Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

December 10, 2020

A PASSAGE TO PAKISTAN: MY FIRST ADVENTURE WITH GEOEX

W hile I have not been traveling far afield in person this year, the pandemic has given me time and motivation to travel another way: by excavating the archaeological layers in my garage. The whole known world is in my garage—or at least, the world I have known since I became a professional travel writer in 1980. Dustily arranged on wooden shelves are dozens of boxes filled with maps, brochures, notes, and photographs from my past journeys. On the floor around these are further dozens of sturdy sacks, backpacks, and duffle bags filled with more brochures, photos, and maps. Sometimes I don my pith helmet and archaeologist’s gloves and wade into these ruins, peering into this box here and that bag there, losing myself on memory’s road and occasionally unearthing unexpected treasures. So it was earlier this year when I discovered a box containing all of the maps, mementoes, and notes from my very first trip with GeoEx: a journey to Hunza, in northern Pakistan, undertaken in the spring of 1990, when I was the Travel Editor at the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle , and GeoEx was known as InnerAsia Expeditions. As 1990 dawned, I was feeling the need for some deeply

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