Travel humorist Bill Bryson has written about America, Europe, Australia and Africa, but now it looks like he has sights set on the Arab world. Maybe. It's actually hard to tell when you read the Guardian article that broke this news. The title of the article, after all, is "Bryson books a wry look at...

As a former South Korea expat, I am always on the lookout for travel stories about the reclusive regime of North Korea. Americans aren't allowed to travel there (unless you count a jaunt into the northern half of the negotiation building at the Panmunjom DMZ ), and other nationals making the visit are usually restricted...

Lonely Planet editor Don George recently interviewed Pico Iyer , who is one of my favorite travel authors. In the interview, Iyer shares how places of supposed danger and poverty often end up being the most welcoming to the traveler. "In some ways the act of travel is throwing a ball into a dark ocean,"...

Here's a novel road-trip concept: According to a recent CNN report , a group of US college students is traveling across America in a converted school bus running on used vegetable oil. In addition to avoiding non-renewable fossil fuels, an advantage of this arrangement is that the vegetable oil can be acquired for free from...

Salon featured a nice interview this week with Monty Python vet Michael Palin , who recently completed a new travel documentary about the Sahara. At a time when so little human-interest news is coming out of the Middle East, it was encouraging to hear Palin's take on his personal interactions within the Muslim world. "When...

I seem to have caught wind of the news a little late, but it appears that MTV has been recruiting Europe-bound backpackers to film this summer for a segment of their True Life documentary series. I'm not familiar with True Life , but the idea of an MTV camera crew following travelers around Europe sounds...

For the past couple years, I've been convinced that backpackers and independent travelers were the only folks still traveling in significant numbers -- but I guess I was mistaken. A recent Reuters dispatch reports that nudist travel is one of the few tourist sectors still booming in spite of war and terrorism fears. According to...

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education features an interesting article entitled " Cultural Globalization Is Not Americanization ". The writer, British economist Philippe Legrain, makes a good case for the positive aspects of globalization -- an issue that I believe goes straight to the heart of travel. "Globalization not only increases individual freedom," Legrain argues,...

This month on the RolfPotts.com Writers Page , I feature an interview with Europe travel guru and PBS television host Rick Steves . Included in the interview are revelations on Rick's past as a piano teacher, the difficulty posed in reviewing restaurants ("You could eat at 100 good places in Paris this year and not...

It's been just about a week since I returned to Ranong, the south Thailand jungle town where, a little over a year ago, I wrote my first book. Since Vagabonding came together quite well here, I've decided to work on book #2 (or at least the introductory chapters) in this frumpy provincial capital just across...

In the process of trying to get back on the road in Asia, I let my RolfPotts.com updates slide a bit, but now -- just a month or so late -- we're back up to speed. A new Update page is online at RolfPotts.com, including links to recent travel writer interviews. This month I talk...

My brother-in-law David Van Tassel alerted me to this lampoon of the new Homeland Security icons from www.ready.gov. I

This month at RolfPotts.com, I feature an interview with indie-travel guru Bill Dalton , who founded Moon Handbooks back in 1973. In addition to talking about this pioneering days in travel publishing, Dalton reveals how his early affinity for travel was an offshoot of his father's drinking habit: "Travel got into my blood very early....

Back in November, Men's Journal featured a list of the "60 Things A Man Must Do in His Lifetime". By far my favorite was "Become an Expat" by Bob Shacochis , which I reprint here: "When you teach grad students, those brainy, dreamy, slack-ass selves who have been squeezed through the educational intestine into the...

By Rolf Potts As a travel writer, it was interesting for me to learn that contemporary travel literature is now dead -- at least, according to an article by Edward Marriott in this month's Prospect magazine (U.K.). "All the paths ahead seem to have disappeared," Marriott writes. "With many younger writers of travel turning to...

Late last month I served as a judge in the Pusanweb Writing Contest . Pusan is where I lived as an expatriate teacher from 1996 to 1998, so it was interesting to see that city (and the teacher-expat experience) rendered through the eyes of others. Surprisingly for a non-fiction writer, I was not impressed by...

Writing a book has many joys to go with the challenges, and one of the joys in writing Vagabonding was that it gave me the opportunity to meet Pico Iyer, whose writing I have long admired. Pico was kind of enough to agree to an interview, and I'm featuring him in the January 2003 edition...

After 71,000 flight kilometers, 61,000 kilometers of land travel, 55 border crossings, 44 countries, 4 continents, 50 World Heritage sites, 44 countries, and 98 email updates, vagabonder WeeCheng Tan has finally made it back to Singapore! A full online archive of WeeCheng adventures is here .

This year, the web-search engine Google has included the Top Ten Destinations of 2002 as part of its annual Year-End Zetigeist . Here's the rundown: 1. Paris 2. Canada 3. New York 4. India 5. Las Vegas 6. Australia 7. Hawaii 8. Japan 9. Cuba 10. London The only surprises I see here are Canada...

Of the many writers whose work I'm showcasing on Vagabonding.net , perhaps my favorite is Kelly Sobczak, who traveled through Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran and Pakistan (among other places) during the tumultuous fall of 2001. This week I'm featuring her Teheran story, " Anger Against America ", wherein Sobczak plays tourist and reporter at an anti-America...