"We were leaving not just a place but a consciousness -- one in which the "I" was different for the Asmat than for me. It was group, tribe, family, tied together in ways difficult to grasp. For me, as an American, "I" is the biggest, most important unit. For us, freedom is everything. The right...

"Michael [Rockefeller] was working with a bottomless supply of money -- the one thing that limits most people, that checks them, that forces them to use friendship and reciprocity and patience with others. And there is a profound difference between people who are friends and people who want your money. Had Michael had less money,...

"There was another message, too: Once again, the more I gave myself to the world, the more I made myself vulnerable by putting myself completely at the disposal of people and situations in which I had no control, the more people took care of me, looked out for me. At first I had thought they...

"Authenticity was a buzzword in travel, but what exactly did it mean? At its purest form you could make the argument that the only really authentic places were ones that had never seen contact with the outside world at all. There were still a few of those left -- in the Amazon, perhaps in Indonesian...

"It was always like that, I knew, when you set out on a long journey; the classic two-week vacation was never enough time to slough off the dead skin of regular life. In some ways, I'd discovered during years of traveling, home life was like an insulating callus you had to wear off before you...