Travel Quotes

[Miguelito]

Here are "13 wisest things Anthony Bourdain said about travel". Do you agree with him, or disagree? I liked Bourdain a lot, but of course he can rub some people the wrong way. He does come across as a little sanctimonious at times, but I appreciate that he does appear pretty genuine.

Or have other good travel quotes?

On having an open mind
1. “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel — as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them — wherever you go.”

2. “Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”

3. “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

On planning
4. “Nothing unexpected and wonderful is going to happen if you have an itinerary in Paris filled with the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.”

5. “I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.”

6. “I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.”

7. “When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.”

On the world
8. “It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it.”

9. “It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I still have to go, the more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough; to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

On connecting
10. "It’s those little human moments that stick with you forever, the random acts of kindness.”

11. “To be treated well in places where you don’t expect to be treated well, to find things in common with people you thought previously you had very, very little in common with, well that can’t be a bad thing.”

On the journey
12. “As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

13. “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.”

[YaTingPom]

I liked his voice. Very creamy but authoritative and reassuring.

I saw he’s look-back at his previous Cambodian visit and he admitted he was a cocky twat!
He was right but then he was quite a bit younger so he’s forgiven!

As chefs go he’s quite amiable on TV, unlike Ramsey and that Oliver, who I’d not give a hoot if they plonked down dead one day (which they surely will. It’s inevitable as is taxes).

Sad there won’t be anymore series.

[over the rainbow]

agree

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

[redhooligan]

Ithaka
By C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.
Source: C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Princeton University Press, 1975)

[Barang_doa_slae]

« Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you. »

“Traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involves a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper, the traveller finds himself reduced to more modest proportions - but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.” 

“After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise you might as well stay at home.”

Nicolas Bouvier
Unknown web translation from:
L’usage du Monde / The Way of the world
1963

Nicolas Bouvier is widely seen as having opened the Europe to Kathmandu road travel.

[RainMan]

Slightly off topic but....
From R Kiplings The Naulakka.

"Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

[kinard]

“In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent” – Joseph Conrad

“Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything.” – Steve Martin

[ផោមក្លិនស្អុយ]

Ireland; Travel

He, I know not why, shewed upon all occasions an aversion to go to Ireland, where I proposed to him that we should make a tour.
JOHNSON. "It is the last place where I should wish to travel."
BOSWELL. "Should you not like to see Dublin, Sir?"
JOHNSON. "No, Sir; Dublin is only a worse capital."
BOSWELL. "Is not the Giant's-Causeway worth seeing?"
JOHNSON. "Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see."

Boswell: Life of Johnson

[Playboy]

"I have seen their backs before, madam."

Attributed to Wellington as a statement to an unidentified woman at a reception in Vienna, who had apologized for the rudeness of some French officers who had turned their backs on him when he entered.

[vladimir]

https://medium.com/@AfricaFreak/these-f ... b03660416e

“If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa.”
* John Hemingway (American author)

“Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates? You are lifted. Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above.”
* Francesca Marciano (Italian novelist and filmmaker; extract from “Rules of the Wild”)

“Africa has her mysteries and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.”
* Miriam Makeba (South African singer and civil rights activist)

“Africa is not a country, but it is a continent like none other. It has that which is elegantly vast or awfully little.”
* L. Douglas Wilder (American politician)

“Nothing but breathing the air of Africa, and actually walking through it, can communicate the indescribable sensations.”
* William Burchell (English explorer)

“The only man I envy is the man who has not yet been to Africa — for he has so much to look forward to.”
* Richard Mullin (Origin unknown)

“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself.”
* Malcolm X (American Muslim minister and human rights activist)

“Africa — You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the Hand of God. You watch the slope lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heart, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.”
* Jodi Picoult (American author)

“If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.”
* Karen Blixen (Danish author best known for “Out of Africa”, her account of living in Kenya)

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa — and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. … Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just ‘home.”
* Beryl Markham (British-born Kenyan aviator, adventurer, racehorse trainer and author; extract from “West with the Night”)

“I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not happy.”
* Ernest Hemingway (American author and journalist)

“When you leave Africa, as the plane lifts, you feel that more than leaving a continent you’re leaving a state of mind. Whatever awaits you at the other end of your journey will be of a different order of existence.”
* Francesca Marciano (Italian novelist and filmmaker; extract from “Rules of the Wild”)

“Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.”
* W. C. Fields (American actor and writer)

“It’s really beautiful. It feels like God visits everywhere else but lives in Africa.”
* Will Smith (American actor and producer)

“Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there, you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe its magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are elephant paths? Could it be because Africa is the place of all our beginnings, the cradle of mankind, where our species first stood upright on the savannahs of long ago?”
* Brian Jackman (freelance writer best known for his interest in wildlife and wild places — especially Africa)

“…few can sojourn long within the unspoilt wilderness of a game sanctuary, surrounded on all sides by its confiding animals, without absorbing its atmosphere; the Spirit of the Wild is quick to assert supremacy, and no man of any sensibility can resist her.”
* James Stevenson-Hamilton (first warden of South Africa’s Sabi Nature Reserve)

“To witness that calm rhythm of life revives our worn souls and recaptures a feeling of belonging to the natural world. No one can return from the Serengeti unchanged, for tawny lions will forever prowl our memory and great herds throng our imagination.”
* George Schaller (American conservationist and author)

“There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.”
* Karen Blixen (Danish author best known for “Out of Africa”, her account of living in Kenya)

“In Africa you have space…there is a profound sense of space here, space and sky.”
* Thabo Mbeki (former South African president)

“Everything in Africa bites, but the safari bug is worst of all.”
* Brian Jackman (freelance writer best known for his interest in wildlife and wild places — especially Africa)

“The biggest lesson from Africa was that life’s joys come mostly from relationships and friendships, not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields; they laughed all the time.”
* Andrew Shue (American actor)

“For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by ‘Africa,’ by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.”
* Henry Louis Gates (Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University)

“The Most hazardous part of our expedition to Africa was crossing Piccadilly Circus.”
* Joseph Thompson (English actor)

“One cannot resist the lure of Africa.”
* Rudyard Kipling (English writer)

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
* Karen Blixen (Danish author best known for “Out of Africa”, her account of living in Kenya)

“There is always something new out of Africa.”
* Pliny the Elder (Roman author)

[cathylewis]

These are the wonderful quotes about travel. I think it can also apply to just day-to-day living if you're regularly trying things outside your comfort zone.

happy wheels

[over the rainbow]

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas