As a fan of great museums, England, and historical stuff in general, I’m excited about a brand new museum that has just opened this week.

Located in the historic dockyard of Portsmouth on England’s picturesque south coast, the Mary Rose Museum houses the sixteenth-century hulk of the HMS Mary Rose, the pride of Henry VIII’s navy. Built in 1511, the massive warship sank off the coast of England in 1545 while fighting the French fleet. … Read more »

Burmese Light  – Impressions of the Golden Land by Hans Kemp and Tom Vater Visionary World, 2013 (buy on Amazon)

“Impressions of the Golden Land” is quite an apt subtitle for Burmese Light as this book literally brings to the table (a coffee-table, to be precise) two kinds … Read more »

Cost per day (for a family of five): $68

$18 room $25 food $25 entertainment

Strangest things we’ve seen lately:

Back home, before 2011 when we hit the road to become The Nomadic Family, we used to not move without seat belts. I would allow the kids to unbuckle only … Read more »

Cost/day: $65/day

What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately?

The strangest thing had to be the view looking down at the tree tops when doing a superman over them. The superman zip lines were over a mile long through the mountains and they provided a uniquely strange – but amazing – experience.

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One of the reasons we travel is to reach across cultural boundaries and experience the world from a different perspective. It’s that genuine human interaction between different worlds, within the same space that is the essence of the value of leaving home and “seeing the world.” That connection is the moment that makes all of the uncomfortable moments on the road worthwhile. It’s the window … Read more »

“To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to a movie travelogue. For the untrained awareness, all reading and all movies, like all travel, are equally banal and unnourishing … Read more »

The following story happened too many times along the back roads of deep Asia. And today, it got me inspired…

They offered me a cup full of hot water and they poured some tea leaves in there, too. It was too hot to handle so I put … Read more »

“We see frightful souvenirs for sale in the Valley of the Kings, or we blanch at the ruination of Bethlehem or the Austrian Alps — and we blame it on mass travel. We prophesy dire and culturally fatal consequences. We wish, often vehemently, that every ugly tourist would stay at home in his living room by his wretched fire, and leave such noble places to their emptiness — or at least, to us. Yet what … Read more »

As a first stop during my “charity discovery tour” in India I visited the village of Sujata, just behind Buddhist pilgrimage center – and Tibetan refugee colony – Bodhgaya, in Bihar state. If Bodhgaya is a bit more developed, although desperately poor, Sujata represents a real Bihar’s backwater: the kind of Indian village where … Read more »

Cost/day: $20

What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen lately? We were on a seven hour train ride from Banyuwangi to Surabaya, and just about every imaginable Indonesian product was being hawked on this train. Fried rice, hot soup, live music, live animals…I was thisclose to buying a bird with a 6 inch beak protruding from it’s … Read more »