2. Travel talk

Travel/travelling (nouns)

"Travel" is the general term to describe going from one place to another, but we do not often use it as a noun. We can talk about someone's travels to refer to the journeys he makes:

• His travels abroad provided lots of background material for the novels he wrote.

"Travelling" is also a general term which refers to the activity of travel:

• Travelling by boat between the islands is less tiring than travelling by road.
• I don't do as much travelling as I used to now that I'm retired.

"Travel" is often part of compound nouns.

• Make sure you keep all your travel documents safely.
• You can obtain your tickets from the travel agents in the High Street if you don't want to order them over the Internet.
• Some of you may suffer from travel sickness.
• Air travel may well give you a bumpy ride.

We often use travel as a verb:

• I love travelling during the summer holidays.
• This year I plan to travel all around the Iberian Peninsula.

Journey (noun)

A journey is one single piece of travel. You make journeys when you travel from one place to another. (Note that the plural is spelt "journeys", not "journies"):

• The journey from London to Newcastle by train can now be completed in under three hours.

 We occasionally use "journey" as a verb as an alternative to "travel", although it may sound a bit formal or poetic:

• We journeyed /travelled between the pyramids in Mexico on horseback.

(Go on a) trip

A trip usually involves more than one single journey and is usually for a purpose (school, business, etc.). We talk about day trips, round trips and business trips. We make journeys usually, but we go on trips:

• I went on a day trip to France. We left at 6.30 in the morning and returned before midnight the same day.
• The round-trip ticket enabled me to visit all the major tourist destinations in India.
• John's gone on a business trip to Malaysia and Singapore.
• The trip went well. It was an old car, but we didn't break down in four weeks of travelling.

(Go on an) expedition

An expedition is an organised trip whose purpose is usually "scientific exploration of the environment".

• Numerous expeditions to The Antarctic have ended in disaster.
• Are you going to join the expedition up the Amazon this year, like the one Tom went on last year?

Less dangerous and less adventurous are shopping expeditions when you are hunting down particular goods or bargains and fishing expeditions when you go in search of fish which are not easy to locate or catch.

A safari is a trip or expedition to observe wild animals in their natural habitat in Africa, usually. You go on safari to safari parks.

A cruise is a holiday during which you travel on a ship or boat and visit a number of places en route. When we cruise, this is exactly what we do.

A voyage is a long journey, not necessarily for pleasure, on a ship. We don't talk about voyages very much in the present time, but historically they were very significant.

• Christopher Columbus's second voyage (1493 - 1496) led to the discovery of several Caribbean islands. On his third voyage (1498 - 1500), he discovered the South American mainland.