In the Outside Magazine story I mentioned last week, I end my Greece sailing tale with an allusion to the great 1911 travel poem, "Ithaca", by modern Greek poet Konstantinos P. Kavafis (sometimes referred to in English as Constantine Cavafy). Here is the text of "Ithaca" in full: Ithaca By Konstantinos P. Kavafis When you...

"I've been lucky enough to go to many of the uncharted places on the map, and these days what I do is go more and more into the unmapped hours of the clock. I travel into 3am, I go into the dead hours of the night, I travel into silence and darkness and uncertainty, because...

"In more remote countries, Americans are still something of a novelty and they look at us the way we look at the Hollywood B-actor set. For example, you may think that Pamela Anderson is a surgically enhanced bad actress who's out of touch with reality and gets paid too much for her minimal talent. But...

"Personally I like going places where I don't speak the language, don't know anybody, don't know my way around and don't have any delusions that I'm in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home." --Michael Mewshaw, "Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel" (2004)

"Americans used to go to Europe in search of a larger life. We went because living abroad expanded our sense of what an American could be; offered, paradoxically, a different and richer and grander way of being an American than we could find at home. In [Henry] James's day we came to grasp at an...

"Journalists belong to a policy elite that is fixated with politics to the exclusion of much else that goes on at home and abroad. Thus, when they arrive overseas they gravitate toward movers and shakers in foreign capitals who have similar fixations. For example, overseas reporters exhibit an obsession with covering elections. But because democracy...

"For some people there is a distinct pleasure in return: the possibility of gaining greater intimacy with a place you know. For me there is something else. I go back not just to see how a place has changed, but also to see how I’ve changed. Travel offers a rare opportunity to view myself outside...

"In order to vagabond, give yourself as much time as you can afford. Bankroll your trip with as much of this treasure as you can, whether you measure it in hours or in months. As a vagabond, time is your capital and life is your collateral. With enough time, you finally stop counting and saving...

"Travel is not just a great education, but most of all it teaches you how little you know when you're very far away. When I make physical journeys in the world, what I try to do is to choose those places that will most contradict or at least compliment reality as I know it in...

"Sophisticated travelers, and not a few scholars of tourism research, tend to cringe at the idea of mass tourism, associating it with superficial encounters and hardships foisted upon local communities. …Still, many of our attitudes related to mass tourism have more to do with our own expectations and prejudices than they do with impacts upon...

"You pass through places and places pass through you But you carry 'em with you on the soles of your travelin' shoes." --The Be Good Tanyas, "The Littlest Birds Sing the Prettiest Songs" (2001) Note : This lyric comes from a delightful song on The Be Good Tanya's album Blue Horse , which has been...

"Travel writing emphasizes solitariness. The best writing, literary or journalistic, occurs under the loneliest of circumstances, when a writer encounters the evidence firsthand without anyone of his social, economic, or professional group nearby to help him filter it, or otherwise condition his opinions. William Faulkner’s works, according to Malcolm Cowley, “are the books of a...

"The thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures -- the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that...

"It is necessary, especially for Americans, to see other lands and experience other cultures. The American, living in this vast country and able to traverse three thousand miles east to west using the same language, needs to hear languages as they collide in Europe, Africa, and Asia. "A tourist, browsing in a Paris shop, eating...

Anyone with an interest in travel writing and journalism should check out the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review , which features a great article by Robert D. Kaplan on the advantages of travel writing over orthodox international journalism. The article is not available online [ update : it is now; see link below],...

"In some ways, the very movement of the world around us enforces the need for stillness. Movement is almost the first act of a symphony that stillness must complete. I am interested in all the new contours and textures and possibilities of the world, but really they only make sense when we can take those...

"A recurrent event in history that has always fascinated me is first contact. The most vivid examples come from travel -- the age of exploration and discovery. Usually, first contact is construed as Columbus meeting his first Arawak and calling him and Indian; but consider the reverse: the Arawak meeting a fat little Italian clutching...

"Travel writing is essentially a dialogue between a person and a place, and the dialogue is only as rich as what the person brings to it -- the extent to which that person brings the weight and intensity of his questions or his hauntedness or his uncertainties. All of us when we're traveling have remarkable...

"Ordinary travelers through life try to control everything, in order to protect their delusions from the nasty shocks of reality. What they get is uptight and paranoid; the music is stilled. By preplanning every aspect of their trip, whether vacation trip or life trip, they think they can circumvent the unimaginable flow of natural process...

"In these times, any one of you who feels inclined to risk a little and learn a lot should travel to an Islamic country to make friends and to learn, not to teach. . . . You should get to know them well enough to understand why what they believe is plausible to them, and...