REAL TRIPS SECTION Real Travel -Joe Robinson The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Humanity -Cindy Ovenrack Dream Vacations -Andy Steiner (print only) Thailand On 500 Baht A Day -Decca Aitkenhead Please Stay Home -Karen Olson Let’s Go—Podunk -Jon Spayde Rough Guide To Your Own Backyard -Chris Dodge (print only) I Disagreed -Christopher Reid (print only) Globetrotter Dogma -Bruce Northam Road Reads Utne Staff Discuss Travel in Café Utne's: cafe.utne.com

It was midnight at the oasis outside Zagora, Morocco. I’d sent my camel to bed. He was hunkered down in the sand still very much awake near my home for the night, a tent used by desert nomads and a growing trickle of Western wanderers. This was once a prime caravan stop of the Tuareg, the masters of the Sahara known as the Blue Men for their trademark indigo scarves. These days the caravans come from the north, mostly France, which has turned this desert outpost into a base camp for adventure travel forays into the Sahara.

For now, it was just me and a wide-awake dromedary, craning our necks in the starlight. Who could sleep with a sky like that going on? I stood on a ridge of dune, gaping at the Milky Way. I’d seen foggy renditions of it, but never this foaming, whitewater river that seemed close enough to kayak. I stared, spellbound, goosebumps rising on my skin. The galaxy was no longer a concept. I was looking at it. The wonder sent me reeling through the inner reaches of outer space, as mythologist Joseph Campbell called it, seeing something I’d looked at hundreds oftimes with new eyes—the real reward of the road. Suddenly this scene was no longer alien. Sahara, dunes, insomniac camel, ghosts of Tuareg caravans, Milky Way, me—it was starstuff one and all. It didn’t matter that countless Moroccans had taken in that view before me. It didn’t matter that there were half a dozen Frenchmen in a tent a couple hundred yards away and that there would be more tomorrow. All that mattered was that I was here now, transfixed by travel’s version of the unified theory.

I’ve often been asked as an adventure magazine editor whether there are any exciting places left in a world that’s already mapped. The answer is: plenty, because the real adventure isn’t about boldly going where no man has gone before; it’s about going where you’ve never been. It’s not about finding the last dune yet to be trod upon by Vibram soles. It’s about the vast landscape of incognita territory within each of us, revealed through the magic of the journey.