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I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I wa...more

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To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in whic...more

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It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold...more

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I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longi...more

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I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so...more

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Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles...more

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The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.

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Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

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What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

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But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that e...more

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Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

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By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the...more

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[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as ...more

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The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.