Pico Iyer has published 15 books, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. At the same time he has been…
“Good Digs in Timbuktu” By Nicholas D. Kristof (an excerpt) It was the slow train to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa, and it had just stopped at the border of the Ivory Coast. Among the mango sellers alongside the train, I found two Canadians who were headed in the same direction.…
My travel mindset has been undergoing a walking-oriented transformation ever since I met my wife Kiki — though my yen for traveling on foot goes back to my 2002 trek across Andorra and 2000 walk across Israel, and even the summer-camp backpacking excursions of my late teens. Below are my five favorite recent Deviate episodes about…
In addition to interviewing other people about their travels and travel-expertise, one joy of the Deviate podcast is the opportunity it affords me to reflect on my own best travel experiences – often with the very people who went on those journeys with me many years ago. My five favorite Deviate episodes about my own…
Late last year, a Spanish researcher named Sergio Gonzalo contacted me with some questions for a multidisciplinary study on travel. “I am trying to approximate how different sciences or disciplines have approached travel as an activity and as a phenomenon,” he wrote. “For that reason, some specialists from different disciplines (such as Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology…
It is commonly known that travelers, when thrown together overseas for extended periods of time, will eventually start to obsess on the idiosyncrasies of their bowels (Tim Cahill has commented on this at length). And, in places where toilet paper seldom exists (such as Asia), there is much debate about just how sanitary it is…
Reporter Thomas Bird interviewed me by email last month for a South China Morning Post article called “Digital nomads adjust to living in one place rather than traveling.” What follows is the full text of our exchange on the topic of how travelers are adjusting and finding opportunities amid new global realities. Do you think…
Two decades on, it’s difficult to remember how obsessively the media was fixated with the 1999-to-2000 New Year (and, in particular, “Y2K glitch” worries about computer data). I was writing my “Vagabonding” column for Salon Travel at the time, and the editor there requested that all regular contributors write a short meditation on where they…
(an excerpt) Space-age technologists tell us that we are the first people for whom it is possible to possess any corner of the globe within twenty-four hours — the first traveler’s for whom the fourth dimension is not a mere hypothesis but an available experience. This very afternoon, you or I could leave the White…
My very first vagabonding trip – which was one of the single greatest journeys of my life (if nothing else because it was my first) – happened 25 years ago, in 1994. My friend Jeff and I spent nearly eight months traveling around North America by van, and the two of us reminisce about the…
Cultural criticism: During a journey across south and southeast Asia, Rolf reflects on the changes he’s seen over the course of 20 years as a vagabonding traveler.
