Travel safe and arrive happy.

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...

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.

To realize the value of one minute, ask the person who has missed the train,bus or plane.

No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.’ The Commandant said it for me.’Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every...

One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.

Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: ‘My needle…always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more exhausted and richer on that...

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

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...

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

The longer you drift the more you will learn. What you learn affects the kind of person you end up turning into.

I didn’t get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation (‘Can you ve’fy you eat banan’ pancake?’) he let me go asking me...

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...

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead.

…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...

A little crazy is good

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.

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...

A hotel room all to myself is my idea of a good time.

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...

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...

For all the energy directed toward the stratagem of big city living, New Yorkers are never too distracted to respond to, and more often, proactively assist visitors. Tourists tracing the routes of subway maps with...

Some flowers need flames to find their way into this world.

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...

I don’t know how many years it was before I arrived at a formulated philosophy that the happiest thing to do, always, when visiting an individual or a country, is to admit, by word or...

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

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...

…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...

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...

No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey’s end.

Admire Beauty

Keep taking new paths to expand your horizon.

London on your own actually seems more exotic than Egypt on a tour.

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...

If you do something that has never been done you will collect treasures that have never been found.

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...

Cuando estamos lejos de la patria nunca la recordamos en sus inviernos. La distancia borra las penas del invierno, las poblaciones desamparadas, los niños descalzos en el frío. El arte del recuerdo sólo nos trae...

A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from

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...

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Istanbul, stazione di transito di tre grandi rotte. Le carovane verso la Mecca, i pellegrinaggi in Terra Santa, il ritorno nella Terra Promessa. Istanbul, capolinea di ogni viaggio iniziatico, da Casanova a Nerval, da Gauthier...

I was supposed to stay for 3 months. But I think I always knew I would stay a little longer, despite the crazy Frenchies. Or maybe because of them.

Well, if you ask me what’s so special about this place.. aku akan bilang, most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.Kayak semilir angin pagi dari teras kamar.Minum air tanpa harus dijerang...

I always consider every place worth exploring once- just in case there’s a thirty foot flaming sign divulging the secret of life, that no one has told me about.

Let the sea breeze blow your hair, let the sunset bring tranquility to your heart, let the distant places you travel allow you to explore yourself.

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...

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...

Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent.

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...

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...