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.
When Rolf’s parents accompany him on a trip to Mongolia, he suddenly finds the whole parent-child dynamic reversed. But who’s teaching whom a lesson?
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings from Kansas, of all places — and thanks to everyone who wrote me after last month’s update with recipes and anecdotes about eating human placenta. Nobody actually volunteered to scarf down afterbirth on television, but I did learn a lot about this bizarre culinary art. One reader, who used to work…
Friends and vagabonders, First off, I want to send special thanks out to all my old friends who sent sarcastic “Rolf = David Hasselhoff” e-mails after last month’s Update featured a picture of me running up a beach in a swimsuit. This month, I regret that the Update photo is not nearly so worthy of…
Rolf reports from Thailand on the difficulty of taking part in a time-honored American custom — watching the Super Bowl — while traveling in Asia.
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings once again from Thailand, and here’s hoping 2002 finds you well! Late 2001 was a busy time for me, with various magazine assignments sending me hiking into the jungles of Thailand’s Khao Sok National Park, scuba-diving in the Andaman sea, and exploring the Mergui archipelago in the south of Myanmar. 2002…
Friends and vagabonders, Those of you who subscribe to my bimonthly mailing list may have noticed that I failed to send out an update message this month. There are two reasons for this. For starters, the events and aftermath of 9/11 seem to have resulted in a glut of forwarded news and opinion emails, and…
Friends and vagabonders, Well, I never thought I’d come to the point where I’d willingly display a photo of myself astride a horse. Maybe this is because I grew up so near the prairie, yet never learned how to properly ride a horse. Or perhaps this is due to lingering resentment over the fact that…
