"Any budding academic can tell you that deliberately placing oneself in a position of not-knowing, and to then go about finding out what you don't know, can be a fulfilling pursuit, and the disorientation itself, the early stages of figuring out what you didn't know that you wanted to know, was as exciting as the...

"Many travelers seek out this high. We seek out what is different from what we behold in our daily lives, whether it is language, fashion, standards of behavior, architecture, climate, or animal species, because beholding what is different has the quality of being unreal. If our brains resist the realness of something, but this thing...

"This is a truth about leaving the culture that raised you and crossing into another: We leave home with an arsenal of things we know about the place we're going. There is no disarming all of what we know, no matter how much touching and kneading and feeling we do, no matter how much we...

"Here's what I think: you need to leave and then go back to the places that obsess you. If you want the delight of the unfamiliar you leave yourself enough time between trips to activate the added kick of nostalgia when you return. That is what it means to be a traveler: the desire to...

"Good writers -- travel writers or otherwise -- make real and tangible a world that some readers have never inhabited. Just look at the great draw of the bizzaro worlds of "Harry Potter" or "The Hunger Games." What turns travel writing into an ethical question that sets it apart from sci-fi or literary fiction is...