A Vagabond’s Adventures
A story teller, National Geographic Explorer and science journalist takes an epic journey, exploring all seven continents - never by jet. Sharing it one day, one culture, one experience at a time.
Learn what adventures you can explore on your own.
Welcome to the Vagabond Adventure!
You’ve arrived at a place we think you’ll like. A world for the sort of person who wonders, and likes to wander.
If you love adventure, are looking to explore the most interesting places in the world and want great travel advice, then you’re in the right place. My name is Chip Walter. I’m an author, journalist, former CNN bureau chief and National Geographic Explorer. My wife Cyndy and I are traveling to all seven continents — never by jet — one day, one culture, one experience at a time. It’s a chance to understand, reveal and share with you Earth’s incomparable cultures and history, its mysteries, characters and out of the way locations. I hope you’ll come along and dive into the most fascinating places on the planet with us.
Where Have We Been?
Read the full adventure, stop by stop in the Vagabond Adventure Journal
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Stories from our recent stops. Tap any to experience.
Listen…
I was thrilled to join Christi Cassidy on the Moving Along Podcast recently where I had the chance to talk about our Vagabond Adventure. Moving Along explores travel, relocation and life transitions. Christi shares stories of people who packed up and left–either by necessity or choice; advice from experts in organization, budgeting and moving; and tips on making your life transition a positive new adventure.
It was a fun conversation. I think you'll enjoy it too. Please listen to the podcast, subscribe and share if you love stories like these, and help support Moving Along.
The Vagabond Gallery: Windows on the World
Featured Location - Devil’s Tower
Devils Tower gives new meaning to the word “there.” Because if anything is “there” it is that massive crag; planted in the earth, enormous out of all proportion to its surroundings, solitary and forbidding; a remarkable piece of igneous rock that has refused to be flattened by wind, water, earthquakes or blizzards.
It is a sacred place to Native Americans who have spent thousands of years in the company of the great edifice. I could see why. In this flat land it rises 867 feet from summit to base, godlike, and when I saw it from afar, I had the impression that it might shake itself free and begin to walk in search of others of its kind. Cyn and I stopped the car, and stared.
The name Devils Tower is a mistake, it turns out, made by an interpreter who somehow read a Native American’s description of the place as “Bad God’s Tower.” That name was then revamped into Devi’s Tower, and, despite some debate, it has remained unchanged since 1875.
The Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow and Kiowa have all given the rock a variety of other names that long predate Devil’s Tower: Bear’s Lodge, Bear Lair, Home of Bears, Tree Rock and Brown Buffalo Horn. The bear references come from several myths, but my favorite is the Kiowa and Lakota version. A group of girls are playing when several giant bears spot them and give chase. The girls scramble to the top of the rock, fall to their knees and pray to the Great Spirit certain they will die. Suddenly, their prayers are answered when the rock mounts toward the heavens. Still the bears (or in some tellings a single huge bear) continue to claw their way up the rock, scraping the deep ridges that give the tower its unsettling and eccentric features. Eventually the girls reach the sky, and there turn magically into the stars of the Pleiades.
If anyone knows about the Tower, it’s probably because of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (See Drew Moniot’s excellent companion piece in Reach: “Remembering Close Encounters.”) Like Native Americans, Spielberg understood the mythic power of the place, a thing that the movie’s main characters couldn’t get out of their heads; so powerful it drew them to it as if magnetized. I could see that, now that I stood there in front of the thing.
The structure impressed Theodore Roosevelt enough that he made it the nation’s first national monument in 1906.
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This ranks as one of the most harrowing and remarkable rescues in the history of human adventure and exploration. In 1914 Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed by encroaching ice floes on its way to the Antarctic. Shackleton’s original plan was the walk across the Antarctic Continent (larger than Australia), but instead he soon faced keeping his crew alive and safely home in the most dangerous and godforsaken region on earth. The story of how members of the expedition survived is one for the ages, with breathtaking original photos by Frank Hurley capturing the experience every step of the way.
• 65% cotton, 35% polyester
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• Fabric weight: 5.3 oz/yd² (237 g/m²)
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• Matching color zipper
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This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk helps reduce overproduction, so thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions!
The fascinating evolutionary links between six seemingly unremarkable traits that make us the very remarkable creatures we are.
Countless behaviors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but all of them can be traced one way or another to six traits that are unique to the human race―our big toe, our opposable thumb, our oddly shaped pharynx, and our ability to laugh, kiss, and cry. At first glance these may not seem to be connected but they are. Each marks a fork in the evolutionary road where we went one way and the rest of the animal kingdom went another. Each opens small passageways on the peculiar geography of the human heart and mind. Publisher’s Weekly called the book, “fascinating and superbly written.”
National Geographic rated this the greatest travel-adventure book ever written. It’s the dramatic story of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition between 1911 and 1913 to become the first humans to reach the South Pole. This is the original version, written in 1922 by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who survived and witnessed the journey. Filled with remarkable original drawings, maps and photos with a fresh preface that explains why this book is so compelling and important, it is a riveting story of courage and danger; a true, rare classic.