Santi. I’m not sure what Santi does for a living, or where on Samosir Island she lives, but I do know that she was remarkably cheerful for someone who’d just gotten her scarf caught in her motorcycle wheel. I didn’t have a tourist map to Samosir Island, so apart from Lake Sidihoni (more on that…
I found the above sign — and its whimsical rundown of tourist options — at Lake Toba, Sumatra. Apparently a gold-capped variety of magic mushrooms grow on the mountain slopes of Samosir Island, and it is locally legal (in the de facto sense, at least) to harvest and sell them. Many of the restaurants in…
This is the view from the balcony of my Lake Toba, Sumatra guesthouse hotel, which is costing me $11.75 a night. Since I got here I’ve been putting in-house expenses on a tab in a paper ledger at the front desk: $1.42 for a fried-rice-and-chicken dinner; $0.71 for a cup of locally grown Sumatran coffee;…
1) On the liberating joy of trashy movies Trash doesn’t belong to the academic tradition, and that’s part of the fun of trash—that you know (or should know) that you don’t have to take it seriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and trifling and entertaining. …Who at some point hasn’t…
Ganda. Short for “Propaganda,” a word his mother found in a magazine the week he was born. Propaganda never had a problem with his name until his 20s, when he got a job on a Holland America cruise ship. The word “Propaganda” on his nametag befuddled English-speaking passengers and made his bosses nervous. Now he…
Twenty-five years ago this month, when I was about to embark on an eight-month van journey around North America (my first-ever vagabonding sojourn), my sister gifted me this copy of Let’s Go USA 1993. At the time I had only the dimmest conception of what indie travel-guidebooks were. That first journey taught me that travel…
By William Zinsser (an excerpt) Next to knowing how to write about people, you should know how to write about a place. People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like. In a few cases…
Friends and vagabonders, Twenty years to the month after my first international vagabonding journey, I have embarked on another multi-month adventure through Asia. Back in 1999 the journey began in Bangkok, lasted nearly three years, led to my first book Vagabonding, and was largely chronicled in my second book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. I…
1) Bringing a list of questions isn’t essential When it comes to interviews, I very rarely turn up with a list of questions. Almost never, in fact. If you’ve prepared well, and know something about your subject, the conversation just happens. –Tom Bissell, interviewed in The Rumpus, April 17, 2012 2) Let the person talk…
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty and has the usual desire to stay pretty. Once she is healed, she takes her new face out on the streets of Rio. A young man with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead. The body is shipped back to…
1) On the importance of reading to writing I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns…
