This work encompasses three parts: theoretical, quantitative empirical and qualitative empirical. Modern humanistic, particularly sociological, reflection on the phenomenon of travel is critically reviewed in the first part. Travel is treated here as a physical and actual relocation in space; a movement or passage from one place to another. The mobility involves a need to leave ”home”, understood as an ”everyday environment”. The departure from ”home” results in finding oneself in ”other”, unusual geographic, social, natural and cultural environment. Part Two, based on quantitative analyses of data aggregated from different sources, aims at depicting foreign travels of Poles in the last fifty years or so and is essentially of descriptive nature. The third part attempts to analyze the phenomenon of travel from the point of view of intercivilization contacts, based on the author’s survey of tourists from the western world in India and offers a qualitative analysis of the accounts of Polish travelers visiting India from the end of 16th century to date. The focus here is the experience of strangeness and the methods used by the travelers to familiarize it.