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.

If I tell a hotel I'm a travel writer, I can't get out of there without spending a few hours looking at every single room!

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.

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.

My favorite place in the whole world is the city of Paris. to me, Paris stands at the frontier of every major category of travel - in food, art, theater, history, in so many different areas that I simply don't get tired of it.

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.

Dubai,I think is a big bore - a city deliberately built to appeal to tourism, and only built for that purpose, and not possessing a valid culture or history of its own.