Over at World Hum , the (somewhat subjective) countdown of the top-30 travel books of all time continues. My latest contributions to the roundup include Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map (#26) , and Tim Cahill 's Road Fever (#21) . Of Road Fever , I write: A founding editor of Outside magazine, Cahill has...

My latest Yahoo! News travel column is entitled " Why We Buy Dumb Souvenirs ", and it examines the idiosyncrasies of souvenir-hunting. "The tourist quest for souvenirs has always been somewhat skewed," I write, In ancient Anatolia, locals hawked supposed Trojan War relics to credulous Greek travelers, and excavations in Italy have suggested that ancient...

This month, World Hum will be counting down (a somewhat subjective list of) the top-30 travel books of all time . Frank Bures , Thomas Swick , Michael Shapiro , Tom Bissell , Terry Ward, Michael Yessis, Jim Benning and I will be contributing the reviews. My first review, of Jeffrey Tayler 's Facing the...

As I hinted at a couple weeks ago, my May interview subject at the RolfPotts.com Writers page is the award-winning editor of the San Francisco Chronicle travel section, John Flinn . Over the course of his career, Flinn has journeyed on assignment to more than 20 countries, including Bhutan, Cuba, the Cook Islands and Croatia,...

This week in Traveling Light , I interview Road Trip USA author Jamie Jensen. Among other things, Jensen recommends traveling the "Road to Nowhere" -- U.S. 83, which travels north-south across the Great Plains: "[I]t is a "little-traveled" route through a part of the country where tourism is rare. So it seems natural and unselfconscious;...

Tourism slogans aim to lure us in. But what really influences where we travel? This is the lighthearted question at the heart of my latest Traveling Light column at Yahoo! News. Entitled Searching for the Cave of Evil , this essay uses an experience on the Greek island of Naxos to ponder just how important...

This week in my " Traveling Light " column at Yahoo! News, I interview David Farley and Jessie Sholl , who co-edited Travelers' Tales: Prague . As Czech novelist Ivan Klima writes in the introduction to the book, "I do not like stories about tourist experiences and I refuse to accept generalizations about a place,...

This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview San Francisco-based travel writer and photographer Amanda Jones , whose work has appeared in Vogue, Travel + Leisure, Islands, Condé Nast Traveller , the London Sunday Times , the Los Angeles Times , the San Francisco Chronicle , and several literary anthologies. In the interview, Jones...

Above : The dubiously valuable Burmese kyat Travel has a way of shaking one's faith in the workings of paper currency, as I point out in the most recent installment of my Traveling Light column at Yahoo! News. As I say in the opening paragraph, One of the most startling travel epiphanies I've had in...

My inbox has been busy recently with announcements for various travel-writing contests. I don't have a lot of insider information on these, but I'll share what I know: Gather.com Travel Writing Contest Rules : Submit an original, first person, previously unpublished, non-fiction travel story. Supporting photos (in jpeg format) are encouraged (but not required) to...

Above : A sunset view from the Indian island of Diu. Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle travel section debuted India's Isle Of Ghosts , my travel story about the island of Diu in India. Originally researched and written for Islands a few years ago (and shelved when that magazine changed ownership), this travel tale uses...

In case you missed it, World Hum recently ran an intriguing Antarctica story, entitled A Brief and Awkward Tour of the End of the Earth . Written my McMurdo Station veteran Jason Anthony, the story details a journey to the Russian research station at Vostok. "Occupied since 1957," Anthony writes, "Vostok is also the most...

Above : A view from the Lower Ninth Ward. My latest Yahoo! News travel column debuted this week -- and it tackles the issue of disaster tourism in the flood-damaged Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. "One year ago," I write, "before the devastation of the 2005 hurricane season, the Lower Ninth Ward wouldn't have...

In the days leading up to Mardi Gras a couple weeks ago, I fielded some strange questions from camera-clutching visitors to the city of New Orleans, where I've lived off and on the for past year-and-a-half. Though the post-Katrina streets of the French Quarter had grown encouragingly festive and rowdy in anticipation of Fat Tuesday,...

Note : I posted this last week, but at the time the RolfPotts.com server was down, and Karl's full profile was not accessible. So, now that my server is up and running, let's try this again... My interviewee this month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page is journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld , whose book China...

Earlier this week, Word Hum posted " Truth in Oxiana ", an excellent essay by Tom Bissell about the line between fact and fiction (and the implications of "truth") in travel writing. Bissell's essay, which was originally a speech given to Bennington College’s low-residency MFA students in early 2004, speaks so well on its own...

I wanted to pass along an expat blog I've been following lately -- Aly Young's Wandering Seoul . Of special interest to anyone who's curious about life as an English teacher overseas, Aly's blog is a great read. Beyond teaching, however, it's a nice glimpse into the travels and expat experiences of a thoughtful sojourner...

This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview Franz Wisner , whose debut book, Honeymoon With My Brother (which is currently in a movie development deal with Sony) comes out in paperback this month. For Wisner, the initial decision to travel the world came from personal trauma. "In 1999, I got dumped at the...

In the course of her recent World Hum interview , travel editor Catherine Watson outlined a few items of her travel philosophy. I found this advice so apt for vagabonding in general that I'll reproduce it here: Go everywhere you can. Be passionately curious. Talk to everyone who’ll let you, especially the quiet people. Stay...

This month at the RolfPotts.com Writers page, I interview Lea Aschkenas , whose book Es Cuba : Life and Love on an Illegal Island will be released this month by Seal Press. As with many travel writers I've interviewed over the years, Aschkenas points to finances as a big challenge of the freelance writing life....