Tag: Why We Travel
A Street Corner in Paris
by Jeffrey Tayler | 01.30.12 | 11:22 AM ET
Jeffrey Tayler had all but given up on the City of Light. Then he sat down at a Left Bank cafe.
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Yahoo! BuzzTom Bodett’s ‘Inside Passage’
by Michael Yessis | 01.10.12 | 11:31 PM ET
Brave and amazing storytelling in this Moth podcast by Tom Bodett, who recounts a low point in his life—he nearly blew himself up on a power line—and how he emerged from it with a realization about his father and a beautiful reason to go to Alaska. He writes about telling the story on his blog:
Standing on that stage in Burlington and telling such a personal tale, almost a confessional, in front of 1500 strangers was one of the highlights of my performing life. Until the moment I walked in front of the microphone a big part of me thought I was making a mistake. It was too personal. It was too revealing of a very low point in my character. It would make me choke up.
It was all those things and more and has made me very happy.
Made me choke up, too.
Interview with Henry Rollins: Punk Rock World Traveler
by Jim Benning | 11.02.11 | 12:40 PM ET
Jim Benning asks the musician about his new book of photographs and how travel has humbled him
Is the ‘Madness’ of Travel in our DNA?
by Michael Yessis | 09.07.11 | 10:49 AM ET
Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker story about Svante Paabo’s quest to sequence the Neanderthal genome contains a theory about why humans travel and seek the unknown. Kolbert notes that the archeological record shows Neanderthals’ migration stopped “when they reached water or some other significant obstacle,” while “archaic humans” pushed past those barriers, across open water and beyond. Paabo, writes Kolbert, seeks to “identify the basis for this ‘madness’ by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA.”
Paabo explains:
It’s only modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.
He adds:
If we one day will know that some freak mutation made the human insanity and exploration thing possible, it will be amazing to think that it was this little inversion on this chromosome that made all this happen and changed the whole ecosystem of the planet and made us dominate everything.
He also tells Kolbert:
We are crazy in some way. What drives it? That I would really like to understand. That would be really, really cool to know.
Fascinating.
Unfortunately, only an abstract of the story is online. There is, however, a Q&A with Kolbert.
David Brooks on Travel and the Haimish Line
by Jim Benning | 08.30.11 | 4:32 PM ET
The New York Times columnist recently took his family on safari to Kenya and Tanzania. They stayed in simple camps where they got to know people and more luxurious camps where they did not.
The more elegant camps felt colder. At one, each family had its own dinner table, so we didn’t get to know the other guests. The tents were spread farther apart. We also didn’t get to know the staff, who served us mostly as waiters, the way they would at a nice hotel.
I know only one word to describe what the simpler camps had and the more luxurious camps lacked: haimish. It’s a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.
It occurred to me that when we moved from a simple camp to a more luxurious camp, we crossed an invisible Haimish Line. The simpler camps had it, the more comfortable ones did not.
Brooks goes on to extrapolate larger lessons about how we live. It’s a well-worn theme in travel—see Rick Steves and a thousand other sources. But the message never gets old, undoubtedly because most advertising continues to insist we’ll be happier if we just spend more money.
On Coastal Time
by Pam Mandel | 08.19.11 | 11:07 AM ET
Kalaloch Beach. (UJ Sommer) Years pass. Life changes. But for Pam Mandel, one thing stays the same: her love for the Olympic Peninsula.
Videos You Must See: Move, Learn, Eat
by Eva Holland | 08.06.11 | 9:56 AM ET
Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin summarizes these three gorgeous travel shorts thusly: “Three beautiful, infuriating young men had enough time and money to go everywhere, eat everything, and turn it into three little movies. Go to hell, beautiful young men!”
“Move” is my favorite. “Learn” and “Eat” are below the jump.
MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
Meditation at Stinson Beach
by Jim Benning | 07.27.11 | 11:00 AM ET
Don George recently visited a favorite northern California beach.
I let the sea wash over me, let the waves fill my head and lungs, lose myself to this inconceivably old and ageless place.
I think: This is the same scene I witnessed two decades ago, quite possibly even the same rock I sat on then, scribbling in my journal as I tap into my laptop now. And if I come back in 20 years, it will almost certainly be the same still.
But of course, much has changed in those two decades. My children have grown up and moved on. My Dad and other loved ones have passed away. New jobs, new places, new books, old dreams.
And suddenly these words flow into my brain: Where does it all come together? What does it mean?
‘Traveling to Europe Didn’t Change My Life’
by Michael Yessis | 03.23.11 | 3:28 PM ET
A contrarian take on the power of travel at Thought Catalog. Caitlin Rolls writes:
Travel is supposed to be this other-worldly experience. People always start looking all moony when they mention their travels, like suddenly they’re back in that musky tent in Morocco wrapped up in the paisley sarong they bought because they just, you know, really wanted to live it. They’ll explain that it was a really amazing experience that they can’t exactly put into words so why don’t they just show you the slide show they set to the music of Ravi Shankar? Super moving stuff but maybe the reason they don’t want to talk about it is because they’re afraid to admit that they came home exactly the same person they were when they left.
Of course, the sentiment has polarized the commentariat.
The Power of Personal Landmarks
by Chris Epting | 11.04.10 | 1:00 PM ET
Forget grand historical monuments for a moment. Chris Epting celebrates the unheralded places meaningful to each of us.
