One of the best ways to see a country is on a slow train. Perhaps the most enjoyable of these are the 19th-century railways of Wales. In 1996, I came across a site called The Great Little Trains of Wales as I was researching my first book on using the Net for travel....
When an editor asks if you’d be “willing” to go to Kenya on a safari led by Micato, an outfitter known as among the best — if not the best — in Africa, it doesn’t take long to blurt out “Yes!” And that’s how I...
Michael Shapiro first met Jan Morris in 1992 at a travel writing seminar near San Francisco. “When I first met Jan she seemed like a visitor from another time,” Shapiro says. He interviewed Morris in Llanystumdwy for his book A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers...
To spark the holiday season, Guatemalans roast an effigy of the devil. I wrote about the spectacle for American Way, the inflight magazine of American Airlines. Here’s how the story starts: The flames rise 30 feet into the air, casting a lurid glow on...
It’s not easy to find the right home for a 6,000-word story about rafting the Colorado River in the wake of John Wesley Powell. A civil war vet, Cpt. Powell and his party made the first descent of the Colorado through the Grand Canyon in 1869. Our trip was more...
After seeing what FLW did with the Guggenheim, I expected his desert home to be outrageous and astonishing. Of course it wasn’t – the low-slung building fit perfectly with their desert surroundings. Following is my story on the witty and enormously...
