All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet’s hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.
The traveler’s boast, sometimes couched as a complaint, is that of having been an eyewitness, and invariably this experience – shocking though it may seem at the time – is an enrichment, even a blessing, one of the life-altering trophies of the road.
There has to be a measure of difficulty or problem-solving in travel for it to be worthwhile.
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
I think most serious and omnivorous readers are alike- intense in their dedication to the word, quiet-minded, but relieved and eagerly talkative when they meet other readers and kindred spirits.
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 a crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eye witness.
If people are driving you around to look at animals, that’s wonderful. That’s educational, but it’s not necessarily enlightening and you’re not finding out much about yourself.
It’s not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train.
I don’t think that it’s possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it’s simple.
Although I’m not fluent in sign language by a long way, I could have a fairly decent conversation.
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn’t make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn’t make a phone call. So for six years I didn’t make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.
I don’t want to be the honored guest. I want to be the invisible person.
It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians.
I hate vacations. I hate them. I have no fun on them. I get nothing done. People sit and relax, but I don’t want to relax. I want to see something.
In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan.
The worst thing that can happen to you in travel is having a gun pointed at you by a very young person. That’s happened to me maybe four times in my life. I didn’t like it.
One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect.
And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he’s seen or thinks he’s seen.