Pico Iyer on the advantages of traveling alone

“When you travel alone you quickly find that you make many more friends because people invite you into their lives much more quickly. If they see two people together, they assume it’s a self-contained unit. And also, I travel to empty myself out and lose myself in a culture as much as possible and also to leave as much of my self at home as possible.”
Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)