Friends and vagabonders, My latest update is short and sweet, in large part because I’ve been posting most of my new information over at my weblog. This summer I’ll be splitting time between Thailand (where I’ve been writing my second book) and Paris (where I’ll be teaching the travel writing section of a creative writing…
The walls are a bit thin at my residential hotel here in south Thailand, so I can generally hear what’s going on in room 311 next door — whether I want to or not. Usually it’s just some couple having an argument, or an HBO Asia movie blaring too loud — but last night someone…
This morning, I went on my obligatory monthly visa run to Kawthaung, the small Burmese border town that lies about 20 minutes by boat from my temporary home in Ranong, Thailand. Ranong is where I come to hole up and get my writing done, so I always welcome this visa run, which takes me across…
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings to you from Thailand, where I have just returned full circle after three months in the United States promoting my book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. My thanks to everyone who came out to say hello at my book events on the West Coast, in the…
Friends and vagabonders, After many months of writing and preparation, my Vagabonding guide is now available in bookstores! For comprehensive preview information on the book, go to Vagabonding.net, which will be adding new online content each week, all year long. For daily travel news and links, surf over to my all-new weblog,Vagablogging.net. This “blog” site will…
Central Laos has all the makings of travel’s last frontier: An unmapped wilderness, a lost city, and villagers unaccustomed to visitors. What’s at stake when tourists arrive?
Friends and vagabonders, It’s still a month before my Vagabonding book hits bookstore shelves, but a companion website, Vagabonding.net, is now officially online to give everyone a preview of things to come. Included on the site are a description and early reviews of the book itself, an interactive travel Q&A, a growing archive of vagabonding stories from…
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings from Thailand — and my apologies for being so tardy with this update. Keeping me busy has been a summer of mostly non-Asian travel: a visit to my family in Kansas, meetings with editors in New York, a travel-writing teaching gig at the American Academy in Paris, a hike across the entire…
Friends and vagabonders, This month I’m happy to announce that a couple of the feature articles I’ve written over the past year have finally hit the newsstands. One article, “The Last Archipelago”, appears in the July issue of Conde Nast Traveler, accompanied by several pages of photos by Cathrine Wessel. This story recounts an adventure…
The Mergui has some 800 (largely unmapped) islands, a population of elusive sea gypsies (the Moken), and, because it belongs to repressive Myanmar, almost no visitors. As the junta in Yangon inches toward political reform, Rolf plumbs a final frontier.
He’d navigated the Mekong river, wandered the Libyan Desert, and been stranded in Siberia. Then – in one last adventure after two years of vagabonding – Rolf traveled to Bangkok to face the specter of world-class luxury.
