Adam from New York writes to ask:

“What are the intricacies of packing for an extended period of solo vagabonding? I’d like to be as mobile as possible, but I don’t want to forgo the items that will allow me to get the most from my experience.”

This is what I told him:

“This is a key question in any vagabonding journey: What should one bring?

“Fortunately, the answer is easy: Bring as little as possible. Basic clothes, basic toiletries and medicines, a guidebook or two, good shoes or sandals. All packed in a small and sturdy backpack. This might sound like a scant amount of gear (especially in comparison to all the junk we seem to require in our day-to-day lives at home), but at the end of the day, you will

“No other major social structural distinction (certainly not that between the classes) has received such massive reinforcement as the ideological separation of the modern form of the non-modern world. International treaties and doctrines dividing the world into multinational blocs serve to dramatize the distinction between the developed nations and the lesser ones, which are not thought to be capable of independent self-defense. Modern nations train development specialists, organizing them into teams and sending them to the underdeveloped areas of the world, which are thereby identified as being incapable of solving their own problems. The giving of this and other forms of international aid is a sine qua non of full modern status, a dependence on it is a primary indicator of a society trying to modernize itself. The national practice of keeping exact demographic records of infant mortality and literary rates, per capita income, etc, functions in the same way to separate the modern from the non-modern world along a variety of dimensions. The domestic version of the distinction is couched in economic terms, the

Vagablogging readers might recall that I won a Lowell Thomas Award earlier this year for “Virgin Trail“, my Central America travel series in Slate. Finally, the $500 award check has arrived, and I’ve decided to donate the full amount to Drive Around the World‘s fight against Parkinson’s Disease.

Parkinson’s is a chronic, progressive disorder of the central nervous system that leaves patients unable to direct or control their movements in a normal manner. Popularly considered an elderly person

“When you travel alone you quickly find that you make many more friends because people invite you into their lives much more quickly. If they see two people together, they assume it’s a self-contained unit. And also, I travel to empty myself out and lose myself in a culture as much as possible and also to leave as much of my self at home as possible.”
Pico Iyer, in Michael Shapiro’s A Sense of Place (2004)

James from Orlando wrote to pose this question:

“I might have a chance to teach English in Spain. I will not be paid, but I will only have to work 10-15 hours per week in exchange for housing with a host family. The problem is I don

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I received the above 2-rupee bill in a Shimla, India coffeeshop a few years ago. In all my years of travel it was the most beat-up piece of legal currency that anyone ever tried to pass off on me with a straight face. I’ve turned down torn and tattered bills before (and I advise travelers to do the same, since these bills can be hard to pass on), but I was so impressed with the sad condition of this one that I had to keep it as a souvenir.

If anyone has ever been passed a worse bill than this in the course of their travels, I’d love to see it!

For more ruminations on the idiosyncrasies of money and travel, check out this blog essay from last year.

“It is not the story that is not getting expressed: it’s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town, the smell; the thousand, thousand elements of reality that are part of the event you read about in 600 words in your morning paper.

“You know, sometimes the critical response to my books is amusing. There are so many complaints: Kapuscinski never mentions dates, Kapuscinski never gives us the name of the minister, he has forgotten the order of events. All that, of course, is exactly what I avoid. If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library, where you will find everything you need: the newspapers of the time, the reference books, a dictionary.”

–

Yesterday, I learned that my longtime friend Mike Marlett, who publishes an alternative newspaper called F5, has had his publication banned from the newsracks of Starbucks coffeeshops in Wichita, Kansas.

Since Kansas has a reputation for being one of the more conservative states in the nation, one might assume that the decidedly left-leaning F5 newspaper was kicked out of Starbucks by some sort of local uprising. But that assumption would be wrong, since local Starbucks managers in Wichita actively asked Mike to stock F5 in their shops, and Starbucks customers avidly read the paper each week.

Indeed, the decision to ban F5 from Wichita Starbucks came not from the local level, but a far-off regional manager. His reason for this pre-emptive censorship? Essentially, his rationale was (on the basis of a single complaint) that Starbucks wants to reflect “local values”, and he had determined, without actually reading the newspaper that F5 was not appropriate for a conservative place like Kansas.

Does anyone else see the ridiculous irony here? I think it’s symptomatic of lingering election-year hysteria, wherein the media obsessively divided the country into the Democrat-leaning “Blue states” of the coasts and the Republican-leaning “Red states” of the heartland. Hence, a Starbucks regional manager, nervous about his job as he stares at the big sea of Red around Kansas, might be inclined to think that Kansans can’t handle liberal opinions.

Unfortunately, this kind of ignorance is not limited to corporate middle-management types. It also applies to many left-leaning people I’ve met in Blue states like California and New York — otherwise intelligent folks who have convinced themselves (purely on the basis of political demographics) that Kansans are ultra-religious, pig-shagging fascists. Since when did “Blue versus Red” turn into “Us versus Them”?

In reality, “Red” places like Kansas are doing just fine by themselves — and my friend Mike is a great example of this. A few years ago, Mike was working at the Wichita Eagle, the corporately owned local paper. Mike enjoyed the design work he did there, but became increasingly annoyed that the paper’s editorial direction was being influenced not by the people who lived and worked in Wichita, but by Blue-state corporate market-watchers who were convinced that readers in the conservative heartland wanted inoffensive news that reflected their existing prejudices. Disgusted, Mike quit the Eagle two years ago, and has been helming an upstart independent newspaper ever since.

“I’d gotten tired of out-of-town corporate middle managers trying to tell the people of this city what they should be thinking,” Mike wrote in an editorial about the Starbucks decision. “By ‘reflecting local values’ they’d turned on a feedback loop that breeds fear, ignorance and paranoia.”

I suppose my reason for bringing this up is to remind both corporate paper-pushers and Blue-state liberals of a simple point: Don’t judge what you don’t know. Despite election demographics, political diversity thrives (and is tolerated) in the heartland. Hundreds of thousands of Kansans may have voted for Bush, but hundreds of thousands of Kansans voted for Kerry as well. To assume Kansans (or anyone else) can’t tolerate a minority opinion is idiotic.

The next time I’m in Kansas, I think I’m going to give Starbucks a miss.

“When seeing a new place, I often think: I am going to come back here later — when I am rich, or when I have more time, or when I have a purpose, or when I am with someone I love — and do this right. But it is a self-deception. More often than not, my feet lead me somewhere new rather than somewhere I have already been. And as I sat at that window watching the train bore through the heart of China, I had a different, more probable thought, and I wrote it down: I better remember what this place looks like. I will never be back.”
–Brad Newsham, All the Right Places (1989)

In Vagabonding, I address the various motivations for choosing a long-term travel destination. Ultimately, I tell people that it doesn’t matter where you choose to go, since all destinations have so much potential, and the surprises of the road always outweigh the expectations.

Among the suggested travel motivations, however, I mention how many American vagabonders enjoy seeking out their ancestral homelands (I also mention how travelers looking to identify with their ancestors’ cultures in far-off places often wind up realizing just how American they are). For European-, Asian-, or Latin-Americans, traveling to one’s ancestral homeland is a fairly easy equation, but for Americans of African ancestry (whose forebears were brought to America against their will), it can be next to impossible to figure out which part of Africa one’s family hails from. Ostensibly, a vagabonding journey to get in touch with one’s African “homeland” could take a person to places as far-flung and culturually varied as Mali, Gambia, Mozambique or Uganda.

That’s why I recently was interested to discover online business called AfricanAncestry.com, which uses simple DNA tests to help black Americans find out which part or parts of Africa their family hails from. I first found out about this service in Spike Lee’s August 2004 Playboy interview (yes, I read the articles!). Lee mentioned that, after testing, he discovered his mother’s side of the family came from what is now Niger, and his father’s side came from the region that is now Cameroon.

So, if you have African ancestry (and especially if you plan to travel to Africa to find out about more about your culture), taking this DNA test could be fascinating. More information online here.