Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

I don't want to go to Peru."How do you know? You've never been there."I've never been to hell either and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go there.

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off

With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Step and land, step and land. That's all travel was. Throw in some running and a change of scenery. No big deal, right? And so, off he went. Off they went together.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business...then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.

With thousands of roads before us that lead nowhere, going in circles. There really are only two roads we will either travel, one going to heaven, or the other to hell.

We speed through the streets past modern buildings and ancient architecture. Gazing through the taxi window Rome becomes a wet painting someone has wiped a hand across.

What one learns in a classroom is just a very small part of learning process . The real learning starts when one crosses borders and travels miles for the real knowledge.

I had a dream about you. The Yesterday Leaf floated like a pack of feathers in flight. It was traveling north, because that’s the direction of warm tomorrow.


Globalization by the way of McDonald’s and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here.

[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.