On travel

I travel slowly, stay too long, and go back — because a place only tells you the truth once it stops performing for you.

Slow, and then slower

The checklist trip — five cities in seven days — collects photographs, not understanding. I'd rather know one market intimately than ten superficially. Staying long enough to become slightly boring to a place is when it relaxes and shows you who it actually is: the second-week regular at the coffee stand, not the first-day tourist.

The ethics of the table

Writing about other people's homes and food carries responsibility. I try to write with places, not about them — to center the people who fed me rather than my own cleverness, to resist the exoticizing gaze, and to remember that someone's everyday life is not my content. Humility is the only honest posture for a guest.

In praise of returning

The most underrated travel is the second visit. The first time, everything is new and therefore flat — all novelty, no depth. Return, and the place has texture: you notice what changed, what endured, who remembered you. Some of my best writing is about places I've been many times, finally seen clearly. A running list of the places I keep going back to lives on the destinations page.

Packing light, staying long

My bag has gotten smaller as my trips have gotten longer, which I don't think is a coincidence. Traveling light forces a kind of dependence on the place — you borrow, you ask, you learn where things are because you didn't bring your own. It's a small discomfort that buys a much larger intimacy.

The itinerary is a suggestion

I plan the first three days of any trip and nothing after that, because the best material has a habit of showing up once the plan runs out. A missed bus, a closed border crossing, a stranger's insistence that you come to dinner — none of it fits a schedule, and all of it is usually the actual story.

Getting lost on purpose

Some of my favorite pieces started with a wrong turn I didn't correct. There's a version of this as a working method, not just a travel habit, over on the writing philosophy page — and shorter, rawer versions of these wrong turns collect in the notebook.