The Tao of Travel

The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy."—

GTES

Travel as Intrusion

It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [

Heart of Darkness],

and one other ... are all the spoil I brought out from the center of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.

—Joseph Conrad, Author's Note,

Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether

(1902)

Travel as Transformation

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those 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.

—Mark Twain,

Innocents Abroad

(1869)

There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.

—John Steinbeck, letter, June 1960, in

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

(1975)

The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil. The person who edits and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least I am not the person I was before. The vagabonding through our "America" has changed me more than I thought.

—Ernesto "Che" Guevara,

Notas de Viaje (The Motorcycle Diaries),

in Jon Lee Anderson,

Che

(2010)

The Traveler Must Be Worthy

The traveler must be himself, in men's eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God's heaven, and were it without a religion: he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt; it is enough and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the end of the world.

—C. M. Doughty,

Travels in Arabia Deserta

(1888)

Traveling Makes One Modest

To go back to Kuchuk [a courtesan and dancer in Esna]. You and I are thinking of her, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honors of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others. Ah! Traveling makes one modest—you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

—Gustave Flaubert, in

Flaubert in Egypt,

translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

Travel Writing

Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.

—V. S. Pritchett,

Complete Essays

(1991)

Travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography ... The anonymous hotel room in a strange city drives one into the confessional mode.—

GRB

The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows.—

GRB

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.—

TEE

Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different from