INTRODUCTION TO WORLD TRAVEL

World travel is my first love. Indeed, I believe one can paraphrase Keats and say that travel is life, and life travel. The benefits of travel are so great that they can hardly be expressed in words, although I have written two books in an effort to try.

As personal background, I spent my summer out of high school, and my summers during university, and also the three years following my graduation, traveling around the United States (often by thumb). I then joined the “real world,” and my ideas on corporate activism reflect my eleven years as an employee of a large corporation and an international bank. Following this, I spent a period of ten years, so far, exploring the globe, particularly traditional and indigenous cultures, and pristine and not so pristine natural environments, writing, and getting involved in activist causes (starting with the drive for democracy in Burma).

My evolution to becoming an activist followed a process that many other people also undergo. It was definitely a case of “natural” evolution. My hope is that by promoting world travel, many more people will experience the same change.

When you first hit the road, as on a long journey, you are overwhelmed by the experience - especially the freedom. But as time passes you become more and more sensitive to the environments and cultures which you visit, and this regularly leads you to feel discontent, if not outrage, over the social and environmental ills that have been created by modern society. At this point it is a simple step to deciding to do something about them. A commitment to activism is the logical successor to the experience of being a world traveler.

(If you are not yet a world traveler, my book, Been Where? Done What?, will get you started. It is a guide for doing your first long trip - ideally, a year long circumnavigation - and then using it as the basis for establishing an international lifestyle.)

This section of the website has three parts. First, it seeks to glorify travel and to encourage you to become a world traveler yourself. There is a collectionof travel stories and photo essays (submissions are welcome) that capture some exhilarating aspect of the experience.

Travel photo essays

Next is World Travelers Press, which is our own little publishing and distribution company. It is now used only for my books and for the needs of Dictator Watch. However, we hope at some point to be able to arrange the printing and distribution of the works of other authors which are consistent with the themes of world travel and of rejecting social forms and conventions: of maintaining personal freedom in the face of an increasingly rigid and domineering society.

Lastly, there is a links section, to other websites which have some relationship to travel and which are definitely worth a visit.