This month, Lonely Planet released a new anthology for its “Journeys” series, entitled The Kindness of Strangers. Edited by Salon.com vet (and LP global travel editor) Don George, this book explores the unexpected human connections that so often transform our travel experiences. And, in what was certainly a coup for Don G. and Lonely Planet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama agreed to write the preface.

The Dalai Lama writes, “If we really think about it, our very survival, even today, depends upon the acts of kindness of so many people. Right from the moment of our birth, we are under the care and kindness of our parents ; later in life, when facing the sufferings of disease and old age, we are again dependent on the kindness of others. If at the beginning and end of our lives we depend upon others’ kindness, then why in the middle should we not act kindly toward others?”

Notable authors in the anthology include Jan Morris, Pico Iyer, Tanya Shaffer, Dave Eggers, Tim Cahill, Stanley Stewart, Jeff Greenwald, and Simon Winchester. My humor-tinged Lebanon story, “My Beirut Hostage Crisis”, is also included in the anthology. (And, in what would have been an ironic balance to the seriousness of the Dalai Lama’s preface, my story very nearly made a first-serial appearance in the December issue of Playboy.) Many first-time authors are included in the anthology as well.

An early rave review for the book comes from my father George Potts, who intercepted my contributor’s copy in Kansas, and (with his characteristically subdued style) wrote: “I’ve been reading the Kindness of Strangers anthology. It’s a fast read and a good book. It gives insights into people from many perspectives and cultures.”

A handful of stories from this anthology can be found at a special page on the Lonely Planet website.

If you happen to be a K-12 teacher, here’s a great opportunity to bring geography home to your students. As the Drive Around the World team drives to points overseas, you and your class can follow us using the education portion of our website.

A prototype of this education website is online here, and I welcome comments and suggestions, so that we can fine-tune it to best serve the classroom and your students. We hope to add an interactive element, so that students can directly ask us questions while we’re on the road. A fully operational version of this website (which includes information on how a Drive Around the World vehicle might visit your school) will be online within a couple weeks.

I don’t usually comment on the comments to this blog (at least, not on the main page), but I was intrigued by a recent post by Nyle Walton, a 70 year-old reader who logged a comment on a quote by Richard Halliburton.

“I first read Halliburton at age 14,” Walton writes, “and he influenced my life enough to make me travel around the world three times, climb mountains such as the Matterhorn and Popocatepetl and take a midnight dip in the pool of the Taj Mahal. I am now seventy years old and do not regret the great experiences I had in the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to the spiritual legacy of Richard. I subsequently put together over a thousand pages of remembrances of my youth entitled ‘Hitchhiking after Halliburton.’”

Indeed, in terms of travel inspiration, Jack Kerouac may get a lot of well-deserved lip service — but there’s no denying that Richard Halliburton inspired a previous generation. His book The Royal Road to Romance, originally published in 1925, has been reissued by Travelers’ Tales, and it’s a great read. Its tone is very young (Halliburton was about 22 when he wrote it), but I think this kind of youthful verve is what inspires us to the road in the first place, regardless of how old we are. In many ways, I wrote Vagabonding as a letter to my 18 year-old self — and while its pages can apply to all ages, at its heart is that youthful thirst for unknown places.

As Tim Cahill wrote in Outside last year:

“A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea. Adolescence is the time in our lives when we are the most open to new ideas, the most idealistic. Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we are not at all in our right minds. We are somewhere in a world of dream, and we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.”

Over at the Vagabonding.net Q&A, a reader asked me to recommend a water filter to use while he goes vagabonding overseas. His logic was that a filter will save him money (and prevent pollution) in regard to plastic bottles, but my instinct was to tell him to leave the water filters at home. I said this not because portable water filters are bad (though some of them are quite useless), but because in seven years of overseas travel, I have yet to meet a traveler who used a portable filter for more than a month before giving up on it. At home, it’s easy to think you can spare the world a few empty plastic bottles, but on the road even the most stalwart idealists I’ve met get sick of filtering their own water supply several times a day. If you really want to avoid plastic bottles, I suggested, try treating your water with iodine or purification tablets (but check with your doctor first on the long-term effect of these products). If you’re particularly intrepid, take note of how the locals prepare their water, and follow suit. This will require a period of building up resistance (i.e. getting sick), but to a big extent it will wean you off plastic bottles. [Note: I don't recommend this for everyone.]

My most basic advice, however, was to just go ahead and use plastic bottles. Granted, there are few official recycling programs in the developing world — but locals have a way of reusing plastic (as fuel funnels, for example, or fishing buoys) in ways First World folks have never considered. For a second opinion, however, I checked with Joe Ehrlich of the Travel Gear Blog, and he concurred. “I buy bottled water wherever I go,” he said, “and I just try to make sure that it isn’t owned by Nestle, Coca-Cola or Dannon (I’m trying to support only the local companies!). The owner will be clearly listed on the label.” As far as filter recommendations, Ehrlich says this:

“From what I’ve learned, Pur is the market leader. Katadyn is, from what I can gather, #2 in the market place. Also, I have used the fine products from McNett in Bellingham, WA, (makers of “Seam Grip”, my favorite seam sealer) and I will attest that the water taken out of a tropical fish tank and run through their special bottle using the McNett product tastes like, well, water. Their product is a sold for a fraction of what the others are. Do check it out. I haven’t used the MSR. Check that one out too, but look at the others first. [Note: Filter reviews can be found at online sources such as TheBackpacker.com, GearReview.com, and Backpacker Magazine.]

“The big issue amongst them seems to be whether or not they can deal with viruses. (I wouldn’t personally trust any filter to effectively filter out viral strains and still make palatable water, which is why I recommend bottled water.) Most people are worried about giardia, and with good reason. Once you get it, you will be very, very sorry. Most filters should filter out giardia. Your local, independent specialty retailer will be happy to demonstrate them. If they won’t actually demonstrate the water filters in front of you, just walk out and try someplace else.”

In addition to all this, I’m interested to hear people’s experiences with water filters on multi-week and multi-month overseas journeys. Have any of you ever used filters consistently over the long haul? How did they work? Please post comments and experiences here.

“When any Westerner tells you that he knows the East like a book and pretends to be an authority, beware, for he is lying. Even the Westerners who stay for years rarely penetrate below a certain class in the East. They meet the Westernized, the cultured, and the rich — and always behind this shallow facade are the numberless Siamese they cannot begin to comprehend, who are Thailand.”
–Carol Hollinger, Mai Pen Rai (1965)

Ever since my story Storming ‘The Beach’ appeared as a main selection in Best American Travel Writing 2000 (which was edited by Bill Bryson) I’ve become mildly obsessed with the annual release of the Best American anthologies. And, since 2000, I’ve never quite made it into the main selections again. In 2001, three of my Salon stories were listed in the “Notable Travel Writing” section of the anthology, but Paul Theroux (the editor that year) didn’t pick any of them for the main selection. In 2002, with Frances Mayes at the helm, my World Hum story landed another honorable mention.

This year, Ian Frazier edited the Best American Travel Writing 2003 anthology, and it looks like a great one. The likes of William Vollmann, Christopher Hitchens, Geoff Dyer, Tom Clynes, Tom Bissell, and Patrick Symmes made the main selection — but it was encouraging to see a host of less familiar names appearing for the first time (including Emily Maloney, who gave World Hum its first big appearance in the anthology). For the fourth year in a row I made the “Notable Travel Writing” section, this time with my Myanmar adventure tale The Last Archipelago, which appeared in Conde Nast Traveler last July. Of course, even honorable mention is quite a thrill for me, since I was joined in the “bridesmaid” section by folks like P.J. O’Rourke, Maya Angelou, Tim Cahill, Paul Theroux, Bob Shacochis, Peter Hessler, Calvin Trillin, and (what I consider an enlightened decision on the part of editor Jason Wilson) two stories from The Onion.

As I’m leaving on my Land Rover expedition in nine days, I probably won’t have time to read Best American Travel Writing 2003 anytime soon. If you get a chance to read it yourself, let me know what you think.

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”
–Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

[Above: All dandied up for the Parkinson's Institute fundraiser in San Francisco, Rolf mugs for the camera with cousin Mary Hill, who serves as the education coordinator for Drive Around the World.]

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about my upcoming Drive Around the World expedition, but plans for the Land Rover journey are still going strong. Right now I’m lined up to write expedition dispatches for Slate in December, and I’m trying to arrange some print magazine exposure as well. I’ll also be posting expedition journals on this blog and on the Drive Around the World website once we get underway two weeks from now. Stay tuned.

For now I wanted to share a few photos from the Parkinson’s Institute fundraiser at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco last weekend. As I mentioned in an earlier post, our global Land Rover trek is a benefit for Parkinson’s Disease research — and I’m proud to say that, with the help of some generous folks at Saturday’s banquet, we were able to raise the first $40,000 for our Parkinson’s drive-a-thon. By the time the expedition makes it full-circle around the globe next summer, we hope to have raised a million dollars toward finding a cure for this terrible disease (which affects family members of almost everyone onboard the expedition). One-hundred percent of the money we raise will go toward the researchers of the Parkinson’s Institute in Sunnyvale, California. In coming weeks, I’ll post more information on how to pledge money (and get a chance to win one of the Land Rovers in the process) for our drive-a-thon.

Fundraising aside, the banquet was good fun — and, since it could be the last time in years many of us will be seen in tuxedos, I’ll post some photos here. Each of the text links below pops up into its own picture window:

Black-tie guys: The nine members of the DATW expedition team pose in formalwear at the Parkinson’s Institute fundraiser.

You’ll never see it this clean again: One of the four Land Rovers that will travel around the world serves as a display-piece in the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel.

Family Ties: DATW team members pose with featured speaker Michael J. Fox. Michael will join the expedition for a few days next year, when we travel through his home turf in western Canada.

At the podium: Team member Todd Borgie, whose father suffers from Parkinson’s, addresses the fundraiser crowd on behalf of DATW.

Late day light: A view of Nob Hill and the TransAmerica building, from the observation lounge atop the Fairmont Hotel.

Left my heart in San Francisco: A sunset view of the Golden Gate bridge, taken from the observation lounge of the Fairmont Hotel.

Fuhgeddaboutit: DATW field ops director Justin Mounts and documentary filmmakers Adam Burgess and Neil Dana strike a mafioso pose. Note Drew Carey Show star Christa Miller in the background at right.

The Gunn Clan: Rolf with cousin Mary Hill, who teaches high school in the South Bay. Mary’s tartan is in honor of the Scottish side of the family. (For a historical perspective, here’s a picture of Mary and Rolf in the late 1970’s.)

[Kudos to Mary's husband David Homa for the above photographs, and to Men's Wearhouse for graciously donating our tuxedo rentals for the evening.]

“Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes whose calls hold the soul-talk of decades — all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating. These are the exercises that help lure the longing out of the soul and honor the brooding-over of unhatched ideas for journeys.”
–Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage (1998)

“Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,
The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.
Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid or liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.”
–Walt Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth” (1856)