Sting was standing close to me (but not too close!) in the lobby of the Chelsea movie theater -- where Daniel Pinchbeck's new film 2012: Time for Change had just premiered --- affably speaking with a couple of fans, a surprisingly slight man in a trim pin-striped suit, attractive with...

While walking on the Puerto Escondido beach as the sun turned red, I passed a young Italian with a surfboard. He had just taken his first surfing lesson...

"In these waters?" I asked. "But this is where people drown!"

"Oh my teacher is...

High on its own island, floating on Lago Titicaca, is a towering white cake of a building: the five-star Libertador Hotel, its hundreds of windows blinking quietly in the sun. From these windows, at sunrise, one can see shreds of orange-red on the marsh while birds fly...

When a parent gets early dementia, it is a nightmare, unless one can afford a few acres of land, private servants, nurses and a guard at the gate (to prevent wandering) or one happens to live in a small village (preferably outside the United States or Europe), where the senile...

While walking at dusk behind my hut in the Amazon, I ran into a little girl I knew crossing the grass , naked, with a towel in her hand, and I said, "what are you doing" sin vestidos? ? She said, "I am going to wash myself! "

"Donde?"...

Just now, swimming under the moon, alongside the palms, rush of ocean beyond, crickets in the grass, I came across a little squooshy brown creature in the dark.

He was hopping alongside the pool, in the shadow, and stopped still when I swam to his side.

He stared at me,...

The old man, bare stomach protruding over his shorts, pointed to brightly painted psychedelic paintings for sale in his hut, while three tiny toddlers peeped in the window and begged for "a peso." "This is a fire," the Huichol shaman explained to me, pointing at three flames shooting out and...

Having traveled to stunning beaches around the world, it was difficult to believe that the Lamu archipelago of eastern Kenya , a loop of islands in the Indian Sea -- would be the "magic paradise" that outdoes them all, as many guidebooks intimate.

The Turkish Mediterranean is given scarce attention -- for no apparent reason. The coast is stunning, as rich in landscape as it is in ruins. The dolmus (small bus) took me from Fethiye, a town in the south-west of Turkey, to the town of Kas, winding along a coast nestled...

Last night, right after my friend JR went to sleep, I decided to go jump in the canal for one final late night swim before going to bed.

I jump in the water -- warm, dark, fantastic -- then turn around to swim back to the dock, but when I...

It is surprising with all the romance manuals and tips for women floating around on the web--and glaring on my Yahoo home page--that so few actually give any tips that women really care about, or intuit themselves. They seem so conventional, on the level of nail polish color and how...