Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

As Thoreau famously sead, it doesn’t matter where or how far you go – the farther commonly the worse – the important thing is how alive you are. Writing of every kind is a way...

Families are so important here,” I said. She looked surprised. “They are not everywhere?

Lonely Places, then are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do...

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, “We have now landed in Lonely Place’s Down-at-Heels Airport,...

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to...

Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That...

…Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the...

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

…home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all...