I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.

Travel is a personal thing, like raising a family, and to reduce it to a science, as the tour operators have done, is to make it meaningless. It is too delicate to be homogenized, sterilized, and rendered so predictable that one may as well remain in one’s living room. The notion of travel is based upon a desire to escape, at least temporarily, from the familiar, the known, the totally secure. Travel demands more determination than courage; a determination to participate and not to play the role of an observer. The airlines have come to refer to travelers as “seats” and hotels refer to them as “beds”; this offends me but it shows how far down the road to mas manipulation we have drifted.

Travel stripped of adventure is almost inevitably an exercise embedded in monotony; without it the traveler moves through strange lands untouched and touching nothing.