Travels in the Riel World

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.

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.

I have to take time for a bit of book promotion here, as there was some nice press coverage in today’s Arizona Daily Star newspaper about my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

It was the trip of a lifetime. Two trips, actually. In 2002, Bob Riel and Lisa Higgins, wed the year before, embarked on a three-month-long trip that took them from Greece to Turkey, then on to Kenya, Thailand, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 2005 they did it again, this time traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Singapore, Egypt and Europe.

But this was no four-star-hotel experience. The couple traveled at times by rickshaw and rickety bus, flatbed truck and camel.

More than mere sightseeing, the trip, says Riel, was a life sabbatical — one that more of us should undertake to renew and refresh our lives.

You can read more about the book, including some chapter excerpts, at my other website, www.bobriel.com.

Everyone knows about the Frommer’s series of travel guidebooks, but what about the man behind the guides? Arthur Frommer just did an online interview for Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding site and talked about his life as a traveler and a writer. Some highlights:

How did you get started traveling?

By accident, and at the expense of Uncle Sam. I was drafted into the army when I graduated from the Yale University Law School. The Korea War was going on at that time, and I was trained to be an infantryman in Korea when someone in the Pentagon must have discovered some of my linguistic abilities. I was assigned instead to Berlin. I wanted to pinch myself for my good luck. I had never dreamed that I would ever be able to see Europe, as I came from a family of very modest income.

And there I was smack in the heart of Europe with a strong US dollar and I utilized every opportunity I could find, every weekend and three-day pass, to simply travel throughout Europe regardless of how little money I had. I was living on a PFC’s salary. And in the course of doing that it occurred to me that I should write a book about the experience.

I discovered that the fact that I had very little money had transformed the quality of my vacation and travels and made them far more rewarding and far more pleasant. I discovered that the less you spend the more you enjoy — the more authentic is the experience you have.

As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

My biggest challenge is to keep my own eyes and consciousness fresh. I’ve realized that there was such a thing as too much travel, which causes you to be jaded.

There was a moment when my plane landed at the airport of Amsterdam one day and I didn’t even take my eyes away from the book that I was reading because I was as familiar with Amsterdam as I was with my own home city. And I suddenly realized that that’s not the mood with which travelers approach a new destination — travel is exciting and novel and somewhat bewildering. And it’s very important, even for an experienced travel writer: not to become jaded and not to relax, but to keep in mind the tingling excitement that most tourists feel when they encounter a foreign destination for the first time.

That has led to a style of writing in which nothing is left out — in which you don’t assume anything, in which you take the reader by the hand and lead him through the steps he will need to absorb in order to enjoy a particular destination.

What travel authors have influenced you?

I don’t think I was influenced by any other authors of travel guides per se, but I loved reading general travel memoirs about trips that people have taken. I remember that Richard Halliburton had an immense impact on me earlier in my life when I read him as a young boy.

But I find that general reading, both novels as well as nonfiction books about different aras of the world, has had a great impact on my writing. I’ve been fascinated in recent months to read the Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian Nobel Prize winner. I have also been influenced by the wonderful books written by Rory Stewart, who in the immediate weeks after 9/11 walked from one end of Afghanistan to the other and wrote a book, The Places In Between, that gives you a better picture of what’s going on in Afghanistan than any other deeper, more political tome could possibly bring to you.

World Hum recently posted an interview with travel writer Laurie Gough. An excerpt:

In hindsight, can you explain how you knew you were destined to be a wanderer?

My Dad was a geographer and he was a lover of maps and any road leading to someplace new. Every summer we’d pack up our trailer and station wagon and go off somewhere. We’d go to the Maritimes, the Rockies, the Canadian Prairies, New England, the Great Lakes, Wisconsin, Quebec, the Appalachians. Every summer was different. We even went to Europe one summer when I was 13, rented a caravan and camped. My sister, who was older, hated those camping trips, but I didn’t. Those camping trips cultivated my love of the open road.

On your Web site, you offer 10 tips for travelers. How would you characterize your own travel philosophy?

I think we look for different things when we travel at different stages of our lives. When I was in my 20s and traveling, I was looking for answers to all the big questions. I was looking for adventure, love, meaning, how to live, where to live, how other people in the world lived. Now I’m just looking for a place with some sun and really good iced mochas.

Actually, no, I’m still looking for some of those big things. I’m definitely still looking for adventure, for that experience of living in the moment when everything feels brand-new and wondrous, and I’m still looking for the perfect place to live. 

