@Kimberly: Traveling has taken me away more than I can imagine.

Haha. Again, just didn’t want to miss anything. Ask Audrey, she’d understand.

1. Learning by doing: We can read all the books in the world about a place, hours of newsreels, or see countless pictures. But going there gives us a deeply experiential level of knowledge, almost a travelers’ gnosis, if you will — knowledge you’ll likely never forget. It’s like when somebody gives you directions to their home or describes their living room, and your eyes glaze over and all you see is their lips moving and sound coming out, and you say, “I’m a visual person. Please draw me a picture.”

2. Addiction to unpredictability: I had an enjoyable moment the other day when I was searching Dakar for the train to Bamako (like the snow leopard, I never found it), and it was pretty damn awful –- confusing, dirty, chaotic –- yet I said to myself, “Wow, I really, really like this.” Geek alert: The adventure of discovery, even of mundane things like train timetables, reminded me of a real-life version of playing computer text adventures (Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide) when I was a kid. When I wrote a post about it, I found the neatest way to convey this feeling was actually turn it into a fake transcript of one of these games (e.g. “go left,” “look at station,” “ask man about train”). The point is when you’re in a strange place, the simplest task becomes a thrilling adventures, because you never know how it’s going to turn out. You just know that somehow, it WILL turn out — something will happen.

3. Seeing for myself: Hooking into what I wrote earlier about “not missing anything,” I travel for the same reason I became a journalist: Because I don’t always trust what I read or see on the news. I’d prefer to go to the source and see for myself.

@Scott: You are a travel junkie, sir.

@yatra: I don’t expect to be traveling when I’m dead. I’ll be resting.

@Scott: I definitely agree with learning by doing. We almost included the “travel is better than reading travel books” thing in this piece, but decided better to cut it back. As I kid, I used to contend that you could learn all you needed to know from books. Having traveled, I realize that was rather green and naive of me.

Discovery of the mundane is key. But the real deal is that the mundane really isn’t. Train timetables, among other points of comparison, tell us loads about the culture, including how it organizes itself. Not to mention, it’s just cool to see a grid of all the places where you can go. Nerds and geeks know how to go deep. Travel as Zork.

I get the “not missing anything” thing and we pride ourselves on digging in, being observant (Audrey better than I, in truth), but I always feel that there’s something I’ve left on the table — even in the tiniest village.

By the way, when I first read your comment, I was thinking “Now why is Scott looking for snow leopards in Dakar?”