“With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” – Sandra Lake
“The most important lesson is to not become cynical. If you become cynical, then you have to leave” – Rauli Virtanen (the first person to travel to all 193 countries)
“Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.” — Bob Bitchin
In life, we all follow different paths. Everyone has their plan. I haven’t met anyone who retired, travels alone, travels cheaply and sees all 193 United Nations countries.
Most people in the world rarely travel much beyond their village or province. Lack of money is a significant reason. Travel may not be part of their culture.
Many people have no interest in travel. They may have travelled in their youth and have nowhere they want to go. Going to places they don’t know takes them out of their comfort zone. They fear for their safety and avoid any risk.
TOURISTS
“Tourists don’t know where they have been, travellers don’t know where they are going”.
Most tourists are still working, and have limited time. Money is usually not an issue. Their travel goal is to rest and relax. All arrangements are made before leaving home leaving nothing unknown.
Resorts with beaches are the destination. I see little attraction on beaches except as a nice place to walk and go for a swim. Lying in the sun to get a tan is essential for many tourists. How else will your friends and workmates know what a traveller you are? We don’t have to be told the dangers of excessive sun exposure. I do make exceptions for oceans with good snorkelling or diving experiences.
Cruises. I have only been on one cruise. It was to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean and a practical and inexpensive way to see eight countries and three territories. There are almost no ferries between Caribbean states and accommodation is expensive. The ship was full of older people, drinkers, and folks who baked in the sun all day and liked to dress up for dinner. No decisions had to be made other than which overly expensive tour to take. They must bring two sets of clothes, one they boarded with and another larger set to leave. I think I will wait until I am decrepit before I take another cruise.
Only see one place. Some travel to the same place every year having discovered cheap accommodation, or they may have invested in a property. They know the place is safe, involves no risk-taking, and are likely not interested in going anywhere else. These are often “snowbirds” spending their winters in warm areas. I couldn’t imagine seeing only one destination.
Tourists with no Money
I am always amazed at how little some people see. A classic example is 20-somethings who travel to party. Drink, wake up late with a hangover, repeat. Thailand and its famous party islands may be the most well-known destinations.
• In October 2015, on my trip following the Silk Road, I hung out in Kyrgyzstan with a 30-something Dutch couple travelling for a year. They had started in Sri Lanka but did not see one of the seven excellent Unesco World Heritage Sites. They didn’t climb Adam’s Peak as she wasn’t in good enough shape to walk more than 2 km, no less something that went uphill. When in Dunhuang China, they didn’t go to Mogao Caves, one of the best Buddhist sites in the world because of the cost, but instead went to the sand dunes (basically an amusement park with a mud-hole called Crescent Lake; it was the one place I didn’t go to). As far as I could tell, of all the countries they went to, they missed everything worthwhile. Like many couples, they also did not meet many other travellers or have a lot of authentic interactions with locals. They may have visited 15 countries but what did they see?
Admittedly, we all have different tastes. Some travellers don’t have enough money to see the good things.
Tours
Many tourists only go on guided tours. They like all the arrangements where nothing is left to chance and the security of travelling with others. I find tours expensive and overly rigid. One has to tolerate a lot of uninteresting folk.
I avoid tours at all costs. Guides rarely give new information if you have done your research. Travelling alone is much more adventurous and fun.
I call the above travel styles tourism.
TRAVELLING WITH a SPECIFIC PURPOSE
Some travel only to experience their specific interest – food, trains, cars, football (see a game in every FIFA country) or you name it. One traveller I know visits every post office to collect stamps and mail postcards home to record cancellation stamps. Collecting specific souvenirs or every country’s currency may not be their main reason for travel but it guides their travel.
World Heritage Sites. WHSs are a major focus of my travel. In 2024, there were 1199 WHS with about 30-40 moved from the Tentative WHS list of 1723 sites yearly. This can be quite political but requires an extensive application procedure and requirements for inclusion.
There are two main sites for information on World Heritage Sites.
World Heritage List — https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/ gives the background and criteria for inclusion. The posts are wordy with redundant info. They are good for serial listings. They give no practical information on how to visit.
World Heritage Sites – https://www.worldheritagesite.org. This lists WHS by country. It gives a brief overview and a map that I find has little value. The best content is in the reviews of personal experiences so this is much more practical than the UNESCO site. Many of its member’s travel is limited to WHS.