2007 has been a big year. I recently wrote about the birth of my first child. Now, I’m here with news about a different type of birth - that of my first book.

Two Laps Around the World: Tales and Insights from a Life Sabbatical is now on the market. The book is about the experiences that my wife and I had when we decided to take a few months off from our careers to travel. The experience was so incredible that we repeated the experience less than three years later and so ended up traveling around the world twice - once in each direction.

You can read more about the book here. There are excerpts from a few chapters, a reading guide for book clubs, and information about how to buy an autographed copy. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope you’ll check it out! And when you do, please let me know what you think.

Some of the better travel writing on the internet can be found in the Dispatches section of World Hum. The site’s most recent story has Catherine Watson writing about a period of time that she spent on Easter Island. An excerpt:

By the time I got to the South Pacific, I was in my early 30s, and I’d been looking for home all my life, for the place I really belonged, the place where I should have been born. I felt I’d found it on Easter Island the instant I stepped off the plane. It was as if the island had been waiting for me, all that time, the way I’d been waiting for the island…

I began to exist in the present tense, as if I had no past regrets and no future fears. It was something I’d never done before. That, and the incredible distances surrounding us, lent me an exhilarating freedom. I likened it to hiding in a childhood tree fort with the rope pulled up. No one knows where I am, I kept thinking. No one can find me.

My days quickly fell into their own gentle rhythm: Go out walking after breakfast. Explore a cave, a volcano, a vista. Take pictures. Talk to people. Go home for lunch. Nap or write or poke around Hanga Roa. And in the late afternoon, walk over to Tahai, the row of giant statues, called moai, that stood closest to town, and watch the sunset paint the sky in the direction of Tahiti…

From the beginning, Yolanda had been urging me to stay longer. I’d only planned on a week, but as plane day got closer and she kept talking, I weakened. Yolanda was right, I decided. There was really no reason to leave so soon. The only thing waiting for me was a small internship on a newspaper in Buenos Aires, and the start date was more than a month away. Besides, there was no penalty for changing my reservation. What harm could it do to wait?

I missed one plane. And then another. And another.

And while I waited, my newly simple life grew complicated. I was enmeshed in a love affair, all right, but it wasn’t exactly with the man I’d met. It was with Easter Island itself. My island.

Holland Carter had an interesting piece in the NY Times recently, in which he reminisced about a Greyhound bus trip he took across a good portion of the U.S. in the 1960s when he was still a teenager. The story is a worthwhile read for Cotter’s descriptions of American life as viewed from the road a few decades ago.

Next I crashed with a cousin, John, a young professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smart, tense, busy with summer school, he gave me a tour of the neat, green campus, then said, ”I want to show you another part of town.” He drove me a short distance from the university to a road lined with falling-down houses, where African-Americans lived. I had never seen such poverty.

He asked to look at my Greyhound map, and he traced with his finger the route I was taking to Texas. ”Look,” he said, ”when you get to Mississippi, stay on the bus. Don’t get off. Go straight through.” Just a few days earlier three civil-rights workers, two of them white and from the North, had disappeared near Meridian. The word was that they’d been murdered. This was Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Bad things were happening, beatings, burnings. John was afraid the South was going to blow.

After North Carolina the trip was different because I was different, on the alert. In Atlanta, on Peachtree Street — a name I knew from ”Gone With the Wind” — I saw a restaurant with a side window for serving blacks and drinking fountains labeled ”black” and ”white.” I lost my wallet there and slept overnight in the bus station and then later in a park in Montgomery, Ala. A recruiting street preacher found me there, brought me to a soup kitchen breakfast, then gave me the third degree: ”Have you found the Lord? Are you saved?” I honestly didn’t know.

Of course I got off the bus in Mississippi, more than once. In Jackson I wanted to find Eudora Welty, but her name wasn’t in the phone book. By this time lack ofsleep, combined with hot weather, gave the days a kind of hallucinatory looseness. I was at ease on the road for the first time.

I also found this other paragraph interesting, because of the author’s sense that his experience may be difficult to re-create in the contemporary U.S.

I couldn’t know that within the year Malcolm would be dead; that the bombing of North Vietnam, and the anger in response to it, would begin; that Kerouac’s Beat would become a period artifact, replaced temporarily by something called Flower Power. Or that in a new century Americans would stop making quest-journeys, would spiritually stay put, put on weight, wait for the world to come to them.

