When I visited Bangkok’s iconic backpacker travel ghetto Khao San Road during my round-the-world “No Baggage Challenge” back in 2010, the experience was, at the time, something of a “walk down memory lane” that channeled an earlier chapter of my vagabonding career. Indeed, eleven years before I made that 2010 video dispatch, I wrote a Salon.com…
Why a chapter about “slum tourism” was edited out of The Vagabond’s Way (with Chloe Cooper Jones)
It’s easy to forget, as travelers, that what feels “inauthentic” by our own cultural standards doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not authentic to the culture we’re visiting. As a foodie, Kiki was over the moon about visiting Bangkok, but when she asked some Thais at our hotel where they might go to find great mango sticky…
Long-term travel 101: Matt Kepnes on how to save money on an extended journey
For more than a generation now, the promotional literature for American universities has painted a picture of diversity that rarely corresponds to actual diversity on campus. Pick up any brochure for any U.S. university, and its glossy photos will show a vivacious mix of white, black, Hispanic and Asian students smiling arm-in-arm on the quad.…
One humbling aspect of climbing Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu is that the rest houses on the mountain are supplied by indigenous Kadazan-Dusun porters who use the same trails as recreational hikers. Hence, while Kiki and I were climbing the mountain in waterproof hiking apparel and light backpacks, we regularly ran into local guys wearing t-shirts and…
Kiki and I didn’t set out to find a satirical Balinese “tourist” mask (which appears 30 seconds into the video below) in the workshop of I Wayan Muka & Mang Mega Mask Product in Ubud. In fact, I might not have stopped by this Balinese craft workshop at all, were it not for Kiki’s interest…
Travel memoir lab: How to blend travel writing with a broader memoiristic life narrative
While my first book had published was Vagabonding in 2003, and the first travel book I wrote (but did not publish) was Pilgrims in a Sliding World in 1995, the first book I ever completed was Dinosaurs, a whimsical (yet completely earnest) hand-illustrated science book that I wrote in 1978, at age seven. I have talked…
The shift from spending a few weeks traveling in Vanuatu to spending a few weeks traveling in Bali made for a curious transition. Not just experientially, but also visually, in terms of choosing what to post on places like Instagram. In Vanuatu, our travel was difficult, frequently uncomfortable, rarely tourist-friendly, and mostly unique to itself.…
How a journey on the Hippie Trail changed Rick Steves’ life (and influenced Rolf’s travels too)
