Before traveling to Bolivia, I thought I knew what I was looking forward to. Like many travelers, I had a list. The Uyuni Salt Flats. The Witches’ Market. The colorful lagoons. The flamingos. The endless mirror landscapes I had admired in photographs for years.

Some journeys test more than our legs. They test our trust. During our Kumano Kodo pilgrimage in Japan, our group of ten set out on the first day’s hike from Takijiri-oji to the small mountain village of Takahara.

There are some memories from travel that stay with me because they were beautiful. Others stay because they were unfinished.

As one of eight children, each of us probably carries a different memory of him. Perhaps each of us carries a different version of him as well. We called him A Ba.

High in the mountains of Nepal, we woke before dawn to make our way toward Poon Hill for sunrise.

A friend said something to me recently that made me smile. “You are a walking rainbow.” I laughed when I heard it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he might be right.

As I was clearing out old papers in my office, I came across something I almost didn’t keep. A simple card. It was from a trip to New Zealand many years ago. At the end of that journey, the group handed it to me — a card filled with handwritten notes from each traveler.

Today I received a letter from Paul, one of the “original five” travelers who joined me many years ago and who has since become a very Out of all the countries in the world, somehow I find myself in one very specific place, at one very specific moment in time. Sometimes it happens while walking a pilgrimage path like the Camino, the Shikoku. Sometimes it happens during something very simple — sharing a meal, walking to dinner with someone, or pausing in a small street some