Here’s a post that will appeal primarily to geography dorks: Danau Sidihoni (pictured above), which I reached by motorcycle during my Lake Toba sojourn, has the distinction of being a lake that is on an island (Samosir) that is on a lake (Toba) that is on an island (Sumatra). Perhaps someday an enterprising Sumatran developer…
Santi. I’m not sure what Santi does for a living, or where on Samosir Island she lives, but I do know that she was remarkably cheerful for someone who’d just gotten her scarf caught in her motorcycle wheel. I didn’t have a tourist map to Samosir Island, so apart from Lake Sidihoni (more on that…
I found the above sign — and its whimsical rundown of tourist options — at Lake Toba, Sumatra. Apparently a gold-capped variety of magic mushrooms grow on the mountain slopes of Samosir Island, and it is locally legal (in the de facto sense, at least) to harvest and sell them. Many of the restaurants in…
This is the view from the balcony of my Lake Toba, Sumatra guesthouse hotel, which is costing me $11.75 a night. Since I got here I’ve been putting in-house expenses on a tab in a paper ledger at the front desk: $1.42 for a fried-rice-and-chicken dinner; $0.71 for a cup of locally grown Sumatran coffee;…
Ganda. Short for “Propaganda,” a word his mother found in a magazine the week he was born. Propaganda never had a problem with his name until his 20s, when he got a job on a Holland America cruise ship. The word “Propaganda” on his nametag befuddled English-speaking passengers and made his bosses nervous. Now he…
Twenty-five years ago this month, when I was about to embark on an eight-month van journey around North America (my first-ever vagabonding sojourn), my sister gifted me this copy of Let’s Go USA 1993. At the time I had only the dimmest conception of what indie travel-guidebooks were. That first journey taught me that travel…
Friends and vagabonders, Twenty years to the month after my first international vagabonding journey, I have embarked on another multi-month adventure through Asia. Back in 1999 the journey began in Bangkok, lasted nearly three years, led to my first book Vagabonding, and was largely chronicled in my second book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There. I…
From Off Assignment’s recurring feature devoted to the letters that travel writers pen during their earliest hours in alien lands, Rolf shares a 2000 letter he wrote to his new Belgian girlfriend from Laos.
“Araki was the only drink on offer, and the owner sloshed it into a plastic bottle from an unwieldy jerrycan before moving around the room to refill clients’ glasses for ten cents a shot.”
“Whatever Johnny Wadie Red Tabel was, it wasn’t whisky; its flavor was a medicinal blend of anise, vanilla, and laundry detergent, and its buzz arrived in tandem with its hangover.”
Rolf leaps off of cliffs, soars through the trees, and jets up rivers near Queenstown, on New Zealand’s South Island.
