"The global landscape used to be a theater of various shadings -- sunlit fields and canyons of dark obscurity, trackless jungles, and misty Shangri-las. Now the whole world is like a cineplex when the lights have come on. Almost no place on the surface of the planet is really obscure anymore. Satellites watch it all...

"The problem is that we know little about other cultures, and rather than decent knowledge we are likely to make do with easy and false stereotypes. This is what Herodotus understood all too well. Better still, he knew that only mutual knowledge of each other makes understanding and connecting possible, as the only way to...

"It is safe to say that the lasting travel accounts are quite subjective, that -- within limits -- the more subjective they are, the more readable, the more "valuable" they are. Travelers, like novelists, learned long ago the truth of Todorov's statement of a universal law: "The best description...is the one which is not description...

"I've found that, for expatriates, America-bashing can become a kind of recreational activity ("re-creating," in a the process, a sense of home), a way of both justifying your choices and reminding yourself, in a playful and not-too-disturbing way, of the country and culture that -- despite anything and all you may do to have it...

"Out in the great wide world, foreign reporting can be depressingly narrow, especially in the post-9/11 climate. Sometimes it seems as if there are only two possible subjects for stories: people we should fear and people we should pity. But those aren't the individuals I met while living abroad." --Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from...

"Since the end of the Cold War and the opening of the world for travel, tourism has become an important source of foreign exchange for the world's poorest nations, often the only one. While tourism requires some infrastructure, from airfields to modern highways, it is less expensive than building factories. In theory, poor countries should...

"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...

"What raises travel writing to literature is not what the writer brings to a place, but what a place brings out of the writer." --William Zinsser, in They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing (1991)

"This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy. We take it like a shot of tequila, or a bump of coke from the key to a stranger's home. We want the inebriation of presence to...

"Rather than lament the fact that trips would have been better in some golden age of travel, we might as well celebrate the fact that we are enjoying the tail-end of an era in which a certain kind of off-the-beaten-track adventure is still possible." --Nicholas Danforth, World travel can be all about timing , San...

"I confess that I have never understood why so many people's idea of a fun vacation is to don flip-flops and sunglasses and crawl through maddening traffic to loud hot crowded tourist venues in order to sample a 'local flavor' that is by definition ruined by the presence of tourists. This may (as my Festival...

"I always get terrified right before I travel. I become convinced that this time will be different: I won't be able to figure out the map, or communicate with non-English speakers, or find the people I need in order to write the story I've been sent in search of. I will be lost and incompetent...

"Michael [Rockefeller] was working with a bottomless supply of money -- the one thing that limits most people, that checks them, that forces them to use friendship and reciprocity and patience with others. And there is a profound difference between people who are friends and people who want your money. Had Michael had less money,...

"There is very little mystery left in driving around America when you can search a million photos of the Grand Canyon online, or when you hew rigidly to the route laid out by the automated Google Maps voice as you roll through the desert. You can travel anywhere you want before you actually go there....

"Of course, writers of any kind are never the norm; those of us who write about travel are different from the start, since we usually head out alone. The reason cited most often is freedom from distraction; when you’re by yourself, you're more attuned to your surroundings. Less discussed, but just as important, is the...

"Why do we, for a spell, trade the security and comfort of a familiar place for the liberty offered by an unfamiliar space , a swap of domestic fixity for freedom of the open road? Even if we go as tourists, where there and then dominate the peregrination -- rather than going like travelers, who...

"It used to be that you would hardly ever see anyone you met ever again. With the advent of email, the half-life of a friendship was about a year. Keeping up with mail tended to fall off at that rate, but with Facebook it lasts forever. There is a dark side, however. Over the last...

"A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality." --Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown (2003)

"These 'non-places' have radically changed the concept of home, not only for most of us in the first world but for a growing number of those in the developing world. Perhaps nothing has left so strong a mark on our identities as the periods spent in the sky and in the airports that gather together...

"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...