled across the reflective surface, breaking it into a million diamonds of yellow-white light.
Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance
After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country.
We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind.
Yellowstone, of all the national parks, is the wildest and most universal in its appeal... Daily new, always strange, ever full of change, it is Nature's wonder park. It is the most human and the most popular of all parks. -Yellowstone Park for Your Vacation (circa 1920s)
When standing in the middle of the marvelous mountains and deep forests, in the earthy smell of all beginnings and endings, I often find myself asking what I have if all my possessions were taken away. Without money, car, house; or power and fame, if there are any, who am I? In that very moment, being away from the external voices and left alone in nature, I find my answer.
What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.
There’s something profoundly intense and intoxicating about friendship found en route. It’s the bond that arises from being thrust into uncomfortable circumstances, and the vulnerability of trusting others to navigate those situations. It’s the exhilaration of meeting someone when we are our most alive selves, breathing new air, high on life-altering moments. It’s the discovery of the commonality of the world’s people and the attendant rejection of prejudices. It’s the humbling experience of being suspicious of a stranger who then extends a great kindness. It’s the astonishment of learning from those we set out to teach. It’s the intimacy of sharing small spaces, the recognition of a kindred spirit across the globe.It’s the travel relationship, and it can only call itself family.
Maybe life is like a walking safari. If you venture out expecting lions and leopards all the time you’ll almost always never find them. Maybe the best things are the ones you never knew you wanted to see. The ones that, scary as they may seem, were just the things you needed to unleash reality. I’d selfishly written my story before even reaching Africa. I’d romanticized scenarios, fabricated settings, invented fantastical dialogue, and almost overlooked the lesson I’d been sent to learn – to live life on foot and not in my head, with fearlessness, presence, without expectation, and above all, with gratitude.
They are the largest collection of freshwater lakes in the world. They border eight U.S. states and the Canadian Providence of Ontario and at time have supplied water to one-third of Canadians and one-seventh of Americans. They're vaster than the entire New England region and define beachfront to many people who have never seen an ocean.
The road was wet with rain, black and shiny like oilskin. The reflection of the street lamps wallowed like yellow jelly-fish. A bus was approaching - a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never land - a bus to death or glory.I found neither. I found something which haunts me still.The great bus swayed as it sped. The black street gleamed. Through the window a hundred faces fluttered by as though the leaves of a dark book were being flicked over. And I sat there, with a sixpenny ticket in my hand. What was I doing! Where was I going?("Same Time, Same Place")
People dream. They talk about escaping from it all. Their friends and family diligently listen and politely ignore it when the ruminations fade into oblivion. So quite a few eyebrows went up when I made this trip a reality.
For the rest of my life, Zanzibar will be the Swahili word for rain. The rain would drizzle, spit, mist, downpour, shower, torrent, gust, deluge and blast. At one point it hit the ground so hard it created a haze as it bounced back up two feet and fell a second time.
When we saw a destitute-looking man trying to sell worn flip-flops, I vowed never to complain about a job again. When I considered the steady paycheck and quality of life it provided, my past gripes - primarily boring meetings, back-biting office politics and pantyhose - were just whining.
It is a place that 'grows upon you' every day. There seems to be always something to find out in it. There are the most extraordinary alleys and by-ways to walk about in. You can lose your way (what a comfort that is, when you are idle!) twenty times a day, if you like; and turn up again, under the most unexpected and surprising difficulties. It abounds in the strangest contrasts; things that are picturesque, ugly, mean, magnificent, delightful, and offensive, break upon the view at every turn.
I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.
Often I would hear other people ask, “When will I be normal again?”What you don’t often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the “old" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal.I knew that I needed to take an honest appraisal of my life. Were my problems really bigger than me? Of course not. That’s why I remained in constant motion. Resistance to life’s changes meant death. No matter how depressing and bleak my past looked, I knew that I needed to keep moving and adapting in order to survive.
As to rocket ships flying between America and Europe, I believe it is worth seriously trying for. Thirty years ago persons who were developing flying were laughed at as mad, and that scorn hindered aviation. Now we heap similar ridicule upon stratoplane or rocket ships for trans-Atlantic flights. (1933)[Predicting high-altitude jet aircraft for routine long-distance travel.]
Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn’t now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see.
These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.
No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain, thrills — every emotion that any human ever had — and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.” ― Richard Halliburton
My travels inevitably begin with copious research and planning. I began this kind of planning long ago when I was very young and anxious to hit the road. Hours were spent pouring over junior encyclopedias memorizing the names of exotic-sounding cities---Addis, Ababa, Samarkand, Damascus. Lengthy lists were written detailing the most minute necessities: three pairs of socks, two pencils. spare batteries, rope.
