Part of the goal in travel is getting lost

“Travel for me is not really about going from A to C via B, but getting lost in G, or finding out that you wished you’d gone via P, or realizing that you wish you’d been in T all along. When the great Islamic traveler Ibn Battuta left his hometown of Tangier for Mecca to make the hajj, at the age of 21 — it’s a not a great distance, as you know — it took him 29 years. And he’s said to have covered more than 75,000 miles, so he clearly wasn’t taking the AAA recommended route. The goal in travel is, really, getting lost.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006