Anthony Bourdain Travel Quotes

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.

If you’re twenty-two, 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.

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

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.

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

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. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

All of us, when we travel, look at the places we go, the things we see, through different eyes. And how we see them is shaped by our previous lives, the books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the baggage we carry.

Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine, walk around a bit more, eat, repeat. See? It’s easy.

We are, after all, citizens of the world - a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. 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 McDonald's? 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. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Senor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What's that feathered game bird, hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some.

Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.

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. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Spanish is the language of the early morning in Manhattan. Frightened people become angry people - as history teaches us again and again. The best of traveling companions: relentlessly curious, tireless and totally without fear.

if you’re going to a country, particularly in Southeast Asia, [where] you’ve never been before, it’s a very good idea to go to the market first, see what they’re selling, get an idea of what they’re good at, what the people are buying.

Tony had an addictive personality and was without doubt a workaholic, choosing to travel over 250 days a year for as long as I’d known him. Whenever I used to suggest he take some time off, Tony would say, “Television is a cruel mistress. She does not let you cheat on her, even for a while.

I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d love seconds.

Glasgow is maybe the most bullshit-free place on earth. I think I call it "the antidote to the rest of the world." It's so unapologetically working class and attitude-free. Everyone's looking "to take the piss out of you," as they put it. They're all comedians, and tough. They don't put on airs.

You know, I'll tell you honestly: if you like food and you haven't come here to eat, you're really missing the fucking boat. This is world-class food; this is world-class wine; this is world-class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. If you haven't been here, you're a fucking idiot. I'm an idiot.

Is the Waffle House universally awesome? It is indeed, marvelous, an irony-free zone where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts; where everybody, regardless of race, creed, color, or degree of inebriation, is welcomed—its warm yellow glow a beacon of hope and salvation, inviting the hungry, the lost, the seriously hammered all across the South to come inside. A place of safety and nourishment. It never closes, it is always faithful, always there for you.

I wanted to be apart from everything I grew up with. In short, I wanted to be elsewhere.

Because I know, I think, how it happened. One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time. First, it’s a simple travel show (‘Good for the book!’). Next thing you know, you’re getting dry-humped by an ex-wrestler on the Spice Channel. I

I used to have a pretty dim view of humanity,” Tony said. “But since I started traveling—particularly to places where I anticipated being treated badly—I am on balance pretty convinced that generally speaking the human race are doing the best they can to be as good as they can, under the circumstances, whatever they may be. I guess my hope is the more people see of the world, in person hopefully, or even on television, they see ordinary people doing ordinary things, so when news happens at least they have a better idea of who we’re talking about. Put a face to some empathy, to some kinship, to some understanding. This surely is a good thing. I hope it’s a useful thing.” “And this is why a show like yours is terrific,” the president said. “Because it reminds people that actually there’s a whole bunch of the world that on a daily basis is going about its business, eating at restaurants, taking their kids to school, trying to make ends meet, playing games. The same way we are back home.

There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don’t even try to compare it with anywhere else. Even trying to describe it is tricky, as chances are, no matter how much you love it, you don’t really know it. No last call at bars, lots and lots of great food. We know that. Locals who are, well, uniquely wonderful. There’s an attitude here that defies all setbacks, all the things wrong with this fabulously, famously fucked-up city that defies logic in the very best possible ways.

An indigenous group native to the vast jungles of Borneo, the Iban considered the Bejalai central to their culture. The general idea is you go on an adventure, and learn something about the world. When all is said and done, hopefully you’re better for what you’ve seen, and you share the knowledge you’ve acquired with your home village. The Iban then commemorate the experience with a hand-tapped tattoo, à la “travel leaves marks.” It was literally a perfect theme for an episode of TV about travel.

Sichuan [cuisine] is actually a wonderfully sadomasochistic interplay between pleasure and pain, between the scorching, searing bite of the dried red Sichuan pepper and the cooling, more floral relief, the tingling, numbing component of the tiny black Sichuan flower pepper.

If I lived across the street from this place, I’d quit my job and just hang out here all day, until all the money was gone. Quimet & Quimet is a four-generations-old tapas bar in the El Poble-Sec neighborhood of Barcelona, which relies heavily on that Catalonian tapas bar staple of canned food.

The absolute worst thing to do when you come to Paris is plan too much. Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, Arc de Triomphe, stand in line for hours to experience what everybody says you have to. Me? I like to take it easy in Paris, especially if I’m only in town for a few days. “Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime. Eat again. Lounge around drinking coffee. Maybe read a book. Drink some wine, walk around a bit more, eat, repeat.

