Vacations are nice, but they're not the same thing as traveling: wandering through marketplaces, sampling food of indeterminate origin, and, most important, meeting new people.
Frozen drinks with little umbrellas have their place-usually involving a white-sand beach. But when inveterate wanderer Hans Christian Andersen wrote "To roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live," he didn't mean cruise ships and high-walled resorts. Vacations are nice, but they're not the same thing as traveling: wandering through marketplaces, sampling food of indeterminate origin, and, most important, meeting new people. It's an old-fashioned but effective way to remind us that we're all in this together. Certainly, we would all be better off right now if a few people in the Pentagon had spent a little more time drinking tea with locals in Iraq.This doesn't require a transcontinental flight-a New Yorker could learn as much from a trip to Kansas as to India. All we require is a willingness to break out of the bubbles most of us live in, to be shocked and moved and a little bit scared. Don't worry, you can grab that umbrella drink next time.
Travel Features from this issue:
Blacker-than-black MarketWhat can $500 get you in one of the world's most notorious black markets? SACHA FEINMAN shops Paraguay's Ciudad del Este to find out.Beautiful Messes: A Travel Guide to Man-made DisastersERIC SMILLIE leads a tour of America's five most spectacular environmental disaster sites.Tony Wheeler on Nontraditional Travel DestinationsThe Lonely Planet founder TONY WHEELER on why the places with government advisories are often the most interesting.Wish You Were Here?Dispatches from unlikely tourist destinations: Iraq, Venezuela, Pakistan, Kosovo, and Kenya.Train in VainBEN JERVEY rides Amtrak coast to coast to figure out how U.S. train travel got derailed.Guide to GuidebooksADAM LEITH GOLLNER on the best guides to stick in your fanny pack.The Ethics of Travel WritingROGER NORUM makes sense of the Lonely Planet scandal.WanderlustGOOD traces the most famous trips in history. An original interactive graphic.
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