Got a craving for Carnival? If you can’t get to Rio, don’t just give up and stay home. There are plenty of places in Mexico and the Caribbean, from Mazatlan to Dominica, to celebrate the annual bacchanal. And there’s still time to get there!

The Mazatlan Carnival lasts six days (in 2010, it’s from Feb. 11 to 16), and is centered along the Paseo … Read more »

The stereotypical Western expat in China is the investment banker in Hong Kong or the executive doing deals in Shanghai. On the other hand, the creative set has also been setting up shop in the Middle Kingdom, according to this New York Times article: For China’s Western Expats, Creative Lives of Plenty.

Five artists are profiled, all of whom have plugged into the rising dragon. There are certainly many benefits, such as the low … Read more »

Besham, Pakistan

Early on in Khaled Husseini’s book The Kite Runner, the main character says, “To this day, I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who mean every word they say.” The reader can’t read this line without conjuring up some mental … Read more »

Some of the original vagabonders were captains at sea who dared to sail between the shipping lanes, tacking between storms and Men-o-War. Rebelling against dependency and striking out on your own was a pirate’s reason for living. Perhaps their methods were suspect, but we can admire their decision to forsake the familiar shackles of society in favor of the … Read more »

You might have heard that 2010 is a Jubilee Year on the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage route that filters into Spain from all over Europe. The number of walking pilgrims is expected to double to 200,000, all because St. James‘ Day falls on a Sunday. Demand won’t only be running high for beds: More hospitaleros (volunteer … Read more »

Sometimes, despite the most careful screening, you may find yourself stuck with a travel partner that you just don’t mesh with. Maybe circumstance threw you together, or perhaps you just didn’t realize how much you differed in your travel styles until you were on the road together. But now, you’re locked into at least a few days of travel … Read more »

Unless you were born into money, your travels are probably funded like mine — by scraping together what you can and doing without many of the gadgets, luxuries and stuff that your friends are likely accumulating and, yes, enjoying.

Some people take pride in this (possibly forced) asceticism, others find it difficult. Certainly stuff can be fun, but it can also get in the way … Read more »

With the Ugandan anti-gay death penalty legislation raising international ire (like Sweden cutting $50 million aid funding), and Argentinian transvestites suffering kidnapping and torture by the local police, it might feel like the whole world’s against gays these days.  Even Thailand’s famed gateu-i, while widely accepted on the street, are required by law to maintain their birth gender on ID cards, leading to discrimination and humiliation.  So where’s the next out-and-proud GLBTQ … Read more »

As the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region begins to shake off its wintry stranglehold, France’s epic Carnaval de Dunkerque is already underway. Dunkerque is a small city in the North of France, right along the Belgian border. The festivities are a longstanding tradition whose roots trace back hundreds of years to Shrove Tuesday. Shrove Tuesday was a day of celebration and … Read more »

“When we accept uncritically what others counsel us, the path they prescribe for us, we risk losing for naught the one thing we possess in inevitable yet mysterious finitude: time, the numbered days of our lives.” –Jeffrey Tayler, “Insanity and the Traveling Life,” World Hum, Jan. 21, 2009