My Deviate podcast has been, since its inception, a pretext to explore topics I don’t typically cover as a travel writer. Granted, a majority of my episodes have nonetheless been about travel (or travel writing), but by its very name, Deviate gives me the opportunity to veer away from what I’m supposed to write about as…
Here’s a curious look into AI image enhancement technology, in relation to how we once captured images. It’s a story that dates back more than 37 years. In early 1989, not long after Kansas native Barry Sanders won the Heisman Trophy as the top player in college football, I had the chance to pose with…
When my mother, Alice Potts, died last month, part of the process of working through my grief came in digging into the archive of digital files I have collected over the years to document her life. This ritual was in part an endeavor to eulogize her in a way that honored who she was, but…
Though I’ve never aspired to be a visual artist — or even studied art history in a formal way — I’ve always been enchanted, as a traveler, by modern art museums. I recall being so fascinated by what I saw at the 1997 Gwangju Biennale in Korea that, more than one decade later, I bought…
Kiki and I visited the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-Strasbourg in Alsace, France, the same week I watched Orson Welles’s quirky 1973 essay-film F for Fake, where, in the context of another French cathedral, Welles noted: This has been standing here for centuries. But, it is without signature. …It might be just this one anonymous glory, of all…
The first copy of Vagabonding I ever held in my hands sits in this display case at The Atlanta Hotel in Thailand. The story of how it ended up there is inseparable from the tale of my own travels in that part of the world. As was the reflexive habit among young budget wanderers passing…
When I visited Bangkok’s iconic backpacker travel ghetto Khao San Road during my round-the-world “No Baggage Challenge” back in 2010, the experience was, at the time, something of a “walk down memory lane” that channeled an earlier chapter of my vagabonding career. Indeed, eleven years before I made that 2010 video dispatch, I wrote a Salon.com…
It’s easy to forget, as travelers, that what feels “inauthentic” by our own cultural standards doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not authentic to the culture we’re visiting. As a foodie, Kiki was over the moon about visiting Bangkok, but when she asked some Thais at our hotel where they might go to find great mango sticky…
One humbling aspect of climbing Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu is that the rest houses on the mountain are supplied by indigenous Kadazan-Dusun porters who use the same trails as recreational hikers. Hence, while Kiki and I were climbing the mountain in waterproof hiking apparel and light backpacks, we regularly ran into local guys wearing t-shirts and…
Kiki and I didn’t set out to find a satirical Balinese “tourist” mask (which appears 30 seconds into the video below) in the workshop of I Wayan Muka & Mang Mega Mask Product in Ubud. In fact, I might not have stopped by this Balinese craft workshop at all, were it not for Kiki’s interest…
The shift from spending a few weeks traveling in Vanuatu to spending a few weeks traveling in Bali made for a curious transition. Not just experientially, but also visually, in terms of choosing what to post on places like Instagram. In Vanuatu, our travel was difficult, frequently uncomfortable, rarely tourist-friendly, and mostly unique to itself.…
