Home is central to travel and vice versa, for without the former, how would one define the latter? One needs to move away from home, presumably, or towards home, in order to engage in travel. For home is the place that defines us, home is often where we feel safe and it is the place we long to return to once we have left home behind. Yet home is also where we feel most bored and constricted; home is the place we feel we know all too well, just as it is a place that locks us into an identity we may not cherish.

Accordingly, home is often the reason we set out to travel in the first place. Robyn Davidson (1980, 18), in Tracks, describes journeying away from home in order to challenge and escape ‘the antipodean machismo’ that she feels constricted by in her everyday life. In The European Tribe, Caryl Phillips (2000b, 2) leaves home behind because ‘I had no idea where I was from’. Nominally British, Phillips does not feel truly at home in a country in which his St. Kitts heritage and non-white skin are perceived as a mark of the foreign. Hence, he feels a need to leave home behind in order to search for a new one. To travel then, may in fact be to engage in a figurative quest for home, even as one moves away from it in physical terms.

Indeed, to be on the move, to travel from one place to another, can itself be construed as a form of home. Nomads, for instance, live their entire lives on the move (see nomadism). To nomads ‘home’ may be a yurt, a camel or an entire region. Unlike the majority of people in the industrialized world, nomads do not have a house or a flat to call their own. Accordingly, a nomadic conception of home may run counter to Eurocentric notions of home as ‘fixed, rooted, stable – the very antithesis of travel’ (George 1999, 2). Indeed, it was an obsession with nomadic conceptions of home that led Bruce Chatwin, in The Songlines (1987), to leave the specifics of his home in London behind in order to search for a more universal sense of home. The central argument of Chatwin's book is that humanity's original home is precisely not a condition of being in stasis.