Last year around this time I wrote a post called “Rolf’s Top-10 ‘Reverse-Bucket List’ experiences from 2023,” in which I confessed that I’ve near really been one to create “bucket lists” so much as decide, after the fact, that a given experience was extraordinary enough to have retroactively qualified as bucket-list worthy. Many of these…
Pico Iyer on how solitude, stillness, and silence play an essential counterbalance to the traveling life
From the moment I left home for the South Pacific, my intention was to give my gray One4Us cap away to a local person who I felt embodied the inclusive vision of the brand. My interest in One4Us flows out of my four-decade friendship with its CEO and founder, Tony Johnson. The stated ideals of…
Life changing travel experiences: Memories of Syria, 25 years on (with Ari Shaffir)
Pilgrims in a Sliding World, my first attempt at writing a travel book, was (and will always remain) never completed. Though I’d set out to write the account of an eight-month van journey that had meandered its way through 37 states, I gave up on the book a little over halfway – describing just four-and-a-half…
Vanuatu’s national dish, laplap (a kind of stone-cooked yam-paste pudding) is so unphotogenic that I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to eating it on my trip to the South Pacific. It probably didn’t help that travel writer J. Maarten Troost, at one point in his humorous 2007 Vanuatu memoir Getting Stoned with Savages, declared: “I hate…
For all of the shortcomings I’ve identified in Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at writing a travel book), it’s worth pointing out that it contained some of the earliest seeds of what later did become my first book, Vagabonding. At a certain level that makes perfect sense, as Pilgrims in a…
Travel memoir lab: How to fast-track your travel book by working with a hybrid publisher
Read any number of travel memoirs about Vanuatu, and you will find repeated use of such hard-K words as kava, kastom, cargo cults, and cannibalism (as well as such non hard-K words as volcanoes and land-diving). Oddly, these same travel memoirs only mention Christianity in passing — or, when they do mention it, they take…
Mike and Anne Howard of Honey Trek talk about working as travel influencers and content creators
In re-reading Pilgrims in a Sliding World (my never-published first attempt at a travel book), I’m often struck by how young the narrator seems. This makes perfect sense, of course, since the book evokes a 24-year-old version of me trying to narrate the exploits of a 23-year-old version of me. Admittedly, I didn’t feel all…
