The Tao of Travel

A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward.—

GTES

Traveling in a Time of Trouble

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness.—

GTES

Travel and Love

If one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier.—

GTES

Smell a Country to Understand It

[Kipling's] gift is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it).

—T. S. Eliot,

A Choice of Kipling's Verse

(1943)

Travel as a Love Affair

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with ... All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

—Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel,"

Salon

(2000)

Tourism and Sightseeing

The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.

—V. S. Pritchett,

The Spanish Temper

(1954)

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. 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 the another.

—Paul Bowles,

The Sheltering Sky

(1949)

Tourists don't know where they've been, I thought. Travelers don't know where they're going.—

HIO

In Mumbai: A tourist would have been in a temple or a museum. I had been in a slum.—

GTES

Sightseeing is an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity.—

GRB

Sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but ... it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.—

GRB

Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel ... It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.—

SWS

Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.—

TEE

Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest.—

OPE

Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation's pleasures.—

KBS