“Once you get home, nobody will be remotely interested in what you did or what you saw. Why should they be? All they’ll want to know is whether or not you ‘had a good time’, and your notion of a ‘good time’ is unlikely to be theirs. The best kind of traveller is a thief on the prowl, looking for illuminating moments. Travelling, unlike tourism, is just living more intensely, freed for a short time from the constraints of being whoever it is we’re accustomed to thinking we are. It’s being on the prowl, beholden to nobody, for the beautiful self we’d forgotten was locked up inside us.”
Robert Dessaix in “The Age” newspaper, 18.ix.04.