And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.
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...
The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.
In one case, at a meeting at Alpha Gamma Delta, active sorority members . . . began standing up to voice support for the [black] recruit and challenge alumnae decisions. The entire house wanted this g...
That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.
That seemed to be a feature of life in the country [Malawi]: to welcome strangers, to let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy - a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria er...
A little farther on, he said, What do you think of India? It’s a hard question, I said. I wanted to tell him about the children I had seen that morning pathetically raiding the leftovers of my breakfa...
Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists.
Most people come to Africa to see large or outlandish animals in the wild, while some others — the new gang — the gang of virtue — make the visit to tell Africans how to improve their lives. And many...
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...
A viagem é muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguível de vivermos a nossa vida.
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 had some good friends - really funny ones. My best friend was a guy called Apolo Nsibambi. We shared an office at the Extra Mural Department at Makerere, and then I got a promotion - became Acting D...
I added that it was no fun to grow old, but that the compensation for it was that time turned your mental shit-detector into a highly calibrated instrument.
Tipping confounds me because it is not a reward but a travel tax, one of the many, one of the more insulting. No one is spared. It does not matter that you are paying thousands to stay in the presiden...
At my lowest point, when things were at their most desperate and uncomfortable, I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom.
In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.
One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South. What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgi...
The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state’s contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace’s, Martin Luther King’s, and Bear Bryant’s.
In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
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