Moab, UT

The Cobalt (provisionally name: Randy) cruised along, unperturbed by the sheer monotony of the straight tarmac, a black ribbon unfolding to the horizon. We're about three hours south of Salt Lake City, on the way to Moab. It's a barren landscape, but beautiful nonetheless. I sit silently and wonder what it must have been like as a pioneer, trekking across such nothingness. Would you feel elated at the sheer intensity of nature? Or ultimately unhinged - when will it ever end?

Helper
Americana redux. Helper is an old coal town in the middle of nowhere. Tumble weed tumbled along the road as we entered this ghost town. All the windows are shuttered. For Sale signs litter every shop along the main strip. The only place doing regular business is the Balancing Rock Eatery. We pop in for a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with fries (coffee refills are free and plentiful). The atmosphere is somewhat nostalagic; back in the day this place would have been humming with gritty mining folk. Today it's a skeleton if its former self. The Union Pacific Railway is just over the road, but there its rolling stock sit idle. I ask about the coal mines and the waitress tells me that there is one coking station a few miles into the valley. But most of the business seems to have evaporated, like the water in this parched and barren place.

Moab
If Helper is of yesteryear, then Moab is of humming today. Sitting right in between two extraordinary national parks - Arches and Canyonland - and along the Colorado and Green rivers, Moab is an adventure-seekers mecca. Here you can whitewater raft, canyon, mountain bike, sky dive and jet boat all day, any day. The town has a sort of modern cowboy feel - just a few saloon bars and bike shops line the main strip; motels plentiful and cheap.

We hiked up to the Delicate Arch this afternoon and discovered that it truly deserves its place on the Utah license plate. It's is massive, an enormous logic-defying span of rock that simply sits on its own ontop of a small peak. Rationally, it makes no sense - how did it get there? Why is it standing? What are all those Norwegian tourists in bikinis doing taking pictures in front of it? (I kid you not. I tried to convince Ebba that it was just the Norwegian Bikini Team on tour. To her horror and shame, she is rediscovering that her fellow Scandinavians go a little crackers when they see the sunshine).

Great Western Road Trip begins

At last. A painful few weeks of tedious exams, paper-madness, and packing shenanigans give way to freedom rediscovered. I'm on a month long road trip through the western US. I'll cover about 3000 miles in a gold Chevy Cobalt (name to be decided - suggestions welcome!) with 4 different amigos (all joining at different stages). I'm hoping to discover the West: the desert national parks of Utah, the chintz and razzmatazz of LA, the rolling Pacific Coast, the wineries of Napa, coffee in Seattle, and finally great Yellowstone itself. The route as it unfolds is here.

Some have called it my legacy tour. I'm not so sure it's that grand. More of a chance to see the US outside of the HBS bubble and get in touch with a bit of Americana before I head back to the other side of the pond.

Why I travel

For the past week I have wandered through a small corner of Central Europe. Armed with little more than my Interrail pass, a Nikon D40, my green Gregory pack, and the requisite Lonely Planet, I swung through Budapest, Krakow, and Prague. A few days into my trip, I asked myself: why do I travel?

Travel junkies often suffer from guilt, because ultimately traveling is a self-indulgent pursuit. You visit a place purely for your own pleasure, to satisfy that natural human inclination to explore, and to saturate your senses with a new and exotic locale. So of course, a large part of why I travel is simply for the joy and excitement of experiencing something new.

But I'm also naturally curious about the world, its people, geography, cultures, conflicts and ideas. I read reams of facts, figures, and statistics on everything from Hungarian inflation to Brazilian bossa-nova. It's an odd, almost insatiable hunger to better understand the world around me.

Traveling is a natural corollary to my paper-based pursuit. Seeing a country or a place or meeting people in the flesh, provides some subjective grit to layer on top of this more objective base. It helps me form an opinion and lends my views credibility and weight; you listen more carefully to a witness than an observing pundit.

Am I just saying that seeing is truth? Well, not exactly. Seeing fuels the imagination and brings understanding. For example, it's hard to comprehend the phenomenal speed of change in China without seeing the sky scrapers sprouting up around Beijing's second ring road. And yet this is not universally true: at Birkenau I saw evidence of the Nazi death camps, yet it was still devilishly difficult to comprehend and truly appreciate the scale of such barbarity.

