Travel Inspiration
The world is a book and those who do not travel only read one page.
St Augustine
The journey not the arrival matters.
T.S. Elliot
A wise man travels to discover himself.
James Russell Lowell
…to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Lao Tzu
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
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
A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.
Henry Rollins
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Freya Stark
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.
Albert Einstein
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
Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.
Euripides
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
Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.
Tennessee Williams
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
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
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
James Michener
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. Chesterton
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Pavese
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
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
Martin Buber
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
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Lawrence Block
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
Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
Louis L’Amour
One’s destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things.
Henry Miller
Not all those who wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkein
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu
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
I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations.
Nyssa P. Chopra
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
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.
Mark Twain, Letter to Will Bowen
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
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
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going.
Paul Theroux
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
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
NOT I – NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.
Walt Whitman
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
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
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
Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
Benjamin Disraeli
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
Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.
Kurt Vonnegut
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of the experience.
Sir Francis Bacon
The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.
Sir Richard Burton
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
Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.
Mohamed
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley
Traveling. It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
Muhammad Ibn Battuta
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
I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.
David Rockefeller
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 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
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
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
Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.
Oscar Wilde
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
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
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
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
Dalai Lama
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
Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times.
Asian Proverb
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
Socialist Republic of Vietnam
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General Facts
- Population: 95,142,535 people
- Capital: Hanoi; 7,600,000 people
- Area: 127,844 square miles
- Language: Vietnamese
- Religion: Buddhist
- Currency: Dong
- Life Expectancy: 76 years old
- GDP per Capita:U.S. $1,9010 per year
- Literacy Percent: 90 percent
Other Fun Facts:
- Vietnam people focus on humanity (nhân nghia) and harmony (hòa), with family and the community valued highly.
- 16% of all the world's species live in Vietnam.
- Viet cuisine has 5 fundamental taste elements: spicy (metal), sour (wood), bitter (fire), salty (water) and sweet (earth).
- Viet food is a Chinese/Thai blend and is considered one of the healthiest cuisines in the world.
- The body of Ho Chi Minh (Uncle Ho) was embalmed and on display in Hanoi. NO PICTURES!!!!
- Tet is the most important festival in Vietnam. It celebrates rebirth and is considered their New Year.
- Water puppetry a popular art form dates to around the 11th century.
Our Suggestions
- The cuisine of Vietnam is varied and delicious. Don't be afraid of street food!
- Train from Hanoi to Saigon on the Reunification Express stopping along the way.
- Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island - UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Coffee, coffee, coffee... Some of the best we have had in the world!
- The New Hanoian Website. This is a verifiable life saver if you plan to live in Hanoi.
- People watching from a sidewalk cafe in Saigon and Hanoi is incredible!
- Hoi An Is charming, beautiful and has great food. Rent a bike and bike around it.
- Stay in Vietnam for Tet (Viet New Years)! Fireworks, parades and fun!
- Hanoi Water Puppet Theater in the Old Quarter