
Travel Inspiration
Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
Mark Twain
How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.
Sarah Reijonen
Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.
Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Pavese
I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
One’s destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things.
Henry Miller
What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
James Michener
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.
David Rockefeller
Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.
Euripides
Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.
Patrick Rothfuss
Not all those who wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkein
Traveling. It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Muhammad Ibn Battuta
A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.
Henry Rollins
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, To gain all while you give, To roam the roads of lands remote, To travel is to live.
Hans Christian Anderson
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.
Albert Einstein
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.
Isabelle Eberhardt
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you- it should change you.
Anthony Bourdain
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 which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted
Bill Bryson
The world is a book and those who do not travel only read one page.
St Augustine
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of the experience.
Sir Francis Bacon
Once you have travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
Pat Conroy
The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.
Sir Richard Burton
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Lawrence Block
Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.
Mohamed
For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.
Aldous Huxley
A wise man travels to discover himself.
James Russell Lowell
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.
Mark Twain, Letter to Will Bowen
You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.
Ella Maillart
Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.
Mark Jenkins
Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.
Kurt Vonnegut
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve Jobs
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Freya Stark
I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.
Bill Bryson
Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
Benjamin Disraeli
At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.
Arthur Frommer
Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
Dalai Lama
A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover
H. Jackson Brown, Jr
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all — the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
Randy Komisar
Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.
Tennessee Williams
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao Tzu
Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
Louis L’Amour
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. Chesterton
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you’re not a traveler. You’re a f@$%ing tourist.
Guillermo del Toro
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
Martin Buber
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey
John Hope Franklin
The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Christopher McCandless
Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.
Oscar Wilde
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
…to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.
Jack Kerouac
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
NOT I – NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.
Walt Whitman
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going.
Paul Theroux
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
Maya Angelou
The journey not the arrival matters.
T.S. Elliot
Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times.
Asian Proverb
If you’re… physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.
Anthony Bourdain
I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations.
Nyssa P. Chopra
Lao People's Democratic Republic
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General Facts
- Population: 7,004,789 people
- Capital:Vientiane; 783,000 people
- Area: 91,429 square miles
- Language: Lao
- Religion: Buddhist
- Currency: Kip
- Life Expectancy: 54 years old
- GDP per Capita: U$D $1,531
- Literacy Rate: 73 percent
Other Fun Facts:
- The Plain of Jars is an area with over 300 giant jars of unknown origin that vary in size from 2.5 to 11 meters in height.
- Pimai (pee-my), the Lao New Year, is the country’s most important holiday. The 3 day festivities take place in mid-April and consists of washing Buddha statues.
- Laos has been tagged as the “World’s Most Bombed Country.” Thousands of live ordinances are still active in the ground from the Vietnam War.
- Laos' food staple is sticky rice, glutinous rice balls dipped it in sauces including; Diosuki (a peanut based sauce)
- The oldest modern human fossil was found in a cave in northern Laos and is believed to have been 46,000 years old.
- Hundreds of years ago, Laos was called Lan Xang meaning “kingdom of a million elephants.”
- Laos is a very poor country. Most people don’t have electricity or running water.
Our Suggestions
- Lao BBQ is an arrangement of meats (raw) and a mini-hibachi and sauces. Delicious!
- Fantastic Indian Food can be found in many cities across Laos. (Phonsavanh's Nisha)
- Bia Lao - Lao Beer is some of the best in the world! LaoLao (rice liquor) is widely sipped and stay away from the brown variety.
- The plain of Jars is one of the weirdest places we have visited.
- The ViangXai Caves are very interesting in the North East and give a rich history from a different perspective on the Vietnam War.
- Vang Vieng is one of the most beautiful places we have been. Do the river tubing if they are still doing it.