Patricia Sanders

Chiang Khong is kind of like that kid at school who doesn’t talk much but then you get to know them and find out they’re really witty and cool and easy to be with. Chiang Khong is up there in northern Thailand on the Mekong. It’s where you pick up…

Dateline: Bukit Lawang, Sumatra. On the edge of the Gunung Leuser National Park, where orang-utans still swing in the trees, gibbons sing out for mates, pythons slither and corpse flowers stink. Brown-eyed boys tout jungle treks and strum lovelorn tunes on their beat-up guitars. They roll their r’s and they…

In the city of Siantar, Sumatra, Indonesia.

“Where are you from?” “How long have you been traveling?” “Where did you just come from?” Those are probably the top three questions I hear travelers asking each other when they first meet, when I’m hanging out in the common area of a guest house or hostel. If they’re asking…

It was a cool, overcast afternoon and the light was gorgeous, so I walked over to Penang’s Protestant Cemetery to take pictures. The British East India Company settled Penang, an island off the west coast of Malaysia, in 1786. This cemetery was opened that same year and used for over…

(With apologies to M!) A little blond boy stood barefoot at the edge of a pier on a lake, and he had something in his hand that he wanted to throw in the water – an orange leaf that he’d found on the path. He put his hand behind his ear and…

Bicycling was one of my passions as a kid. At the age of 10 or 11, I would ride my green three-speed Schwinn into the countryside and go until I got lost. Then I’d find my way home again. That was my game, a way of bringing adventure into my bland…

Six months ago, I turned my life upside-down. Literally. I went to the other side of the Earth. At the end of October – a month before my fiftieth birthday – I boarded the Texas Eagle train in Maricopa, AZ, and let it rumble me west, and then climbed into…