The wisdom, quirks and hard-won habits that belong to no single country.
The wisdom, quirks and hard-won habits that belong to no single country.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
Reefs occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor but support around a quarter of all marine species.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
There is a hierarchy: carpet beats tile, chairs without armrests beat carpet, and a bench near a plug beats everything. This knowledge is earned.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
We have better high-resolution maps of Mars than of our own seabed, though mapping projects are closing the gap.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
The modern passport with a photo and standard booklet emerged from a 1920 League of Nations conference.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
My phone died in a city where I could not read the alphabet. A teenager at a bus stop looked up my hotel, wrote the address in her language, and walked me to the right stop.
The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
Before railways every town kept its own solar time. Standard time zones were adopted to make timetables possible.
Not all those who wander are lost.
The consulate staff had clearly done this a thousand times. She asked three questions, made two calls, and told me it would be four days and to go and enjoy the city.
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
The international date line bends around island groups so countries are not split across two calendar days.
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
The body finds it easier to lengthen a day than shorten one, so westward flights usually feel gentler.
To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote.
Three days without luggage taught me that I had packed twice as much as I needed and that laundries exist in every country on Earth.
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
The small bleed hole in a cabin window equalises pressure so the outer pane bears the load.
No one realises how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old familiar pillow.
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
Relative humidity on a long-haul flight often drops below 20 percent, which is why you feel thirsty.
The gladdest moment in human life is a departure into unknown lands.
We missed by eleven minutes and were rebooked for the next morning. The forced overnight became the best city we visited that year, and we had never planned to go.
Adventure is worthwhile in itself.
Low pressure and dry air dull sweet and salty perception, so airline meals are seasoned more heavily.
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people.
Flight recorders are painted bright orange with reflective tape so search teams can spot them.
Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
Four strangers at an airport at one in the morning splitting a fare into town. Two of them are still in a group chat with me eight years later.
Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.
Chicago O'Hare uses ORD from its old name Orchard Field, long after the orchard disappeared.
Live your life, take chances, be crazy. Don't wait, because right now is the oldest you've ever been.
A ball, a wall and six children. Nobody needed to explain the rules and nobody kept score properly.
The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
The hop between Westray and Papa Westray takes about a minute and a half in fair wind.
A good traveller does not know where he is going, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
Ultra-long-haul routes such as Singapore to New York run close to 19 hours nonstop.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.
Hello, please, thank you, sorry, yes, no, how much, where is, delicious and goodbye. Ten words changed every single interaction of the trip.
Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
Contrails form when hot humid exhaust meets cold air and freezes, which is why they appear only at altitude.
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
Wings are tested to flex far beyond anything turbulence produces. The discomfort is real, the danger mostly is not.
Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Three days without a signal in a mountain hut. By the second evening, everyone had stopped checking their pockets and started playing cards.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
The first duty-free shop opened at Shannon Airport in 1947 to serve transatlantic refuelling stops.
The best view comes after the hardest climb.
Wheeled luggage was only patented in 1970, and the upright rolling case with a long handle arrived in 1987.
Leave it better than you found it.
The first time is awkward. By the fourth you bring a notebook, sit at the bar, and end up talking to the chef.
We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Magnetic stripe keycards were introduced to solve the expensive problem of guests walking off with metal keys.
Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort.
Go where the traders eat, at the hour they eat, and order what is already on the counter. It has never once failed.
There are only two kinds of travel: first class and with children.
Some hotels skip or renumber room 420 because the sign disappears so often.
A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.
Superstition means a large share of tall buildings label the 13th floor as 14, especially in North America.
Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.
We found one in a hostel with four years of notes in three handwritings. We added ours and left it on the shelf for the next person.
Collect moments, not things.
In Chinese, Japanese and Korean the word for four sounds like death, so floors and room numbers often omit it.
Jobs fill your pocket, adventures fill your soul.
Fill your life with experiences, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.
Tipping is expected in the United States, unusual in Japan where it can cause offence, and rounded up in much of Europe.
Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures.
Write one to your own address from each country. They arrive weeks later, out of order, when you have almost forgotten the day you wrote them.
Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn.
In Bulgaria and parts of Greece a head shake can mean yes and a nod can mean no.
People don't take trips, trips take people.
The thumbs-up gesture is offensive in several countries, so travellers are safer with words.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
Twenty-four exposures for a two-week trip forces you to look before you press. Half of them were terrible and four of them are framed.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
Orderly single-file queuing is a strong norm in Britain and Japan but far looser in many other countries.
The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.
Pick a direction, walk for ninety minutes, then turn around. You will find more than any list of top ten sights.
Travel and change of place impart new vigour to the mind.
About 35 percent of the world's population drives on the left, mostly in former British territories.
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.
Around 17 countries, mostly desert or small island states, have no permanent natural rivers.
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Sit on the same bench for an hour. A neighbourhood reveals its schedule: school, deliveries, lunch, dogs, old men, then children again.
The beckoning counts, and not the clicking latch behind you.
Both microstates import essentially all their food, having no agricultural land at all.
Solitude, I have discovered, is not a lack of company but a different kind of it.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
The United States, Liberia and Myanmar are the main holdouts from full metric adoption.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
Every good trip has a place where you stayed one night too few. The fix is a rule: if you say maybe on the first evening, book the extra night.
A person susceptible to wanderlust is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.
Nepal's double pennant is the famous exception, while Switzerland and the Vatican use squares.
Travel is like love, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness.
Border towns sometimes straddle a time zone line, so neighbours legally live an hour apart.
Nothing matched that search on this page. Try a shorter word, or browse by destination.
The missed ferry. The stranger who handed over a key. The meal that ran until midnight. If something happened to you on the road and you still think about it, send it - a few sentences is plenty, and we do the tidying up.
