I celebrated my 50th birthday in Jerusalem; it was my first trip to Israel. Many of my dispatches appeared on the ThingsAsian site, but here’s a story I published in the San Francisco Chronicle’s bi-annual travel magazine. It’s titled  Of Wine and Walls.

        Okay, Cyberpals, looks like we’re up and running … literally as well as figuratively. Makes crazy poetic sense that this brand-new website, created with the help of the masterful Bradley Charbonneau, unfolds mere hours before yet another hasty departure — this time for Telluride, Colorado, where I’ll lend my decidedly non-filmic talents to the high-altitude hijinx of the MountainFilm Festival. 

    Which leaves me in a typical pre-road quandry: to pack, or to write?

    In this case, the Middle Way won’t really work. Many people assume that, since I travel for a living, I must be an expert packer. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite obsessive "packlists" upon which pre-determined numbers of thermal socks, computer adapters, and Zantac are crossed off with a felt marker, the packing process takes hours, and always culminates in a familiar sense of despair: once again, I’ll be carrying something heavy around the world. (more…)

"Unnatural Selection"

from The Size of the World
© 1995 / Jeff Greenwald

Whenever an O approaches in my life, I get an irresistible urge to jump through it. The ’round-the-world overland journey I envisioned was my gut response to a long-anticipated need – as March 6, 1994, crept ever closer – to perform a worthy and appropriate ritual. What better way to celebrate the circle, as cycle, shape and circus hoop?

But there was something else, even more compelling. In Indo-Tibetan Asia, performing a kora – a clockwise circumambulation around revered shrines, holy cities or sacred mountains – is considered a supreme act of pilgrimage. This, then, was my goal: To perform a kora around the Earth itself.

The idea had looked great on paper. As I plotted my route, though, and fathomed the lonely logistics of such a voyage (weeks at sea, days on trains, hours on oxcarts), my heart sank. Six months was a long time. It was a very long time. It was more time, I realized, than I could bear to spend with myself. (more…)