Friends and vagabonders, Late April finds me in Calcutta, poised to make my way into Burma after three months in India. And a wild three months it’s been! Since my last update, I have survived a dog attack in Himalayan snow leopard country, been jailed overnight by the Indian army near the Tibetan border, traveled…
Friends and vagabonders, Early March finds me well into my second month in India — a massive and complex country that I am still trying to absorb and comprehend. And, as P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “just when you think you’re getting India, you get it even less.” But even trying to understand this place has thus…
Friends and vagabonders, January finds me back in India, headed northeast out of Bombay en route to the epic Kumbh Mela pilgrimage on the banks of the Ganges River, near Allahabad. This colossal Hindu sin-cleansing festival takes place every 12 years, and some sources are predicting a turnout of 70 million people (I didn’t tell…
Friends and vagabonders, Welcome to my newly redesigned website! It’s been a long time since I sent everyone an update — June, in fact, when Salon closed down its travel department just as I was boarding a freighter for India. Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support for Vagabonding to me or to the…
With Flaubert’s 1850 letters as a guide, Rolf explores the enduring allure of opera, orgasm, belly-dancing and other Cairo clichés.
Amid an epic Beijing-to-St. Petersburg train trip, Rolf parties with librarians, tracks down the fate of Genghis Khan’s testicles, and (among other things) embarks on a madcap race to catch up with the train after getting stranded on the Mongolian-Siberian border.
When he tries to infiltrate a movie set on a heavily guarded Thai island, Rolf embarks on a rollicking post-modern travel adventure, somewhat starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Rolf describes the heady rise and wistful fall of expat life in South Korea.
Political commentary: Dissident politician Kim Dae-jung was not (as Time declared upon his inauguration) “Destiny’s Choice” to lead Korea into the new millennium, but the beneficiary of mudslinging, opportunism and circumstantial luck amid a wacky 1997 election season.
An American expatriate weathers the slings and arrows of learning another language.
Commentary: Simon Peter once found that a relatively small amount of faith allows a man to walk on water, but he was never faced with the more relevant prospect of navigating intersections in a city where 15.5-ton Hyundai buses careen four abreast down streets originally designed for oxcarts.