Zoë Sheng. From Canada, she had visited a whopping 1,036 WHS by June 2024. I doubt anyone will ever see more than her. I believe WHS are her only destination. She is very private and her only online presence is on worldheritagesite.org. She has visited 150 UN countries. She does extensive research and has plans to see as many of her remaining 163 sites as possible. Some are impossible (Gough and Inaccessible Islands) or can only be seen by chartered tours (Henderson Island) or boat (Bikini Atoll, Macquarie Island, Sub-Antarctic Islands, NZ, Henderson Island, Heard and McDonald Island, Aldabra Atoll, Tanzania, Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, Honduras). A 30-day cargo ship Is necessary for French Austral Lands and Seas, Some are remote (Mongolian sites, Tajik National Park). And some are presently inaccessible (Tauric Chersonese is in Crimea and presently off-limits).
Els Slots. From the Netherlands, she is the founder of www.worldheritagesite.org and I believe her only destinations are WHS. In June 2024, she had visited 911 WHS.
TRAVELLERS – LOW-COST TRAVEL
Hitchhiking, camping or using couchsurfing.com for accommodation, and buying food in supermarkets, some amazing travellers see the world on a minimum budget. They may have heard of “Travel on $10 a Day”, possibly in the 1960s but difficult now because of inflation. Some still make it happen.
• Josh – Freegan. 2010. I hiked all nine Great Walks in New Zealand, the best of the 55+ hutted treks. The 82 km Heaphy Track on the south island crosses the mountains ending on a spectacular walk along the ocean. Taking 4 days, I occasionally ran into Josh, a 20-year-old from Colorado and a true freegan. In the U.S. he often rode freight trains. All his clothes were found in dumpsters. His only food was 20 bagels and some onions he rescued from a dumpster. On the last evening, he juggled on the beach and was given $20 by an Australian.
We walked together on our last day, At lunch, I mentioned that I had little money as I couldn’t find an ATM near the start of the hike. He immediately offered me the $20 he had made on the beach. Of course, I refused as I had no worries about getting money in the next town. He insisted again stating “It’s way more fun with none”!
• Rhys. In Osh, Kyrgyzstan, on my trip along the Silk Road in 2015, I met an incredible traveller. Rhys was a 25-year-old Australian travelling continuously for the previous 5 years. He worked hard at a good job after high school, lived cheaply and saved. Then approaching 100 countries, he travelled as close to the ground as possible. He travels almost only by hitchhiking and camps virtually all the time – he called it “stealth camping” – in old buildings, construction sites, rooftops, and obscure woods and bush (parks have too many people and dangers). He uses a bivy sac and a small tarp. With no tent, he is practically invisible. He carries a phone, laptop and small SLR camera as he is an active photographer. Hitchhiking is usually safe, but he has had a few near-death experiences with weirdos. In Mongolia, he was beaten up and tortured. In Jamaica he was captured by a gang, had everything stolen but his passport and a credit card, and escaped twice with the benevolent help of a young woman. Otherwise, he would now be dead. Understandably his expenses are minimal. Even with occasional expensive flights, he averages less than US$10 a day! Despite having no income, he believes he can travel for 7 years in his style.
• Heinz Stücke. This famous bicyclist from Westphalia, Germany visited all 193 countries including an amazing 1105 of The Best Traveler regions by bike over 51 years, about 660,000 km. He must be the greatest traveller of us all. To finance his trip, he sold colour brochures about his incredible journey.
• André Brugiroux, Described as the Marco Polo of modern times”, at 17, in 1955, he left Paris with 10 francs in his pocket to tour the world. In 1955, there were no guidebooks, no telephones, no television and no Google, in short, no information.
On his first 18-year trip he saw a world that no longer exists. With savings earned during 3 years in Canada, he hitchhiked 400.000 km through 120 countries from 1967 to 1973 on a dollar a day. He never slept in a hotel, avoided restaurants and never paid for transport. After 18 years, he took 2 years off and then in 1976, he started roaming again. He never considered 193 countries nor the competition to be “the biggest traveller” and finds it ridiculous to tick off countries so common today.
He doesn’t consider himself a real traveller but rather a student of mankind. In 2002, after 50 years, he visited his last country, North Korea. In 2021, he gave up on the last blank on his map, the Chagos Islands, even though he had found a kind skipper to take him for free from Mauritius.
He thought travelling and marriage were not compatible. He married at 47. “My wife who is not a traveller had the cleverness and kindness to let me go at my will without saying a word. Lucky me!”
“You have to be alone to travel properly. Two people travelling together are taking a holiday. Three is already a group. Over 3 starts colonisation!”
