Ben Groundwater Jan 9 2015 at 12:15 AM

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"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."

So said the oft-quoted Mark Twain, having recently visited the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The American writer's eyes had apparently been opened by his travels, his thoughts and ideas changed by the things he'd seen and the people he'd met overseas.

As an experience, it's something that must be as old as travel itself. Surely even the earliest explorers had their minds irrevocably changed by their treks into the great unknown. Everyone from Marco Polo to Captain Cook must have been forever altered in their assumptions and knowledge of the world.

Travel changes you. Anyone who's been away overseas for an extended period of time and come back to a reverse culture shock, to the realisation that nothing and no one in Australia has changed in the slightest, would understand this.

There's huge frustration when you come home to find that no one else has seen the things you've seen, and no one thinks the way you think. The world is an exciting, fascinating place. Travellers know this.

And that knowledge changes you. According to Twain it makes you a more tolerant, open-minded person. It removes your prejudices and makes you appreciate the essential similarities that everyone in the world shares.

I've always agreed with this point of view. I don't know how you could travel and keep a closed mind. So much of bigotry and xenophobia is a product of ignorance, a fear of people and places unknown.

Once you see those places, meet those people, the fear is taken away.

Continued here:

Are travellers more open-minded than those who don't?