What do you think? Have Americans become complacent? Have we stopped making quest-journeys?

Tom Haines of the Boston Globe, one of the country’s better travel journalists, is currently wandering about in the Arctic regions of Norway. He’s blogging about his experiences for the Globe, and also just did an online interview with World Hum:

World Hum: Where in the world are you?

Right now, at the harbor in Vardo, an island town a mile or so offshore at the far northern edge of Norway. It’s the end of the road—E75—which begins in Greece.

What are you doing there?

I’m here on assignment for the Boston Globe with photographer Essdras Suarez, and we spent a night on Hornoya, another island a 20-minute tug ride from this harbor.

Hornoya is home to a lighthouse and more than 10,000 nesting seabirds. On Hornoya, watching the high summer drama of life for puffins and guillemots, kittiwakes and cormorants…

The puffins and friends are just one part, though, of a look at life at this edge of Europe. Third part of a series that so far has landed in Romania and Turkey. Here we’re hanging out with scientists and miscellaneous locals to see how nature and the life settled in it are changing these days. It will all go toward a package for the Globe in a few weeks.

What did you experience in the last 24 hours that you’d recommend?

Stood in the tundra just south of Vardo and watched an eagle owl fly low in search of prey. Fog had lifted a bit, the 11 p.m. sunset blazed—literally, as the cliche comes from somewhere—over a low ridge, a cool breeze dropped the temperature from a midday high near 65 down into the 40s. The tundra is tree free in this part, so I could stand and watch the owl cruise a mile or more south—always just a few feet off the ground—then angle back.

There are so many places in the world to visit, aren’t there?

Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic and several other popular travel books, stopped by Rolf Potts’ website recently to talk about travel and travel writing.  Some excerpts from his interview:

As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

Wearing down, mentally and physically. Travel comes from the French word, travail; it can be hard work. … Improvising in strange places makes for the best stories, but it’s also exhausting. You’re never really off work; everything that happens from the moment you wake to the moment you fall asleep is potential material. You’re also planning ahead — where do I go next, how do I get there, what will I do there? — while trying to milk the most out of the place you’re in.

What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

Take risks. Not necessarily physical risks, though that often comes with the territory. Rather, personal and professional risks. And do it while you’re young. Travel is potentially punishing: to your body, to your relationships, to your bank account. … If you do it young, the worst that can happen (apart from death, dismemberment, or chronic dysentery) is that you’ll suffer for awhile and find something else to do, which is better than being filled with regret years later over never having tried.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

Seeing the world at someone else’s expense, and having something to do while you’re out there. Writing about travel makes you pay closer attention, and it gives you a way into whatever place you’re visiting. It makes you a traveler rather than just a tourist, or a vagrant. As Raban puts it, taking notes on the road “gives me occupation and identity when I might otherwise recognize myself as an ageing unkempt drifter without visible means of support.”

There was a wonderful in-depth interview recently on World Hum with the travel writer Pico Iyer.  He is the author of Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling Off the Map, and a number of other titles.  Some excerts from the interview:

How do you think travel writing has evolved over the past 20 or 30 years?

I think it’s evolved a great deal. Partly because even when I was growing up, travel writing was mostly white, nearly always male, often from England, and about going to Africa and Kenya and surveying the strange customs of the natives. And I think now it is more and more about a half-Thai, half-German girl living in Iowa City, going to an Afghanistan full of German aid workers and Japanese businessmen.

And what used to be a very simple discussion between, in some ways, colonizer and colonized, is now a dialogue between a multi-cultural society and a multi-cultural person. All of which has made the texts much more interesting.

I think travel writing is also having to confront a challenge, which is a good challenge, namely the fact that it is not a remarkable thing now to describe Mongolia or Tibet because anyone can access them on the Internet or their TV screens. And so the person who goes there has to do something more and other than just bringing back the sights and sounds. … the travel writer has to extend the form and refresh it, to write a more inward kind of travel.

You are very adept at noticing trends, global trends, not only in cultures and how they’re exchanged, but also in people, and how they travel. Have you noticed anything in terms of after 9/11 versus pre- 9/11 about how that changed?

In the rest of the world, I don’t see much of a change in perceptions of America except perhaps a hardening of that fundamental disjunction … which is that most parts of the world are quite skeptical or hostile towards the American government, but those same people love American culture and love nearly every American individual they meet.

A few years ago I went around to all the countries then covered by the “Trading With the Enemies Act” - Cuba, China, North Korea, and Vietnam - and I found … those people were more keen to meet Americans than anyone else.  And that’s something … that many people in this country who don’t travel, don’t know.

I suppose the only thing I notice is that the gap between America and the rest of the world does seem to be increasing. … The country that most wants to change the world is also the country that least wants to see or learn about the world.

The most recent Washington Post travel section carried a fun story by Ben Brazil about a journey he and his wife took through southern Mexico, entirely on their own and via public transportation.

For nearly a week, my new wife, Laura, and I had been traveling Mexico’s Carretera Fronteriza del Sur — the Southern Border Highway — a 262-mile route that hugs the border between Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. We had climbed the Maya pyramids at Palenque, studied the ancient frescoes at Bonampak and taken a sunrise boat to the riverside ruins of Yaxchilan, where howler monkeys roared from the treetops.

Between ruins, we visited a shaman, forded a jungle river and hitched a ride with a cool 43-year-old Mexican hippie and his hot 24-year-old Swedish girlfriend. …

If you just want to see the highlights, scads of tour operators in Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas — Chiapas’s main tourist hubs — sell reasonably priced package tours. But we wanted to see the whole highway on an unscripted journey open to chance encounters and random weirdness. As such, we opted to travel on public transportation and eschew reservations, following an itinerary so vague that it verged on impressionist art. … 

I loved the do-it-yourself approach, but it’s not fast, efficient or even marginally luxurious. Almost no full-size buses serve the remote border area, so travelers rely on combis — vans and microbuses that comfortably accommodate about 15 passengers. In practice, this means that “full” combis carry up to 25 passengers, and often their poultry. It can get tight.

It’s not recommended travel for everyone, but it’s a fun read.

I’ve been doing a bit of my own traveling the past couple of weeks.  Lisa and I have been meaning to explore more of South America and so we decided to take a bit of time to see part of Argentina.  It’s too big of a country to explore in one trip and so our focus, in addition to Buenos Aires, has been to experience Patagonia.  We’ve spent time in El Calafate and in nearby Glacier National Park, as well as at the “end of the world” in Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego.

The Patagonian landscape is something to behold.  Spectacular and stark, dramatic and barren, all at the same time.  While traveling here, I’ve been reading Bruce Chatwin’s famous travel narrative, In Patagonia, which is a worthwhile companion for any trip to this part of the world.  Here is one example of how Chatwin describes the region:

The Patagonian desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed.  Unlike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience.  Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible.  In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these arid wastes had taken such firm possession of his mind.

While in El Calafate, we experienced some of what Chatwin wrote about.  On the Patagonian steppe, the land stretches vacantly for miles and the wind howls.  The solitary homes of the local farms are all protected from the wind by rows of planted trees.  Otherwise, there is little vegetation aside from grass.  It’s an apt landscape for the southernmost region of the world.

If you enjoy travel writing, you might want to check out Rolf Potts’ collection of interviews with travel writers on his website.  He’s been publishing an interview with a different writer every month for six years now.  It’s an interesting site to wander through, reading interviews with your favorite travel writers and with others you may not have heard about.  Here is a sample from an interview with Sarah Erdman, author of Nine Hills to Nambonkaha:

How did you get started traveling?

Probably something happened in utero — my parents were living abroad until a few months before I was born, came back to Washington for my birth, and then shuttled me straight back to the Mediterranean, making me a global nomad before I hit six months. My parents are in the Foreign Service, so we moved every couple of years, and traveling was a natural state of being early on. I distinctly remember moving back to Washington DC at age three and wondering why we had no goats in the backyard.

Every place we lived, my parents were hell-bent on seeing and doing everything. My brother and I were sometimes whisked, sometimes dragged into all their adventures — from drinking gritty tea with a Berber family in a lightless stone hut in the Atlas mountains, to tramping through one picturesque little village after another, to riding camels across the Negev.

My own path, as soon as I was old enough to tread it, naturally led me overseas again. I studied in Paris during college, and moved to Israel after graduation because I was fascinated by its passion and its conflict. At that point, I had already spent eleven of my 23 years abroad, but I wanted to push my limits further. I wanted to work for everything I had, start from scratch, suck the marrow out of life, as Thoreau put it. I also wanted to be absorbed as much as possible into a different rhythm of life, and forced to look at my own life from a different perspective. And I felt that the only way I could be of real use to people was to understand them first, and work from there. So I joined Peace Corps.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

The fact that somehow the story of my tiny, insignificant village in the African savanna has struck a chord with high society North Carolinians and ranchers in Montana. That suburban moms have said to me, “Tell us how we can help your village, because we really want to.” It’s a good antidote for cynicism to know that people are hungry for each other’s stories, and want to find similarities despite all our differences. I’m honored that I get to be one of the storytellers. And then there’s the magical rush of fusing writing and traveling, the two things I’m most passionate about, and calling it my career.

“Why can’t we be like normal people and go to an all-inclusive?” These moans from our teens–Tess, 17, and Lucy, 14–are predictable when we announce we’re going on a three-week trip to India.

My husband, Terry, and I heard the same chorus of complaints prior to our trips to Thailand and Malaysia (2000), and Vietnam and Bali (2004). These are only token protestations for two reasons: 1) We foot the bill; 2) They know from past trips that they will be stretched to the limit, but lovely surprises await around the corner.

Truth be told, Terry and I admit to each other we’re not quite as pumped as we’re making out to be, going on to the girls about how it will be tough but wonderful. We have our own fears about the culture shock being even more than we’re up to. In one travel book introduction, the author says for many travelers India stands for: “I’ll Never Do India Again.” Remind me here–whose idea was this?

That’s the introduction to an amusing story written by Leslie Gavel for the travel section of the Chicago Tribune - about visiting India with her husband and two teenage daughters.  You can read the story here.

The magazine Transitions Abroad is published for travelers who want to learn about the world through their experiences on the road.  It focuses not only on independent travel, but also on studying, working and living abroad.  The magazine was founded in 1977 by teacher and journalist Clay Hubbs.  This month, he is a featured interviewee on Rolf Potts’ website.  Some excerpts:

How did you get started traveling?

In the early sixties … my wife Joanna and my son Gregory and I went toodling off across North Africa and the Middle East in a used VW van, following the path of Alexander the Great. It was a wonderful trip — filled with many adventures and breakdowns — in which we fell in love with that part of the world and with travel.

Joanna’s second pregnancy brought us back to the West before we could reach India, so in the mid-sixties we returned — this time with two kids and a new bus. And this time we included the length of the Soviet Union in our itinerary.

What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

Over the years I’ve recommended hundreds of books and authors — always those that describe ways to learn about (and from) a culture from the inside.

Travel, like literature, is educational, challenging…and very exciting. The transitions or changes that result — and here’s my pitch! — affect us profoundly and for the better: the mask falls and we no longer see only what our culture has conditioned us to expect. Any writing that facilitates what I have sometimes called “life-seeing” travel I welcome and recommend.

Although it isn’t on many lists of popular travel destinations, Ethiopia offers an intriguing culture and some of the most spectacular sights in Africa, in particular the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela.  Joshua Hammer wrote an article for the New York Times about a recent visit to Ethiopia.

In Ethiopia, the per capita income is $120 a year; tuberculosis and other contagions are rampant; and the literacy rate is just 43 percent, a sad figure considering that Ethiopia was among the first societies in sub-Saharan Africa to develop a written language.

But … significant development has come to Ethiopia, including mobile phone networks, decent hotels, Internet cafes, reliable electricity, and asphalt roads — phenomena that were unheard of in the outlying provinces a decade ago. And it is now possible to travel across Ethiopia with some degree of comfort.

… those who want to venture on their own will discover that Ethiopia is reasonably well set up for independent exploring. They will find a proud, if bedraggled country with ruggedly beautiful landscapes and a unique sense of its identity.

This was the writer’s first impression of arriving in Lalibela:

Lalibela, with a population of about 30,000, still has the look of a destitute mountain village: round, thatched-roof mud huts, called tukuls, clinging to steep slopes; peasant farmers wrapped in homespun white cloth robes; goats and sheep that scatter frantically, bleating in distress, before the rare motorized vehicle. In this humble setting, King Lalibela’s 900-year-old creations seem all the more extraordinary.

There is an intriguing post on World Hum, attempting to offer a fuller perspective on life in Israel and Lebanon that goes beyond the current fighting there.  They do this by providing links to recent travel writing about the region.  It’s worth checking out.

We often say that we travel and read travel writing to discover more about the world. So this week, we turn our attention to Israel and Lebanon, where a violent conflict shows no sign of letting up. To get a different perspective, we thought we’d link to some of the best travel stories we’ve seen from Israel and Lebanon in recent years.