Category: Travel

A whole sector of the marketing industry shapes stories about nations and cities to shape our opinions about place.

“…the camels were always looking around as they walked, with a prospective optimism that eluded us.”

“He was beginning to think the point of the revelry was to celebrate gluttony, and he wept for the world that his boy would have inherited, had he lived long enough to do so.”

“I’d had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past.”

Some travelers can mystify even the most experienced butlers.

Sketch artist and writer Candace Rose Rardon tells the story of her search for home through the different teas she has discovered while traveling.

Sarah Miller travels in exactly the way she’d hoped to avoid.

“The Sacred Door Trail is a pilgrimage if enough pilgrims say it is. “

Grace Linden considers repatriation to Austria — a place she has never lived.

At Outside, Stephanie Pearson explores Lake Superior’s extreme history, expanse, diversity, and dangers.

Mary Mann lays bare what most travelers are loathe to admit: it’s just as easy to be bored in Paris or on Bora Bora as it is at home.

An editor reflects on a career in travel writing, even as Americans travel less and are exposed to less diversity.

Pam Mandel’s absurdly earned travel resume is why she always have time for the same sentiments from other voices of this rootless era.

In 2007, David Zoby went on an academic tour of Syria. He admits he was kind of a fraud, but he went anyway.

“People insist that only an idiot would move from the land of the dollar to the 68-times-weaker rupee.”

“We just want a normal life. We are here for survival.”

Rafia Zakaria’s essay in The Baffler on flying while Muslim is an important read that exposes a long list of things that most white, non-Muslim Americans never have to worry about while traveling.

“Travel writing, like pop music, abhors a vacuum,” Michael Meyer, author of several books on travel and associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in an email to City Paper. “There always has to be The Next Place to Go, or the Best City You’ve Never Heard Of. If it’s not Baltimore or Greenpoint or St. Paul, then it’s Pittsburgh.”

At Eater, journalist Emily Yoshida hits some of Tokyo’s absurd, popular tourist attractions trying to understand specifically what themed-destinations offer and why they’re so popular.