Rolf sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.
Notes on my (never published) first travel book, part I: Pilgrims in a Sliding World
For almost as long as I’ve been making my living as a writer, I’ve been telling folks about the role that failure has played in my development as an author. Specifically, my failure to write an insightful and coherent book about my first vagabonding experience – an eight-month van journey around North America undertaken when…
The secret to adventure is to travel in such a way that it finds you
Our arrival in the South Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu just so happened to coincide with Air Vanuatu, the nation’s flagship airline, going out of business. This meant that we had no easy way to travel domestically from island to island, apart from taking industrial ferries that require passengers share the boat with cargo. Years ago,…
3 key insights from “Dervla Murphy’s Laws of Travel”
1) Unplugged travel is the best travel Abandon your mobile phone, laptop, iPod, and all such links to family, friends, and work colleagues. Concentrate on where you are and derive your entertainment from immediate stimuli, the tangible world around you. Increasingly, in hostels and guesthouses one sees “independent” travelers eagerly settling down in front of…
A history and future of digital and biological technology, with Jane Metcalfe
/
RSS Feed
“We need positive visions of how all this technology gets deployed, because what we visualize is what we build.” –Jane Metcalfe In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jane talk about the pioneering work she did with Wired during the dawn of the “digital revolution” (3:00); how and why Jane’s professional focus shifted away from digital…
“Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology” (Oxford): Introduction essay
Since remote antiquity, for all kinds of reasons, people have left home and hit the road. Couriers and diplomats, merchants and worshippers crisscrossed the Mesopotamian triangle well before 3000 BC. Even tourists, travelling for pleasure, left graffiti on the Pyramids by 1500 BC. Very early in history, then, travel and writing converged. Homer’s Odyssey, the…
Bicycling across the USA (with no money or food) looking for human connection
/
RSS Feed
Filmmaker Daniel Troia talks about his experience of biking across the USA with no food or money
Of Travel, by Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be…
Bill Bryson: The 1998 Salon Wanderlust “Walk in the Woods” interview
Interview by Don George You are usually referred to as a “travel writer,” and your books are shelved in the “travel books” area of bookstores, but you are hardly a conventional travel writer. What does the term “travel writing” mean to you? Well, I suppose all it suggests really is leaving home, having to go…
How writers can sharpen their prose by understanding the “ladder of abstraction”
By Roy Peter Clark Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.” Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy…
Wonder Year: The Art of Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling
/
RSS Feed
Insider tips for family vagabonding and worldschooling