This image from my trekking journey in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands figured into the recent Deviate episode wherein Ari Shaffir and I discussed the idiosyncrasies of travel onstage at KGB Bar in NYC. Specifically, we talked about the tourist desire to see a “pure” vision of distant cultures, and how years of working with travelers in…
Exactly 10,603 days days ago this week I packed a few belongings into a second-hand 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon (into which I’d built a homemade fold-out bed), and embarked on a journey across North America that wound up lasting eight months. Nowadays this endeavor is known as #vanlife, but in that pre-hashtag era it was (for…
My book The Vagabond’s Way has a mini-chapter entitled “The Definition of ‘Traveler’ is Broad (and Vibrant),” which examines the notion that “middle-class folks from industrialized countries aren’t the only people taking journeys.” I allude to a number of situations that illustrate this (based on travel experiences in India, Mexico, Laos, and Sumatra), but the…
The setting of the Listasavn Føroya, the Faroe Islands’ little national art gallery, can at times feel less like a museum than the parkside home of a person who really enjoys art. Michigander Matthew Landrum, who translates Faroese poetry into English (check out his translation of Katrin Ottarsdottir’s Are There Copper Pipes in Heaven), was…
For travelers seeking to keep track of how many countries they’ve visited, a common question is: What, exactly, counts as a “visit” When Kiki and I hiked through the Finnskogen region of Norway, for example, the trail took us across the border into Sweden’s Värmland province, before it looped us back into Norwegian territory a…
It took a trip to Norway, of all places, for me to learn of an American car known as the “Vagabond” — a proto-hatchback manufactured by Michigan’s Kaiser Motors in the late 1940s. One curious thrill of travel is the opportunity it offers you to see your own country through the eyes of another culture.…
Of the many pleasurable travel moments I found amid my August 2022 journey through Norway, I got a curious thrill out of the afternoon I spent dozing in this hammock, alongside a forest-fringed lake not far from Sørumsand. Over the years I’ve come to believe that the multifarious sights and activities a new place offers…
This image is the result of a free-writing exercise my wife Kiki led near the Louvre, during the 2022 Paris Writing Workshops. Kiki is a classically trained actress, and she drew on her stage skills to create an exercise where students lingered near the Louvre, attempting to describe people in their journals without using adjectives,…
My travel mindset has been undergoing a walking-oriented transformation ever since I met my wife Kiki — though my yen for traveling on foot goes back to my 2002 trek across Andorra and 2000 walk across Israel, and even the summer-camp backpacking excursions of my late teens. Below are my five favorite recent Deviate episodes about…
In addition to interviewing other people about their travels and travel-expertise, one joy of the Deviate podcast is the opportunity it affords me to reflect on my own best travel experiences – often with the very people who went on those journeys with me many years ago. My five favorite Deviate episodes about my own…
One great thing about travel is the way it forces you to come to terms with the rich complexity of history – particularly the amazing historical sites you had no idea existed until you set off to wander the world. Many fellow-travelers recommended that I visit Sigiriya when I was in Sri Lanka, but it…
