If you know me, you know I love to travel...Here are 10 of Anthony Bourdain�s Best Travel Quotes:
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life � and travel � leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks � on your body or on your heart � are beautiful. Often though, they hurt.
If you�re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel � as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them � wherever you go.
I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks � the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I�d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I�d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world � and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.
There�s almost never a good reason to eat on a plane. You�ll never feel better after airplane food than before it. I don�t understand people who will accept every single meal on a long flight. I�m convinced it�s about breaking up the boredom. You�re much better off avoiding it. Much better to show up in a new place and be hungry and eat at even a little street stall than arrive gassy and bloated, full, flatulent, hungover. So I just avoid airplane food. It�s in no way helpful.
If I�m an advocate for anything, it�s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else�s shoes or at least eat their food, it�s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch. Move.
It�s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you�ve been and what's happened. In the end, you�re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that�s enlightenment enough � to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.
The journey is part of the experience � an expression of the seriousness of one�s intent. One doesn�t take the A train to Mecca.
When I�m in a city that�s new to me, I try to go to the central market very early in my trip. I�ll go at 6 a.m., when people are shopping for businesses. You get to see what people buy and really eat.
For more quotes on travel, see:
Travel Quotes