“The three favourite words of usual tourists are prohibited in my travelling: hotel, restaurant and taxi.”
“I have nothing against organized tours as long as I organize them myself.”
• Dervla Murphy (1932-2022). She started her long bicycle trips at 31 – 4,500 miles from Ireland to Delhi, 1,300 miles through the Andes and trips to southern Africa, Madagascar, Cuba, and the Middle East. Her copious diaries grew into 26 books.
She preferred an Armstrong Cadet man’s bike but used a mule in Ethiopia, and occasionally buses. She travelled alone.
The more remote the place, the more she was drawn there. Afghanistan on a bike became her special love. She felt she might have stayed in the Hindu Kush, living in the sanity of backwardness. She disliked Western ways. In old age and subsisting mostly on beer, her regrets were few.
Travel for Work
Digital Nomads travel full-time with no home base. Many make their living in IT. They are digital nomads. There are many websites, meet-up groups and occasional festivals where they connect as a community. Varying where they live and exploring nearby countries, allows many to see much of the world.
Travel bloggers have different income streams – advertising accommodation they stay at for free, links to retail sites like Amazon and any other way to make a buck.
You Tubers can make an astonishing amount of money. Once they learn how to create good posts, a dynamic personality attracts subscribers.
My experience is limited, but in Burundi, I stayed at a guesthouse with a young Israeli woman with great sex appeal. She made $4,000 a month after starting only a few months before. However, you don’t ever want to travel with them. They constantly speak into a microphone instead of interacting with their travel mates. They stop to make videos. It’s awful.
Jobs Associated with Travel.
Many international corporations send their employees on business trips. They fly business class and stay in expense-account hotels. They may not venture out of their hotel or conference room. I don’t think this is travel. But some travel a great deal.
This is a superficial look at work and travel.
• Rauli Virtanen was the first person to visit every country in the world finishing in 1980. From Finland, he was a renowned journalist specializing in conflict zones. He also saw much of the world as he was a great traveller.
• Frank W. Grosse-Oetringhaus (1943- ) From Hamburg, he started travelling at age 15, got a Ph.D. and joined Siemens, a global company, that sent him around the world.
• Michael Runkel (1969-), a German travel photographer, has been to 193 countries and 1254 regions second in the world. In 2018, Saudi Arabia was his last country and he travelled to the North Pole on the nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker 50 Let Pobedy. He has appeared on television and radio and has been featured in dozens of publications. A major focus of his work is UNESCO World Heritage Sites, He has written two books.
Airline Employees. Pilots, flight attendants and other employees can access cheap flights. • Working for airlines would subsidize travel. Boris Kester and Irina Ignatenkova are both flight attendants.
Adventure
• Eric Weihenmayer. Weihenmayer has climbed the highest mountain on every continent, kayaked the length of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, scaled the notorious “Nose” route of El Capitan in Yosemite and completed some of the world’s most gruelling races. He skis, rafts, ice climbs, mountain bikes, surfs and paraglides. His accomplishments would be jaw-dropping even if he could see. But Weihenmayer is completely blind.
Weihenmayer was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and started losing his sight as an infant, suffering from an inherited condition, juvenile retinoschisis, that causes slow disintegration of the retinas. When 14, he realized he couldn’t see enough to take a step. Unable to play football or basketball, he joined the high school wrestling team and excelled. Wrestling was mostly about feel – something that was also true of climbing where he scans his hands across the rock face like a grid,
He started to love hiking after discovering trekking poles. In 1995 he ascended Denali in Alaska, the highest mountain in North America. It took him six years of training to attempt the Grand Canyon in a kayak, He keeps in contact with his guide via a radio mounted on his helmet. To paraglide, he relies on a hanging bell that rings when it touches the ground below him. When he skis he follows a guide who wears a speaker on his back to amplify directions. When ice-climbing, he uses the ice axe to “scan” the ice by tapping it to feel the vibration through the ice to determine its density.
He earns most of his money as a motivational speaker. He has had a hip replaced.
He may be the world’s greatest adventurer.
I met him in about 1996. It was 5 am and he was behind us in a queue to obtain the permit and camping spot at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We chatted for an hour but I had no idea of his accomplishments.
NOMAD TRAVEL
If one has a sense of curiosity, wants to explore the world, has no fear and takes risks, wants to challenge oneself and has a desire for adventure, you may find that the nomadic style of travel suits you best.
