Why We Travel

Students wrote this week in response to Pico Iyer's essay "Why We Travel" (see link from the article from Slate in an earlier post below). Iyer is fairly tolerant of different reasons why people travel, certainly more so than Paul Fussell is in his well-known book about travel writing from 1980 entitled Abroad. The students have given me permission to quote from their essays: Erik writes, "The key is that a traveler digs deeper, asks more questions than a tourist. They go out of their way to create, map, and explore something...." From Jim: "You can study the politics, religions, history, and economy of a country in a classroom and pretty much 'get it.' But culture is something that no textbook or lecture can instill in you, and culture is the piece of the puzzle that completes the picture, that ties all the loose ends together." Jeff considers Pico Iyer's ideas, who theorizes that" 'all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.' [On an earlier trip] I fell in love with that feeling of terror and wonder, and that feeling was in fact frightening yet exhilarating at the same time." We'll be considering both travel and tourism during this trip, and defining what we are doing in Beijing and Kyoto.