Inspiration for the Weary Traveler

Today, while attempting to read about methods for doing research on sustainable rural livelihoods, I found myself on an amazing website called Matador Network (http://matadornetwork.com/), an online community of travelers, adventurers and such. My kind of people. I managed to spend a good hour or two procrastinating by reading several interesting posts from other travelers. One of these was the humbly titled, "The 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes of all Time." It is always fun to read travel quotes that discuss the experience, the purpose, and the effects of a traveling/wandering/adventuring lifestyle. Especially when you're in a mid-trip mini existential crisis like I am (why I am here again? what am I doing? what about this research I have supposedly committed to doing?). So I picked out a few that really spoke to me and what I'm feeling on this trip, as well as what I've felt during and after other extended stints abroad. If you're traveling, you'll love them, and if you're stuck at home right now they might just induce some travel fever. I know its not just me that's addicted to the rawness of life abroad.

From:  http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2008/03/07/50-most-inspiring-travel-quotes-of-all-time/

“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

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat Moon

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling


“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” - Robert Louis Stevenson