It’s a little more, but not much. And, you get conversation, which is something to be savored in Ireland. If you’ve got any kind of a heart, a soul, an appreciation for your fellow man, or any kind of appreciation for the written word, or simply a love of a perfectly poured beverage, then there’s no way you could avoid loving this city.

What do they do here better than any other place on earth? Answer: Guinness. This delicious, some say magical, probably nutritious, unparalleled beverage. This divine brew is so tasty, creamy, so near chocolatey in its rich, satisfying, buzz-giving qualities, that the difference between the stuff here, and the indifferently poured swill you get where you come from, is like night and day. One is beer, the other, angels sing celestial trombones.

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from "Real Housewives" who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.

The fact that she’s a girl requires, I believe, extra effort. Dada may have, at various times in his life, been a pig, but Dada surely does not want to ever look like a pig again. This can’t possibly be overstated. As the first of two boys, I can’t even imagine what it must be like for a little girl to see her dad leering at another of her sex. This creature will soon grow up to be a young woman and that’s something I consider every day. I figure, I’m going to spoil the shit out of this kid for a while, then pack her off to tae kwon do as soon as she’s four years old. Her first day of second grade and Little Timmy at the desk behind her tries to pull her hair? He’s getting an elbow to the thorax. My little girl may grow up with lots of problems: spoiled; with unrealistic expectations of the world; cultural identification confusion, perhaps (a product of much traveling in her early years); considering the food she’s exposed to, she shall surely have a jaded palate; and an aged and possibly infirm dad by the time she’s sixteen. But she ain’t gonna have any problems with self-esteem. Whatever else, she’s never going to look for validation from some predatory asshole. She can—and surely will—hang out with tons of assholes.

In 1925, a master plan was instituted to blend the French neo-classical design with the tropical background. The Art Deco movement, both in Havana and in Miami Beach, took hold during the late 1920’s, and is found primarily in the residential section of Miramar. Miramar is where most of the embassies are located, including the massive Russian embassy. The predominant street is Fifth Avenue known as La Quinta Avenida, along which is found the church of Jesus de Miramar, the Teatro Miramar and the Karl Marx Theater. There is also the Old Miramar Yacht Club and the El Ajibe Restaurant, recently visited and televised by Anthony Bourdain on his show, “No Reservations.” Anthony Bourdain originally on the Travel Channel is now being shown on CNN. The modern five-star Meliá Habana hotel, known for its cigar bar, is located opposite the Miramar Trade Centre. Started in 1772, el Paseo del Prado, also known as el Paseo de Marti, became the picturesque main street of Havana. It was the first street in the city to be paved and runs north and south, dividing Centro Habana from Old Havana. Having been designed by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, a French landscape architect, it connects the Malecón, the city’s coastal esplanade, with a centrally located park, Parque Central. Although the streets on either side are still in disrepair, the grand pedestrian walkway goes for ten nicely maintained blocks. The promenade has a decorated, inlaid, marble terrazzo pavement with a balustrade of small posts. It is shaded by a tree-lined corridor and has white marble benches for the weary tourist. Arguably, the Malecón is the most photographed street in Havana. It lies as a bulwark just across the horizon from the United States, which is only 90, sometimes treacherous miles away. It is approximately 5 miles long, following the northern coast of the city from east to west. This broad boulevard is ideal for the revelers partaking in parades and is the street used for Fiesta Mardi Gras, known in Cuba as Los Carnavales. It has at times also been used for “spontaneous demonstrations” against the United States. It runs from the entrance to Havana harbor, alongside the Centro Habana neighborhood to the Vedado neighborhood, past the United States Embassy on the Calle Calzada.

With a spoonful of nostalgia and even more sauce,

What you hear from other Italians is that Naples isn’t even Italy. “But that’s a very Italian attitude to start with, a not-quite nation of city-states for whom the next village over will always be the worst place on earth.

What’s left of her former glories, her days of empire, are in ruins, but those ruins continue to enchant us. You fall into a trance here.

the best pizza being the end result of an old and well-maintained bacterial culture, a starter.

Pretty much mention oxtail, and ragù, and I’m ready to slit somebody’s throat for a bite.

life keeps kicking out extra points regardless of how I play it.

the difference between the stuff here, and the indifferently poured swill you get where you come from, is like night and day. One is beer, the other, angels sing celestial trombones.

As we continue upriver, we move farther and farther away from the world I know, and toward someone else’s. It’s thrilling to not know where you’re going.

