“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” Paul Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, who has spent more than 50 years wandering the globe. “It is a stimulating way to live my life,” he has said.Read more
Gone forever are these 12th-century manuscripts from the Centre de Recherches Historiques Ahmed Baba in Timbuktu / Photo by Laura Watilo Blake These delicate pages of text survived for centuries in the dry desert air in Timbuktu, a remote outpost of the Sahara Desert in Mali, which was once a wealthy trading center. Today, theRead more
The phrase “from here to Timbuktu,” is commonly used to describe some remote, hard-to-reach mythical place, but never a real destination that one could actually visit. But then, a few years ago, I was on a flight going who knows where, when I started chatting with a woman sitting next to me. “I’m going toRead more