November 23, 2001

3:33 PM

Mark and Michelle like to take trips, like this one by SUV across the entire width of Asia, from Vladivostok to istanbul, through Siberia, Mongolia, Tuva, Kazakhstan, western China, the Central Asian ex-Soviet republics, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. An immense site, with hundreds of photographs and lots of great stories. Travel narratives like this are a classic use for the web, and there must be lots of them out there. Any favorites?
posted by rodii (9 comments total)

I recently came across the Washington Post's Siberia Diary but haven't read the whole thing yet.

I've also been fond of Emergency Exit for a while.

Have anyone read the The Long Ride Home, travel diary of Cass Gilbert? He biked from Australia to London for Children With AIDS. (All of those entries are in the gray sidebar, before you click.) He also did TandemToTurkestan.com.
posted by kathryn at 5:09 PM on November 23, 2001

Sailors have a long history of writing home, and the internet has been an obvious improvement over the message in a bottle. For over a year now, retired Cruising World editor Bernadette Brendon has been posting weekly about her and her husband's retirement cruise aboard a sailboat that has so far made it to Central America from Rhode Island. While it's not in any way as unusual an experience as Mark and Michelle's, Brendon is unusual in having the magazine-sponsored forum in which to keep writing.

I've always wished that the Seven Seas Cruising Association would put the vast collected wealth of experiences represented by their Commodores' Bulletin online, but they've never had the financial resources to do so. There are, however, the inevitable collection pages, and you can waste spend quite a bit of time voyaging vicariously from one end of the earth to the other amongst them.

posted by salt at 5:18 PM on November 23, 2001

who are mark and michelle and where are they now? (looks like they last updated their site over a year ago...)
posted by subpixel at 6:23 PM on November 23, 2001

Obviously Phil Greenspun's Travels With Samantha is required reading in this genre.
posted by sudama at 6:26 PM on November 23, 2001

Traveling across unspoiled wilderness in an SUV? In Asia? Doesn't that, like, make them inherently evil?
posted by kindall at 6:56 PM on November 23, 2001

Heh. If you read it you'll see how un-unspoiled it is.
posted by rodii at 7:24 PM on November 23, 2001

I enjoyed Mario and Diana's Cross Country Jaunt '96 because Mario's commentary is so damned funny. They drove from San Jose, CA to Maine and back, hitting tourist traps and Dairy Queens all along the way. Hilarious stuff, and highly recommended.
posted by evixir at 10:35 PM on November 23, 2001

In my various travelog reading, I particularly liked Mikey's Arctic Circle on a Harley Sportster, Through the Americas in a Mail Van (Volkswagen Vanagon) and Koransky.com, among others.

Of course, there are also a few ongoing travel logs (Travels With Rover, and a few others I have only bookmarked at work) that I follow, but I wish there was a dedicated site to provide links to these types of sites whenever they are updated.

Of course, most of the open directory project's Recreation: Travel: Travelogues: Personal category is required reading. :)

But then again, I guess I'm reading too many of these reports, since I've been wanting to do such a long-term trip for quite some time now, even though right now, I neither can afford it, nor want to resign my job to be able to have the time.
posted by ckemp at 1:56 AM on November 24, 2001

My all-time favorite internet travel writing can be found at Sarah Bunting's Tomato Nation: Part One and Part Two of Sarah drive down Route One, from Maine to Florida. Hilarious.
posted by acridrabbit at 11:23 AM on November 24, 2001