"In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That's the theory." --Paul Theroux, Ghost...

"The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, the bear witness to the consequences, tragic or comic, of...

"Walking to ease the mind is an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of the process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing." --Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel (2011)

Dahab, Egypt There are a gazillion things to observe when on the road, and here's one of my favorites: the books people read. Anytime you see someone reading a book, they're traveling. There is of course the geographic location in which they are actually reading. The English fellow above, for example, is sitting on the...

southwestern Cambodia In Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town , he describes the journal entry made by a 19th-century visitor to an Egyptian temple. In the entry we read that an Arab man is taking measurements of the temple. We also read that while this is happening "a yellow cow,...

"The books I don’t have a lot of time for are the frivolous ones: lovable people in Tuscany, or a little treasure of a man in Spain, or wonderful meals. The books about having a great time. I'm not too interested in them. But there are plenty of them because people have the fantasy of...

"Travel is mostly about dreams — dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile...