This photo was taken last summer, during my keynote speech at Kazakhstan’s “Go Viral” festival, which is a kind of Central Asian equivalent of TED Talks. I also gave some smaller talks, including a “Travel Storytelling” session to a room full of young Kazakhs. The crowd was smart and engaged, and they had tons of…

The month I spent in Sumatra proved to be as spectacular a kickoff to any year I’ve experienced during my time on planet earth – but it was merely the first stop on a dynamic Air Treks itinerary that took me to a number of countries in Asia ( with Sri Lanka, as we shall…

The sudden rise of the COVID-19 pandemic last month (which, in real time, didn’t feel sudden, even as data changed on a daily basis) left us all scrambling to understand what was happening, why it was happening, and what we should do about it. One way I sought to make sense of the disease during…

I need to confess, as I come to the end of the Sumatra leg of these Dispatches, that the visual narrative of these posts is – perhaps inevitably – shaped by what I was able to photograph as a solo traveler on the island. A few weeks ago I illustrated a mini-essay about the joys…

One curious aspect of my stay at Sumatra’s Rimba Ecolodge was the fact that, during my tenure there, I was the only guest who was not there to observe wildlife. We all ate meals together in the dining lodge, and while I enjoyed the company of my French and Dutch and German fellow-travelers, they would…

One physical activity I rediscovered during my time in Sumatra was open-water swimming. I alluded to this in my previous post about Lake Maninjau – but whereas my swim to the bat-infested slopes of Tarandam Island was a one-off undertaking, I swam over mile each day during my stay at Rimba Ecolodge. Specifically, I made…

Nadege and Reno founded Rimba Eco-Lodge almost one decade ago as a way to integrate tourism with habitat preservation on the Indian Ocean coast of West Sumatra. Tourism, they tell me, is more sustainable than logging or mining when it comes to bringing money into the area – and the very presence of tourists protects…

I spent my final week on Sumatra at Rimba, a remote ecolodge on a roadless stretch of coast one hour by boat from Padang. There, I rented a rattan-and-bamboo room with beach access and a view of the Indian ocean for $18 a night, including three meals a day at the dining lodge, and full…

I think I become smitten with wherever I am in the world if I have enough time to linger and get to know it a little. This was certainly the case with the Mentawai settlements of Siberut Island, an isolated and beautiful (and, at times, uncomfortable) place that harbors some of my favorite travel memories…

My guide in the jungles of Siberut Island was a Mentawai fellow named Agus, who was a walking example of how cultures everywhere creatively adapt to a globalized word. Agus wore Western garb, had a university linguistics degree from the Sumatran mainland, and spoke great English (his fourth language, after Mentawai, Bahasa, and Minangkabau) –…

This post isn’t about the dragonfly pictured here; it’s about the joys (and challenges) of trying to take a shit in the jungles of Siberut Island. One would have to be extremely self-conscious to take a selfie while voiding one’s bowels in the jungle; hence the photo of this dragonfly, which I spotted while looking…