Why was I still traveling? Was it purely because it was better than turning around and going home, where I would have to make grown-up choices about my future? Or was I waiting to happen across a place that would tell me to stay?
Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.
When it was time to board my flight, I took one last glance back. I knew that I had everything with me so it was not a "make sure I have everything" glance. It was more like a parting glance to Philadelphia, my home, America- for I would not be coming back for ten months. (Ch 5- Twenty in Paris)
The words beat through me like a cosmic string that threatened to dissolve my molecular bonds. The wave fed upon itself until the tsunami it created swept me out of my life and into a world of confinement that broached vastness. That, after all, was the process of space travel. The small spaces, the great speed, the reach beyond knowable.
What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try. I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough.And I believe the same is true of inner travel. You don't have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can find about them for yourself if you want to. Don't take my word for it. Be as skeptical as you like.Find out for yourself.
Travel is the discovery of truth; an affirmation of the promise that human kind is far more beautiful than it is flawed. With each trip comes a new optimism that where there is despair and hardship, there are ideas and people just waiting to be energized, to be empowered, to make a difference for good.
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors.They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humor and understanding.When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean.They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion, or political correctness.They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.It is the nation of nowhere.
Remember that a little learning can be a pleasant thing. Italy gives much, in beauty, gaiety, diversity of arts and landscapes, good humor and energy—willingly, without having to be coaxed or courted. Paradoxically, she requires (as do other countries, probably more so) and deserves some preparation as background to enhance her pleasures. It is almost impossible to read a total history of Italy; there was no united country until a hundred years ago, no single line of power, no concerted developments. It is useful, however, to know something about what made Siena run and stop, to become acquainted with the Estes and the Gonzagas, the Medicis and the Borgias, the names that were the local history. It helps to know something about the conflicts of the medieval church with the Holy Roman Empire, of the French, Spanish and early German kings who marked out large chunks of Italy for themselves or were invited to invade by a nervous Italian power. Above all, it helps to turn the pages of a few art and architecture books to become reacquainted with names other those of the luminous giants.The informed visitors will not allow himself to be cowed by the deluge of art. See what interests or attracts you; there is no Italian Secret Service that reports on whether you have seen everything. If you try to see it all except as a possible professional task, you may come to resist it all. Relax, know what you like and don’t like—not the worst of measures—and let the rest go.
Every Inch of the Way is a great page turning adventure which is as close as you can get, without actually saddling up and pedalling yourself into the unknown. It takes real magic to turn a great adventure, into a great book. For one thing, most people can't relate to the mindset of the long distance cyclist and I found myself laughing along to Tom's thoughts and observations, wondering if they were in - jokes, shared by those who had seen the world at the speed of a bike, for example his relationship with Serbia's stray dogs! . But his anecdotes have a great balance of the cultures and places, as opposed to just inward reflections, so I am sure would be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in travel and human experience. A lovely story, written from the heart.
That we leave our homes, that we step through our doors to the world, that we travel our whole lives not because we want to collect exotic T-shirts, not because we want to consume foreign adventure the same Western way we consume plastic and Styrofoam and LCD TVs and iPads, but because it has the power to renew us—not the guarantee, not the promise, just the possibility. Because there are places our imaginations can never construct for us, and there are people who we will never meet but we could and we might. It reminds us that there is always reason to begin again.
Born at Letterman Army Hospital. I never actually lived in San Francisco. It's not my home town, but then, I don't have one. I'm a nomad...a gypsy...an Army Brat. Put me on an airplane, send me anywhere. That's where I belong...anywhere.
Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will feel defrauded.
A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming in quantity rather than quality, and comes away with his soul and imagination unchanged, untouched by the wonder of a life lived differently.
I ease into the idea of letting go of control and simply let life take the reins. And when I don't hold it so tightly, it doesn't thrash against me so wildly. It calms to a trot and allows me to take in the scenery, experience love, and learn what is important in this world: people, places, memories—not things or perceptions.
While National Geographic magazine had given me a taste of the world, the three-dimensional details of this moment - the tickle of the rain drops, the suck sound of my feet in the mud, the challenge of getting photographs of the monkeys, my immature urge to make the driver wait even longer because he was annoying - would feed me for years to come.
I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat withGod and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple coresthat I threw out of car windows when I was a child—did any of them becometrees? Few boys or men had ever asked me out. I told myself that itwas because I was almost 6-feet tall. Was that true or was there somethinghumbling I needed to know?
Summer is a period of luxurious growth. To be in harmony with the atmosphere of summer, awaken early in the morning and reach to the sun for nourishment to flourish as the gardens do. Work, play, travel, be joyful, and grow into selfless service. The bounty of the outside world enters and enlivens us.
