Friends and vagabonders, It’s still a month before my Vagabonding book hits bookstore shelves, but a companion website, Vagabonding.net, is now officially online to give everyone a preview of things to come. Included on the site are a description and early reviews of the book itself, an interactive travel Q&A, a growing archive of vagabonding stories from…

Friends and vagabonders, Greetings from Thailand — and my apologies for being so tardy with this update. Keeping me busy has been a summer of mostly non-Asian travel: a visit to my family in Kansas, meetings with editors in New York, a travel-writing teaching gig at the American Academy in Paris, a hike across the entire…

Friends and vagabonders, This month I’m happy to announce that a couple of the feature articles I’ve written over the past year have finally hit the newsstands. One article, “The Last Archipelago”, appears in the July issue of Conde Nast Traveler, accompanied by several pages of photos by Cathrine Wessel. This story recounts an adventure…

Friends and vagabonders, Greetings from Kansas, of all places — and thanks to everyone who wrote me after last month’s update with recipes and anecdotes about eating human placenta. Nobody actually volunteered to scarf down afterbirth on television, but I did learn a lot about this bizarre culinary art. One reader, who used to work…

Friends and vagabonders, First off, I want to send special thanks out to all my old friends who sent sarcastic “Rolf = David Hasselhoff” e-mails after last month’s Update featured a picture of me running up a beach in a swimsuit. This month, I regret that the Update photo is not nearly so worthy of…

Friends and vagabonders, Greetings once again from Thailand, and here’s hoping 2002 finds you well! Late 2001 was a busy time for me, with various magazine assignments sending me hiking into the jungles of Thailand’s Khao Sok National Park, scuba-diving in the Andaman sea, and exploring the Mergui archipelago in the south of Myanmar. 2002…

Friends and vagabonders, Those of you who subscribe to my bimonthly mailing list may have noticed that I failed to send out an update message this month. There are two reasons for this. For starters, the events and aftermath of 9/11 seem to have resulted in a glut of forwarded news and opinion emails, and…

Friends and vagabonders, Well, I never thought I’d come to the point where I’d willingly display a photo of myself astride a horse. Maybe this is because I grew up so near the prairie, yet never learned how to properly ride a horse. Or perhaps this is due to lingering resentment over the fact that…

Friends and vagabonders, This month I am happy to announce that — for the first time in ages — I have a new travel story appearing online. Actually, it isn’t a new story so much as it is the “Lost Vagabonding Column of 2000” — a Syria-based essay that got lost in the shuffle when Salon…

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…