“I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. … Read more »

The New York Times had a commentary article that argued in favor of students taking a gap year before college.  In response, their inbox got flooded with comments from readers.

Naturally, many of the letters were from parents worried about the cost of travel.  One example:

Great advice … Read more »

“Taking someone’s picture doesn’t cost them anything, not in any Western commercial sense, yet the picture has value. The picture has no value for the ‘primitive’, yet the tourist pays for the right to take pictures. The primitive receives something for nothing, and benefits beyond this. Doesn’t the fame of certain primitives, and even respect for them, actually increase when the tourist carries their pictures back to the West? It seems to be the most … Read more »

“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. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with … Read more »

The start of a new year usually means resolutions. New beginnings. New goals. This is the time when many people finally take control of their lives and accomplish the things that they really want to accomplish in life. If one of those goals is to travel the world, then stop making excuses and do it. If you are sick of one week vacations and really want to get out and see the world, then it’s … Read more »

When you look over your travel photos, do you linger more on the people shots more than the location pictures?  I know I do.  It’s an experience that’s happened to me over and over again.  I go to a place excited to see famous landmarks.  Yet after the trip, it’s the new friends and fun memories that stay in my head.

The country music group Lady Antebellum put backpacking front and center in their … Read more »

“Europeans may sneer at Chinese tourists who pursue Beethoven, Bordeaux and Hugo Boss with the same undiscriminating avidity. But Europeans used to tour their own continent in a similar way. The original Grand Tour was also a display of relative economic power, as the gilded youth of northern, industrializing Europe headed to France, Switzerland and Italy to pick up a veneer of continental ‘polish’ and crateloads of antique souvenirs (many of them fake). Those tourists, … Read more »

“In the years after Edward Said’s Orientalism, the exploration of the East — its peoples, habits, customs and past — by travelers from the West has become a target for scholarly bombardment. Travel writers have often come to be seen as outriders of colonialism, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by ‘imagining’ the East as decayed and degenerate. This has always seemed to me to be a narrow and prescriptive way of looking … Read more »