The trip was far too short but the fact of the matter is, it was longer and further than most people will ever travel. I circumnavigated the globe in 42 days – leaving Hawaii for Australia, then Bali in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Morocco, France, Iceland, New York City and now back to…
And so today, part two of this journey around the world begins. Part 1 was the solo journey from Hawaii to Australia then Bali, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Dubai, and Morocco – almost exactly on the other side of the globe from Hawaii. Here in Morocco it has been my extreme pleasure to connect with…
Morocco has changed a tremendous amount since I left nine years ago – and so have I. The truth is, during my time in Morocco, I did most of what I wanted to do here with the exception of taking a road trip to the South of Morocco and Mauritania – but that’s not something…
It’s such a strange thing to come back to a place you once lived. At this point in my life, with where I am today versus where I was back in 2009 when I arrived here the first time – there is such a vast chasm of experience and perspective. Not to mention the contrast…
William S. Burroughs – no other name rings so loudly in the annals of extraordinary literary vagabonds of the 20th century.
Explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton was quite possibly the greatest vagabond in history. In his lifetime he lived diverse cultures, broke boundaries, and did most of it without much in the way of resources or travel money.He is this week’s Extraordinary Vagabond.
The greatest adventurer of all time for me is the Moroccan vagabond, Ibn Battuta. He not only traveled everywhere in his known world, but he wrote about it in ways that no one before him had. Ibn Battuta’s journey lasted 29 years, so by Moroccan standards, my wife should be understanding of this current journey I’m on.
Traveling the world used to be a game that only the men played, but as in all fields, brave pioneers broke out of the Victorian conception of women as meek and mild and showed that even the hardest travel makes no distinction among the sexes. Isabelle Eberhardt was one of these extraordinary feminist vagabonds.
Can Hanno the Navigator even be classified as a vagabond? To my mind, the answer is yes – in that a vagabond is anyone who sets out on a voyage of discovery where the unknown is the biggest thing that is known.
Travel is not just moving over the earth from one place to another in some kind of conveyance. It’s not about where you’re going or how you’re getting there. It’s not about getting away from it all, at all. In fact, more the opposite … a way of getting to it all. Travel is a metaphor for life, a way of experiencing it more intensely and self-consciously. Traveling is not so much an action as an enlightened state of consciousness, opening you to fresh experience, to fresh looks at the world and yourself in it.