Look beyond the array of stores and restaurants, try to ignore the uncomfortable seats, and don’t stress about the latest delay in your flight. Instead, look around you carefully. You will be amazed at how much airports can tell us about places and their connections with other places. I recorded this video blog during a journey from the US to Southeast Asia, with a stopover in Bahrain.… Read the rest

The Tonle Sap must surely be one of the world’s strangest rivers. For most of the year, it originates in the waters of the Tonle Sap Lake in central Cambodia, and flows south, joining the Mekong at Phnom Penh. But during the latter part of the rainy season each year, the Tonle Sap River reverses direction. In this short video… Read the rest, I talk about the Tonle Sap, the Mekong, and their importance for Southeast Asia.

  In August 2011, I led a small group of American students on a study abroad program in South Africa. At the beginning of our trip we visited the Irene Concentration Camp Cemetery and Memorial near Pretoria, home to the remains of more than a thousand Afrikaners who died in a British internment camp during the Anglo Boer War. At the end of our tour, we spent some time at the Prestwich Memorial, a brand new repository of the recently… Read the rest

Maurice is round-faced, bespectacled, and jovial 27-year-old who works as a chef in a guesthouse in suburban Johannesburg. Since the guesthouse serves only breakfast, his working day here lasts only three hours. But his commute is long; he lives in Roodepoort, a town about 25 km west of Johannesburg, about a half hour drive away.  But Maurice doesn’t have a car; like most South Africans, he relies on minibus taxis to get around. These taxis ply fixed routes, and there… Read the rest

You may now sign up for Professor Donald Rallis’s Cambodi study abroad program.  For details and instructions go to his website:  http://www.regionalgeography.org/cambodia/?page_id=27… Read the rest

A guest column by Dr. Richard A. Russo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Frostburg State University, Maryland. The election: Why the world was watching This past Sunday’s national parliamentary election in Turkey was closely watched outside of the country.  Turkey’s election drew global attention because the country’s rise over the past decade has also commanded the world’s attention.  Since 2001, when Turkey suffered a deep recession prompting an IMF intervention, the country’s GDP and per capita income… Read the rest

Phnom Penh, June 9, 2011 I have been in Phnom Penh for the past five weeks. When I planned this trip, I had ambitious goals. I would explore the city, talk to lots of people, take hundreds of photographs, and read every English-language local news story I could find about the place. I brought a book on the city’s history with me, and another on the history of Cambodia, which I planned to study as background for my fieldwork. By… Read the rest

“Drive Safely. Think of your loved ones.” I had been in the taxi for three minutes, and already there was no doubt where I was.  Where else could I find an exhortation to safe driving followed by a noble justification calibrated to make even the best driver feel just a little bit guilty? Where else could I be traveling along an urban six-lane highway under a canopy of trees, with neatly clipped hedgerows on each side and in the median?… Read the rest

A Day in the Park. … Read the rest I have an aversion to the whole notion of royalty. To me it seems archaic, elitist, and about as antithetical to democratic ideals as it is possible to be. After all, there is at least a chance that the next head of the North Korean state won’t be a Kim. And I hate crowds. So I was not at all pleased when I discovered that a two day stopover in London I had planned many

It was December 1976… Read the rest, I had just finished my first year of university in Johannesburg, and I was traveling outside of Southern Africa for the first time. For someone like me, it was almost a foregone conclusion that my first foreign journey should be to England. After all, both I and my home country had strong links to the place. South Africa had been a British colony for century or so when it gained independence in 1910, and one