Do you know Aggrey Awori?’ Mushana said, ‘He’s an old man.’ Awori was my age, regarded as a miracle of longevity in an AIDS stricken country; a Harvard graduate, Class of ’63, a track star. Thirty yea...
What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world,...
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with tra...
There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.
No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell; hope never comes That comes to all; but torture wi...
He was serene, fulfilled, the real thing, the person no one wants to hear about, a happy man.
But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes.
But art should require no instrument but memory.
All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.
All the crockery in China had been smashed – flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which China was famous. All the blood-stained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors’ por...
A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.—OPE
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.
Book of Revelation,
Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to --- they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool ca...
There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather, a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past.
The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks Ind...
Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That...
Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of...