Our arrival in the South Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu just so happened to coincide with Air Vanuatu, the nation’s flagship airline, going out of business. This meant that we had no easy way to travel domestically from island to island, apart from taking industrial ferries that require passengers share the boat with cargo. Years ago,…
1) Unplugged travel is the best travel Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, iPod, and all such links to family, friends, and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are and derive your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you. Increasingly, in hostels and guesthouses one sees “independent” travelers eagerly settling down in front of…
“We need positive visions of how all this technology gets deployed, because what we visualize is what we build.” –Jane Metcalfe In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jane talk about the pioneering work she did with Wired during the dawn of the “digital revolution” (3:00); how and why Jane’s professional focus shifted away from digital…
Since remote antiquity, for all kinds of reasons, people have left home and hit the road. Couriers and diplomats, merchants and worshippers crisscrossed the Mesopotamian triangle well before 3000 BC. Even tourists, travelling for pleasure, left graffiti on the Pyramids by 1500 BC. Very early in history, then, travel and writing converged. Homer’s Odyssey, the…
Filmmaker Daniel Troia talks about his experience of biking across the USA with no food or money
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be…
Interview by Don George You are usually referred to as a “travel writer,” and your books are shelved in the “travel books” area of bookstores, but you are hardly a conventional travel writer. What does the term “travel writing” mean to you? Well, I suppose all it suggests really is leaving home, having to go…
By Roy Peter Clark Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.” Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy…
Insider tips for family vagabonding and worldschooling
The title of this book is not my own creation: It is a direct quote from an inmate I met at Bangkok’s women’s prison in January of 1999. At the time I had been a full-time travel writer for less than a month, and I’d been telling people I planned to travel across Asia in…
At some point, writers of creative nonfiction come to a road block or dead end in our writing, where we don’t have access to the facts we need to tell our story or to sustain our reflection with depth and fullness. If only it was ethical to just make something up, we might think, or…