It is often said that the world is shrinking. Indeed, earthquakes and invasions, celebrity weddings and 100m sprints, are simultaneously available on your TV, Macbook, or Blackberry. But this is really just a trick, because it's reality which is here one moment and suddenly gone the next at the touch of a button. If you find the image to offensive or banal, you can instantly exchange it for another more agreeable picture.

Travel is the antidote to this world of filtered information. It helps me remember that the world is a big place. As I roll across the grain basins of the southern Czech republic on Euronight 402, I see a farmer sitting on his tractor tilling the land and a woman on her bicycle off to the shops, or church perhaps. In each of these villages are hundreds of lives with their own aspirations, fears, successes and tragedies. Although I am virtually closer to these people than ever before, they know little about me, and I little about them. Travel reminds me that I should not confuse virtual closeness for a shared world view or a common opinion.

So ultimately, I travel because I want to push back my boundaries of understanding, bridge physical divides and enjoy drinking beer with locals in far off lands.

A view from Auschwitz

It's hard to find the words to write about this place. Every syllable seems unworthy; too light, too insignificant.

It's a beautiful day. The giant green chestnut trees are bathed in sunlight, and a few buttery clouds float in a startling blue sky. The idyllic backdrop gives the squat red-brick buildings an almost quaint feel. They look like old warehouses or bakeries. But the electric barbed wire and the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" arch points to the horrors within.

I thought that seeing Auschwitz would help me comprehend one of the 20th centuries greatest tragedies. But its hard to fathom the scale of the Nazi's brutality: more than 1.5m people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau. At its worst, the gas chambers could murder upwards of 10,000 men, women, and children a day. Life expectancy for inmates was 3 months for women, 6 months for men.

Almost more shocking to me was the Nazi's systematic, almost factory-like approach to killing. Death factory is really more accurate than death camp. In this factory people were the inputs and absolutely nothing was wasted: people were shorn of all hair to produce "hair cloth", shoes were sorted and shipped to civilians in Germany, and gold fillings were even pulled out of their mouthes after they'd been gassed and used to fund the Nazi war machine.

The total and utter perversion of norms and morals is astounding. How could the Nazis create a culture in which such terrible savagry was not considered abnormal? Where people lived in such fear that they simply complied and condoned it? Many philosophers and historians have asked this question. I'm not sure there is a good answer.

At one of the prisoner's sheds in Birkenau there was a wreath laid at the foot of the internal fireplace. "For all those who have suffered at the hands of of evil" it read. But I thought this was perhaps wide of the mark. If anything, Auschwitz stands to remind us what we are all capable of such evil. Perhaps "for those who have suffered at the hands of others" would have been more fitting, for it is up to each and everyone of us to protection us from ourselves.

Mr Weasel & Mr Innocent Motorbike Man

I’m in the back of a rickshaw. It’s late Tuesday evening and my belly is full of South Indies delights. It’s been raining and cool air is blasting down my neck. I pull up the collar on my jumper.

My driver is a shadow, sitting squat in front of me. This shadow is small, skinny, and a bit of a weasel. Mr Weasel thinks I’m a dumb tourist. He’s trying to rip me off by making a huge detour into random backwaters whilst assuring me we’re taking a “short-cut”. I’m not falling for the bait. I’m calm, relaxed, the epitome of serenity.

Yes, Mr Weasel you can play your games, but I will have the last laugh. My plan is to just ride along with Mr Weasel for as long as he likes. Then upon arrival at the guest house, I will make a wild dash inside, chuck Rs100 at him, and seeing whether he has the balls to follow me inside to demand the rest of his fare. So I pull out my book – Slaughter House Five – and get stuck in, ignoring Mr Weasel’s sight-seeing tactics.

But weasels are cunning creatures, and this one is onto my tricks. He corners an innocent motorbike and starts jabbering away at him. The man translates: “Where do you want to go? He wants to know if you want to take the short cut?”. Me: “He knows where I want to go. And he’s driving me all around town. Tell him direct or no money.” We carry on like this for 10 minutes, sitting on the side of the road, honking traffic speeding past us, splashing arcs of gray water from the puddles.