A travel nomad is an individual who roams about. Strictly, it implies someone who travels without a home base but that refers more to digital nomads. I have a home base that I am rarely at. I travel with no set plans, deciding to spend as long as required to see an area as completely as possible.
Nomad travel describes a traveller best.
• Timetables are not fixed. Who knows what circumstances may change plans? Besides a general itinerary, fluid travel allows you to take advantage of unanticipated opportunities. Accommodation and flight reservations don’t determine what you will do next.
• Travel alone.
• Low-cost travel. Hitch hike or use public transport. Use cheap accommodation and avoid restaurants
• Risk Tolerance. No fear and realistic evaluation of risk are important.
UNDERSTAND CULTURAL CONTEXT
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
For most travellers, the greatest gift of travel is exploring individual cultures. The most important and heartwarming experiences are meeting the locals in developing countries – the poorer they are, the more hospitable they are. Wherever you go in this fractious world, people are essentially the same and should be treated with simple fairness and respect.
We are travelling in their country and thus need to strive to tolerate and understand their behaviour, that is to understand the cultural context. It can make travel much more enjoyable. Travel can be a very trying experience – go with the flow and learn to enjoy these differences. It is what travel is all about.
There is a built-in tendency for all groups to interpret nonverbal communicative patterns as though they were universal. All cultures have their characteristic manner of walking, sitting, standing, reclining and gesturing. The chances of being able to read nonverbal cues correctly decrease as cultural distance increases – even smiles must be seen in context.
To understand a given behaviour, we must know the individual’s entire life history, which is impossible. Understanding oneself and others is a closely related process. As travellers, understanding culture is fraught with problems. Spending a short time allows only superficial interterpretation. Stop ranking people and talents and accept that there are many roads to truth. No culture corners that path or is better equipped than others to search for it.
LANGUAGE
Wouldn’t it be nice if one could have at least conversational language everywhere you go? The ability to converse well with locals vastly improves one’s travel experience. The locals appreciate any attempt to use their language. However, for me, problems arise when they answer back. When language skills are rudimentary, understanding them can be difficult especially as fluent speakers talk much more rapidly, have a different accent, or use slang.
Everyone has a different aptitude for language. On CBC, I heard an interview with a 16-year-old New York polyglot who could fluently speak 23 languages from Farsi to Ojibwa. It is well-accepted that the ability to learn a new language starts to decline after age 12. Like any other skill, each individual has different skill sets as our brains are wired differently. I’m great at math and sciences, but poor at English as a subject and even worse at languages. This may sound ignorant, but I never spend a second even learning simple phrases of any language. My accent is so bad, that nobody would understand me anyway.
Your native language affects your ability to learn a new language. Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian with Latin as a base are obvious examples.
Where you grow up affects language ability. Being raised in Europe where many languages are heard and taught in school makes it easier. Young people from Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium usually have great English skills. English (and other languages) are often taught in elementary school as these ‘progressive’ countries seem to understand the important role of speaking English, especially for business and industry. It is the one universal travel language. Knowledge of English will help one’s career and job prospects immensely. In contrast, in France and South Europe, other languages are less stressed and young people tend to be unilingual.
Exposure to other languages over time can be important. Growing up in Switzerland exposes one to German, French, and Italian and Swiss young people may speak all three in addition to Swiss German. In Canada, we have two ‘official’ languages but when growing up in western Canada, like me, I have never had the opportunity to speak French since high school, and my French is terrible. My heritage is French Canadian and I am 10th generation Canadian, but my ‘French’ grandfather left Quebec as a teenager to homestead in Saskatchewan, and even though he had a French accent, I never heard him speak French.
The majority of my initial travel was in Spanish-speaking countries, and my travel Spanish was barely adequate. My ability to hold a conversation with a native speaker is virtually nil. I had 2 weeks of good Spanish instruction in Guatemala and had few problems asking for directions, finding a room, making a reservation over the phone, and understanding money, dates, and time. My biggest problem is my accent in Spanish. Getting your vowels and accents perfect can be difficult, and usually don’t understand what you are saying. It can get frustrating enough to stop trying. As native English speakers, we meet people from all over the world with bad accents, we are used to it, and can usually make out what they say.
To acquire good conversational skills in Spanish would probably require at least 3 months of intensive study, something I don’t have the time, aptitude or interest in. I once had a girlfriend who worked hard at her Spanish and thought she was ‘pretty good’. But in a conversation, she was hopeless, and the conversation rarely went past basic levels.
