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)
When my first book, Vagabonding, hit bookstores early in 2003, it didn’t make many bestseller or Top-10 lists — though it did find an enthusiastic word-of-mouth following that has slowly grown in the two-plus decades since it first debuted. This grassroots success has been so resonant that Vagabonding has, in the past ten years or so, landed…
A travel writers’ Super Bowl special: Pico Iyer and Rolf discuss NFL football from the global perspective
If there’s one twist to our taking a 16-hour industrial ferry from Port Vila to the South Pacific island of Malekula when Air Vanuatu went out of business, it’s that — if we wanted to leave the country as scheduled — we had to find a way to get back to Port Vila. For us,…
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…
