This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview indie travel guru Clay Hubbs , who in 1977 created Transitions Abroad magazine "for people who travel to learn." The bimonthly magazine and its website focus on the life-changing alternatives to mainstream tourism. In the interview, Hubbs reflects on his beginnings as a traveler, and how...

This week, my Yahoo! "Traveling Light" column gives a nod to the 12-year anniversary of the completion of my first vagabonding journey -- an eight-month road trip through 37 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces in 1994. Reflecting on this journey made me consider how much independent travel has changed in the ensuing years, including...

This week in my Yahoo! News travel column, I interview Moon Handbooks author Wayne Bernhardson about South America's Patagonia region -- a sprawling frontier of unrivaled wilderness; an emptier, antipodean version of the American West, full of gorgeous dry plateaus, dense, temperate rainforests, and active glaciers. Bernhardson has a few tips for Patagonia first-timers: I...

In this week's "Traveling Light" column at Yahoo! News , I take a look at Jeffrey Tayler's latest literary journey, River of No Reprieve , which takes the author down the waters of Siberia's remote Lena River, home to sprawling wildernesses, dying villages and a brief white-summer season known for its wind storms and freezing...

This week my Yahoo ! News column takes a look at Lonely Planet's new City Book , which ranks the top 200 cities in the world. As is the case with any ranking list, half the charm in reading the City Book comes not in noting its facts, but in pondering its opinions. Is Vancouver...

This week at the RolfPotts.com Writers page , I interview travel and food writer David Downie , whose newest book is Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light , a collection of 30 travel essays about Paris. In the interview, Downie warns against the restaurateurs, hoteliers, guides, tourist officers, and PR agents who only...

This week, my " Traveling Light " column at Yahoo! News covers a familiar (and surprisingly common) question about "catching rides" on frieghter ships. Specifically, Suzanne from Colorado asks: I recently read that it's possible to travel from country to country as a passenger on cargo ships. Do you have any kind of advice for...

This week in my Yahoo! News "Traveling Light" column, I review J. Maarten Troost's new travel book , Getting Stoned With Savages , and interview the author about travel in the South Pacific. Troost's first book, The Sex Lives of Cannibals , is among my all-time favorite travel-humor tomes, and his South Pacific sequel is...

This week, my Traveling Light column at Yahoo! News is a report from Paris entitled " Living and dying with 'Les Bleus .'" Set in a street near the Champs Elysees during the France-Italy World Cup final last weekend, it's really an examination of how sports can make the travel experience richer: Over my years...

A few weeks ago, Wayne Yang of Eight Diagrams interviewed me about my history as a traveler and writer. We managed to cover lots of new ground in the interview , including: How the travel experience was different during my first vagabonding journey in 1994. Why I went to Korea to teach English at age...

Tomorrow I will debut a RolfPotts.com Writers page interview with Karin Muller , who is the author of three books -- Hitchhiking Vietnam : A Woman's Solo Journey in an Elusive Land , Inca Road: A Woman's Journey into an Ancient Empire , and Japanland : A Year in Search of Wa -- all of...

This week in Yahoo! News , my "Traveling Light" column gives a nod to the upcoming Independence Day weekend with a subjective list of my top ten travel destinations in the United States . In roughly west-to-east order, they are: 1) Olympic National Park , Washington 2) Big Sur , California 3) U.S. Highway 50...

This month's travel featured story in World Hum , a New Orleans dispatch called " The Places We Find Ourselves ," was written by my sister Kristin Van Tassel. Kristin, who teaches American Literature at Bethany College in north-central Kansas, has written about literature for American Studies , mothering issues for AlterNet , and the...

This week's Traveling Light column is a conversation with guidebook author Philip Briggs , whose Bradt: Northern Tanzania guide hit bookstores this spring. Among other things, I ask Briggs about the feasibility of self-guided travel in Tanzania, and this is what he told me: It's easy enough to travel between towns using public transport (and...

This week, my newest Yahoo! News travel column, Slumming the Golden Arches , focuses on a curious question: Why do travelers so often seek out McDonald's overseas, when they would never eat there at home? The answer, I posit, lies in the fact that the Golden Arches create a smoothly standardized absence of place and...

This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview Tom Haines , who works as a staff travel writer at The Boston Globe . At the Globe , Tom has covered guns and cricket in Guyana, trumpets and nationalism in Serbia, and Gandhi's legacy in rural India. In 2005 and 2003, he was named Travel...

World Hum 's, (somewhat subjective) countdown of the top-30 travel books of all time has now entered the top ten. Earlier this week, I reviewed Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (#11) , of which I write: Matthiessen’s Zen-flavored masterpiece is as much a classic of nature and spiritual literature as it is of travel writing....

My latest Traveling Light column at Yahoo! News , You Have Now Entered the Tourist Zone , relates the story of how a curious experience in India led me to consider how the presence of travelers changes the way locals act: On the surface, Pushkar didn't seem much like a Tourist Zone: There were no...

A couple months ago, I read in Tim Leffel's blog that author Taras Grescoe has pointed out that supporting a pack-a-day cigarette habit in New York City for a year costs as much as a round-the-world plane ticket : At $7.50 a pack, a common price in New York, the tab after 365 days would...

This week at Traveling Light, I review Peter Hessler's new China book Oracle Bones , and pose a few Asia travel questions to the author. In Oracle Bones , Hessler (who I first interviewed in 2002) readily admits that China is a huge topic to tackle, and makes the apt observation that orthodox news journalism...