Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
The trip changed all that. Stirring the murk of a life ill-fitting, Something More was perceptible though without name or form. Something More was the genesis of a map, not one handed to me but rendered with each step taken, a skill seasoned by a cruise gone bad.
People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura oflife which bears no relation to true immortality but through which theycontinue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. Itis as though they were traveling abroad.
Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.
With the earth firmly beneath our feet, we can approach what attracts us, and withdraw from what unnerves us. If there is real danger, we can run. Mobility means security, both physically and emotionally. Flying takes away our most basic way of regulating feelings.
I didn't get the impression that the policeman cared much about the whole thing either. After another thirty minutes of ruthless interrogation ('Can you ve'fy you eat banan' pancake?') he let me go asking me not to leave Khao San within 24 hours
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Roosevelt sneered.
For the rest of my life, Zanzibar will be the Swahili word for rain. The rain would drizzle, spit, mist, downpour, shower, torrent, gust, deluge and blast. At one point it hit the ground so hard it created a haze as it bounced back up two feet and fell a second time.
After every shirt she looks at me and smiles, letting go of air she no longer needs. She laughs after the sweater, knowing I’m gonna tell her it’s too hot for it, knowing she’ll say it’s for the plane and ask “what if the room gets cold?
In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.
In my errant life I roamedTo learn the secrets of women and men,Of gods and dreams.I've known all the countries of our world,I've lived a thousand lives:Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I squandered.For in my life I never traveled, All I did was wander.
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
