Theroux and Iyer: What Makes Travel Meaningful

Taken from http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4914

Few know more about the art of travel than acclaimed writers Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer, who have a combined six decades of experience chronicling their adventures around the world.

In his book The Tao of Travel, Theroux highlights the work of some of his favorite travel writers, including a conversation with Iyer. And 100 Journeys for the Spirit, which Iyer wrote the foreword to, features an essay by Theroux about the Lhasa prefecture in Tibet.

Theroux and Iyer give NPR's Neal Conan a list of things they do to make travel meaningful and how they go about being a traveler rather than a tourist.

1. Pick a destination that raises more questions than answers. "When I travel," Iyer says, "I want to be moved and I want to be transported and I want to be sent back a different person." Visiting places like Ryoanji in Japan, he says, inspires questions that reverberate long after you leave. "There's something in it that is always elusive ... that keeps bringing you back, again and again."

2. Leave the technology at home. "The more the world moves toward movement and acceleration and data, the more something in us cries out for silence and stillness and spaciousness," Iyer says. Iyer has visited monasteries for the past 20 years just to escape his phone and laptop, and he says he has found it liberating and even luxurious.

3. Rely on yourself. Self-sufficiency can be one of the best parts of travel, Theroux says. He says walking, looking for water, and just experiencing the simplicity and primitivism of life can lead you to a destination you end up truly loving.

4. Visit a charismatic place, not a pleasant place. "I would never call Jerusalem beautiful or comfortable or consoling," Iyer says. "But there's something about it that you can't turn away from." Similarly, he says, sitting in a very simple place like a Californian monastery in the midst of a storm takes you back to an essential, almost primal sense of fear or isolation — yet another part of the beauty of the experience.

5. Just go! "I still feel that ours is the only developed country in the world that's not full of travelers," Iyer says. Whenever you take yourself to some magical space abroad, he says, you see people of many nationalities, but few Americans. Take the time and trouble, he advises, to seek out the new places.

Thoughts. Maybe I'm an Asshole.

by Michael Mintz

If you have the choice to walk into a pile of fly infested green mushy cow poop, black sewage water, florescent green effluent water, a puddle of random yet degrading gobs of what seem to be garbage and smells like the sewer, or unknown animal/human feces, which do you pick? That's the daily decision I had to make going to work...

Am I an asshole if a bum comes up to me and asks for money because he is missing an arm but I don't see a man missing an arm but instead a man with two legs and an arm? In Bangladesh it got so bad that beggars would come up to me and I would look at them and realize that the guy before only had one leg with three toes on it, this guy has more than 7 digits combined on his two assorted yet crippled limbs, he is not worth any charity... am I an asshole or is right to play beggar comparisons when looking at people asking for money? So you're missing both your legs but it looks like your hand works... Sorry no money. You're totally blind and deaf? Maybe that's why you sing so bad. You're blind but you look a little fat to me...

I got fired from my job on Tuesday for reporting to an incoming boss that the other guy I worked with got fired on Monday and we were having serious problems. I was going to quit but still.

Wall Street Journal did a fab job capturing how savvy our generation of wanderers is.

Check out the article, "New Generation of Global Jet-Setters."

What Possessed Him to Go Here, Now?

There are stories that pop up every so often of Americans jumping into the thick of things overseas right when they're in the news. They're usually alone. And without an organization supporting their efforts. Remember that guy who wanted to personally kill Osama bin Laden, so he flew over into the mountains of Afghanistan? Like that.

I remember my father being that guy once (he didn't make international news, although I was still riveted). My parents had tickets to visit Argentina early 2001. Just before their trip, the currency broke. Argentina was sliding into full unrest as the nearly developed Latin American country's economy slid ferociously backward over the course of a few weeks. There was a lot of rioting. My father decided this was in fact the best time to visit Buenas Aires, and considered the timing of their trip a great opportunity to witness live action history. What fortune! (My mother stayed home figuring history would be made just as well without her getting tear gassed.)

So another one of these adventurers just popped up. This time it's a UCLA undergrad, just looking to lend a hand to Libyan rebels. Click on the image to read the story in the National:

P.S. The author did a great job of selecting this quote to be the last line of the article: "'Whatever you do, don’t tell my parents,' he pleaded. 'They don’t know I’m here.'"

Meet Taylor Hamilton, Globetrotter

I've had the fun fortune of meeting Taylor Hamilton at my new job. Turns out my new co-worker and budding buddy is also quite the photographer!

Here he discusses his passion for photography:

Click on the image below to see more of his globetrotting photos:

In Defense of Long-Term Travel

Written for International Business Times

by Mark Johanson

Travelers have long suffered a bad rap as bums, stoners, and drifters, lost in the vastness of mother earth's open arms. The hippie trails of the 1960's and 70's only served to further this unfair reputation. Those who left their desk jobs to dip their toes in foreign seas were seen as flighty, unstable, and generally aloof. By jumping off of their surefire career path, they supposedly set themselves up for years of waiting tables and flipping burgers. But those of us who have taken the leap, despite all of the obstacles, know that it just isn't true.

It's not easy to pack up your bags and buy a plane ticket to an unknown land - to leave on a jet plane not knowing when you'll be back again. Long-term travelers are risk-takers, unmoved by the voice of reason. They are rebels, but they are not rebellious. Long-term travel is not a protest against the homeland, but a longing for perspective.

Each country has its own names for it. In New Zealand and Australia they call it an OE (overseas experience). Younger generations in Europe and the Americas call it a gap year while older generations label it a mid-life crisis. Call it what you will, long-term travel is not about running away from home, it's about understanding a global world.

Long-term travel is a passion that is hard to defend. It is irrational by nature. While I have found no good words to support it over the years, what I can say is this:

There is the world that you live in and the world that you dream to live in. Often times, when you start to live the life of your wildest dreams, you find yourself longing for the familiarity and comprehensibility of the life you left behind. As a traveler and a constant dreamer, you find yourself living for the dream, running from the reality, and longing for a connection on either end. Complacency scares you and the end goal eludes you, so you keep on running towards an uncertain future in hopes that, in the process, you will find the answers to questions you never even thought to ask.

Some find contentment in short vacations, bookended by work. Great! I am not arguing that long-term travel is superior to the traditional holiday. On the contrary, I only argue that the act of traveling, however it is done, is an important part of understanding the human condition. To step outside of your comfort zone and look back on your life from an outsider's view offers you the chance to appreciate what you have. Even if the trip is to Disneyland, at least you can look back and say, "I don't have a bunch of fuzzy overstuffed critters marching around my hometown but, at the end of the day, I think I'm okay with that." The realizations need not be grand ideas.

Yet, the longer and farther you travel, the more your traditional values are questioned. I always thought that long-term travel was about absorbing other cultures and ideas - about meeting different people and trying new things. I thought it was about everybody else but me. But no matter how far from home you go, the one thing you're left with is yourself. I may learn heaps about foreign cultures, religions, and ideals, but more than anything else, I learn about myself.

And so, in defense of long-term travel, we are not all bums, stoners and drifters. We are not rebellious. We are not even as confused as we seem. Some of us know exactly what we're doing. Sure, we may be unconventional dreamers, but our dream is a collective one of global understanding. To use the famous J.R.R. Tolkien quote, "Not all those who wander are lost."

Now THAT'S skiing!

Ongoing WhatUpWanderers contributor Eric Misbach just returned from a father/son skiing journey in the Alps. Click here to check out more of these phenomenal photos of their experience!