News analysis: Rolf and writers like Pico Iyer and James Fallows speculate on what travel will look like after the COVID-19 pandemic.
An unexpected long-haul tuk-tuk journey through central Sri Lanka
After traveling classic Sri Lankan train routes across the highlands from Kandy to Ella to Nuwara Eliya, I ended up taking a long-haul tuk-tuk from Nuwara Eliya to the Adam’s Peak trailhead town of Nallathanniya. This wasn’t planned in advance; I did it at the suggestion of my driver, Suranga, whom I’d hired to take…
It is totally normal to see a quasi-Rastafarian bar in the middle of Sri Lanka
This is Nuwon, who oversees a restaurant named Mandala Café just down the road from the train station in Ella. Mandala Café has an unabashedly Rastafarian vibe, and pictures of reggae great Bob Marley hang in every corner of the restaurant. Though Ella is a mountain town smack in the middle of Sri Lanka, Mandala…
On the joys of hostel life in a Sri Lankan hill-station backpacker town
Located in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, Ella is a classic backpacker town. Sure, there are parts of Ella that exist independent of tourism, but it’s not hard to spend a week in the town entirely in the company of travelers from Europe and North America. There are plenty of things to do in…
In Sri Lanka trains don’t just take you to attractions; they are the attraction
While trains are a great way for travelers to get around in many parts of the world, in Sri Lanka they are something of an attraction in and of themselves. On the Kandy-to-Ella train through the central highlands – and again on the Ella-to-Nuwara Eliya train – my fellow travelers spent hours hanging out the…
Update: Spring 2020
Friends and vagabonders, I’ve been writing these updates for more than two decades now – it’s something I’ve been doing for such a long time that, in the age of continually updated social media, a website Update page feels downright anachronistic. Yet for all the years I’ve written travel-updates from various corners of the world,…
On the joys of staying put (and running errands) in a place like Sri Lanka
Having arrived in Kandy without a hostel reservations (or even a Sri Lanka guidebook), I fell back on the old backpacker trick of asking local folks at the train station for recommendations. Two decades ago they might have pointed me to a hostel (which was what I had in mind), but now that I’m in…
Stepping back onto the backpacker trail on the trains of Sri Lanka
After a guesthouse reservation fell through in Colombo I decided to give Sri Lanka’s sweltering capital a miss and head five hours inland to the storied hill-station city of Kandy. Coming off Sumatra I hadn’t properly fleshed out my travel plans for Sri Lanka, but sometimes it’s nice to improvise, and learn things as you…
How being travel-influential differs from being an travel “influencer”
This photo was taken last summer, during my keynote speech at Kazakhstan’s “Go Viral” festival, which is a kind of Central Asian equivalent of TED Talks. I also gave some smaller talks, including a “Travel Storytelling” session to a room full of young Kazakhs. The crowd was smart and engaged, and they had tons of…
One could spend years in Indonesia without needing to revisit a single place
The month I spent in Sumatra proved to be as spectacular a kickoff to any year I’ve experienced during my time on planet earth – but it was merely the first stop on a dynamic Air Treks itinerary that took me to a number of countries in Asia ( with Sri Lanka, as we shall…
Travel and health in the age of COVID-19: A Deviate podcast roundup
The sudden rise of the COVID-19 pandemic last month (which, in real time, didn’t feel sudden, even as data changed on a daily basis) left us all scrambling to understand what was happening, why it was happening, and what we should do about it. One way I sought to make sense of the disease during…