Tag: Travel

For many of us, road trips are also trips through the self.

This month’s books newsletter has one foot out the door.

Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I became the youngest person and first woman ever to win the Mongol Derby. What made me so sure I was ready, when I was totally unprepared?

Let’s grab a waffle and challenge the global hegemony of U.S. culture.

From over-development to contaminated cenotes, the problems continue to pile up in the Mayan paradise formerly known as Tulum.

It’s only “discovery” if you assume the place — or the people — has no meaningful existence apart from your visit. Surprise: you’re not that important.

Normally, kibbutz volunteers visit Israel and return home. Pam Mandel went on to Egypt, and kept going . . .

In the desert at Burning Man, Joanne Solomon dissects the implicit transaction that defines her cross-cultural love affair.

On a visit to Banja Luka, the city her family fled during the Bosnian War, Ana Barić encounters old wounds and alternate realities.

Anthony Boudain passed away in Strasbourg, France, on Friday, June 8th, at age 61.

At a theater in Branson, Missouri, Pam Mandel finds an unexpected plot twist in a very familiar story.

As passports give way to fingerprinting and retinal scans, our bodies themselves become tools to limit our free movement.

Now what I remember most about my guide is what he said about the Rohingya. But I walked 50 kilometers with him before he said it.

Billy Gawronski was hell-bent on stowing away to Antarctica on Richard Evelyn Byrd’s 1928 expedition.

When two Irish travelers take hiking advice from a supposed guide, they soon find themselves relying on their wits in the dark.

“…the camels were always looking around as they walked, with a prospective optimism that eluded us.”

“I’d had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past.”

Some travelers can mystify even the most experienced butlers.

Leigh Shulman learns the meaning of home and belonging when she volunteers at a monkey refuge with her nine-year-old daughter.

Sarah Miller travels in exactly the way she’d hoped to avoid.

Grace Linden considers repatriation to Austria — a place she has never lived.

At Outside, Stephanie Pearson explores Lake Superior’s extreme history, expanse, diversity, and dangers.

Mary Mann lays bare what most travelers are loathe to admit: it’s just as easy to be bored in Paris or on Bora Bora as it is at home.

Pam Mandel’s absurdly earned travel resume is why she always have time for the same sentiments from other voices of this rootless era.

In 2007, David Zoby went on an academic tour of Syria. He admits he was kind of a fraud, but he went anyway.

Rafia Zakaria’s essay in The Baffler on flying while Muslim is an important read that exposes a long list of things that most white, non-Muslim Americans never have to worry about while traveling.

“Travel writing, like pop music, abhors a vacuum,” Michael Meyer, author of several books on travel and associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in an email to City Paper. “There always has to be The Next Place to Go, or the Best City You’ve Never Heard Of. If it’s not Baltimore or Greenpoint or St. Paul, then it’s Pittsburgh.”

At Eater, journalist Emily Yoshida hits some of Tokyo’s absurd, popular tourist attractions trying to understand specifically what themed-destinations offer and why they’re so popular.

Jacob Hoerger, in The Point, pens an essay on cars, road trips, and how they force us to create our own meaning.

After navigating a lifetime of being fat (and ashamed) in the US, Jonatha Kottler moved to the Netherlands and found a whole new universe of exclusion.