See the full audio slideshow: »
Words Are Like Icebergs
by Frank Bures | 09.21.10 | 11:06 AM ET
Frank Bures on the pleasures of traveling and learning foreign languages
Travel Morality Tales
by Tom Swick | 09.13.10 | 10:54 AM ET
Screen shot from commercial for DIRECTV Parsing the hidden travel advice in two DirecTV commercials
Rats, Exploration and the Benefits of Travel
by Jim Benning | 08.27.10 | 2:48 PM ET
This passage in a New York Times story about the downsides of frequent exposure to information and entertainment on mobile devices caught my eye:
At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.
The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.
Sounds to me like the perfect day of travel away from the rat race: exploring an unfamiliar place, followed by some good downtime in the evening.
As if you needed another reason to travel, right?
‘Everything was Richly, Gloriously Strange’
by Eva Holland | 08.18.10 | 2:09 PM ET
Thirty years later, Guardian writer Peter Bradshaw looks back on a youthful European tour he took as winner of an essay contest. It’s a good read:
There was no listening to iPods or iPhones - even the Sony Walkman was years away from being commonplace - and no tearful texting our mums from our mobiles. We didn’t tweet and we didn’t upload loads of digital pictures to our Facebook pages. We were going abroad, cut off utterly by the Channel, taking pictures with Kodak instamatic cameras that would take a month to develop. There was no nonsense about making sure we didn’t get dehydrated, or giving us water bottles etc. We just sweated southward through Europe in those non-aircon coaches, got out, did some sightseeing and partied after-hours in our hotel-rooms—although using the word “party” as an intransitive verb was something else no one did in 1980.
The Shrink-Wrapped Traveler
by Eric Weiner | 08.18.10 | 10:23 AM ET
Welcome to the Buddha Zen hotel, where the options are few and the travelers are happy
Victory at the Louvre
by Erin Byrne | 08.11.10 | 10:50 AM ET
Erin Byrne never let her mask slip, until a headless, armless Greek statue taught her a lesson she couldn't ignore
Ode to the Summer Vacation
by Terry Ward | 08.09.10 | 7:30 AM ET
The sun. The sand. The improvised Taco Bell sing-alongs. Terry Ward revels in the power of her family's long ago trips to the Outer Banks.
Daisann McLane: Gem Dealer, Jazz Singer, Archaeologist?
by Eva Holland | 08.06.10 | 1:13 PM ET
In her latest column in National Geographic Traveler, the World Hum contributor spills on a secret travel habit of hers: lying. Here’s McLane:
I wasn’t always so footloose with the facts. For a very long time, the only travel lie that crossed my lips was the one that is necessary in every traveling woman’s toolkit: “I’m married.” However, when I began to travel to more off-the-map destinations, I started prevaricating about my profession for security reasons: In many nations, identifying yourself as a journalist, even when not working as one, is tantamount to putting a big sign on your back that says, “Take me to the nearest police station now.”
One lie, two lies, and soon I was tumbling down the rabbit hole. The next thing I knew, I was in a café in Salvador, Brazil, drinking a caipirinha and telling the owner I was an ex-jazz singer who’d come looking for a school teaching the martial art capoeira. Disconnected from my everyday self, I exhilarated in the freedom of trying on new lives, new personae.
What it Means to Travel Back to the Future
by Michael Yessis | 08.06.10 | 12:21 PM ET
Another great piece by Peter Jon Lindberg, who returns to London and a pub he called home 20 years ago. He finds “not the workaday tavern of memory but a roomful of attractive people sipping Pinot Grigio” and lingers for “12 uncomfortable minutes.” Among his findings:
Good Lord, listen to me. I’ve become a bad novel: Aging crank revisits lost youth; cue strings, bittersweet regret. Forgive my maudlin self-indulgence. (If it’s any excuse, I just turned 40.) But really, what on earth did I expect? Only a child—a 20-year-old—could have wished London not to evolve, not to grow up.
Of course, this isn’t just about London, is it? It’s about the feeling any traveler has returning to a place he once knew as well as any: A city that seems to hold you in it, or some earlier incarnation of yourself. Going back, you become again that long-ago person, even while the city changes utterly around you. As it is I’ve spent most of my post-London life in New York, 5,000-odd days of it, such that I’ve scarcely noticed the incremental, wholesale transformation of Manhattan over the past 15 years. Yet an Englishman returning here after a decade away might feel the same about New York as I do about London: that it looks like an artist’s rendering; that “it’s all about money now”; that glamour has eclipsed grit, and something has been lost in the process; that the city no longer belongs to me, but to other, younger, wealthier, more exciting people.
Dear Gumbo: ‘You Haunt Me’
by Eva Holland | 08.04.10 | 3:46 PM ET
Intelligent Travel’s Aimee Brown, currently traveling on the Gulf Coast, has an open letter to the Louisiana stand-by. Here’s a sample:
I find you rich with a depth that speaks to an unknown source. You haunt me. I taste in you hope and fear. There is darkness in your roux, and your scent suggests all that Louisiana is. Lust, love, dark alleys, open arms, bayous that hold within them hidden threats of danger and beauty.
Made of simple ingredients—shrimp, crab, crawfish, and spices—you are more than the sum of your parts. You are formed by the hands of people who belong to this place. Because of that so do you.
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