I think I understand passion. Love is something else.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

Now and then in travel, something unexpected happens that transforms the whole nature of the trip and stays with the traveler.

Travel is about failure or overcoming obstacles, overcoming failures. When a traveler is having lots of good luck, that is not a happy book. That's a book you say, well, I don't need that. I want a life lesson. I want to find out - I want a journey that reflects my life.

The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.