Here’s something I noticed when I was backpacking solo across Europe: the most memorable sites were rarely the ones that had the biggest crowds or the most aggressive marketing. It was the places I had to work a little harder to find, the ones where I felt like I had arrived somewhere real rather than…
There is a specific kind of quiet that comes over you inside a great history museum. Not boredom, not reverence exactly, but something closer to recognition. You are looking at an object, a coin, a textile, a carved stone face, that someone made with their hands hundreds or even thousands of years before you were…
Here is something nobody tells you when you start planning a trip to the Mayan world: the Maya are not an ancient people. They are here. Right now. Around 7 million Maya people live across Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. They speak dozens of distinct Mayan languages, grow the same crops their ancestors…
There’s a particular kind of travel experience that stays with you differently from everything else. Not the Instagram photo, not the famous landmark, not the restaurant reservation you waited three weeks for. I’m talking about the kind of encounter where you sit with someone in their community, watch the way they move through their own…
There is a particular kind of silence that happens in certain streets. The ones paved with centuries-old cobblestone, lined with walls painted the color of turmeric or washed-out coral, where the sound of a local vendor calling out to neighbors carries further than any tour guide’s voice. I have felt something close to that silence…
Before I became a full-time traveler, I spent years guiding tourists around New York City. I’d point out St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue so many times it started to feel like furniture. I knew every fact about it, but I’d never really looked at it. It took leaving my job, trading my tour script…
There is a particular silence you find at ancient ruins. It is not the silence of an empty room. It is the kind that settles in when you realize you are standing somewhere thousands of years old, surrounded by stone walls built by people who looked at the sky, wondered the same questions you do,…
The first time I really understood what canyons do to people, I wasn’t standing inside one. I was talking to a solo traveler in a hostel common room during my backpacking trip through Europe. She had just come back from the American Southwest and she couldn’t stop talking. Not about the distance she covered or…
There is a specific moment that happens to a lot of travelers. You are looking at a photo, maybe it is a misty jungle canopy, a stone staircase swallowed by roots, or a river cutting through impossible green. Something in you goes quiet. Not the “I want to visit” kind of quiet. The “I need…