A Vagabond’s Adventures
A story teller, National Geographic Explorer and science journalist takes an epic journey, exploring all seven continents - never by jet. Sharing it one day, one culture, one experience at a time.
Learn what adventures you can explore on your own.
Welcome to the Vagabond Adventure!
You’ve arrived at a place we think you’ll like. A world for the sort of person who wonders, and likes to wander.
If you love adventure, are looking to explore the most interesting places in the world and want great travel advice, then you’re in the right place. My name is Chip Walter. I’m an author, journalist, former CNN bureau chief and National Geographic Explorer. My wife Cyndy and I are traveling to all seven continents — never by jet — one day, one culture, one experience at a time. It’s a chance to understand, reveal and share with you Earth’s incomparable cultures and history, its mysteries, characters and out of the way locations. I hope you’ll come along and dive into the most fascinating places on the planet with us.
Where Have We Been?
Read the full adventure, stop by stop in the Vagabond Adventure Journal
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Stories from our recent stops. Tap any to experience.
Listen…
In this conversation, Chip joins Jonathan Otero from the Globetrotters Podcast to share some unforgettable experiences from their jet-free journey, including witnessing the most stunning sunset in Antarctica, being blown away by the rugged beauty of Patagonia, and surviving a comedic yet unnerving stay in a rural village. Read about Episode 79: No Jets! Exploring the World With NatGeo Explorer - With Chip Walter and follow the links to listen on your favorite podcast site.
Or catch the episode here. Just click the Play Button to begin.
Stay Involved, Stay In Touch and Crack On With Us!
Subscribe to receive all of our Vagabond Adventure Dispatches. Feel free to contact Chip or Cyndy and share your travel suggestions and experiences.
You’ll also receive inside news and updates on Chip’s latest book as well as ongoing tips about travel, history and world culture.
Special Bonus Offer: Sign up today and receive a free digital copy of my book, Thumbs, Toes and Tears. The fascinating evolutionary links between six seemingly unremarkable traits that make us the very remarkable creatures we are.
Countless behaviors separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but all of them can be traced one way or another to six traits that are unique to the human race―our big toe, our opposable thumb, our oddly shaped pharynx, and our ability to laugh, kiss, and cry. At first glance these may not seem to be connected but they are. Each marks a fork in the evolutionary road where we went one way and the rest of the animal kingdom went another. Each opens small passageways on the peculiar geography of the human heart and mind. Publisher’s Weekly called the book, “fascinating and superbly written.”
The Vagabond Gallery: Windows on the World
Featured Location - Devil’s Tower
Devils Tower gives new meaning to the word “there.” Because if anything is “there” it is that massive crag; planted in the earth, enormous out of all proportion to its surroundings, solitary and forbidding; a remarkable piece of igneous rock that has refused to be flattened by wind, water, earthquakes or blizzards.
It is a sacred place to Native Americans who have spent thousands of years in the company of the great edifice. I could see why. In this flat land it rises 867 feet from summit to base, godlike, and when I saw it from afar, I had the impression that it might shake itself free and begin to walk in search of others of its kind. Cyn and I stopped the car, and stared.
The name Devils Tower is a mistake, it turns out, made by an interpreter who somehow read a Native American’s description of the place as “Bad God’s Tower.” That name was then revamped into Devi’s Tower, and, despite some debate, it has remained unchanged since 1875.
The Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow and Kiowa have all given the rock a variety of other names that long predate Devil’s Tower: Bear’s Lodge, Bear Lair, Home of Bears, Tree Rock and Brown Buffalo Horn. The bear references come from several myths, but my favorite is the Kiowa and Lakota version. A group of girls are playing when several giant bears spot them and give chase. The girls scramble to the top of the rock, fall to their knees and pray to the Great Spirit certain they will die. Suddenly, their prayers are answered when the rock mounts toward the heavens. Still the bears (or in some tellings a single huge bear) continue to claw their way up the rock, scraping the deep ridges that give the tower its unsettling and eccentric features. Eventually the girls reach the sky, and there turn magically into the stars of the Pleiades.
If anyone knows about the Tower, it’s probably because of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (See Drew Moniot’s excellent companion piece in Reach: “Remembering Close Encounters.”) Like Native Americans, Spielberg understood the mythic power of the place, a thing that the movie’s main characters couldn’t get out of their heads; so powerful it drew them to it as if magnetized. I could see that, now that I stood there in front of the thing.
The structure impressed Theodore Roosevelt enough that he made it the nation’s first national monument in 1906.
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