Reaching the village of Tenmaru in the Melanesian South Pacific was quite the task. First, it took Kiki and me nearly 20 hours of trans-Pacific flights to reach Vanuatu by way of Fiji. Then, because Air Vanuatu had just gone out of business, it took us 16 hours on an industrial ferry to reach the…

The video below doesn’t contain a narrative arc — it’s just a series of slice-of-life moments from a half-day cage-truck trip around the northern rim of Malekula Island, en route to the isolated Big Nambas village of Tenmaru. Rough as dirt track looks, it was the only through-road on that part of the island. Buying…

This photo of “kastom” dancers was taken our second full day of traveling through Malekula Island (and its surrounding islets) in the Vanuatu archipelago. Kastom is a pidgin word (a play on the English word “custom”) that refers to traditional art, ceremonies, religion, and magic in Melanesia. This troupe of men and boys from the…

I’d heard of the ritual of drinking kava before I traveled to Vanuatu, but I didn’t realize how pervasive the practice was (particularly among men) until I traveled to the outer reaches of the archipelago. Made from the emulsified bush-roots of Piper methysticum (roughly, “intoxicating pepper”) and mixed with water before being filtered with a…

Although the word “locavore” has something of an upscale-foodie connotation in the US, to “eat foods grown locally whenever possible” (as Merriam-Webster defines it) is pretty much the only option for people who live in the outer islands of Vanuatu. After the 16-hour ferry ride from Efate to Malekula, Kiki and I boarded one more…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

“Staged authenticity” is a term coined by anthropologists to describe how, within the tourist economy, indigenous people perform a version of their culture that caters to the expectations of tradition-obsessed outsiders. My visit to northern Kenya this summer reminded me how complex and savvy displays of indigenous traditions can be — often mixing ancient cultural…