There can also be a significant difference in the “Spanish” spoken in different countries. Chilean Spanish is notoriously different. They speak rapidly with a ‘singsong’ lilt. Most s’s at the end of words are dropped and have many different expressions not used anywhere else. I was lost there and had no hope of making sense of their Spanish.
Often having poor Spanish has been helpful. When being panhandled, ‘no hablo Espanol’, ends the interaction. When stopped at military checkpoints common especially in Mexico, “no hablo Espanol”, smiling and being pleasant, works great. They throw up their arms in frustration and wave you through.
TRAVEL QUOTES
Travel quotes help one express the emotions felt when travelling to new places. Memorable quotes capture little moments of clarity that highlight truths about travel, adventure, and life.
Sometimes we need extra inspiration to get us moving in that direction. Boost your adrenaline with these motivational musings from famous risk-takers.
♦ “Life should not be a journey to the grave to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!” ― Hunter S. Thompson
♦ “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
♦ “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” – Erol Ozan
♦ “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag
♦ “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Chief Seattle. It is disheartening to see trash, even worse if left by careless travellers. We are responsible for not throwing orange peels on the ground as they take years to degrade. Women who use toilet paper to wipe after a pee should realize it is not biodegradable.
♦ “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
♦ “I travel because it makes me realize how much I haven’t seen, how much I’m not going to see, and how much I still need to see.” – Carew Papritz
♦ “We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.” – Ray Bradbury
♦ “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” – Douglas Adams
♦ “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin
♦ “The only impossible journey is the one you never begin” – Anonymous
♦ “Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.” — Bob Bitchin
♦ “We live in a wonderful world full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” – Jawaharial Nehru
♦ “People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – John Steinbeck
♦ “Love your life. Take pictures of everything. Tell people you love them. Talk to random strangers. Do things that you’re scared to do. Fuck it, because so many of us die and no one remembers a thing we did. Take your life and make it the best story in the world.”
♦ “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.”
♦ “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.” – Anais Nin
The Routine of Life
The purpose of life is to live it! Are you hunched over the couch, covered in cookie crumbs, battling friends in Fortnite, and daydreaming about the endless real adventures waiting to be experienced?
When we first quit our unfulfilling day job to go backpacking around the world, we didn’t know what we were doing, or where it will take us. Minds crave new experiences, and often cannot get them from our hometown. By going somewhere new, you continue to grow in numerous ways. We may feel safe in our little bubble, but it’s boring. That may be the primary reason we started travelling, and then we fell in love with the thrill of discovery.
♦ “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Anonymous
♦ “One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.” – Ella Maillart
♦ “Life is a journey – travelling gives you two lives.”
♦ “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal. The more risks you take, the bigger the adventure you have. I’d rather look back at my life and say “I can’t believe I did that.” instead of saying “I wish I did that”.
♦ “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller
♦ “I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” – Diane Ackerman
♦ “Because in the end, you won’t remember the times you spent in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac
♦ “It’s time to remember what it’s like to feel alive.” – Anonymous
♦ “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace
♦ “Then one day, when you least expect it, the great adventure finds you.” – Ewan Mcgregor
♦ “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen
♦ “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” – H. Jackson Browne Jr. This famous travel quote is attributed to Mark Twain but he never said this.
♦ “I travel because I’d rather look back at my life, saying ‘I can’t believe I did that’ instead of ‘if only I had’.” – Florine Bos
♦ “To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen
♦ “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
♦ “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” – Caskie Stinnett
♦ “Don’t die without embracing the daring adventure your life was meant to be.” – Steve Pavlina
Experience.
Nothing can substitute for experience. The constant search for things that will make us whole sums up the desire to keep learning. We all have preconceived notions, but travelling can show you that many are usually false.
♦ “Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times.” – Asian Proverb
♦ “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
♦ “Once in a while it hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley
♦ “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
♦ “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine
♦ “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” – Ray Bradbury
♦ “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
♦ “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
♦ “Life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.” – Simon Raven
♦ “The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for a newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
♦ “I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” – Eric Roth
Personal Growth
When we travel, try to give your mind something new and exciting to focus on. We need to keep learning for our minds to thrive. Travelling can teach you about life, and yourself. We’re all shaped by each of our experiences. I love that every new adventure helps shape me for the better and will forever expand and change my mind. Travelling is one of the best ways to open your mind and heart to the world. Travel can change your perspective.
Although this has sometimes meant having my lifestyle and point of view challenged, I wouldn’t give up a second of it because it helped shape me into the person I am today.
