“Our incessant commentary on others gives insights into the tourist or vacation mode of consumption. “Those other tourists” come to represent a commodified, fragmented tourism. Here we find a model of tourism as consumption, with vacationers moving along the shelves of the tourist supermarket, falling for today’s special offers, the well-advertised, the cheap, the easily digested, the standardized items of tourist experiences. The commentator sees himself or herself in other terms, not as a consumer … Read more »

Without exception, every traveler I’ve met has been an avid reader.  Makes sense, as a keener interest in information and stories complement a curiosity to see the world. The natural next step is to pick up our keyboards and write stories of our own, in travel blogs.

The website Travelllll.com had a post titled, Good Travel Blogging: Seven Ways to Read Better.  There is a … Read more »

“I saw a crocodile in this part of the Niger, close to the bank; it looked just like a small boat. One day I went down to the river to satisfy a need, and lo, one of the blacks came and stood between me and the river. I was amazed at such a lack of manners and decency on his part, and spoke of it to someone or another. He answered, ‘His purpose in doing … Read more »

“‘Getting off the beaten path’ is still a negotiation (even if a contrarian one) with the pre-formed idea of a place, rather than with the place itself. And soon enough, it becomes incorporated into the approved, expected experience: witness the advertisements for SUVs and sporting gear that now use that phrase as a slogan. Indeed, the presumption of location-aware technologies is that place can be a sort of consumer artifact, a packaged item in a … Read more »

There are so many different steps to a RTW trip that it’s sometimes difficult to know where to begin. First you have to get through that first stage of actually making the decision to go. Finding inspiration shouldn’t be terribly difficult in this technological age we live in, but actually taking that plunge is a whole different story.

But once you decide that a RTW trip is right for you, where do you … Read more »

It’s a common traveler’s dilemma: to avoid jet lag after a long-haul flight, you should really sleep on the plane. That way, you can wake up refreshed and already be on local time. The problem: you can’t sleep on planes.

If you’ve ever arrived at an airport feeling groggy like Bill Murray’s character in the film Lost in Translation, you’re not alone. Seth Kugel, who writes the “Frugal Traveler” column for The New York Times, … Read more »

“So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn’t really give them the idea of the world. Or they don’t read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself. And so anything from the travel stories I tell, that’s what I’m trying to get across. That you have to realize there are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, … Read more »

“I came to the conclusion that some more ascetic reason than mere enjoyment should be found if one wishes to travel in peace: to do things for fun smacks of levity, immorality almost, in our utilitarian world. And though personally I think the world is wrong, and I know that in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them, I would … Read more »

One of the great things about travel is how even ordinary errands can become cultural adventures. For example, the simple act of going grocery shopping. Ben Groundwater, who writes “The Backpacker” column for The Sydney Morning Herald, waxed poetic in this article: Culture shop: the joy of supermarkets.

Groundwater recounts his memories of his favorite supermarkets. He admits that he sometimes remembers them better than the sightseeing … Read more »

“Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to make trips to exotic, non-Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old stereotypes: that simpler society, where faith is pure, nature pristine, discontent (and its civilization) unknown. But paradise is always being lost. One of the recurrent themes of modern travel narratives is the depredations of the modern, the loss of the past — the report on a society’s decline. The nineteenth-century travelers are noting … Read more »