"Unlike the oil industry, which is scrutinized at all levels, travel writing has become an extension of the industry. With few exceptions, travel writing and travel sections share the singular goal of helping consumers spend their money pursuing the dream of a perfect trip. They seldom write critical reviews; only articles about what to do...

"Impatient people…find that travel is slow and full of nuisance and delay -- that there's no instant gratification. Or that there's only one bus or train a week and you might get stuck. They haven't got the patience for it but that's what travel teaches you. Temperamentally, people are less suited to travel than ever...

Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard. — Vera Nazarian Our first year traveling full time we spent on bicycles. It was a beautiful way to see the world. The drumbeat of pedal strokes become meditation, if you do it...

"Wit, style, a keen and original mind, an eye for the unusual -- these are what delight us in the travelogue writer. The compiler of a guidebook, on the other hand, must be a totally different kind of person. His job is to report the location, dimensions, age, and life-history of the monuments, and only...

"Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse -- all of it slipped away." --Peter...

"China is easier to write about than Cheyenne, Leningrad easier than Louisville. But to see Cheyenne and Louisville written about well, to see the dailiness of America brought to life with freshness and humor, is to watch one of the hardest high-wire acts in travel writing." --William Zinsser, They Went: The Art and Craft of...

"Reading and restlessness -- dissatisfaction at home, a sourness at being indoors, and a notion that the real world was elsewhere -- made me a traveler. If the Internet was everything it was cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available,...

"As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability -- like not knowing what the hell I'm supposed to do upon arrival -- makes me more open to outside interactions than I might otherwise be when I'm at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is...

"Because most tourists rarely penetrate beyond the boundaries of "tourist space," they have few opportunities to experience and photograph that which is really "unspoiled." Their limited knowledge of the culture and life of the indigenous people tends to narrow down their conception of the "typical" to the stereotypical. …Locals often stage themselves in response to...

"One strike against travel writing, though, is that many writers who describe familiar places without making shallow or trite observations suddenly run into trouble when they go on the road. They seem to lose their inhibitions when they find themselves in exotic surroundings, and start telling us how red-cheeked and healthy the children look, how...

"I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart...

"Now the quest for the authentic Other is one of vanishing horizons. One genuine "backstage" is penetrated, only to reveal another fake front-stage: the act of observation changes that which is observed. Hence travelers do not (indeed cannot) succeed in their quest any more than tourists. That is only too clear from the accounts of...

"The rigid distinction between romantic world travelers and a locally based, sedentary population is rapidly being erased. Cities are no longer waiting for the arrival of the tourist -- they too are also starting to join global circulation, to reproduce themselves on a world scale and to expand in all directions. As they do so,...

My friend Clark sent me this poem recently. It was a timely delivery. My Dad and I have been discussing this very thing: the desire to live multiple lives simultaneously, our deep wish to be in more than one place at a time, the bittersweet frustration of the knowledge that we can do anything we...

"A concentrated influx of tourists can be a welcome boon to an economy, or it can be a pestilence. "I have always been proud to be British, but these degenerates are dragging us through the mud," Michael Birkett, Britain's vice-consul in Ibiza, said, before quitting his job, in 1998, in disgust at the behavior of...

"You are still young, free... Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late." --Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake: A Novel (2003)

"One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If the story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist's diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer's presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it's described as...

"Herodotus -- who lived 2,500 years ago and left us his "History" -- was the first reporter. He is the father, master and forerunner of a genre --reportage. Where does reportage come from? It has three sources, of which travel is the first. Not in the sense of a tourist trip or outing to get...

"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...

Pic credit:Flickr/Chloester " Marrying into a culture is a strange pinnacle of interaction. All of these travelers and travel writers think they’re so “extreme” because they visited this place or that place or ate this or bungee jumped off that, but — in my experience — there is nothing more challenging than truly learning language...