I’ll just leave this here. BUY THE BOOK!

It is with enormous satisfaction and pride that I announce the publication of my first solo, book-length project, a Romania travel memoir called Backpacking with Dracula. Honestly, so many nights and weekends have been dedicated to working on this project for the past year and a half, I guess the prevailing…

Why yes, this is a full-tilt, vanity listicle, shamelessly basking in personal achievement in the Lonely Planet universe. You wanna make something of it? All right, then. I’ve already forgotten how this got started, but for some reason I was cataloging all the Lonely Planet articles I’d written from late-2010…

A travel book investigating Vlad “The Impaler” Dracula and the vampire monster he inspired   The book is out now!   The undisputed A-lister among Transylvania’s cabaret of supernatural blood-drainers and face-eaters, Count Dracula is both a publicist’s dream and nightmare. Like Justin Bieber, despite unremitting horrifying behavior, the public…

The shirtless, strapping, Pacific Islander man standing roughly 20 feet in front of me was possibly drunk, definitely pissed off, and holding a two foot machete. His unkempt hair, smoldering facial expression and posture alone would have been unnerving enough without the added knowledge that I’d just spent the day…

Twenty years ago this week, possibly even this day, was the last time I vomited. Ever since, I have self-branded as “vomit free since 93.” The 1993 episode was no run of the mill, spew-wipe-and-go caliber vomit, which is why I remember the event so well. It was spectacular enough…

Being that travel is effectively a perpetual exercise in ungraceful, humbling discovery, travel writers are often put in the position of writing about stuff that they knew little or nothing about before the trip. Moreover, the editorial understanding for these assignments is that the new experience or activity will be…

I have been sitting alone in this tiny room for a very long time. It seems so anyway. Time has a way of becoming deceptively elastic under certain conditions. Like how the three minutes it takes to eat a cupcake seems like eight seconds. Or, in this case, how time…

[This is an edited and re-mastered excerpt from my 2005 travelogue, recounting my visit to Bario, in the Malaysian Borneo jungle highlands.] Myriad thoughts race through your mind when you are lost and alone at night in the Borneo jungle highlands. Usually, this brain revving involves panic, urgency, and double…

Long term world travelers are not exceptionally brave. They don’t fight fires or deactivate bombs or take 78 hour bus rides from Spain to Romania in the punishing heat of June (the sane ones don’t at any rate). Yet, world travelers frequently hear reverential comments about their bravery from friends,…