Little had changed after independence. Jomo Kenyatta’s face hung in a framed portrait in every shop where Queen Elizabeth’s had been. Some schools were built, some streets renamed. But educated people...
I said I was a stranger here. Ain’t no strangers here, baby, she said, and gave me a merry smile.
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing...
Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone t...
The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone ‘on safari’ is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.
Listen, stranger; this was myself: this was I.
In elk land tonen de treinen de essentiële kenmerken van de cultuur: Thaise treinen hebben de badkruik met de geglazuurde draak op de zijkant, de Ceylonese een wagen die gereserveerd is voor boeddhist...
I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.
I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I...
One of the things the 'Tao of Travel' shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about...
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible baza...
A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not...
You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.
We all know that a vast proportion of travel is accumulated nuisance; but if boredom or awfulness is handled with skill and concrete detail, it is funnier and truer than the sunniest prose.
The saddest task for the ironist is having to tell the listener that it's a joke, because of course it is never a joke.
The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.
Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists.
It takes a certain specialist’s dedication to travel in squalid cities and fetid slums, among the utterly dependant poor, who have lost nearly all of their traditions, and most of their habitat. You n...
In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, a...
His education was sketchy, yet he was immensely learned in the oblique and selective way of someone self-taught.