It’s these condiments here, the chilis, the chili padi [Thai chilis]. Once you have that, there’s no going back. They open up the nether regions of your palate, which hitherto you didn’t know existed.

Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes toward immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, look after our children.

Nairobi means ‘cool water’ in Maasai.

address the problem of keeping all this alive and safe without excluding or marginalizing the people who’ve lived here for centuries. That is a delicate balance: man and nature;

An estimated 30 percent of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to detonate. These and other UXOs [unexploded ordinances] remain in the ground and continue to take lives and limbs.

Plain of Jars is a collection of thousands of massive limestone cups whose origins remain unknown, scattered over a wide area of Laos’s Xiangkhoang Province.

Beirut: “It was so much more sophisticated and tolerant and beautiful than I thought it was going to be;

Beirut traffic is horrendous, public transport is nearly nonexistent, and that it often may make more sense to walk if you’re within a half mile of your destination.

Like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco or the Times Square of New York’s seedier, darker era, Tangier’s time as a freewheeling playground for artistic deviants has long passed.

Live the dream for a bit. But keep your eyes open. And be careful. As you’ll see, many visitors came to Tangier for a short vacation and remained for life. It’s that kind of place.

The tagine’s dome top is supposed to force the condensation back into the dish and keep it moist and tender.

Five hundred years of truly appalling colonialism, eighteen years of enthusiastic but inept Communism, and a brutal and senseless sixteen-year civil war ending less than twenty years ago left Mozambique with a devastated social fabric, a shattered economy, and only the memory of an infrastructure.

Shockingly, people here, throughout the country, after being relentlessly screwed by history, are just as relentlessly nice.

Fortunately, octo-cannibalism is the sort of thing that leaves me morally outraged without actually ruining my appetite

every chef I’ve ever met, if you asked them, ‘If you had to spend the rest of your life in one country, eating one country’s food for the rest of your life, where would that be?’ They’re all gonna say the same thing: Japan. Tokyo.

There are don’ts: You don’t use anything but your fingers. You definitely don’t use soy sauce or additional wasabi. It comes the way he says it should be. That’s the way you eat it.

brace yourself for feline taxidermy, disco balls, crystal chandeliers, and other oddities of decor.

the legends persist, of Sichuanese cooks spiking their dishes with opium. Nothing else explains the powerful addiction one develops to something that just hurts so bad.

Respect for the natural world is fundamental to Bhutan’s spiritual identity. More than half the country is off-limits to development or timbering. A whopping 50 percent of Bhutan’s GDP comes from hydropower.

If you wanna get there, just follow the sound of the drums. Things seem to just sway and move constantly.

The wheel, the internet, the pint glass, the electric guitar: these were all important inventions that made the world a better place to live in, but we must add another innovation—the pork chop bun.

After a while, even the most beautiful scenery threatens to become moving wallpaper—background—but other times, it all seems to come together: the work, the play, all the places I’ve been, where I am now, a happy, stupid, wonderful confluence of events.

Travel is a very important part of anyone’s growth. There’s no book in the world, no podcast, no Anthony Bourdain episode that can ever replicate that life experience.

A prophet once said, ‘Don’t tell me what a man says, don’t tell me what a man knows. Tell me where he has traveled.’ I wonder about that. Do we get smarter, more enlightened as we travel? Does travel bring wisdom?

There was once a mean house cat who would drink your whiskey and bite you; now there’s a friendly dog, Peeve, for whom you can buy “shots” of dog treats, the proceeds from which are donated to animal shelters.

You know what’s good? Books. I’m not ashamed to say it. I read.

I thought it was the kind of bar my guy [Rebus] would drink in,” said Rankin. “Very unaffected, very unpretentious, basic, stripped back. Almost like a private club. Everybody knows everybody else. . . . The kind of Edinburgh I was writing about was this secret Edinburgh that tourists never saw, the stuff that was happening just below the surface, and I thought [Oxford Bar] a nice representation of that.

I used to have a pretty dim view of humanity,” Tony said. “But since I started traveling—particularly to places where I anticipated being treated badly—I am on balance pretty convinced that generally speaking the human race are doing the best they can to be as good as they can, under the circumstances, whatever they may be. I guess my hope is the more people see of the world, in person hopefully, or even on television, they see ordinary people doing ordinary things, so when news happens at least they have a better idea of who we’re talking about. Put a face to some empathy, to some kinship, to some understanding. This surely is a good thing. I hope it’s a useful thing.” “And

Mexican food is about taking the time to do it right, about hours of slow simmering.

