Why do places grow vaguely annoying once they become travel destinations?
World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books
Book reviews: In a round-up of top travel books for the Travel Channel’s World Hum, Rolf sings the praises of Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu (#8), Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (#11), Tim Cahill’s Road Fever (#21), Tony Horwitz’s Baghdad Without a Map (#26), and Jeffrey Tayler’s Facing the Congo (#28).
Why we buy dumb souvenirs
Travel-culture essay: Souvenir hunting is not a meaningful examination of place so much as it is a litmus test of our own whims and preconceptions as travelers. At a certain level, buying an electric blender is more representative of day-to-day Indian life than buying Kashmiri silk (though, admittedly, a blender would not look as good in your living room).
The Dark Side of Travel Romance
What could possibly be bad about an on-the-road romance? Try rekindling it when you get home.
Lost in Transaction
What’s money worth? In Myanmar, Rolf discovers that travel has a way of putting “cash value” into a new perspective.
India’s isle of ghosts
On a journey through western India, Rolf explores the former Portuguese outpost of Diu, which brims with history’s phantoms.
In New Orleans: The Allure of Disaster Tourism
Is it weird to want to visit the flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward during Mardi Gras season?
Update: Fall/Winter 2005-2006
Friends and vagabonders, 2005 proved to be a busy year for me, with travels and sojourns in New Orleans, England, northern Kansas, France, Greece, California, and Mexico. A Korean translation of Vagabonding debuted in Asian bookstores early in the year, and I had an all-new story, “Something Approaching Enlightenment” in Lonely Planet’s By the Seat…
The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra
He traversed an entire nation in a long weekend. Now, Rolf shows how you can impress members of the opposite sex and write a textbook-perfect travel article in eight easy steps.
An Open Letter to Lewis Lapham
Commentary: Though the outgoing Harper’s editor’s opinions invariably carry a left-wing slant, Lapham would seem to be a profoundly conservative thinker — someone who has never questioned the insipidity of his elite, east-coast patrician-intellectual assumptions.
The tourist is always the other guy
Travel-culture essay: The rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity: it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash.