You must not judge people by their country. In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.

I don't think that it's possible to have a truly rewarding experience in travel if it's simple.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.

I greatly enjoyed Tom Reiss's The Orientalist, for its mingled scholarship and sleuthing, and for so elegantly solving the puzzle of one of the Twentieth Century's most mysterious writers.

To a lot of Africans, seeing an animal is a something of a rarity. So it's a paradox of this sort of parallel life. A safari is an expensive experience and it's adjacent to a place where people are having a very tough time.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.

Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.