“I do not want to know where this journey ends. Otherwise, why call this action ‘journey’?”
–Matsuo Bashō, in his journal

“Contemporary life is perhaps unprecedented in the scale, quantity and global organization of modern journeys, and yet it is clear that travel is not a new human experience. Mobility is the first, prehistorical human condition; sessility (attachment or fixation to one place), a later, historical condition. At the dawn of history, humans were migratory animals. Recorded history — the history of civilization — is a story of mobilities, migrations, settlements, of the adaptation of human groups to place and their integration into topography, the creation of “homes.” In order to understand our present, we must understand how mobility has operated historically, in the past, as a force of change, transforming personalities, social landscapes, human topographies, creating a global civilization.”
–Eric J. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (1992)

“We travel long roads and cross water to see what we disregard when it is under our eyes. This is either because nature has so arranged things so that we go after what is far off and remain indifferent to what is nearby, or because any desire loses its intensity by being easily satisfied, or because we postpone whatever we can see whenever we want, feeling sure we will often get around to it. Whatever the reason, there are numbers of things in this city of ours and its environs which we have not even heard of, much less seen; yet, if they were in Greece or Egypt or Asia…we could have heard all about them, read all about them, looked over all there was to see.”
–Pliny the Younger

“To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to a movie travelogue. For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel, are equally banal and unnourishing as experience. Difficulty of access does not confer adequacy of perception, though it may involve an object in an aura of pseudo-values, as with a gem, a movie star, or an old master.”
–Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)

“We see frightful souvenirs for sale in the Valley of the Kings, or we blanch at the ruination of Bethlehem or the Austrian Alps — and we blame it on mass travel. We prophesy dire and culturally fatal consequences. We wish, often vehemently, that every ugly tourist would stay at home in his living room by his wretched fire, and leave such noble places to their emptiness — or at least, to us. Yet what we forget is that without travel — there would be no “us.” For what is modern man, other than the consequence of movement, of migration, of wandering?”
–Simon Winchester, intro to Martin Parr’s Small World (1995)

“It may seem absurd to view a sightseeing tour of Versailles or the Pyramids as a kind of pilgrim’s progress toward spiritual fulfillment — or it may seem entirely appropriate. For one thing, the pilgrim of yore had more in common with the present-day tourist than many suspect. One of the first books printed in English, Informacion for Pylgrymes unto the Holy Londe (1498) is a sort of primitive Rough Guide, advising pilgrims on how to negotiate with ships’ captains, obtain the best berth once aboard and find the strongest horses upon arrival. What’s more, many of the vices that today’s tourists are accused of in Ibiza or Las Vegas were also leveled against pilgrims. The sixteenth century Dutch theologian, Erasmus, condemned pilgrimages as little more than excuses for dissipation, accusing pilgrims of merely seeking adventure and a chance to boast of their exploits upon return.”
–George Pendle, “Sight Seers,” Bidoun, Spring/Summer 2006

“D.H. Lawrence, in a letter written early in the last century, complained, “I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is no where to go, no ‘new world.’” In Tristes Tropiques (alternately—and tellingly—titled A World on the Wane), published in 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, “There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilizations which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit.” Maybe every generation feels this way. Alexander the Great was said to have wept when he realized he had no more worlds to conquer, and Evelyn Waugh, in 1946, took the same tone when he wrote that he did not “expect to see many travel books in the near future,” adding that, “Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport … and feel the world wide open before us.” Even the title of the book from which that passage is drawn, When the Going Was Good, puts joy in the past tense.”
–Malcolm Jones, Is Travel Writing Dead? The Daily Beast, Jun 5, 2011

“I was recently in Kenya, in the Masai-Mara game reserve in southwestern Kenya, and every so often saw a Masai moran, or warrior, with a cell phone in one hand and a spear in the other. Rickshaw wallahs in India carry cell phones, and there is electronic media available in the unlikeliest places. While I was paddling around the Pacific in the early ’90s for my Happy Isles of Oceania, the elders in some islands confided to me their lament that, for the first time ever, their people were seeing pornographic movies and the Rambo films on TVs with battery-operated video systems. The Internet has now reached the Solomon Islands and the Cooks and the Marquesas, and it’s everywhere else, dispensing information, corrupting some, informing others, putting people in touch, creating a deafening global buzz of confusion, mingled opinion and prejudice and fact.”
–Paul Theroux, “Dispatch From a Shrinking Planet,” Newsweek, May 15, 2011

“I think increasingly with globalization the job of the travel writer has to be to try and peel back the surface impression of globalization and to reveal the much more complex reality. It seems to me in a sense an almost paradigmatic illustration of what a travel writer can still do today. Today there is no empirical information about a country that a travel book can give that cannot be got more accurately elsewhere. But what a travel writer can do is interpret the complexity of the globalized world, look at the hybrid human being that exists in different parts of the world, give a first person account of how that person seems, interpreting reality in a literary form in the same way novelists try. That seems to me to be what travel writing can be about now, what travel books can offer which Google or Encyclopedia Britannica or the novel cannot: you are going there and presenting and going deeper than the journalists, you are spending time and learning. I think that the idea that the travel book has had its day is true neither in the sense of having nothing more to offer, nor in the sense of sales. It is still a form of literature which people turn to and certainly in its comic form is more popular than ever. It is a very popular form still, because it is a form which has the ability to reinvent itself for each period. During the colonial period it sometimes, though not always, was doing colonial work, now it is doing a different job for a different audience in a different period of time. It seems to be a universal form, like poetry, but unlike the novel, has existed at all periods of history in all or most cultures.”
–William Dalrymple, interviewed by Tim Youngs, Studies in Travel Writing (2005)

“New Guineans are well aware that the culture of their fathers is gone forever and can never be reconstituted. They may still respect old traditions, perform tribal rituals, and honor their ancestors, but in an essential sense, the old way is lost, if only because there has been a transfer of political and economic power, and the New Guineans can no longer act in the modern world and in their relations with outsiders as if their old culture were still intact. Many decisions previously made on the basis of New Guinean cultural premises are now made on the basis of Western premises, for there has been a transfer of power. What is ironic is that the old New Guinea culture is lost in the present, but is recovered in the tourist imaginary, in a tourist dream, and not in the real conditions of native existence. The New Guineans find themselves acting in two time frames: in a real present that the tourists do not see, and in the tourists’ fantasy of their past. …Most ironic of all is that the primitive life that the foreign visitors celebrate has been altered by a previous generation of these same foreigners. In effect, the tourists long for what they have previously destroyed, a phenomena that Rosaldo calls ‘imperialist nostalgia,’ or what might be called ‘tourist nostalgia.’”
–Edward M. Bruner, “Transformation of Self in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research (1991)