The Tao of Travel

Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that people you trust have warned you against.—

FAF

For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have become trophies.—

FAF

Travel and Optimism

It was the poor person's way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action.—

KBS

Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere.

—FAF

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life.—

GTES

Travel and Tradition

Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.—

POH

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them.—

POH

Observing local rituals while traveling is important, not for

its dubious sanctity, but because the set of gestures in rituals reveals the inner state of the people involved and their subtle protocol.—

GTES

Travel and Politics

Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble.—

POH

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.—

DSS

Sightseeing is perfect for a dictatorship—China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The non-sightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency, and has to be deported.—

RIR

Travel and Porno

It seemed incontestable to me that a country's pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth, but it contained many clues and even more warnings, especially of its men.—

POH