After nearly 70 trips across six continents, Professor Vincent Resh has come to see travel as a kind of lifelong education. For 35 years, he has led journeys with Cal Discoveries Travel to Egypt, West Africa, Antarctica, India, and the rivers of Europe, bringing his expertise in environmental science into conversation with the places he visits. But just as often, he finds himself learning from fellow travelers and the people who call those places home. We sat down with Resh to talk about what it takes to move beyond an ordinary “vacation”—and the lasting changes he sees in travelers after a trip.
Urja Upadhyaya: You’ve now led nearly 70 tours. What have those years taught you about what people are seeking when they travel?
Vincent Resh: People interested in international travel have no shortage of options. What Cal Discoveries offers, I think, is a strong intellectual component. The local lecturers are exceptionally knowledgeable and provide a rich sense of place, but the role of the enrichment lecturer is also to put a trip in a broader context. The hope is that travelers carry something home with them, that what they saw on the ground stays alive when they encounter that place again in the news or in conversation. Cal travelers are especially engaged in that way. They arrive curious, prepared, and eager to contribute.
The ways societies imagine and organize life can be wonderfully distinct. Seeing that firsthand changes your sense of the world.
UU: How does your own background shape the way you guide people through a place?
VR: Teaching a wide variety of courses at Berkeley taught me how to take information that may be quite complex and make it digestible. That matters on these trips, because often the conversations become as memorable as the sites themselves, after lectures, around dinner tables, in those in-between moments. My wife and I also prepare book and movie lists for each trip. They help create a common frame of reference, and they often spark some of the best discussions, before and after the journey.
UU: You’ve led trips across an astonishing range of places. What threads connect them for you?
VR: Natural resource issues, especially water. In so many places, the central questions involve water, waterborne disease, flooding, drought, pollution, or the ways cities and civilizations have formed around rivers. Historically, you really cannot have a great city without a great river. I’m always interested in how societies have adapted to those realities and how they have prospered despite adversity. That connection between history, public health, environment, and daily life is one of the strongest threads across these journeys.
UU: What separates an educational journey from an ordinary trip?
VR: For me, very clearly, it is the quality of the tour director and the quality of the local guides. On our recent trip to Madagascar, for example, the local guides did far more than explain wildlife and landscapes. They talked about the country’s challenges, but also about people’s hopes and ambitions. That changes the experience. It moves a trip beyond sightseeing into something more layered and human.
UU: Are there places you feel people do not fully understand until they see them in person?
VR: Certainly. West Africa is one example. People sometimes assume colonization erased local culture there, but the reality is much more complex and in many ways it remains more culturally continuous than they expect. India is another. Travel reveals both commonality and differences. People want security, food, and a better future for their children. Those things are universal. But the ways societies imagine and organize life can be wonderfully distinct. Seeing that firsthand changes your sense of the world.
UU: What do travelers tend to notice differently by the end of a trip?
VR: What I see most is an increase in curiosity. Some travelers arrive having read everything. Others, because life is busy, have had less time to prepare. But by the end of the trip, both groups want to know more. That expanding curiosity is one of the great rewards of travel.
UU: What do you hope people carry home from your trips?
VR: A sense that one of the great pleasures of life is never to stop learning. That is what I see again and again in Cal travelers. The pleasure of travel is not only what a lecturer says. It’s what travelers learn from one another, what they observe for themselves, what a local guide explains, or what someone reveals in passing. Those are the moments that stay with you.
