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...

To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.

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...

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...

a foreign affair juxtaposed with a statesideand domestically approved romantic fancy is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing it will only be parlayed into a memory

Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.

Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,’ she said. ‘Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.

Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light,...

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,...

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...

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...

…the longer she had lived away, the more she realized that nowhere became home… though everywhere had.

…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...

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...

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...

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw...

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step unless you missed it.

Make sure your not followed! Don’t go anywhere

I like to travel, I like to do it as much as I can,

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.

This is the highest level of weekly non-travel spending recorded to date.

These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind

‎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...

He has a passport,” my classmates would whisper. “Quick, let’s run before he judges us!

Solo” by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience.

Those who walk the talk get the work.

The treasured vistas of our solo journeys are not always about the landscape.

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.

Travel empties out everything you’ve into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are

Sooner or later, everybody dreams of other worlds.

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...

Sometimes it feels like I’m walking around with bricks for shoes, not going anywhere.

There was no opiate like a French pillow.

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...

Zisťujeme, že nemáme s ničím vrátane seba žiadne skúsenosti.

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...

There’s something about climbing a mountain that I find to be so beautiful, it’s like visiting an old home for the first time, discovering something about yourself you didn’t know existed and taking pleasure in...

Your inner light is greater than the darkness.May your light shine brightly in every path you travel.

I was 8,569 miles away, 37 butt-numbing hours of travel across seven time zones in the last two days, or was it three? Amelia Earhart, eat your heart out.

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...

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....

Whatever yerz’re lookin’ for, I hope yerz find it. Yerz moight’ve never lost it!

You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy – how sad that I could not reinvent the...

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.

I’m heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o’-lantern, will get therewithout help and nosy proclivities.

I am compelled into this country.

Wish you were here, we can get lost in the forest together and eat bamboo rice.

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...