Quotes about travel

And maybe that is the true reason for this journey, by shedding all the ballast of the familiar life they are each trying to recapture a sensation of weightlessness they remember but perhaps never lived, in memory more than anywhere else traveling is like free-fall, or flight.

A map says to you, "Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not." It says, "I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost."

'In every journey...there comes a point, around three quarters of the way through, when the traveller, without a guide, can go no further. But not everyone finds a guide. Not everyone accepts a guide. Not everyone is convinced. Many would rather keep fumbling on their own, trying and trying again. They would rather risk not completing the journey, they would rather risk getting lost or content themselves with the advance already made, than follow in trust.' (p259)

“I suspect that the benefits of travel are indeed overrated. It seems mostly hardship and needless frustration,” she said.

“I am not one to deny the broadening effects of distant lands,” offered Nofreg, “yet I have often said that the chief benefit of travel is to allow the returned sojourner a renewed appreciation of his native milieu.”

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.

I love my life, I like to be cosmopolitan, I would like to visit the whole earth and love it all.

As it was my first time in a foreign country, my eyes soaked it up - but I'll save you the travelogue description. It's Thailand. You know the sights, you know the smells. You've read the books, you've seen the movies. Hot, sticky, sweaty, it smelled of spicy food, and everywhere there lurked the hint of drugs and prostitution, because like most travelers, we had brought our preconceived notions with us on the journey and did not check them, as we should have, into immigration as hazardous materials best suited for quarantine.

Vagabonding is about gaining courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate. Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic tempation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead --- out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need -- we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory --- a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.