Jim Ellinger’s Travel Tips & Quotes
Words
to Travel By…
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Don’t get between a crowd and a hard place. As soon as you get into a story, start figuring how to get out. Don’t carry more than you can run with for half a mile. The Gentle Traveler’s Tip: “Exploration is the physical
expression of the intellectual passion.” “He
who would travel happily must travel light.” Antoine
de Saint-Exupery “La
geografia manda.” “Geography always
has the last word.” Ancient
Spanish saying “The one who has not
traveled widely thinks his mother is the only cook.”
Ugandan proverb “It is good to have an end to journey toward: but it is
the journey that matters, in the end.” Ursula K. LeGuin “If
you looking for that ‘home away from home’ “Travel
is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Mark Twain “Travel
across foreign nations, leave your homeland behind. In the
effort and exhaustion of travel, you will find the savor of life.” Al-Imam
Al Shafi “A traveler without knowledge is a bird
without wings.” “Every land has its own special rhythm, and unless the traveler
takes the time to learn the rhythm, he or she will remain an outsider there
always.”
Juliette
de Bairicli Levy, English writer (b.
1937) The Ultimate Travel Tip: The
night before you leave on your big trip, lay all your clothes out on the bed, and all your money too.
Take half the
clothes and twice the money! Bon Voyage
et Bonne Chance! Inshallah!!
More Travel Tips &
Quotes
(12/4/04)
"All travel
has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn
to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to
enjoy it."
Samuel Johnson
"Travel
does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like
a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic
qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that
everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of
art."
Freya Stark
"In the old
days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order
to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically
little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of
sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own
insipidity. From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back
the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is
conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take
the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales."
Claude Levi-Strauss
"The
traveler may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers,
excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a
moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored
patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and
of making the best of every occurrence. Traveling ought also to teach him
distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly
kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever
again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him
the most disinterested assistance."
Charles Darwin
"There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief…without the help of other argument." Thomas Gray (1739) on viewing the Alps "Travel was
flight and pursuit in equal parts."
Paul Theroux
"Comes over
one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some
particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to
know whither."
D. H. Lawrence
"Spirit of
place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is
a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the
memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."
Alice Meynell
"When I was
very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature
people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as
mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured
that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps
senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. ... In other words, I don't
improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is
incurable."
John Steinbeck
"For my
part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake.
The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life
more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find
the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."
Robert Louis Stevenson
"One of the
gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant
journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters
of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the
slavery of home, man feels once more happy."
Sir Richard Burton
"Though a
plane is not the ideal place to really think, to reassess or reevaluate
things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often
the illusion will suffice."
Shana Alexander b. 1925, US journalist
"There has
been, of late, a strange turn in travelers to be displeased."
Samuel Johnson
On
the toil of travel
"If there is anything worse than the aching
tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets,
packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water,
digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is
seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to
San Remo is of the devil."
Sinclair Lewis
“The
traveler often arrives at the wrong moment: too hot, too cold, the opera,
theatre, museum, is closed for the day, the season, or indefinitely for
repairs, or else there is a strike, or an epidemic, or tanks are taking
part in a political coup."
Paul White
"...there
was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with
entire security to the cat."
Mark Twain, on the size of a
ship's stateroom
"If a
person asked my advice, before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would
depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge,
which could by this means be advanced. No doubt it is a high satisfaction
to behold various countries and the many races of mankind, but the
pleasures gained at the time do not counterbalance the evils."
Charles Darwin, on long
voyages
"This was
pleasuring with a vengeance. We would have shone at a wake, but not at
anything more festive."
Mark Twain, on travel in
general
"How
was your flight Mr. Coward?" "Well, aeronautically it was a great success.
Socially, it left quite a bit to be desired."
Noel Coward
"Bad roads
and indifferent inns...the continual converse one is obliged to have with
the vilest part of mankind -- innkeepers, post-masters, and custom house
officers."
Edward Gibbon, on the travails
of travel
“Every
journey has a chance to become a forced march, commanded by the primacy of
next meal and next bed.”
John Krich
"In America
there are two classes of travel---first class and with
children."
Robert Benchley
"He that
travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his
disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of
gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the
chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach
him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry,
the horses are sluggish, and the postilion brutal. He longs for the time
of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are
neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook
has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at
night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he
expected."
Samuel Johnson
"An
involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most
disturbing of all journeys."
Iain Sinclair
"Extensive
traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at
first, contracts the mind."
Paul Theroux
"Pack the
one bag. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: passeport, ticket, book,
taxi, airport, check-in, beer, announcement, stairs, airplane, fasten
seat-belt, air born, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling
stewardesses, read, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, descent,
circling, touch down, earth, unfasten seat-belt, stairs, airport,
immunization book, visa, customs, questions, taxi, streets, houses,
people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness,
loneliness, fatigue, life."
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Soccer
War
"Is there
anything as horrible as starting a trip? Once you're off, that's all
right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling
that you are a snail being pulled off your rock."
Anne Morrow
Lindbergh
"Traveling
may be...an experience we shall always remember, or an experience which,
alas, we shall never forget."
J. Gordon 1896-1952
"The first
condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it."
Rudyard Kipling
Samuel Johnson's advice for
travelers: “A good
holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer
than yours.”
J. B. Priestley
"On the
other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has
a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a
self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was
with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards."
Freya Stark, on her native
guide in Persia
"We found
in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered
ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be
imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and
winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder,
and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased
himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and
fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but
himself."
Samuel Johnson, on packing for
travel
"Tis a good
rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the
hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best
economist."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"He should
be endowed with an active, indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which
can...support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the road, the
weather, or the inn."
Edward Gibbon (1760) on the
qualifications for a traveler
"...the
understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of
foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of
his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited."
Evelyn Waugh, on qualities
of a good travel writer (speaking of Eric Newby)
"As the
Spanish proverb says, ‘He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies,
must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’ So it is in traveling; a man must
carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home
knowledge."
Samuel Johnson
"A journey
is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control
it."
John Steinbeck
"A wise
traveler never despises his own country."
Goldoni
"Tourism
requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a
conventional way."
Paul Fussell
"He who has
seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten
cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in
each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all."
Sinclair Lewis
"A disease
of the mind, whose germ is the idea that one may learn that which is
valuable, or in any way acquire virtue, by the process of being shown
things."
Kingsley Martin, on modern
tourism
"That
gregarious passion which destroys the object of its love."
Patrick Leigh Femor, on
travel
"The
tourist debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always
inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and
deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of
forgeries.... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty;
'we'
are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow."
Evelyn Waugh, on
tourists
"Tourists
don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're
going."
Paul Theroux
"The
traveler sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to
see."
G.K. Chesterton
1874-1936
“I have
learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda
water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be
halved."
Robert Byron, on bargaining in
the Middle East
"Here the
tourist is still an aberration. If you can come from London to Syria on
business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you
must be very rich. No one cares if you like the place, or hate it, or why.
You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of
the human species, which exists to be tapped like a milk cow or a gum
tree."
Robert Byron, on travel in
Syria
"It is only
the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think."
Freya Stark
"The
Pyramids, whose function as a public latrine no guide book mentions, were
made impossible by guides, watchmen, camel-drivers.'Come and have a cup of
coffee. I don't want you to buy anything. I just want to have a little
intelligent conversation. Let us exchange ideas. I am a graduate of the
university.’"
V. S. Naipaul
"A riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
Winston Churchill, on Russia
"An
American diplomat is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china shop
around with him."
Winston Churchill
“Where
daily life was pared down, the imaginative life could not help but grow
terrifyingly complex. Less was not more here. More was more, less was
little. Less than that was nothing at all.”
John Krich, on principals of
aesthetic design in Bali
“Competition was brisk; a survival of the weakest.”
John Krich, on beggars in
India
"I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time." Sergio Leone, on the idea of America, Ruminations of the Philosophical Kind "The world
is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."
St. Augustine
"People
don't take trips. . .trips take people."
John Steinbeck
“There are
no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
Robert Louis
Stevenson
"Sightseeing was...based on imaginative invention,
like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had
fled."
Paul Theroux
"All the
pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every
joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be
recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries
new places all the time."
Paul Fussell
"Travel at
its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers...seem to
be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at
the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and
clowns."
Paul Fussell
“Charity is always help that is
offered too late, just as revolution is help that is offered too
soon.”
John Krich
“The past
has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.”
V. S. Naipaul
"Every
exit is an entry somewhere else."
Tom Stoppard
"Traveling
is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all
that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance.
Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the
sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine
of it.”
Cesare Pavese
"A part, a
large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The
world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea,
enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places
safely and on time."
Sybille Bedford, British
author
"The whole
object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set
foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
G. K. Chesterton
"Journeys,
like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances
contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever
we may think."
Lawrence Durrell
"It would
be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would
live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're
always in other places, lost, like sheep."
Janet Frame
"If we are
always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally
anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of
looking at things."
Henry Miller
"Traveling
is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you,
but I have to go; this is my station.”
Lisa St. Aubin de
Terán
"To travel
hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
Robert Louis
Stevenson
"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
"Here I am,
safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and
strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this
safe return brings such regret?"
Peter Mathissen, US
writer
"So much of
who we are is where we have been."
William Langewiesche, US writer
"Too often
travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the
conversation."
Elizabeth Drew, US
writer
"One always
begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."
Charles Dickens
"People
travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they
ignore at home."
Dagobert D. Runes, US writer
"Travel is
the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel
bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in
Hong-Kong."
Vita Sackville-West
"And the
ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also
moved by a powerful will to teach. Inside every good travel writer there
is a pedagogue -- often a highly moral pedagogue -- struggling to get
out."
Paul Fussell
"But we
love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and
lie..."
Mark Twain, on experienced travelers
"We
travelers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has
been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell
anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic."
Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu
"Our
instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but
runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and
banyans-which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre
of its imagination to the Zambesi."
George Eliot
"The travel
writer seeks the world we have lost -- the lost valleys of the
imagination."
Alexander Cockburn
"Writing
and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing
up."
Ernest Hemingway
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