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Photo Credit: alvaro tapia hidalgo via Compfight cc PRELUDE Day 5, Hour 77: 9:53 pm. Twenty-three hotel floors above the gritty neon splendor of downtown Las Vegas, I am nearing the end of a bewildering travel experiment: For the past five days, I have been watching the Travel Channel for the entirety of my waking...
Photo Credit: TeryKats via Compfight cc Perhaps I never would have met the Iranian had it not been for the influenza epidemic raging across Europe at the time. Because of the flu, Larnaca — a holiday beach town on the southern coast of Cyprus — was nearly empty of tourists. I was walking along the...
I want to take this opportunity to declare that the Mile-High Club is, for all practical purposes, defunct. Much like the practice of phrenology or the fad for goldfish swallowing, the notion of having sex on commercial airplanes is no longer worthy of serious consideration. Before I get inundated with angry e-mails accusing me of...
Image credit A few years ago, when the tide of war was shifting in Afghanistan, Northern Alliance troops began using a contemptuous moniker for the Pakistani, Uzbek, and Chechen militants who were fighting alongside the Taliban. "The [Afghan] people," Alliance commander Ustad Mohammed Atta told TIME magazine , "want to kill these tourists." Not "terrorists",...
Image credit Of all the throwaway lines I’ve fed into my travel-writing biography over the years, one creates the most fascination with readers. I am, according to a major American newspaper, “Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age.” This little quip, which appeared in USA Today when my book “Vagabonding” was first published in 2003 (and...
Image credit Travel has a way of slowing you down, of waking you up, of pulling you up out of your daily routines and seeing life in a new way. This new way of looking at the world need not end when you resume your life at home. Here are 5 key ways in which...
Image credit I am 15 minutes into my hike down the muddy little stream when a tree carving captures my attention. Sticky with sap and arcing brown across the bark, it seems to have been made recently. I drop to my haunches and run my fingers over the design. After three days of living on...
Whenever anyone asks me why I still travel on a shoestring at the ripe old age of 38, I usually tell them about the time I learned how to play the bagpipes in Havana. Granted, I could probably relate a more typical story about the joys of budget travel - some tidy parable of money...
I’m a big advocate of getting off the beaten path, but I would agree that there’s nothing wrong with the attractions of the “tourist trail.” These standard attractions—from Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat right on down to small-town museums and curiosities—are part of what inspires people to travel in the first place. So why do...