Charts & Graphs

Study Abroad

Educational voyages.

Painting of a curly-haired woman holding up a pen and a book Name Egeria
Travel Dates 381–84
Itinerary A Christian woman born in either Aquitaine or Spain, Egeria retraced the path of the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt, spent time at the Sea of Galilee, and visited Jerusalem.
Lessons Learned Writing home to a community of religious sisters, Egeria described climbing Mount Sinai by foot, “the ascent being impossible in the saddle, and yet I did not feel the toil…because I realized that the desire which I had was being fulfilled at God’s bidding.”
Statue of a thin bald man with a long pointed beard Name Faxian
Travel Dates c. 399–c. 412
Itinerary Around the age of sixty, the Buddhist monk Faxian traveled by foot across the Pamir Mountains to centers of Buddhist learning in northwestern India.
Lessons Learned For ten years Faxian learned Sanskrit and transcribed Buddhist texts, including the Nirvana Sutra. Carrying several Buddhist scriptures, he returned to China around 412, landing at the Shandong Peninsula after a two-hundred-day journey. He died ten years later at the age of eighty-five.
Painting of a woman wearing a large ruffled collar Name Hester Lynch Piozzi
Travel Dates 1784–87
Itinerary After marrying an Italian singer, Piozzi left England to tour Europe and published an account of her journey in 1789.
Lessons Learned While in Italy, she viewed the Venetian doge’s private art collection, visited the ruins of the Roman Forum, and watched Mount Vesuvius erupt. “Power unlimited once, now changed to a childish display of empty splendor,” she wrote in a 1785 letter, “are the images with which Rome impresses one’s imagination.”
B&W photograph of a man with dark hair and a beard Name Bayard Taylor
Travel Dates 1844–46
Itinerary Haunted from early childhood by an “enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World,” Taylor left for Europe in 1844 with $140 and spent two years traveling around the continent by foot.
Lessons Learned “I have seen no city yet which so forcibly reminds me of the past,” Taylor wrote in one letter from Prague. “In a word, it is, like Venice, a fallen city; though, as in Venice, the improving spirit of the age is beginning to give it a little life.
B&W photograph of a woman with her hair up Name Florence Merriam Bailey
Travel Dates 1889–94
Itinerary Bailey conducted field research in Southern California by horse and published her third bird-watching guide, A-Birding on a Bronco, in 1896.
Lessons Learned On viewing a crushed wren’s nest during one of her rides, she wrote, “You become so much interested in the families you are watching that you feel as if their troubles were yours, and are haunted by the fear that they will think you have something to do with their accidents.”
Color photograph of a man with light hair looking to his left Name Benedict Cumberbatch
Travel Dates 1995–96
Itinerary After deferring his university education, Cumberbatch traveled to Darjeeling, where he taught English and learned to meditate at a Buddhist monastery.
Lessons Learned On a hiking trip to Nepal, Cumberbatch and four friends became lost and suffered from altitude sickness and amoebic dysentery. “We were woefully underprepared,” Cumberbatch later said. “I had simply an extra scarf my mother had knitted me and a piece of cheese.”