The Global Travel section is different from the others. There’s no plan or a content calendar. It exists because fifty-plus years of moving through the world, through the Asia-Pacific mostly, but not exclusively, produce observations that don’t fit neatly into a category, and that seem worth writing down anyway.

The pieces here are dispatches in the original sense: reports from somewhere specific, written from the perspective of someone who has been on the road long enough to notice what changes and what doesn’t, what the guidebooks got right and what they’ve always gotten wrong, what traveling with less certainty, and more patience, allows you to see that an itinerary would hide. Perhaps about places. Some are about encounters. Maybe some are about the experience of travel itself, and what it does to a person over decades.

The geographical range follows curiosity rather than strategy. The Philippines is a constant reference point, but the Asia-Pacific is vast; Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and there are corners of it that barely appear in travel writing aimed at Western audiences, not because they’re inaccessible but because the tourism industry hasn’t found a way to package them yet. Those tend to be the most interesting places to write about.

If there’s a thread running through all of it, it might be this: the most valuable thing travel can give you isn’t a collection of places you’ve been to, but a growing ability to pay attention. To slow down in a particular street, or conversation, or meal, and understand, at least partially, what you’re actually looking at. That’s what these pieces try to do. Whether they succeed is for you to judge.