June 30, 2003
Mark Twain on Americans in France
"The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from...Read this article
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June 27, 2003
Travel insurance for vagabonding journeys
Many travel insurance policies are based on short-term or group travel, so I figured I'd expound here about insurance for...Read this article
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William Dalrymple on travel in a shrinking world
"Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late twentieth century: go to the ends of the earth...Read this article
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June 26, 2003
La Repubblica's Vagabonding review
Following on to my surprised announcement on Monday that Vagabonding had been translated into Italian, here's an English version of...Read this article
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Davydd J. Greenwood on the complexities inherent in cross-cultural tourism
"Are we correct that all cultural values are being destroyed? Or are they once again changing, under the press of...Read this article
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June 25, 2003
Summertime Rolls
Monsoon season in southern Thailand can be a strange time of year. The heavy rains can last all day, and...Read this article
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June 24, 2003
Taras Grescoe on how to stop being a tourist
"To stop being a tourist, sometimes all you have to do is start standing still." --Taras Grescoe, End of Elsewhere:...Read this article
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June 23, 2003
Big in … Italy?
Yesterday evening, I learned -- with no small sense of astonishment -- that La Repubblica, the largest national paper in...Read this article
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Rolf Potts on traveling slowly
"Vagabonding is not like bulk shopping: The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have...Read this article
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June 20, 2003
A note about whining
Complaining about things you don't like is a natural symptom of the culture shock that comes with travel: we all...Read this article
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Claude Levi-Strauss on the complexity of the travel experience
"Travel is usually thought of as a displacement in space. This is an inadequate conception. A journey occurs simultaneously in...Read this article
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June 19, 2003
Oil has a long history of poisoning foreign policy
"It was the discovery of black gold underneath the Arabian desert that provided the old religion with the means and...Read this article
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Claude Levi-Strauss on the true task of exploration
"Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment...Read this article
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June 17, 2003
Miracle-vision on Koh Yao Noi
Just over a month ago, there was a miracle on Koh Yao Noi, an island one hour east of Phuket...Read this article
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Claude Levi-Strauss on the threat of global monoculture
"Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited...Read this article
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June 16, 2003
What I Just Read: Dyer, Perrottet, Dalrymple, Tayler, Buruma, Stone, et al
Part of the task of being a good writer is being a good reader, though at times one has to...Read this article
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Claude Levi-Strauss on the social reinvention that comes with travel
"Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up...Read this article
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June 13, 2003
Getting started with travel writing
Ever since my days as a Salon Travel columnist, I've gotten lots of messages from people asking how they can...Read this article
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Pope John Paul II on the advantages of world tourism
"Tourism enables people to use part of their free time to contemplate the goodness and beauty of God in his...Read this article
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June 12, 2003
Globalization is no simple binary equation
"The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it...Read this article
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June 11, 2003
Bored with Cabo? Try Kabul.
Ever since the Taliban fell in late 2001, I've been curious about when tourism would return to Afghanistan. Apparently, it's...Read this article
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Edward Abbey on why we travel and explore
"Reproduction and mere survival have never been good enough for humankind. We torture one another, we torture ourselves, we torture...Read this article
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June 10, 2003
Will Bill Bryson tackle the Arab world next?
Travel humorist Bill Bryson has written about America, Europe, Australia and Africa, but now it looks like he has sights...Read this article
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William Gibson on the future
"The future is already here -- it’s just unevenly distributed." --William Gibson, quoted in the Economist, June 23, 2000...Read this article
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June 09, 2003
Radical movements reflect the civilization that spawned them
"Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers may not represent Islam, and their statements and their actions directly contradict...Read this article
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June 06, 2003
I Made Pizza for Kim Jong-il
As a former South Korea expat, I am always on the lookout for travel stories about the reclusive regime of...Read this article
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June 05, 2003
Notes on Alan Rabinowitz's Beyond the Last Village
Conventional wisdom has long insisted that there's nothing new left to discover on the surface of the earth. "The time...Read this article
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American innovation v. American insipidity
"So much of the best new thinking about society, economics, politics and philosophy in the last century came from America....Read this article
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June 03, 2003
The wild world outside the beaten path
These days, whenever I read that the world has been fully explored and overrun by tourism, I just peer out...Read this article
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Rolf Potts on getting off the tourist trail
"Strangely, few people (even Lonely Planet-clutching "independent" travelers) think to stray from the accepted travel routes. It's almost as if...Read this article
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June 02, 2003
Paul Fussell's famous rant on the hypocrisy of "anti-tourists"
From Abroad (1980): "As I have said, it is hard to be a snob and a tourist at the same...Read this article
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Pico Iyer interview at LonelyPlanet.com
Lonely Planet editor Don George recently interviewed Pico Iyer, who is one of my favorite travel authors. In the interview,...Read this article
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