What is fascinating about a place like Los Angeles airport is that it is lots and lots of people, many of whom have saved up all their lives and channeled all of their energies toward coming to the promised land of abundance and plenty - the American Dream. But as soon as they arrive here they get a crash course in the American reality.

For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

[The Dalai Lama] told me some years ago, "I've made every concession to China, and I've been as open and tolerant as I could, and still things get worse in Tibet." If you look at it from one point of view, as he himself says, his monastic position of forbearance and nonviolence hasn't reaped any benefits. And yet, he's thinking in terms of the long term, of centuries.

With the war in Iraq, he [Dalai Lama] feels that the causes of that lie maybe hundreds of years ago, and he says, "What we do now may have consequences far into the future that we will never see."

I think people's minds are going to have to assimilate in the sense that all the world is international now. The whole world has gone global. I think cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are the models of our future.

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave.

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.