Quotes About Exploration

I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance

I decided to hike up to Cerro Potosí, the hill above the town, beyond Tangamanga Park. The guidebook recommended good shoes, water, and long pants against the agave lechuguilla—thorny agave. I started on a cool morning, setting out on the trail

Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting it.

If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear and sometimes - importantly - to suffer the effects of this curiosity.

made notes on my progress through the mountains, which had thrilled me.

back to my hotel, where it was always mealtime.

That's a road. You can take it. Go that way. My bus is too big, but your car can do it.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us

Paul Theroux

Reasoning that I would rather take a detour for hours on a bad road than sit in my car in a traffic jam, I thanked him and drove away, past the parked cars and the children and the protesting teachers, through the bowl of a green valley and into the hills that looked rockier and drier in the distance.

the journey is the goal.

On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European's first glimpse of smoking.

I was traveling south in sunshine, euphoric again, on the open road.

every trip is unique.

Pimsa," Héctor said, passing the industrial park. "What's that?

Australian inland taipan is the most poisonous snake on earth—its bite will kill you in seconds. But none of this ought seriously to deter anyone from confronting the outback on foot, or even on all fours.

from San Luis Potosí, and at Santa María del Río, where the good road ended

I stopped simply to look around, in the idle curiosity that is available to any person with a car in Mexico and no particular place to go.

I found my berth and discovered that no one else was going to Xian. The sleeper was empty. This was the rarest situation on a Chinese train, and one to be relished. Such circumstances were almost luxurious and definitely cozy.

Tourists don't know where they've been. Travelers don't know where they're going.

Why is it . . . that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?

Paul Theroux

I was now deeper into Mexico than I had driven so far.

Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity.