Old World Wandering

Arriving in Calcutta

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:22:50 -0600

Arriving in Calcutta

"We suppose that we are superior to dung beetles, but are we really? At least dung beetles recycle...."

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:07:57 -0600

“We suppose that we are superior to dung beetles, but are we really? At least dung beetles recycle. We scavenge, hoard, consume…what? Crap, mostly. It piles up around us; increasingly we live on a ball of it. Even light we waste; designed to illuminate, it now obscures. As our celestial guides recede, we risk losing our bearings and will have ever less to consider but ourselves.”

- Dung Beetles, Dancing to the Milky Way

"If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet..."

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 06:27:30 -0600

“If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word’s value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society’s ability to communicate in writing decays. And this threat to our capacity to read and write is a slow-motion body-blow to science, scholarship, the arts—to nearly everything, in fact, that is distinctively human, that muskrats and dolphins can’t do just as well or better.”

- David Gelernter, who worries about the prevalence of drivel online. What do another 149 smart people worry about?

Photo

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:30:47 -0500

A family outside their yurt in inner Mongolia, from Chinese...

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 19:30:23 -0500

A family outside their yurt in inner Mongolia, from Chinese families’ worldly goods in Huang Qingjun’s pictures

The nomadic Tuareg tend to live in the Saharan parts of Niger...

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 19:30:25 -0500

The nomadic Tuareg tend to live in the Saharan parts of Niger and Mali, as well as Nigeria. More striking photos of women in all their diversity from around the African continent.

Songs of Shambala As it was, Claire and I didn’t get sick. We...

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:28:46 -0500

Songs of Shambala

As it was, Claire and I didn’t get sick. We took Chinese medicine made from the roots of an Arctic shrub for the duration of our journey along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and at elevations of 4,000 metres and above we felt short of breath but otherwise well. The roads were dirt tracks for long stretches, and where they were being worked on there were long delays and detours and billowing dust. In places they were so narrow that looking out from my window in a claustrophobic miànbāochē I saw nothing but ravines at the bottom of yawning, hundred-metre-long drops, but Tibetan-owned guest houses and restaurants serving Sichuan’s málà cuisine made it easy to forget my aches and apprehensions at the end of each day. We ate lunch with nomads in the hills around Shangri-La and drank beer with migrant workers in Xiangcheng, where the government was putting down a strike. We were disappointed by dirty hotsprings and tourists flocking like vultures to sky burials in Litang, and it wasn’t until we made our way on foot to a monastery near Tagong that we felt like our journey was in some way complete. Its gold roof glinted far in the distance at the foot of a single, snow-capped peak and to reach it we’d passed carefully through an icy river and herds of temperamental yaks. It was in making my way to the monastery that I prepared myself to arrive for a few moments at Shangri-La, which in the words of the Dalai Lama “is not a physical place that we can actually find,” but exists only in our minds.

Continue reading Songs of Shambala»

Back our Kickstarter Campaign» Old World Wandering is an...

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:58:00 -0500

Back our Kickstarter Campaign»

Old World Wandering is an experiment. It is a literary travelogue reinvented for the internet. Over the past year, we have travelled across Southeast Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, looking for connections: connections between past and present, between communities, and – most of all – between places. We believe that travel writing is about journeys, not destinations, about people, not a list of sites, and – at its heart – about the connections that bind us all together.

Shifu Li: Camel Whisperer – Fire Starter From Dunhuang: Three...

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 19:30:29 -0500

Shifu Li: Camel Whisperer – Fire Starter

From Dunhuang: Three Days on the Silk Road

Gangnam Style’s subversive message

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:28:19 -0500

Gangnam Style’s subversive message

India to build world’s tallest statue

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 20:25:25 -0500

India to build world’s tallest statue

William Dalrymple: "What is to become of travel writing now that the world is smaller?"

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 19:53:00 -0500

William Dalrymple: "What is to become of travel writing now that the world is smaller?":

When In Xanadu was published at the end of the 80s, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator: his adventures were the subject; the people he met were often reduced to objects in the background. I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories centre stage.

Above all, I had to consider whether travel writing was still a form that could adapt to this very changed world. With the book finished, and having read a lot of the more recent travel books produced by younger writers, I have not the slightest doubt that the genre has a great deal of life in it yet. For wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. It’s possible to cross-fertilise the genre with other literary forms - biography, or anthropological writing - or, perhaps more interesting still, to follow in Chatwin’s footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel.

Bsampeling Monastery in Sichuan, China

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 19:19:50 -0500

Bsampeling Monastery in Sichuan, China

Inmates outside a 1930s Shanghai opium detoxification clinic,...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 19:28:38 -0500

Inmates outside a 1930s Shanghai opium detoxification clinic, from Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, a Foreign Policy slideshow

Lunch with Tibetan nomads

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:29:08 -0500

Lunch with Tibetan nomads

"Traveling with Clinton is like chasing after a woman shot out of a cannon with rocket boosters..."

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:55:46 -0500

“Traveling with Clinton is like chasing after a woman shot out of a cannon with rocket boosters strapped to her pantsuit: The world rushes past in a blur and you’re catapulted into an alternate reality, one in which days are relentlessly scheduled and life seems an endless progression from one meeting, interview, press conference, or statement to another, with flights covering thousands of miles in between.”

- Nine Days with the Most Traveled Secretary of State in History

Dawn over a Tibetan village outside Shangri-La in Yunnan, China

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:19:00 -0500

Dawn over a Tibetan village outside Shangri-La in Yunnan, China

Why do so many travel guides make excuses for...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:24:32 -0500

Why do so many travel guides make excuses for dictators?

There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.

Continue reading»

Happy Independence Day India!

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 20:27:48 -0500

Happy Independence Day India!

The King of the Bambara Empire in Mali.

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:53:03 -0500

The King of the Bambara Empire in Mali.