Travel-culture essay: Within certain hipster circles of indie travel, announcing that you patronize McDonald’s is kind of like confessing that you eat your boogers. But the contempt sophisticated travelers hold for McDonald’s has less to do with ethical principle than the fact that fast-food franchises ruin the fantasies of otherness that are an inherent part of travel.
Why do places grow vaguely annoying once they become travel destinations?
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).
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).
What could possibly be bad about an on-the-road romance? Try rekindling it when you get home.
What’s money worth? In Myanmar, Rolf discovers that travel has a way of putting “cash value” into a new perspective.
On a journey through western India, Rolf explores the former Portuguese outpost of Diu, which brims with history’s phantoms.
Is it weird to want to visit the flood-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward during Mardi Gras season?
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…
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.
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.
