"The global landscape used to be a theater of various shadings -- sunlit fields and canyons of dark obscurity, trackless jungles, and misty Shangri-las. Now the whole world is like a cineplex when the lights have come on. Almost no place on the surface of the planet is really obscure anymore. Satellites watch it all...

"Traveling in Siberia a decade ago, I thought I was pretty much beyond the reach of checkability; in fact-checker shorthand, anything I wrote would be “O.A.,” which stands for “on author,” meaning “unverifiable by anything other than the author’s say-so.” I did not need to worry that any checker would visit where I had been,...

"People say that because of Google Earth and the 'net, travel is less of a priority. I would say the opposite is the case. The very fact of easy interconnection, and the illusion such contact creates of understanding, makes travel ever more necessary. The world is not what it seems. The peevish person in his...

"The world is not as small as Google Earth depicts it. I think of the Lower River district in Malawi, the hinterland of Angola, the unwritten-about north of Burma and its border with Nagaland. Nearer home, the urban areas of Europe and the United States. I do not know of a book that recounts the...

Have you ever returned from a trip and wished there were an easier way to show your friends and family the exact route you took on your journey? Check out Wikiloc , one of three winners of the 2009 Geotourism Challenge , sponsored by Ashoka’s Changemakers and the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations ....

The legendary lost civilization of El Dorado, said to be in the Amazon jungle, has led many explorers to come up empty-handed for nearly 500 years. According to a report in the journal Antiquity , three scientists have found more than 200 earthworks (dating from A.D. 200 to 1283) in Brazil’s upper Amazon basin near...