Tahir Shah quotes:

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  • The porters could always be coaxed to continue a little further through driving rain by the mere suggestion of a Pot Noodle at the end.

  • To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path

  • With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.

  • A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.

  • I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.

  • Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom

  • Venture to a remote corner of a faraway land and, from the moment you get there, every person and every thing becomes an obstacle, designed to entrap you, to stop you proceeding on your way.

  • Only a man who has his health, a full stomach and wears clean clothes would ever entertain the notion of tracking down the greatest lost city on Earth.

  • There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.

  • There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.

  • Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.

  • Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.

  • Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.

  • The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture.

  • I was no longer troubled when he pulled out a machete in a crowded bar, tried to pick up schoolgirls, or threatened to scalp us, then rip off our heads and scoop out our brains.

  • Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us all, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.

  • On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.

  • Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us al, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.

  • Previous experience had taught me that any expedition marches on its stomach.

  • Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.

  • In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

  • On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.

  • The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city.

  • There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.

  • A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.

  • For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

  • At the dealership, I pulled out the sieve and toyed with it threateningly. When the salesman was ready for me, I held it up, told him I was not a tourist and demanded a large discount."

  • The situation was different in the jungle. Every inch of ground had to be earned, and was done so through much exertion with the blade.

  • There is nothing like a train journey for reflection.

  • As I see the world, there's one element that's even more corrosive than missionaries: tourists. It's not that I feel above them in any way, but that the very places they patronize are destroyed by their affection.

  • The last thing we wanted was for the Machiguenga to be sad again. Sadness appeared to bring out their violence.

  • Exploration is a dirty game.

  • Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.

  • It was an awkward moment. We were burning down our host's house, a situation which any guest seeks to avoid.

  • In any case, a little danger is a small price to pay for ridding a place of tourists.

  • For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home

  • A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.

  • Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home~?

  • The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.

  • A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation

  • Previous journeys had taught me the danger of taking too much stuff.

  • There's nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.

  • Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.

  • My journey to the land of the Shuar tribe had taught me the importance of practical gifts.

  • As far as Samson was concerned I was just another foreigner in pursuit of a lunatic quest.

  • When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.

  • The ability to tell a good route from a terrible one is a valuable skill when leading an expedition. Unfortunately for us all, it was a skill I did not possess.

  • If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.

  • Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.

  • My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.

  • A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.

  • As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.

  • Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.

  • Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.

  • Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.

  • During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.

  • Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.

  • For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.

  • I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.

  • I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

  • In India everything has a use and a value.

  • In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that i will come to no harm.

  • In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.

  • In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.

  • It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.

  • Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.

  • Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent

  • Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?

  • Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.

  • My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heighetned thought. Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

  • Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.

  • Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.

  • One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.

  • Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.

  • Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.

  • Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.

  • Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them.

  • The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.

  • The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.

  • The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.

  • The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

  • The model of publishing is changing and its happening right now, but most publishers are so frightened, they just dont know how to embrace it.

  • The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.

  • The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.

  • The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.

  • The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after two minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.

  • There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest.

  • These days no one challenges us,' he said. 'And because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we have all become lazy.

  • Through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.

  • To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest foe real progress.

  • Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.

  • Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breezy, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it's impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.

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