As we all know, travel has become a lot easier in recent decades—at least for those of us born into relative privilege and possessing passports that allow us to travel widely. But the flip side of that is that often we don’t know the places closer to home. As Marco D’Eramo points out in his New Left Review essay Geographies… Read More
As regular readers may know, I’ve been travelling full-time with my wife Genie since the beginning of 2015. We don’t have a home anywhere, just a second-hand Toyota in which we travel from place to place, mostly in and around Europe. We pay the bills by doing freelance writing and editing work as we go. I’ve always meant to blog… Read More
I just had a travel essay called Death by Preservation published in Issue #34 of Post Road Magazine, a literary magazine over in the U.S. It’s about the tourist project of fantasy construction and the curious correlation between UNESCO World Heritage status and spiritual death. The essay starts in the medieval theme park of Tallinn’s old town, before moving across the… Read More
Remember when you used to go on holiday and completely lose track of what was happening back home? In the days before the internet and widespread satellite TV, the only way to get news from your home country was to buy an overpriced newspaper that was a few days out of date (if you could even find one). You could… Read More
If you live in the U.S., you’ll find my article on living a nomadic life in today’s Wall Street Journal. Or everyone can read it online. To be honest, I was a bit surprised when they asked me to write it—I didn’t think our lives would be of much interest to WSJ readers. But judging by the comments, tweets and emails I’ve… Read More
I’d like to wish all of you a Happy International Women’s Day! Let’s all do what we can to #BeBoldForChange. I would really like it to be a happy day for women in Morocco, too, but from what I’ve seen over the past few months, I doubt that it will be. While travelling around Morocco, I’ve seen women in Morocco: hauling… Read More
Usually I try to tie my posts to a topic or theme, or expand my travel observations into an essay. This post isn’t like that. It’s just some photos of a town that’s blue. The town is called Chefchaouen, and it’s in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. Why is it blue? There are various theories… One theory is that the… Read More
Back in the year 2000, Genie and I took our first trip together. We were living in New York City at the time, and we rented a car and drove up to Montreal. After a great long weekend there, it was finally time to start the six-hour drive back home. So what did we do? We drove another couple of hundred miles in… Read More
We’re now more than a month into our trip around Morocco, and I have lots of things I want to say about it. But I’m struggling to formulate those thoughts exactly. I think what it comes down to is that it’s a beautiful and fascinating place, but I don’t like being in a place with so much inequality. By inequality, I… Read More