The faces with anticipated youth look out from the current identifications, judge or salesman, the neighbor, the man who killed, mattering only as the sliding world they betoken, the time it never mattered to accumulate, the fact that nothing mattered but for what one could make of it, some passing, oblique pleasure, a pain immense…
By Phillip Lopate In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective,…
What it’s like to spend a full year traveling within a day’s radius of your home, with Alastair Humphreys
Late last year I had the honor of participating in a seven-day, 100-kilometer “Walk and Talk” across northern Thailand. Organized by futurist Kevin Kelly and writer-photographer Craig Mod, a “Walk and Talk” mixes long-distance hiking during the day with an in-depth, one-topic-per-night “Jeffersonian conversation” over dinner each evening. Our ten hand-picked participants, strangers to each…
Deviate Super Bowl Special: Superstitions, sacraments, and the weird emotional power of sports
At the height of the Covid pandemic a few years ago, when Kiki and I were dreaming of travel to Kenya, we became fixated with the Lets Drift Instagram account, which depicted the hiking adventures of young Kenyans in the gorgeous landscapes of their own country. For me, the appeal of the Let’s Drift narratives…
One cool thing about traveling through Kenya last summer was the number of fellow-travelers we met who were visiting from other parts of Africa. We met Kevine Kagirimpundu of Rwanda and B’Nor Mackey, originally from Ghana, at Nairobi’s Karen Blixen Museum. Kiki and I were curious about the place because of the 1985 Meryl Streep…
Bestselling author Tim Ferriss and Rolf discuss travel, time wealth and “success management”
Though people have been dreaming up “Bucket Lists” to help focus their travel and life goals for as long as the concept has existed, I have never consciously created one. Granted, I’ve had no shortage of year-to-year travel- and life-goals, but my “bucket list” experiences have typically been realized after the fact. For example, I…
One intriguing aspect of traveling through the desertlike landscape near north Kenya’s Ndoto Mountains was the opportunity it provided us to meet fellow travelers. The travelers in this case there were not Western tourists, but young Rendille “warriors” (tribesmen who’ve been circumcised, but are not yet married) who live traditional nomadic lives in the northern…
Road rituals, imagination, and bringing the mindset of travel back home (Vagabond’s Way book club remix)
