Excerpt

Why We Travel, by Pico Iyer

"Travel is like love: It cracks you open, and so pushes you over all the walls and low horizons that habits and defensiveness set up."

The first time I ever met Don George (then the travel editor for a San Francisco newspaper, though "Wanderlust" was already his motto and his destination), we found ourselves talking just like that, and talking and talking and talking, about the ways in which love quickens a sense of vulnerability and so admits us to states of mind, or areas of knowledge, that we didn't know we had (to that extent travel always moves invisibly). Don in Greece and Paris, I in Thailand and Cuba, and both of us most poignantly and heart-shakingly in Japan, had come to relish the sensation of being spellbound outsiders, wide open to all the beauties of a place, and in a state of excitement for which the only words we could find were those associated with romance and passion. To travel is to trust again, and to believe anew in many of the deeper qualities that get mislaid on the office desk.

As the years went on, Don and I found ourselves crossing paths in all kinds of unlikely places, from Marin County, California, to Melbourne, Australia, from a waiting room in Los Angeles International Airport to a dining room beside the swan-filled gardens of the Bel Air Hotel. And whenever we did, our conversation (with a life of its own, it seemed) would pull us back to what really sent us: the trips that made the soul fly. All the journeys we most deeply cherished and remembered were the ones that threw into question—or rotation—our notions of home and abroad, and reminded us that home is fund