It's a pretty good little old place after all, and I have little time for the gloomers who are eternally shrieking that this old mud ball is rolling to the bow wows. I am satisfied to take my chances with this one, thank you, and not worry about the next . . . You must carry along with you a lively imagination and plenty of romance in your soul. Some of the most wonderful things in the world will seem dull and drab unless you view them in the proper light.
somewhere along the dust-chocked Guatemalan road between...and ...was where I confirmed that I preferred traveling around the slow, bone-rattling way: by bus,with ordinary people. The bus we were riding in had been repainted in bright reds. The inside was colorful too: the seats had springs popping out of the upholstery, and the floor was caked with dirt and garbage. Chickens, some tied in bunches and others wandering loose, squawked noisily. Bouncing along a road to a place I had never been, and would never go back to, suddenly felt exciting, liberating even
Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.
They lied, you know,” said Cpl. Allan Richmond. He hugged thewall next to Owens. Beside him, PFC Bucky Hatton crouched low, aBrowning 1911 semiautomatic gripped tightly in his hand.“Who?” asked Bart, glad to be out of the wind and rain, even if itwas only for a short time.“The assholes who said France was beautiful.
To Mr. Blot, who went through life an unconscious example of the raison d'être of the British Empire, a shipwreck was merely one of the many things to be ignored. His was a calming influence.
The passion for travelling is, I believe, instinctive in some natures. We have seen men persevere in their enterprises against the most formidable obstacles; and, without means or friends, and even ignorant of the languages of the various countries through which they passed, pursue their perilous journeys into remote places, until, like the knight in the Arabian tale, they succeeded in snatching a memorial from every shrine they visited.
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.
Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'WorriesForget your worriesAll the stations full of cracks tilted along the wayThe telegraph wires they hang fromThe grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle themThe world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic handIn the cracks of the sky the locomotives in angerFleeAnd in the holes,The whirling wheels the mouths the voicesAnd the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heelsThe demons are unleashedIron railsEverything is off-keyThe broun-roun-roun of the wheelsShocksBouncesWe are a storm under a deaf man's skull...'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far awayOverheated madness bellows in the locomotivePlague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our wayWe disappear in the war sucked into a tunnelHunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding cloudsAnd drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpsesDo like her, do your job'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?
In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true.
Soon you catch your first glimpse of a vineyard basking in the sun, its broad leaves silently turning sunlight into sugar, ripening vitis vinifera, the European grapes that make the world’s finest wines. For a moment you might imagine you’ve been mysteriously wafted to the French countryside, but no, this is the East End of Long Island, the most exciting new wine region in North America. You’ve reached your destination, but your journey of discovery has barely begun
...in the unique case of a country’s geographic position, it is difficult to consider this factor as anything other than a cause, unless we assume that in prehistoric times peoples migrated to climates that fit their concepts of power distance, which is rather far-fetched.
In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.
You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, "We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.
One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation.
Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.
We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.
...I'm momentarily transfixed, torn between curiosity and fear. I can pull it up the gently sloping mud bank, but then what? Already thought is lagging behind events, as the blotchy brown mass slides up wet mud toward me, its amorphous margins flowing into the craters left by retreating feet. In the center of the yard-wide disc is a raised turret where two eyes open and close, flashing black. And it's bellowing. A loud rhythmic sound that is at first inexplicable until I realize that those blinking eyes are its spiracles, now sucking in air instead of water, which it is pumping out via gill slits on its underside. And all the while it brandishes that blade, stabbing the air like a scorpion...
I wore only black socks, because I had heard that white ones were the classic sign of the American tourist. Black ones though,- those'll fool 'em. I supposed I hoped the European locals' conversation would go something like this:PIERRE: Ha! Look at that tourist with his camera and guidebook!JACQUES: Wait, but observe his socks! They are...black!PIERRE: Zut alors! You are correct! He is one of us! What a fool I am! Let us go speak to him in English and invite him to lunch!
Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere of exploration, using charm, chutzpah--and her extensive network of establishment connections--to get where she wanted to go. (From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937)
We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film.
No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?
You must regard this deviation from your plan as part of the adventure that you sought when you decided to embark on it in the first place...Absence of certainty is its essence. People...who choose to shun the mundane must not only expect, but also enjoy and profit from surprises.
What happened to me? I asked myself. Morris's high, smoky voice took me back to my university years, when I thought rich people were evil, a shirt and tie were prison clothes, and life without freedom to get up and go - motorcycle beneath you, breeze in your face, down the streets of Paris, into the mountains of Tibet - was not a good life at all. What happened to me?
Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.