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.
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.
