Short

excerptsThe 18th of March. Depressing weather in Berlin, yet I'm not depressed, only sleepy, in spite of a coffee and a lot of bitter chocolate. Coming back from Italy is like waking up from a Paradise dream or from a heroin trip and finding again those four walls of

Chapter XLV – How to TravelTraveling is a spiritual need of everybody: our life actually ends with a trip that we are so sorry we have to take in mourning and without companions, leaving the body to which our soul, which is in fact ourselves, was so much connected. We

excerptsVienna, December 1838 Extra Hungariam non est vita, si est vita, non est ita.  Vienna and Bucharest! Oh, what a difference between these two cities! Like the sun and the planets is this Capital surrounded by adequate corollaries stretching to the margins of the

excerptsThe most dazzling phenomenon of the long Finnish winter night is the polar lights. The fantastical miracles that move profoundly the foreign traveler, they also impress the local people, who watch them in ecstasy like some genuine miracles of nature. The most impressive

Lapland is the most northern country in Europe. It has more than 70,000 inhabitants and its surface, comparable to that of France, is barren and lacks vegetation. Physical appearance. The Lapps are short and thin, their legs are short and curved and they seem smaller than

The proportions of the body of an Eskimo are of great interest. The body is well built. It shows, among other things, a bust circumference of 945 mm for the male and 863 mm for the woman. So, as one can see, from the point of view of the proportion of the medium circumference

excerptsA group of Indians. In one of these caves I saw the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego for the first time. I had left the convoy behind at a certain distance and accompanied by two men, I had gone ahead, when all of a sudden, I found myself near a group of 25 or 30

For centuries now, every once in three years, The Feast of Immortality – Kumbh Mela, takes place alternatively in four Indian centers : Allahabad and Hardwar (Uttar Pradesh state), Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh) and Nasik (Maharashtra). Descending from Vedic mythology, the feast

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

excerptsAlthough if you observe it partially and with amusement the Chinese landscape may look like any other landscape, the fundamental impression is of being on another planet. The soil suggests here that the matter froze quickly while boiling and it stood still in dramatic

The parallel journals of two travelers, separated by more than three centuries, who crossed Asia from the west to the east, following the same route to the capital of China, offers us a human measure of the passage of time. Double photographs of the same places, even the

excerptsThe greatest dream of my life, to see, with my very own eyes, the beauties and wonders of the tropical world, the hard nostalgia for those woods full of game from the Indian Archipelago, determined me to go on a hunting trip to Sumatra, together with my friend K.