"Contemporary life is perhaps unprecedented in the scale, quantity and global organization of modern journeys, and yet it is clear that travel is not a new human experience. Mobility is the first, prehistorical human condition; sessility (attachment or fixation to one place), a later, historical condition. At the dawn of history, humans were migratory animals....

"We travel long roads and cross water to see what we disregard when it is under our eyes. This is either because nature has so arranged things so that we go after what is far off and remain indifferent to what is nearby, or because any desire loses its intensity by being easily satisfied, or...

"To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to...

"We see frightful souvenirs for sale in the Valley of the Kings, or we blanch at the ruination of Bethlehem or the Austrian Alps -- and we blame it on mass travel. We prophesy dire and culturally fatal consequences. We wish, often vehemently, that every ugly tourist would stay at home in his living room...

"It may seem absurd to view a sightseeing tour of Versailles or the Pyramids as a kind of pilgrim’s progress toward spiritual fulfillment -- or it may seem entirely appropriate. For one thing, the pilgrim of yore had more in common with the present-day tourist than many suspect. One of the first books printed in...

"D.H. Lawrence, in a letter written early in the last century, complained, "I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is no where to go, no 'new world.'" In Tristes Tropiques (alternately—and tellingly—titled A World on the Wane ), published in 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, "There was a time when traveling brought the traveler...

"I was recently in Kenya, in the Masai-Mara game reserve in southwestern Kenya, and every so often saw a Masai moran, or warrior, with a cell phone in one hand and a spear in the other. Rickshaw wallahs in India carry cell phones, and there is electronic media available in the unlikeliest places. While I...

"I think increasingly with globalization the job of the travel writer has to be to try and peel back the surface impression of globalization and to reveal the much more complex reality. It seems to me in a sense an almost paradigmatic illustration of what a travel writer can still do today. Today there is...

"New Guineans are well aware that the culture of their fathers is gone forever and can never be reconstituted. They may still respect old traditions, perform tribal rituals, and honor their ancestors, but in an essential sense, the old way is lost, if only because there has been a transfer of political and economic power,...

"The photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. Descartes, in the early seventeenth century, had observed that traveling was almost like conversing with men of other centuries, a point of view quite unknown before his time. For those who cherish such quaint experience, it...

"New devices, new methods, new machines to make new products, new proofs of the power of the human mind to conceive and the human hand to construct instruments with which to conquer the forces of nature and bring them to the service of humanity -- these are the characteristics of the age we live in....

"Tourism is a sacred journey, the contemporary counterpart of medieval pilgrimage. It turns on a very contemporary distinction between work and play. It thereby ignores that hard work can be pleasurable and that pleasure can be hard work." --David Brown, "Genuine fakes" (1996)

"It is good to come to a country you know practically nothing about. Your thoughts grow still, useless. Everything must be rebuilt. In a country you know nothing about, there is no reference point. You struggle to associate colors, smells, dim memories. You live a little like a child, or an animal. Objects and events...

"There is an almost Orientalist presumption [on the part of travel guidebooks] that the citizens of places like Cuba or Afghanistan have made a choice in rejecting globalization and consumerism. From the perspective of the disaffected Westerner, poverty is seen as enviable, a pure existence unsullied by capitalism. [ Lonely Planet: Cuba co-author Brendan] Sainsbury...

"Travel is as familiar as the experience of the body, the wind, the earth, and this is why at all times and in all places it is a source of reference, a ground of symbols and metaphors, a resource of signification. The anthropologist and historian of religions Mircea Eliade laments the absence of genuine ritual...

This is my gift to all the lovers – and all the others, too - on this Valentine’s Day: “Culture is public because meaning is. You can’t wink (or burlesque one) without knowing what counts as winking or how, physically, to contract your eyelids, and you can’t conduct a sheep raid (or mimic one) without...

"The image of traveler depends not on power, but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks, and rhetorics. Travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms and rituals. Most of all, and most unlike the...

I've been spending a lot of time uncomfortable in Indonesia this month. I confess to being a bit burnt out, a bit gritchy about the things I generally have a sense of humor about (taxi drivers and touts at the top of the list). We flew to Bali for some R&R and to eat our...

"We have an unceasing capacity to make ourselves nuisances, basically. Students of tourism science can and do construct elaborate theories from physics, of course, invoking such wizards as Heisenberg and the Hawthorne effect and the status of Schrödinger’s cat to explain the complex interactions between our status as tourist-observers and the changes we prompt in...

"There are definitive stories about nearly every place on Earth now. And with so many other ways to get information -- if you want to know about Albania, for example, you can now much more easily ask the Albanians -- the point of travel writing has fallen out. There's an increased pressure on travel writers...