Right now, a defiant, young, creative generation of Mexican chefs like Eduardo are performing some of the most exciting new cooking anywhere on earth—a mixing of the very old and traditional, with the very new,

Fonda Margarita has “all the indicators of greatness—long communal picnic tables, minimalist decor, menus on the wall, and the heady aroma of what is unmistakably home cooking.

In Mexico City, as in any enlightened culture, street food is king.

Out of this world. Best tortilla ever. There’s not even any pork in it.

In Oaxaca, ancient indigenous traditions and ingredients define not only the mescal, but also the food.

we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is not melted cheese over a tortilla chip. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ at halftime. It is, in fact, old; older even than the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated.

Punjabis are known for their adventurous spirit; as brave warriors who spread throughout the world bringing great food with them.

In the Punjab, meat or no meat, you’re almost guaranteed a free-for-all of intense colors, flavors, and spices.

If this was what vegetarianism meant in most of the places that practice it in the West, I’d be at least half as much less of a dick about the subject.

When in “this place,” though, a visit to the sauna is all but mandatory. Both a Finnish invention and something of a national pastime, the sauna is “the number one thing people tell you to do around here.” In Cold War times, it was a way to ensure that confidential conversations remained so, since it’s impossible to wire a nude politician or secret operative

Sometimes you see the uninviting door and just have to go through it.

I come from a small family. Even at holiday meals, it was just me, my father, mother, younger brother, and maybe a cousin once in a while. Maybe that’s one reason I’ve always been kind of bitter about not being Italian American, why I always kind of yearn for that, those scenes in movies where the whole family’s sitting around at a long table, kids running around everywhere. Even when they were arguing, that looked good to me.

I like the idea of having to travel to experience a French Laundry meal. The journey is part of the experience - or was for me - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent, of the otherness of everything Keller. I liked looking out the window and seeing hills and countryside. I don't know if I want to be able to just to pick up the phone, make a reservation, and, sooner or later, simply hop in a cab and zip down to Columbus Circle. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca. That experience, like the French Laundry, should be a pilgrimage.

Proximity to livestock and animal feces, I have found in my travels, is not necessarily an indicator of a bad meal. More often than not, in recent experience, it's an early indicator of something good on the way. Why is that? It might have to do with the freshness question. Still living close to the source of your food, you often don't have a refrigerator or freezer. Equipment and conditions are primitive. You can't be lazy - because no option other than the old ways exists Where there are freezers and refrigerators, laziness follows, the compromises and slow encroachment of convenience. Why spend all day making mole when you can make a jumbo batch and freeze it? Why make salsa every day when it lasts OK in the fridge? Try a salsa or a sauce hand-ground with a stone mortar and pestle and you'll see what I mean.

every shelf is personally curated by the well-read staff. They have an amazing and esoteric collection of unsurpassed LA-related weirdness. A great and rare pocket of wonderful and strange and beautiful. And they’re a major stopover for all the heavy-hitting authors to read. Everybody loves this place.

I am a pretty loyal guy. When I fall in love, I fall hard. And even if we part, years later, there’s still, chances are, love in my heart. And my love for this place, dimly but fondly remembered from years ago, will last forever. It’s a national treasure.

To know Jersey is to love her.

I KNOW HOW THIS is going to sound, but Anthony Bourdain was the one who hooked me on Laos. Over the previous year, I had slipped further into insomnia—the accumulated effect of Benghazi stress and a hungry newborn keeping me awake for long stretches of each night. I’d fill that time lying on my couch in a darkened living room plowing through every episode of Bourdain’s various travel shows, over and over. I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own histories. I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.

Who gets to tell the stories?” asked Tony on the Kenya episode of Parts Unknown, which he made with his CNN colleague W. Kamau Bell. It was the last episode for which he recorded narration, and the winner, in 2019, of an Emmy Award for television writing. “This is a question asked often. The answer, in this case, for better or for worse, is, ‘I do.’ At least this time out. I do my best. I look. I listen. But in the end, I know: it’s my story, not Kamau’s, not Kenya’s, or Kenyans’. Those stories are yet to be heard.

I feel like Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame—if he stayed in nice hotel suites with high-thread-count sheets. I feel kind of like a freak, and . . . very isolated.

Most of us are lucky to see Paris once in a lifetime. Make the most of it by doing as little as possible. Walk a little, get lost a bit, eat, catch a breakfast buzz, have a nap, try and have sex if you can, just not with a mime.