I walked through the streets of East Beirut on a Saturday evening, and felt like a yokel suddenly translated to a cosmopolis. Sushi bars and tapas bars and a cafe where girls with glitter around their eyes were deep in this month’s copy of Vanity Fair; boites bathed in blue light, and cigar bars, and […]

A craggy man with leathery skin–from the American West, I’m guessing–is telling his slightly younger female friend about the world. I’m sitting at the next table from them at La Cucaracha restaurant in Waikiki, trying not to ask myself what Mexican restaurant, anywhere, names itself after a cockroach. “I’ll have two enchiladas a la carte,” […]

Orhan Pamuk takes the pundit’s dry talk of a “clash of civilizations” and gives it a human face, turns it on its head and sends it spinning wildly. In his early novel, The White Castle, a Venetian slave and his Ottoman master swap clothes, exchange ideas and squabble like siblings till soon you can no […]

A powerful, unexpected scene glances through the beginning of Colin Thubron’s characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted, new book of travel. As he walks through the mountains of Nepal, towards Mount Kailas in Tibet, suddenly he realizes that he’s only 140 miles from Naini Tal, the Indian hill-station whose name rang across his home as a […]

On sofas overlooking the lights of the city, salon-tanned kids stretched out before a blue-lit cocktail bar—not to be confused with the espresso bar (offering tiramisu) in another corner or the regular popcorn counter serving up Pepperidge Farm cookies and tubs of Häagen-Dazs. It took me a while to realize that these glamorous teenagers weren’t […]

To get to the Desert Rain coffee-house in central Leh, you have to walk off the crowded main street that leads to the mosque and slither through a passageway to a parallel back lane, barely paved, too narrow for more than three people to pass at a time, in the process forever of being completed, […]

“You’ve got to remember we’re on an island here,” my old friend Nicolas was saying, as unseasonal rains crashed down on Alice Springs, the worst downpour in nine years, and great chocolate-brown currents clogged the usually dry river-bed of the Todd, blocking our way back to our hotel and washing away roads for the moment. […]

The perfect traveler must be a perfect contradiction. She should be open to almost everything that comes her way, but not too ready to be taken in. He should be worldly, shrewd, his feet firmly on the ground; but he must also have the capacity to give himself over to moments of real wonder. He […]

I got off the overnight train in Mandalay, Burma’s historical city of kings, and instantly there was a swarm of men around me. They were hard for me to tell apart, most of them dressed in white shirts, with wrap-around longhis around their waists, many of them wild-eyed and unshaven after spending all night in […]

So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi. Relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”); workers from villages and rainfalls of marigolds; cousins that no one can quite place and […]