"Unlike anti-tourists, elite tourists don’t have to worry about those other tourists. They have always been able to pay for privacy and exclusivity. The anti-tourists have a more difficult position, because they belong to the category of tourists who crave a chance to experience the unspoiled, the unexploited, and for them it is crucial to...

"I spent a lot of time in cars when I was a kid, and you know, there’s something about cars— you’re going somewhere, you’re occupied, which can make people very unguarded in their conversations. I hitchhiked across the country a couple of times when I was a kid, and I used to have the most...

"If we were to map out our daily movements, we'd find that we tend to stick to what we know with little deviation. We move from our house to our job to the gym to the supermarket, back to the house, and get up the next day to do it all again. Guy Debord, one...

"Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting in to a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be...

"May you travel in an awakened way, Gathered wisely into your inner ground; That you may not waste the invitations Which wait along the way to transform you. May you travel safely, arrive refreshed, And live your time away to its fullest; Return home more enriched, and free To balance the gift of days which...

"Although ignorance of the local language thwarts exchanges of ideas, it's unimportant on a practical level. I've wandered around four continents using only English and a few courtesy phrases of Tibetan, Amharic, Quechua, Albanian, or whatever. Our basic needs -- sleeping, eating, drinking -- can always be indicated by signs or globally understood noises. Even...

"[Travel is] humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like, you forgot the lesson from the last time. Because the first person you encounter kind of bitch-slaps you upside...

"Museums are inextricably related to that phenomenon known as "tourism." Both museums and tourism are relatively modern phenomena which were once exclusively the province of the rich and powerful and which developed, especially during the Victorian era, into institutions for the ordinary citizen. Both are "public" in that they are mass phenomena that take place...

"The question remains: does travel writing have a future? The tales of Marco Polo, or the explorations of “Bokhara Burnes” may have contained valuable empirical information impossible to harvest elsewhere, but is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in...

"Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did it mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left -- in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian...

"Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half of our domestic...

"I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to...

"Taking someone's picture doesn't cost them anything, not in any Western commercial sense, yet the picture has value. The picture has no value for the 'primitive', yet the tourist pays for the right to take pictures. The primitive receives something for nothing, and benefits beyond this. Doesn't the fame of certain primitives, and even respect...

"Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as...

"Europeans may sneer at Chinese tourists who pursue Beethoven, Bordeaux and Hugo Boss with the same undiscriminating avidity. But Europeans used to tour their own continent in a similar way. The original Grand Tour was also a display of relative economic power, as the gilded youth of northern, industrializing Europe headed to France, Switzerland and...

"In the years after Edward Said's Orientalism , the exploration of the East -- its peoples, habits, customs and past -- by travelers from the West has become a target for scholarly bombardment. Travel writers have often come to be seen as outriders of colonialism, attempting to demonstrate the superiority of Western ways by 'imagining'...

"There is nothing exclusive about tourism. Quite the contrary: it is primarily in clusive. It is an industry determined to embrace you. It wants you to check in to the right hotels; it wants you to spend as much as you can on fatuous souvenirs; it wants you to do Machu Picchu or the Taj...

"When a person says, in a foreign place, "I feel right at home here," he is making a statement about the nature of travel, not in the texture of the place he's in. ...I don't belittle this sort of travel, which I regard as Traveling As A Version Of Being At Home; but it is...

"For many habitual travelers, hating America is a given. Not just America at home, but the detritus of America abroad. The States are the font of all ignorant interference, all destabilizing of delicate cultures and economies. America is the cause and the symptom of what's going wrong. Of course the people on whose behalf travel...

"When some tourists accuse those other tourists of not being good enough tourists, not open enough, not interested in adventures and new challenges, they fall back on the normative ideal developed from the days of the Grand Tour and onwards. They forget that behind the tourist label there are very different kinds of explorers. Some...