My brother-in-law David Van Tassel alerted me to this lampoon of the new Homeland Security icons from www.ready.gov. I

“But the routine of the beggars is heart-rending. The little girl who suddenly appeared at the window of my taxi, the utterly lovely smile with which she stretched out her hand, and then the extinguishing of the light when she drew it back empty. I had no Indian money yet. She fell away from the taxi as if she were sinking in water and drowning and I wanted to die. I couldn

“The goal of preparation is not knowing exactly where you

“I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendor of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoiled

“Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, this precipitating a chain of change in the host community. The notion that people in more or less continuous, first-hand, face-to-face contact become more like each other should not be ignored just because tourists come and go. A tourist clientele tends to replicate itself. As a host community adapts to tourism, its facilitation to tourists’ needs, attitude, and values, the host community must become more like the tourists’ culture. That is what tourists in search of the exotic and ‘natural’ vacation setting mean when they say a place has been ‘spoiled’ by tourism, i.e., those who got there before them and required the amenities of home. Anthropologists are often in the forefront of those who deplore the dilution and adulteration of traditional culture

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these 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, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

“‘Adventure travel’ is a term I’m not entirely fond of, but I suppose we need it to distinguish modern modes of travel from those that entail some risk and hardship. By that definition, the act of getting from Point A to Point B on land or sea was an adventure for all travelers before the inventions of the steamship, the automobile, and the passenger plane, before there was a multibillion dollar tourist industry to make even remote corners of the world accessible and comfortable, before the United States was spanned by interstate highways with convenient rest stops, motorist call-boxes, and franchise eateries offering high-fat ‘Happy Meals.’”
–Philip Caputo, In the Shadows of the Morning (2002)

Good judgment can come from bad experiences; good experiences can come from bad judgment.
–Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

“To travel somewhere is almost always to support someone and to exploit someone — often the same person.

“Optimism is dangerous, because optimists don’t believe in worst-case scenarios, and worst-case scenarios are what are used to frighten us into submission.”
–Douglas Rushkoff, from an online interview, 1999