Why Do We Travel?

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.05.03 | 9:06 PM ET

Many writers take a crack at answering the question. Pico Iyer’s meditation is a travel-writing classic. This week, Lonely Planet’s Don George explains in his column why he travels. His essay is eloquent and full of heart. “At some point early on in my life, I decided that I wanted to understand everything,” he writes. “Or at least as much as I could. It seemed to me that this was the best we could do as human beings, to get to know our world as completely as possible. It was the ultimate quest, the reason for our being here. By ‘understand everything,’ I didn’t mean simply intellectually, by reading books. Reading books was part of the process, but an even more important part of the process was by living everything, understanding everything by experiencing it. So I started to travel.”