Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

Travel does not exist without home....If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.

The magnificent thing about her [Amelia Earhart] is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart's legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don't think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon.

If travel has momentum and wants to stay in motion, as I mentioned earlier, then adventure has the gravitational pull of a black hole. The more you do it, the more you find a way to keep doing it.

Adventrue rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run.

The true secret to seeking the unknown is in the looking, not the finding. The journey is what matters.

We cannot bear for our most mysterious experiences to remain unexplained. I've therefore learned...that every story has worth, since a person takes the time to tell it. The key is to listen.

They're both a bit cavalier about the whole thing at first; more than anything, they seem to think that it's going to be a lot of fun. Which it is, of course, but mostly in the way a plane crash is fun to reminisce about after you survive it.

What i took away from witnessing the broken climbers in Moshi was this: *Everything is easy until it isn't.*

This isn't my last brush with catastrophe while making Destination Truth. Rather, it's merely the opening act in a cabaret of close calls, all in the name of exploration. I'm not saying that making D.T. is dangerous; it's not, per se. It's just that when you go out of your way to find adventure, sometimes adventure bites you on the ass. The key is figuring out how to walk away in one piece.

Beyond customs and norms and wildly variant beliefs, we all generally laugh, cry, and make our way along the dusty road of life in pretty much the same way.

When traveling in rural Africa, it's important to not actually *go* to a hospital until the patient is on the brink of expiration, otherwise things are apt to get worse.

As travelers, it is our responsibility to adapt, otherwise we miss the whole point: the opportunity to gain a new perspective.

When we can stand in the solitary presence of something magnificent, the obligation of sharing the experience evaporates, and we are free to truly be a part of it.

Where can one buy a lit of that *Right Stuff* bravado required to shrug off the fact that your airplane is now a convertible?

Seeing the world is a prerequisite to understanding one’s place in it.

I've therefore learned, above all, that every story has worth, since a person takes the time to tell it. The key is to listen.

Chernobyl haunts us with the reminder that all of man’s ambitions are ephemeral. Our grandest designs and sturdiest monuments,

There is a stillness to those in-between hours, a meditative peace to the dawn that evaporates with sunlight, a solitude to dusk that is consumed by night. It’s a private place where we seem to have infinitely more clarity of purpose.

And so I would like to humbly offer a little basic travel etiquette (and a tip or two on how to not be an international douchebag).

In flight...entire days can be wound back or skipped over...as we exist merely in a world of vapor. Adventures are both beginning and coming to a close up here as people from opposite ends of experience paradoxically move in one direction.

Never travel with people you aren’t willing to depend on. Remember that.

It’s just that when you go out of your way to find adventure, sometimes adventure tries to bite you on the ass. The key is figuring out how to walk away in one piece.