Friends and vagabonders, 2005 proved to be a busy year for me, with travels and sojourns in New Orleans, England, northern Kansas, France, Greece, California, and Mexico. A Korean translation of Vagabonding debuted in Asian bookstores early in the year, and I had an all-new story, “Something Approaching Enlightenment” in Lonely Planet’s By the Seat…
Travel-culture essay: The rhetoric of tourists and travelers is not just trapped in the rituals of human vanity: it has become hopelessly mixed up in the postmodern wash.
Friends and vagabonders, After my return from Brazil in 2004, I’ve spent a good portion of the past year splitting time between Baja and USA locations such as San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Wichita, and New Orleans. This July I will travel to France, where I’ll teach a travel memoir class in Paris. After that,…
Travel-culture essay: As alarming as it can be to find “Fried Rice With Crap” on a menu in Asia, bad translations can go both ways. Indeed, it’s only a matter of time before someone travels to China and discovers that the “Crouching Tiger” Chinese ideogram on his butt cheek (purchased in good faith in Seattle) is provincial slang for “Adult Diapers.”
Friends and vagabonders, After four months of living out of a Land Rover, I have completed the San Francisco-to-Tierra del Fuego leg of the Drive Around the World expedition. It was an amazing experience across 13 countries, and I wish my expedition teammates luck as they continue this spring through Australia, Southeast Asia, India, China,…
Friends and vagabonders, New Year’s 2004 finds me in Peru, where I am roughly halfway through my drive across the Americas on the Land Rover-supported “Drive Around the World” expedition. Since departing from San Francisco in early November of 2003, we have traveled overland through southern California, the Baja peninsula, mainland Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador,…
Friends and vagabonders, Fall promises to be an exciting season for me this year, as I will be departing to drive across the Americas as part of a Land Rover-supported expedition that will eventually drive around planet Earth along lines of longitude. The name of this expedition (and nonprofit organization) is “Drive Around the World”…
Book Review: As David Tomory’s A Season in Heaven reveals, the wanderers of the 1960s and 1970s were creative and intrepid — but they also tended to be petty, competitive, self-ghettoizing, and self-deluding. In short, they had the same charms and weaknesses as any self-conscious, authenticity-seeking counterculture movement of the last half-century.
Friends and vagabonders, My latest update is short and sweet, in large part because I’ve been posting most of my new information over at my weblog. This summer I’ll be splitting time between Thailand (where I’ve been writing my second book) and Paris (where I’ll be teaching the travel writing section of a creative writing…
This morning, I went on my obligatory monthly visa run to Kawthaung, the small Burmese border town that lies about 20 minutes by boat from my temporary home in Ranong, Thailand. Ranong is where I come to hole up and get my writing done, so I always welcome this visa run, which takes me across…
Friends and vagabonders, Greetings to you from Thailand, where I have just returned full circle after three months in the United States promoting my book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. My thanks to everyone who came out to say hello at my book events on the West Coast, in the…
