travel

"You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that
travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an
elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves
with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy
— being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the
greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the
traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and
mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler’s
worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria,
but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.
Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions,
and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent
monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the
lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative
mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted
with Munchausen syndrome."

- Paul Theroux
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar