Travels in the Riel World

Ladakh is a fascinating place. A Tibetan Buddhist culture in northern India, it has more in common with such neighbors as Bhutan and Nepal than it does with the country to which it belongs. David Desjardins and his family recently discovered that the Ladakhi landscape is also spectacular and the people are friendly and welcoming. He, his wife and their 12-year-old son recently went trekking in Ladakh, an adventure that David recounted in a story for the Boston Globe.

A high desert plateau pitched between the autonomous Chinese region of Tibet to the east and Pakistan to the west, Ladakh (”Land of High Passes”) is part of India, but has more in common with its neighbors. It is the meeting place of two mountain ranges - the Karakoram and the Himalaya - and of two cultures, Buddhist and Muslim. For centuries, it was an important stop along the ancient Silk Road, but today political tensions to the east and west ensure that most visitors to Ladakh approach it from the south.

Surrounded by mountains, Ladakh was for centuries inaccessible for much of the year, its high passes choked with snow from October through May, often longer. Air travel has changed that, but even today flights are frequently canceled because of bad weather. The region’s high paths and roads are open in July and August. When the throngs arrive, they flock to Leh, Ladakh’s ancient capital and the center of its tourist trade.

Nestled along the Indus River valley at an altitude of 11,500 feet, Leh is where visitors catch their breath. The need to acclimatize, and to organize a trek, usually keeps newcomers in Ladakh’s biggest town for a few days - and for most, that’s more than enough. Leh’s narrow streets and alleys are choked with traffic, shops, and meandering dogs and cattle. Although it had its charms, we were soon eager to strike out for the wide-open country…

So began our journey into the backcountry of Ladakh, where all traffic is foot traffic and life is lived at a slower pace. Our daily routine - rising, eating, walking, eating, sleeping - helped us slow down too, and let us experience the rhythms of Ladakhi life. Passing fields, we heard farmers singing as they worked. Atop mountain passes, we paused as our guides strung up prayer flags and lighted incense. Descending, we picked our way through herds of grazing sheep and dzos, the Ladakhis’ hybrid of yak and domesticated cow. Visiting a town’s temple, we turned the prayer wheels that lined its walls and rested in the presence of centuries-old Buddhist sculptures, gilded in riotous colors that contrasted with the gray-brown terrain outside.

The landscape we walked through was a slideshow of wild, tortured peaks and ravines, mostly tan and gray, interrupted occasionally by purple funneled hoodoos and reddish slashes raked into the hillside. Glaciers sprawled below snow-capped mountains, feeding streams that carved the deep gorges we hiked through.

If you’d like to read a sample of my own experiences in Ladakh, you can check out this section from my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

Mexico seems to have caught the attention of the New York Times. In the past week, the newspaper has published two in-depth feature stories about the country. Luckily, this enables us to vicariously explore two distinct regions of that nation.

First, the travel section published a story on travel in Chiapas as part of its Frugal Traveler series.

In Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’s central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy color, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed from 10 to 13 pesos to the dollar. But Chiapas’s affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travelers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rain forests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

Then, the Escapes section of the Times published a story on the charming town of San Miguel de Allende, which happens to house a fair number of American expatriates.

It had been four years since I last saw San Miguel de Allende, the 16th-century colonial Mexican hill town that shelters a happy crowd of American retirees and part-time residents. I was curious about what time, trendiness and progress had done to this place beloved for its preserved Spanish colonial architecture and aura of timeless charm. Now, sitting in the jardín — the loud, leafy central plaza — I began to deduce a complex answer.

A few weeks before my recent visit, San Miguel had been named a Unesco World Heritage Site, and at a nearby table, a group of Americans were buzzing about that success. Yet from the park bench where I sat, I could see something else that was new: on the facade of one of the carefully preserved old downtown buildings was the unmistakable logo of Starbucks.

This, in a nutshell, is San Miguel these days: balancing in a moment of almost exquisite equilibrium between new and old…

While my wife and I were in San Miguel, an international short-film festival occupied half a dozen venues, the play “Shimmer” was in town on tour, a new bistro opened and there was a gala for a local charity. There was a time when Americans retired to San Miguel for its glacial pace and tranquillity. These days, it’s more like a high-end summer camp for aging boomers.

“It’s like Berkeley for retired people,” said Sally Osbon, 55, who, with her husband, Jim, 64, lives half the year in San Francisco and half in San Miguel. The Osbons, whose three-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house is at the edge of the centro, enjoy not only the climate and the golf, but also what Ms. Osbon called the town’s “bohemian feel.”

When I first heard about San Miguel in the mid-’90s, the knowledge was shared by a friend as a precious secret. Soon afterward, on our first morning there, my wife and I ambled through the most guileless and sweet-natured place we’d ever seen, authentic right down to the donkey-drawn carts carrying water and firewood. Its appearance of being unaffected by its own beauty gave it a quality that was irresistible.

Lots to explore in Mexico, as even the NY Times has apparently discovered.

Not only are more American students participating in study abroad programs, but now China is the fifth most popular destination, after the more traditional destinations of Britain, Italy, Spain and France.

Record numbers of American students are studying abroad, with especially strong growth in educational exchanges with China, the annual report by the Institute on International Education found.

The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent, and the number of Chinese students studying at American universities increased by 20 percent last year, according to the report, “Open Doors 2008.”

“Interest in China is growing dramatically, and I think we’ll see even sharper increases in next year’s report,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. “People used to go to China to study the history and language, and many still do, but with China looming so large in all our futures, there’s been a real shift, and more students go for an understanding of what’s happening economically and politically.”

A new travel niche, called “philanthropic travel,” is gaining in popularity. The goal of this movement is to enable travelers to have a worthwhile experience while simultaneously providing assistance to a people or country. The NY Times has a report:

Nadine Rubin wanted to give her daughter the trip of a lifetime for her 21st birthday. They were planning to visit Hong Kong because her daughter was interested in fashion. “But I wanted to do something else,” Ms. Rubin said. “I’d heard Vietnam was beautiful, but I had mixed feelings about it because I knew people involved with the war.”

But then Ms. Rubin, who lives in Westport, Conn., talked with Lydia Dean, president of GoPhilanthropic (www.gophilanthropic.com), a philanthropic travel company formed about a year ago. “I caught the bug,” Ms. Rubin said.

Ms. Rubin and her daughter, Bryce, decided to experience Vietnam through the lens of the Global Village Foundation, a nonprofit organization run by a humanitarian, Le Ly Hayslip, that distributes portable libraries — wooden boxes with shelving and room for 250 books — to Vietnamese communities. Ms. Rubin and her daughter bought and delivered a library to a village and met the students who would benefit from the books. “Going there and seeing those kids, to say I bawled my eyes out is an understatement,” Nadine Rubin said.

Philanthropic travel — which introduces tourists to local outfits working to better their communities — is on the rise…

“Travel philanthropy is now core to sustainability,” said David Krantz, program director for the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development (www.ecotourismcesd.org). “In terms of responsible practices, originally companies were following more of a charity model. It was a lot of, ‘I give a check, take a picture and walk away.’ ”  …

“Philanthropic travel is about traveling with an intention, with an open heart,” said David Chamberlain, president of Exquisite Safaris. “We need people to visit, connect at the heart and go home and talk about it and try to raise money. That’s philanthropic travel.”

Students who take advantage of study abroad programs have a wide variety of experiences. In the best scenarios, they not only have a fun and enriching life experience, but also come away with nuggets of insight into the culture of a new country. That’s what happened for Laura Corser, who was recently profiled in the Boston Globe after spending a semester in Seoul, South Korea.

One of her key insights into Korean culture:

ACT YOUR AGE: “Korean etiquette is highly focused on age and rank. Often the first question out of someone’s mouth (after ‘what’s your name?’) is ‘how old are you?’ One habit I had to acquire (other than taking off your shoes when you enter a house and several restaurants or eating rice with a spoon) was the style of interacting with elders, like serving them with both hands, or with one’s free hand on the arm if only one hand is required.”

For most Westerners, any mention of Kenya as a tourist destination will spark images of safaris. But for those who know of Lamu, Kenya is a very different place. A small island off the Kenyan coast, Lamu contains a quaint old town and miles of deserted beaches that have enchanted many a traveler. In this article, Sophie Lam writes of her own captivating experience on Lamu.

Omar beckoned with a sweep of his arm: “Come, come!” And with that he disappeared around a corner and out of sight again. I trailed him as quickly as I could, but he had vanished. Left or right? The tangled alleyways of Lamu Town served only to confuse and disorient me. The town had looked as small as its transport inventory implies (one car, one donkey ambulance, no roads) when our boat pulled up at the docking jetty of the island’s main port that morning. Yet, like a hall of mirrors, once I ventured into the web of passages it seemed to expand with every corner I turned.

As I stopped to compose myself in an airless alley, my guide Omar’s beaming face reappeared and we continued on our way, deep into the heart of the town. Some passages were barely wide enough for overtaking people; add the town’s itinerant donkeys to the equation and you can imagine the tailbacks. On either side of us, thick-walled, lime-plastered houses soared towards a ribbon of blue sky above. These 600-year-old coral stone buildings form East Africa’s oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement, now part of the Unesco-recognised maze.

Like the shell of a pearl oyster, the rough but resilient exteriors conceal beautifully ornate interiors. A step beyond a wooden door might lead you through to a sun-drenched inner courtyard, hung with jasmine and frangipani, or splashed with tropical fronds.

Bolivia is a fascinating nation - one of the highest altitude countries in the world and a place where past and present co-exist in various interesting ways. That’s what Patrick Symmes discovered during a recent visit, which he wrote about for the NY Times travel magazine.

Bolivia is the poorest and highest country in South America, and La Paz is its lively, fermenting main city of 1.5 million, stuck into a cleft in the Andean plateau. High and low, La Paz throngs with a slightly feudal aura, where clothing trends of the 1890s and the 1980s mingle, and politics seamlessly blends the 1960s with the 1690s.

The exotic is right at the end of the block, where at dawn, checking into my hotel, I encountered the end of an overnight festival, with wealthy women in bowler hats knocking back beers and dancing to a brass band. Then a man walked by carrying 10 mattresses on his back. There was a fistfight. Someone emptied a chamber pot from a second-floor window. Todo normal here means 17th-century cathedrals and 21st-century lodgings, witchcraft markets selling disenchantments, eco-tourists packing telephotos and storefront ‘‘mentalists’’ peddling lottery predictions to the hopeful…

There is no doubt that Bolivia is still a hard place, physically, emotionally, aromatically. Compared with the Europeanized societies of neighboring Chile and Argentina, it’s a step back in time, a rustic patchwork quilt of cultures and environments, with large swaths of the country accessible only by beaten tracks and mud roads. (Travel is what Bolivians call imprevisible, unforeseeable.)

But things are getting easier, and today’s visitor is admitted to a particularly sweet spot in Bolivia’s history, a moment when the roads are new but the ways are still old. I’ve had the classic Andean destinations of Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca, and the mountain town of Sorata on my to-do list for a dozen years. Yet only now have Bolivia’s stars aligned to make them not just possible, but possible with the surprising ease and unexpected rewards that mark the best days of travel in a difficult place.

I just finished reading a book called “Four Seasons in Rome,” by Anthony Doerr. One the surface, it’s the tale of a husband and wife who move to Rome for a year (for a writing fellowship) with their two children. The catch is that the children are twins and are only a few months old when the sojourn in Rome begins, so the story is really about learning to navigate Rome while also learning how to be a parent to two young boys.

The story is fun to read and has the added benefit of wonderful prose and interesting insights into Italian life. A sample of Doerr’s writing about Rome:

Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life.

And an observation about Italians:

“Italians,” our friend George Stoll says, “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.

I’m always amazed when writers catch my eye with just the poetic power of their prose, and I love to discover random nuggets of cultural insight buried in manuscripts about other topics. On both of these counts, “Four Seasons in Rome” was a good read.

The city of Fes, Morocco, has enchanted many a traveler. Tahir Shah was spellbound by the medieval magic of Fes and wrote about the city for the U.K. Guardian.

Walk through the bustle of Fes’s medina and it’s impossible not to be catapulted back in time. It is as if the old city is on a frequency of its own, set apart from the frenzied world of internet and iPods and all the techno clutter that fills our daily lives. Abdul-Lateef and his magic-medicinal stall are a fragment of a healing system that stretches back through centuries, to a time when Fes was itself at the cutting edge of science, linked by the pilgrimage routes to Cairo, Damascus and Samarkand.

These days the low-cost airlines shuttle the curious back and forth to Europe. And everyone they bring is tantalised by what they find. Fes is the only medieval Arab city that’s still absolutely intact. It’s as if a shroud has covered it for centuries, the corner now lifted a little so we can peek in. Once the capital of Morocco, Fes is one of those rare destinations that’s bigger than mass tourism, a city that’s so self-assured, so grounded in its own identity, that it hardly seems to care whether the tourists come or not. Moroccans will tell you that it’s the dark heart of their kingdom, that its medina has a kind of sacred soul.

Wander the labyrinth of narrow streets and you can feel it. It’s all around you - in the meat bazaar, where shanks of mutton nestle on fragrant beds of mint, and it’s down in the most ancient quarter, at er-Rsif, where the seed of Fes fell more than a thousand years ago.

Eritrea is not a well-touristed place, nor even a very well known country. But Jeffrey Gettleman went there recently with his wife and found it to be a rather interesting destination, with a taste of old Italy mixed with Africa. He wrote about his trip for the NY Times.

Eritrea, for better and for worse, is a nation locked in a time capsule. Visiting here is like spending your vacation in a vintage shop. Old men in dapper Fedora hats and antique Italian shades haunt Harnet Avenue, the palm-studded main drag in Asmara, the capital. The city itself is a showcase for some of the world’s boldest, most whimsical examples of 1930s Art Deco architecture, perfectly preserved by the thin desert air…

Asmara the architectural marvel is not so much the purposeful result of a hard-fought preservation battle. No. There were battles, real ones, and it was Eritrea’s bloody history of conflict and civil war that has kept this little-known sliver of a country along the Red Sea hermetically sealed to the outside world. The result is a surreal, out-of-body tourist experience, where you feel dislocated from just about everywhere else, but euphoric and inspired by what is in front of you. Africa? The Mediterranean? The Middle East? South Beach? It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what Eritrea feels like.

Well, yes, if Humoud Yakobi has his way. The chairman of the Iraq Board of Tourism, Yakobi has a vision of legions of tourists returning to Iraq. Not decades from now, but in the near future. The NY Times reports on Iraqi dreams of building a tourist infrastructure.

Humoud Yakobi gazes at the rubble-strewn parking lot, the maze of blast walls and the clusters of dusty palm trees on the island around him and sees hotels, restaurants and shopping malls, with throngs of people enjoying refreshments by the swimming pool or playing a round of golf.

“I always imagine it as some kind of heaven,” he said.

Mr. Yakobi, the chairman of Iraq’s Board of Tourism, is charged with attracting foreign visitors to his beleaguered country. Jazirat A’aras, an island in the Tigris that is just across from the fortified Green Zone and the new American Embassy, is central to his plans. He is seeking investors who might want to spend $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion to build on the island…

Some might argue that Mr. Yakobi’s vision is premature, if not absurd. Despite a drop in violence in Baghdad in recent months, Mr. Yakobi still cannot leave his office on Haifa Street without a convoy of armored cars and bodyguards. During an hourlong interview at his office recently, the lights blinked off, then on again, as the building’s generator kicked in, an event repeated many times a day throughout Iraq. It was not so long ago that American forces sometimes had to escort the workers at the Tourism Board home, shielding them from the firefights in the street.

Mr. Yakobi, however, is by his own description an optimist, and he says he has some reason to believe that Iraq, known for its holy sites and antiquities, will once again be a tourist mecca.

Other Iraqis are a bit more pragmatic about the possibilities.

Hassan al-Fayadh, head of the tourism board’s media relations department, was more skeptical.

“Western visitors are very sensitive to bombings and things like that,” he said. “You can’t achieve the tourism industry without security.”

Yes, tourists tend to be sensitive to bombings. Still, you have to admire a person with a vision.

One of the most impressive but least known sites in the world is the Indonesian monument of Borobudur. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on this stunning edifice, which is considered the largest Buddhist monument in existence.

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza.

If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression…

Borobudur rises to a height of 400 feet, nearly as tall as Cheops’ pyramid, in a series of concentric terraces. Its walls are lined with exquisitely carved bas-reliefs illustrating episodes from the life of the Buddha and his teachings, amounting to more than a mile of continuous sculpture — and that doesn’t include 504 life-size statues of the Buddha…

Like its Egyptian predecessors, Borobudur poses many enigmas to archaeologists. One visionary, slightly mad aspect of its design is that the ground plan, visible only from an aerial perspective, is a perfect mandala, a symbolic schema of Buddhist cosmology that serves as an aid to meditation. Or perhaps the monument represents a lotus blossom, a nearly universal image in Buddhist art. In 1931, a Dutch artist named W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp proposed the whimsical theory that the plain surrounding Borobudur was once a lake, and the monument was conceived as a lotus flower floating on it. His hypothesis became less fanciful in 2000, when archaeologists found stratigraphical evidence of a paleolake in the area.

There is an interesting and in-depth interview with travel writer Rolf Potts on World Hum. Potts covers a variety of topics and it’s worth checking out the entire piece, especially if you’re interested in travel writing. But here is a small excerpt from the interview about the transformation of travel in recent decades.

What major changes have you noticed in travel in general?

Electronic communication has radically transformed the travel experience. Fourteen years ago I took my first vagabonding trip, eight months around North America. That was before the ubiquity of email and cell phones; communication meant sending a postcard or jamming quarters into a pay phone, which meant I was usually out of touch with family for weeks at a time. Five years later, I was paying $15 an hour to send emails from a slow dial-up connection in Luang Prabang, and it seemed like a communication miracle. By contrast, just last month I was traveling with an AT&T BlackJack in East Africa, and I could use it to call home or check my messages in Juba, Sudan. This wasn’t just a one-way thing: The people in Juba may not have much in the way of indoor plumbing, but they love their cell phones, too; I lost track of how many little thatch-roofed kiosks I saw selling phone credits.

So that’s the main transformation I’ve seen. There have been other big developments in the past decade, including the boom in online travel-planning resources and the rise (and possible fall) of cheap airfares. But communication technology stands out. 

The new challenge here, of course, is learning how to wean yourself off this new technology as you travel. The charm of leaving home has always been that it transports you into new places and vivid moments; it makes you slow down and take note of your new surroundings. This can be hard to do if you’re always checking your inbox or texting your friends back home. If you can actually do that—if you can cut the electronic umbilical cord and embrace the moment on the road—travel can still be as amazing as ever.

When one thinks of ancient civilizations in the Americas, it tends to be of those societies that left behind spectacular ruins. The Incas of Peru, the Mayans of Mexico and Central America, or even the Pueblo people of the U.S. Southwest who built the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Not many minds conjure up images of advanced Indian civilizations in the Midwestern United States.

In fact, though, archaeologists continue to produce evidence that large societies not only inhabited this region, but also built large edifices in the form of mounds that are only now being understood and appreciated. Check out this article for an in-depth tour of some of these sites.

The earthworks left behind by the long vanished civilizations of the Midwest are harder to spot than the pueblos and kivas of Arizona and New Mexico. For a long time many of them were hidden in plain sight or dismissed as little more than heaps of soil. But the more today’s archaeologists learn about the Midwestern mounds, the more intriguing is the picture that emerges from 1,000 or more years ago: a city with thousands of people just a few miles from present-day St. Louis, a 1,348-foot earthen serpent that points to the summer solstice, artifacts made of materials that could only have arrived over lengthy trade routes.

The mound builders lived over a wide area. But on a road trip of a few days in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, you can get a sampling of their work — and, along the way, find some modern-day diversions. Start from St. Louis, which early European settlers called Mound City because of the Indian constructions that were soon flattened to build the modern city.

A fast-growing travel niche is religion-based tourism, which caters to people who want to have a pilgrimage experience during their journey. This NY Times article has more information.

Some 16 feet beneath the present-day street level of Damascus, the Syrian capital, just off the Street Called Straight, is a cramped, artificially lighted chapel with roughly cut stones for walls and a few modern pews as furnishings. The grotto was once part of a home where — 2,000 years ago — Saul of Tarsus is said to have taken shelter after he was blinded by a heavenly light, the incident that converted him to Christianity. He emerged from that home as the Apostle Paul.

On a recent sultry summer evening, that historical event was very much on the minds of the 20 or so worshipers who watched reverently as a priest stood in front of a modern altar at one end of the small room, arranged the liturgical items he had brought with him, lighted the candles and celebrated Mass. “In the tradition of legions of pilgrims, we find ourselves doing what the early Christians did,” the Rev. Cesare Atuire said during his homily…

To many present-day pilgrims … nothing quite compares with the experience of traveling the road to Damascus. “It’s one thing for Christians to read the Holy Scriptures, quite another to come see where things happened,” said Father Atuire…

Of course, Christians aren’t the only ones showing an interest in religion-based tourism. Participants in the Kumbh Mela, a rotating Hindu festival, have reportedly topped 75 million, and each year, some two million Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. Nor is Damascus the only place where Christians are heading these days. Lourdes, France, which the Pope will visit in September, draws an average of six million a year … and San Giovanni Rotondo, home to the shrine of the mystic monk Padre Pio, lured eight million to Puglia, Italy, in the last year.

Father Atuire has some thoughts about the surge of believers searching for the roots of their faith. “In times of epochal change, people sense a greater need to find points of reference,” he said while a bus lurched along a Syrian highway to the town of Malula and the Convent of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, another popular pilgrimage site and one of the few places in the world where Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, is still heard. “But at the same time many are looking for untraditional forms of expression and a pilgrimage allows you to approach a religious experience from a different perspective.”

Have you heard of the Lost Girls? They’re three twentysomething New York friends who left their jobs and hit the road together for a one-year journey around the world. Along the way, they blogged about the trip and are now back home working on a book about the experience. Sort of like Sex and the City meets On the Road. They recently stopped by the Vagabonding site to chat about their travels and their writing. An excerpt:

What are each of you up to now?

Despite our passion for full-time vagabonding, the three of us accepted desk jobs in order to restock our bank accounts (boring, but necessary!). Amanda is a nutrition editor at a health magazine, Jen does integrated marketing for an independent film/television channel, and Holly now taste-tests chocolates all day for a major candy manufacturer (well, that’s her dream job…she’s actually a freelance writer and editor for several national publications).

Recently, both Jen and Amanda approached their individual bosses about the possibility of going part time in order to focus more attention on book writing. And to their shock—both supervisors agreed to the arrangement! We’ve realized that if you put in the time and hard work to cultivate a successful career, your company/boss is generally more willing to allow time off to travel, or to rearrange your schedule to accommodate special project.

Now, all three of us spend our Fridays together at a coffee shop in Union Square, so we can make the task of book writing a collaborate process—and a fun one, at that.

Do you still crave a life on the road?
Absolutely. After living out of a backpack for a year, we found that we craved the stability and comforts of home. But now that we’ve been back in NYC for a while, all three of us find that we miss the freedom and ever-changing nature of life of the road.

Travel brought us rewards in the form of new friends, discoveries, and cultural experiences. It’s kind of fun never knowing where the day will take you, and we can’t wait until our next adventure.

Are there any trips in the works?

When we finished our year-long trip, we vowed to take a Lost Girls Getaway together once a year for the rest of lives. Since returning, we’ve planned a few weekend excursions together in the United States, and have traveled independently to Antarctica, Ecuador and the Bahamas. For the next six months, we’ll be staying close to home in order to write and promote the book. Once we finish the first draft of the memoir in January ’09, we’re planning to return to Argentina, the country that inspired our around-the-world adventure.

In 1975, Paul Theroux published a bestselling travel memoir, The Great Railway Bazaar, about a train trip from Europe to Asia. In the years since he has become one of the world’s most successful and best known travel writers. He recently published a new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which he retraces much of his first route to Asia by train. He spoke with USA Today about the trip and his writing.

The most striking change you saw?
Without question, Vietnam. From a country that was a muddy, flattened, bloody, beleaguered hell hole … to the country it is today: flourishing, forward-looking and, almost incredibly, forgiving.

How tempted were you to try to retrace your 1973 route through Afghanistan?
After I read about the numerous abductions and killings of Western wanderers like myself in Afghanistan, it was an easy decision to detour through Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — some great train rides in those countries. And lately they have been in the news, so I think I was lucky in my timing.

Do you agree with The Guardian’s description of you as “the Indiana Jones of American literature”?
Very nice. I’m flattered. But I have only been shot at three times: twice in Africa, once in the Philippines. I have been bitten by snakes, and once by bats in an outhouse one night in Central Africa. I think Indy can top those.

Any advice to travelers?
If you’re planning to write something about your travels, go alone, go overland, go cheap, and leave all electronics behind. To all travelers, I urge patience.

Have you ever imagined what it’d be like to spend time at a yoga retreat in India? Well, now you can live vicariously through Kyle Jarrard, who wrote an account for the International Herald Tribune of the experience he and his wife had in Puducherry, India.

The first sound in the morning is crows, right at 5. Then we hear waves off the Bay of Bengal slapping the shore. In the garden, a man meditates while walking quickly over the lawn of the ashram guest house in the dark. Along the shore, other men pace the beach in the silver jetty light. Fishing boat lanterns like stars ride the black sea south to north.

My wife and I have come to this old French comptoir (formerly Pondichéry) in southeast India mostly for the yoga. The classes used to be held in one of the many parcels of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram scattered across the colonial city. But for this retreat, there’s a new venue and to get there you have to be on Ajit Sarkar’s bus by 5:45…

For the first few blocks the streets have French names: Rue Dumas, Rue Suffren, Rue Romain Rolland. Then we leave town and head south over fetid canals and clogged streams, through trash-heaped neighborhoods thumping with all-night Hindu festival music while men in dhotis stand around sipping tea out of plastic goblets. Cows with brightly painted red and green horns meditate in the middle of the road as we plunge into the lush Tamil Nadu countryside…

We take our yoga classes on the roof of the new school, under a tall thatched structure with open sides. Most of the people in the assembly know their Hatha-style yoga; others stumble a lot - but soon everyone gets into the flow, despite the great sensual distractions: banana groves to the north wavering in the gold sunlight; rice paddies to the east where a few dozen women bend weeding at daybreak; thick coconut trees to the west that invite the eye to enter and roam; and to the south, the village, overlain with teak, drumstick and casuarina trees, where cooking-fire smoke rises and every dog yaps at everything.