Back to Global Conversations 2.05: Mary Morris, Author and Travel Writer

If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably love traveling. Taking off on the plane with the promise of a new world to explore when you land, meeting locals who will introduce you to their foods, customs, and cultures. It’s all very exciting. But for many, the preparation for travel — the research, the planning, reading books… helps us get inspired but also informed for upcoming trips. So for the next couple of weeks, we’re talking to some of Melissa’s favorite travel writers.

Melissa’s guest today, Mary Morris wrote one of her very favorite travel books ever, called Nothing to Declare, which is a bit ironic because in the book she has a great deal to declare about the role of travel in life, especially in women’s lives—how travel lets us dream and be open to the world and to possibilities and to ourselves. It celebrates solo travel but also how the people we meet on the road can transform us. Her latest book, one of sixteen that she’s written, is called All the Way the Tigers and is about pursuing one of her long-held travel dreams to visit India. “As a child, I had a tiger dream,” she writes in the beginning, and what follows is a three-year trip, literally, of a lifetime but also of the things that life can throw at us and how to move past them. Mary has a lot to say about freedom, obstacles, and how to overcome them but also how sometimes the most important decisions in our lives aren’t obvious ones.