What would we do without life's little adventures or the trips we take off-the-beaten-path? Journeys like this make travel a break-away from the ordinary routine of home. Whether your adventure means white water rafting in West Virginia or visiting an ancient castle in the Italian countryside, these experiences heighten one's sense of being alive. And later, when we write about these moments and memories that shape the ordinary, our lives don't seem so mundane after all.

This category is devoted to the writing and photography that is produced when we focus on adventure and off-the-beaten-path travel.

Next issue: April. Submission deadline: March 15, 2006.
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Over Sleeping Policemen into Sleeping Volcanoes:
Driven Into Mexico's Central Pacific Highlands new!
by Lee Patton

Emerging from my bath in a volcano’s steam vent, I sensed intent eyes on my half-naked body.  I faced a Mexican bull.

A week before my volcanic face-off with a snorting
beast, I stood on a hotel balcony determined to escape Puerto Vallarta.  To my left, on a beachside stage, a large, tipsy tourist belted “I’m Just a Gal Who Cain’t Say No.”  At the rooftop bar to my right, a local drag queen channeled a creaky Cher dance tune.  On this Mexican vacation, I vowed, I would actually find Mexico.

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An Arrival in Malawi new!
by Jessica Martell

Once the developing world gets in your blood, I'm told, it is likely to remain.

Before landing on the Blantyre Jetport tarmac in Malawi, my travel belt displayed only first world notches: England, Italy, Germany, New Zealand. I barely remembered the bustle of the Bahamas and the waterfalls of Puerto Rico from childhood trips. In short, I was a greenhorn; or as some people might say: spoiled. Great anxiety accompanied my decision to visit a friend halfway around the world in southern Africa, but I needed to be stretched.

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Riga: The City that Sleeps
by Daniel Brauer

So Latvia’s not doing bad for itself. Just under fifteen years of independence and it’s a member of the European Union and the most stable and prosperous of the former Soviet republics. The difference between old and new is that of grey and pink: in the U.S.S.R the buildings were grey, as were the fruit and the children. Today the buildings in Riga’s city center scream. They are blue. And yellow. And pink!

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Goodbye to Saigon
by Robert Macey

If an early breakfast of sour soup and salted duck eggs turns your stomach, then you'd best avoid these offerings on your way to find the English Daily (what is the English daily mean?). Even at this early hour, the streets and tiny lanes hum with the sound of small shining motor scooters - metallic bees off to work in their hundreds. Weaving and dodging together, it seems impossible that any of them will make it. It’s cooperative chaos.

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The Sweet Taste of Adventure
by Alastair Bland

So you are an adventurer. You challenge the strength of your mind and body each summer with long, strenuous journeys. You find an almost masochistic pleasure in the strains you place upon yourself, and the tougher the adventure, the more you long for it. You find yourself saying you could do this all year long, leave everything behind except for the adventure. But in the middle of each excursion, your cash runs low, and you are left with no choice but to return home, settle down and rejoin the workforce.

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Diving in the Desert
by Wade Hughes

Umm Kamar blocked our view of the helicopter gunship, but we could hear it throbbing low across the water toward us. It was getting close to curfew, and we were probably being treated to a testosterone–laced reminder of the order to be back in harbor by four o’clock. We were anchored in the lee of Umm Kamar, a sere island, a wedge-shaped chip of desert, flaked off and deposited on the Egyptian Red Sea coast near Hurghada.

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The Last Baja Sunset
by Alastair Bland

april quarter 2005

It is May 6, 2004.  I am in the desert with not a soul around.  Overhead, the sky is pure blue.  To the east it meets the peaks of a high mountain range, to the west a smaller ridge of mountains.  The terrible sun has heated the country to ninety-five degrees.  Though I am walking along a road, I don't expect to encounter any vehicles.I have walked all the way from Mulege, over on the Gulf.  I've walked 80 miles in a week, not a car in site. The silence is overwhelming, and, for a moment, I can't help but wonder what I am doing here.

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Live Drunk or Die
by Nicholas Mistretta

The train stopped a little short of the Thai border around noon, and it had been a long, hard-seat night with little sleep. We spent an hour and a half confused and hot and miserable, then we boarded a local bus full of school children. Dan and Seamus sat up front, their constant jabbering was getting on my nerves. I lurched to the back like a lost bum and sat among the shy schoolboys, all of us silently staring out the window together.

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The Highway into Ladakh
by Seán Harnett

The tiny Indian province of Ladakh is located 3,600 metres above sea level in a broad plateau between the Himalaya and Karakoram mountains. When my partner and I travelled to India last year it was the place we most wanted to see. But even by Indian standards Ladakh is a difficult place to get to. You can fly there, but if you come from sea level the sudden gain in altitude will knock you sideways for the better part of a week. Alternatively, you have the option of driving there, going over the mountains in a bus or jeep or motorcycle from Manali or Srinagar, but the journey takes two days, is by all accounts a bit of a bone-shaker, and you still haven't solved the problem of rapid altitude gain. We decided, therefore, to take the third, and by far the easiest, route into Ladakh: we walked, from Darcha to Padum. It took us ten days.

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Alan Siegle's Alaska (photojournal)
by Alan Siegle

april quarter 2004

My first trip was in September of 1980. I flew into Anchorage and rented a pickup truck with a cabover camper. This provided me with transportation and a place to sleep. I found that this was the best way for me to travel and photograph the grand landscape. I was able to stop and camp almost anywhere that I wanted or take a nap, since the days are very long. I visited Denali National Park and stayed in the campground inside the park.

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