To travel best requires some time preparing for your visit to a particular location - that you don't travel anywhere without spending a few nights reading about the culture and history of the place you are visiting. This is what most of us don't do - we fling ourselves on an exotic destination hoping that someone will tell us what we are looking at, but by that time it's too late, and all the lectures and tour guides simply add to our confusion.

At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.

Luckily you cannot get to the Golden Triangle in a bus. You can only access it on your own two feet!

I'm somewhat antagonistic towards these various projects that charge $250,000 per person for the ability to be weightless for 3 minutes after being brought up from earth. I think there are such better uses for that money that i seriously question the ethics of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on space flights for extremely wealthy people.

You avoid the overcrowding of tourist locations by traveling in off-season. That is now one of the major rules of smart travel - go when the tourists are NOT there, and even though you may have to don an extra layer of clothing, you will enjoy the sights and the experiences at the destination in the way that they were enjoyed before they became so well-known.

I've always found that the best travelers are the very same people who are intensely interested in the history and culture of their own home city.

Nicaragua is becoming the least expensive Caribbean destination.