♦ “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” – Anthony Bourdain
♦ “If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveller, and teacher, bitter as medicine, crueller than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.” – Patrick Rothfuss
♦ “It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary
♦ “If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.” – Angelina Jolie
♦ “I love the places that make you realize how small you and your problems are.” – Anonymous
♦ “Until you step into the unknown, you don’t know what you’re made of.” ― Roy T. Bennett
♦ “The things you are passionate about are not random, they are your calling.” – Anonymous
♦ “Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.” – Thomas Fuller
♦ “Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.” – Pico Iyer
♦ “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert.
♦ “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai
♦ “Travel and change of place impart new vigour to the mind.” – Seneca
♦ “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” – Anonymous
♦ “Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.” – Matthew Karsten
♦ “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain
♦ “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” – Sandra Lake
♦ “The use of travelling is to regulate imagination with reality, and instead of thinking of how things may be, see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson
♦ “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.” — Peter Hoeg
♦ “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
♦ “When overseas you learn more about your own country than you do the place you’re visiting.” – Clint Borgen
♦ “The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeing new landscapes but having new eyes. Adventure travel, whether armchair or up-close-and-personal, has less to do with what there is to be seen than what we have in us to see. We can travel the world and see nothing, or wander through our garden and be awed by what we’d never imagined.”
♦ “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” – David Mitchell
Happiness
We’ve all been at our best, and absolute worst while travelling. Emotions are bigger during these trips because there’s so much new information to process. Travel brings out the full range of human emotions. Hopefully, happiness predominates.
♦ “The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton
♦ “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” — Lawrence Block
♦ “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner“
♦ “If happiness is the goal – and it should be, then adventures should be a top priority.” – Richard Branson
♦ “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman
♦ “The most important lesson is to not become cynical. If you become cynical, then you have to leave” – Rauli Virtanen (the first person to travel to all 193 countries)
Adventure
♦ “Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aesop. It doesn’t get more simplistic than Aesop’s take on travelling.
♦ “A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, travelling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints.” – Wilfred Peterson
♦ “You must go on adventures to find out where you truly belong” – Sue Fitzmaurice
♦ “The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” – Oprah Winfrey
♦ “Jobs fill your pockets, but adventures fill your soul.” – Jaime Lyn
♦ “Adventure isn’t hanging off a rope on the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude we must apply to the day-to-day obstacles of life” – John Amat
People
♦ “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
♦ “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain
♦ “May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.” – Trenton Lee Stewart
♦ “We’re all beautifully connected by a love for travel.” Matthew Karsten
♦ “The more I travelled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” – Shirley MacLaine
Nature
I am not a spiritual person. I’m not even sure what spiritual means. However, my love of nature is where my spirit is fulfilled.
♦ “Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach of us more than we can ever learn from books.” – John Lubbock
♦ “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” – Henry David Thoreau
♦ “The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” – John Muir
♦ “I urge you; go find buildings, mountains and oceans to swallow you whole. They will save you in a way nothing else can.” – Christopher Poindexter
♦ “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” – John Muir
♦ “The best view comes after the hardest climb.” – Sir Edmond Hilary
♦ “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by.” – Robert Frost
♦ “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.” – Edward Abbey
Courage and Taking Risks.
Reach beyond your comfort zone. Discard the safety net of your comfortable surroundings. Be brave. Take risks. We can go anywhere if we stop putting restrictions on ourselves. The world is waiting; we need to have the courage to answer the call. Doing this, again and again, can give your life meaning.
♦ “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.” – Spanish Proverb
♦ “I feel the need to endanger myself every so often.” – Tim Daly
♦ “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
♦ “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” – Seth Godin
♦ “No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.” – Chuck Thompson
♦ “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” – Neale Donald Walsch
♦ “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the trip.” – Babs Hoffman
♦ “I travel because I become uncomfortable being too comfortable.” – Carew Papritz
♦ “Then I realized that to be more alive, I had to be less afraid. So I did it. I lost my fear and gained my whole life.” – Anonymous
♦ “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin
♦ “The danger of adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort.” – Paulo Coelho
♦ “When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
♦ “Only those who risk going too far can find out how far they can go.” – T.S Eliot
♦ “And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want, on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” – Randy Komisar
♦ “Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that is why life is hard.”
♦ “It’s not about where you begin your adventure, it’s simply taking that first step to kick off a chain reaction. Even if that step is scary.” Matthew Karsten
♦ “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he dares to lose sight of the shore.” – Andre Gide
Reference: The Expert Vagabond – Matthew Karsten