Mr Weasel gets the better of me. My blood boils, I froth at the mouth, and I prepare to grab Mr Weasel by the throat and throttle this treacherous wretch. I catch myself just in time, jump out of the damned rickshaw and set off up the road.

But now Mr Weasel wants his money. He scampers after me and grabs my arm. “Gimme 50, gimme 50!” he shouts. Mr Weasel is not worth 2 cents let alone 100. He’s half my height but still he stretches out his palm, ready to administer a flying slap. Bloody weasels! I pause and wonder whether I can really knock his head off his shoulders.

And then Mr Innocent Motorbike Man arrives. But he’s no longer Mr Innocent Motorbike Man. He’s now Mr Mounted Conflict de Conflicter, Bringer of Understanding and Peace Amongst Men. He quietly negotiates Mr Weasel’s surrender and extracts Rs 50 Rs 50 from me as a peace settlement.

Mr de Conflicter transforms himself into Mr Benevolent Transporter of Cheated Foreigners. We zoom along Bangalore backstreets and tree-lined boulevards. He instructs me in local ways of beating wily weasels. A full 35 minutes later we arrive at Cunnigham Road. Again, he morphs into Mr Humble refusing my offers to contribute some money towards petrol. “Pray for my family. That is all”. We shake hands, I thank him profusely again, and he slips off into the night.

Mysore

I went to visit the seat of the Wodeyar maharajas, once one of southern India's most powerful kings. The maharaja obviously didn't want for much and his Palace is suitably grand: marble and granite on a huge scale, intricate wood carvings adorn most rooms, and I counted many silver engraved doors.

I especially liked his receiving room with it's ornate peacock stained glass ceiling and his gilded throne. I could see myself sitting there whilst my vassals bowed down to kiss my toes. And just in case they'd forgotten why they had come to pay tribute, the entrance to the grand hall was flanked by two vicious, snarling tigers carved out of heavy black-green marble.

The city itself is vibrant and colourful. The market is a warren of stalls selling piles of long green beans, stacks of plump crimson tomatoes, and pyramids of small pale lemons. Pungent fumes from the stocks of fresh jasmine hang mist-like around the flower stalls. Wholesalers sit on a bed of petals to the left from where they sold sackfuls of roses, frangipanis and other flora. On the right are an army of cross-legged workers who shape the flowers into chains violet, pink, and white offerings to sell to worshipers.

The pace of life in Mysore is relatively laid back. Cows wander the streets, happily hoovering up banana peels and anything else they discover. The star of the trip was undoubtedly the big black and white cow which had discovered a black Suzuki Swift. She stood there, eying the front bumper, nodding her head up and down, and then moved round the side to nuzzle up to the wing mirror. Maybe she was angry, or else she wanted to mate. Either way the result wasn't going to be pretty so I didn't stick around to find out.

2007 Shatabdi Express

Most Brits are conditioned to feel nostalgic about the railways - mainly because we can remember their glory days, but also because we are incessantly complaining about their current dilapidated state.

The railways are an institution in India. Not only does it have the most extensive network in the world, carrying millions of people every day. It is also the world's biggest employer with close to 3m workers. Of course, the impressive statistics hide the fact that much of the rolling stock is old and crumbling, there are few high-speed routes, and delays are frequent.

But for me, riding an Indian train is full of nostalgia. On most European trains food carts are merely designed for glorified snacking. In India, you've barely been seated five minutes when the tea-wallah comes racing down the aisle to offer you a cup of piping hot chai. What's more, he's soon followed by a samosa-wallah, a myriad of others serving rice, raitas, chutneys, curd, mango juice and more!

Outside rice paddies and water buffalo drift past my window. A man is bent double, plucking coriander from his plot. A boy rides an oversized bike down a dirt track. Palm trees and a cloudy grey sky. Humid, sticky. Hot.

On board a plane you miss the subtle, slow transformation of a landscape. Frames of reference are distort and time is shortened. Going by train is the way travel should be: functional yet timeless, languid and enjoyable. I can't help but think we've lost something by flying about in aluminum birds.