In 2013, Thor Pedersen was 34 years old, living in Copenhagen, and doing quite well within his chosen career of shipping and logistics. He had a comfortable life, had just purchased an apartment, and had recently started dating a woman he really liked. Looking back, he says there wasn't much in the cards that would suggest he would completely change course and set off on an adventure into the world, but that’s in fact precisely what was about to happen.

It was mid-2004. I was early in my career as a public radio reporter and applying for literally every job opening I saw. I wasn’t having much luck until I heard back one day from a small station in Norman, Oklahoma.

Jamie Yuenger was born and spent most of her life here in the United States, including over a decade in New York City. Then a few years ago, she fell in love with a Dutch guy named Piet and decided to join him in the Netherlands. She didn’t understand the language or the culture, but really, she figured… how difficult could it be?

In the days that followed 9/11, the cleanup process began, along with the search for answers. And then came the response. President Bush and other political leaders quickly vowed revenge against the perpetrators of the attack. But not everyone found his words comforting. Around this time, a small but vocal group of people got together to speak out for peace.

COVID-19 has closed borders and made traveling difficult if not impossible for many of us. But radio signals don’t needs passports or plane tickets. They circle the earth, bouncing off the atmosphere, so even if you’re confined to your home, it’s possible – with a good antenna – to listen to voices from the other side of the planet.

For anyone who lives in Oklahoma City, April 19th is generally a somber day. It’s the anniversary of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, which killed 168 people including 19 children. Prior to September 11, 2001, it bore the distinction of being the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil.

Justin and Patrice La Vigne had a lot of hiking experience under their belts by the time they set out on Te Araroa — a 2000 mile path across New Zealand — so they were pretty sure they knew what they were getting into. But this trip would be much different from anywhere else they had gone in the past.

During this period when travel hasn’t really been possible, exploring places closer to home has given me a greater appreciation for all the fascinating and undiscovered adventures it’s possible to have right in my own backyard.

Where I come from in the United States, this time of year means dressing up in costumes, carving jack-o’-lanterns, and watching scary movies. And of course going to the polls. But in Peru, people have other traditions. Chief among them is the celebration of All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day on the 1st and 2nd of November.

In many ways, Barbuda is a lot like other Caribbean islands. It has beautiful pink sand beaches, pastel colored homes, and tropical fruits I’d never heard of before I before I went. But there’s also something really unique about this place.

Like many people, I’ve been pushed by the protests for racial justice these past few weeks to take a step back, reexamine my place in this world, and think once again about how so many people go through vastly different experiences in life simply because of the color of their skin.

The historical accounts are a bit fuzzy, but the way the story is commonly told, Caribbean slaves in the 18th century gained a day of freedom two times a year, on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) and New Year’s Day. They made costumes and played music to celebrate, and over the centuries, that tradition evolved into what’s now know as the annual Junkanoo festival, an all-night parade through the streets that’s been compared to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in Brazil.

It was the fall of 2016. I had just finished driving 11,000 miles across Europe and Asia -- the story I told on the first season of this podcast -- and now my friend Donna had flown out to Eastern Siberia to join me for the trip back, three quarters of the way across the largest country in the world. I’d hardly spent any time in Russia up to this point, so I really had little idea what to expect.

This week’s episode of Far From Home is a bit different from what I normally do on the show. I’ve been getting a lot of questions and comments from listeners recently, so I spend some time answering some of them and sharing a bit of the feedback I’ve received. I also feature a recent interview I did with Corey Cambridge on his program, OPP (Other People’s Podcast), where I talk a little more about my background and the thinking that goes into my show.

This upcoming January marks the tenth anniversary of the massive earthquake in Haiti. It came on a Tuesday afternoon, 12 days into the new year, and destroyed or severely damaged a quarter of a million homes, killing more than 100,000 people.

When he was growing up in Southern California, Addi Somekh wasn't quite sure what to do with his life. But he knew from a young age that he wanted to "spread warmth" and make other people happy. On this week’s episode, the unusual story of how Addi’s quest to do just that set him off on a worldwide mission to make people laugh.

Cambodia has changed dramatically in recent years. It was just a few decades ago that the country experienced a massive genocide, where about a quarter of its population was killed under the rule of the dictator Pol Pot and his brutal communist followers in the Khmer Rouge. But today it’s become one of Southeast Asia’s tourist hotspots.

It was a Saturday, a few weeks after I’d first met him, when Lucho sent me a text. It was totally last minute, but some people had hired him to lead an ayahuasca healing ceremony that evening in the Huarochiri Valley, an area of shantytowns on the northern outskirts of Lima, Peru. He asked if I wanted to tag along.

Lucho is a traditional medicine man who describes himself as a "curandero," or someone who heals. Using medicinal herbs, archeological relics, and hallucinogenic plants (as well as some special powers), he claims to have rid himself of diabetes and his father of cancer. He regularly travels around Peru treating people with all sorts of ailments. "Some diseases are said to be incurable," he told me, "but in the jungle, there is no way that a disease cannot be cured."

Before traveling to Ireland a few months ago, I’ll confess I knew very little about the island and its history. I had this vague notion – like I think a lot of people – that there had been some fighting in Northern Ireland in the past, but that it was all over now, everyone had moved on, and things were more or less back to normal. So I was surprised to learn that in many ways, that was very much not the case.

Tuva is famous for its style of throat singing, which the local people call khoomei. It’s an ancient practice created by the nomadic people of Central Asia who were trying to mimic sounds of nature like the songs of birds, a babbling brook, or even the growls of a camel. Experienced singers can produce up to four pitches simultaneously, creating an effect like a bagpipe or a didgeridoo. And these are sounds I didn’t even realize it was possible for a human to make!

For more than 80 years, Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market had a reputation for supplying some of the freshest and best quality seafood anywhere. But having been built before the Second World War, it was a relic from an earlier era, and over the decades, it had become overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe. After years of planning, the city decided to move the market last fall to a larger and more modern facility about a mile-and-a-half away.

Like most people, I had originally assumed that this surely couldn’t be a safe place to go, and it probably wasn’t even possible for outsiders like myself to get anywhere near it, but then I did some more research and learned that not only is it possible, but there are in fact a number of companies that take people visiting Kyiv, Ukraine on day trips to the site. Their brochures claimed that as long as you followed the tour guide’s instructions and don’t wander anywhere you’re not supposed to go, the dose of radiation you’d get from spending an afternoon in the area around Chernobyl was just a fraction of what you’d get from a long airplane flight. So early one Saturday morning, my friend Donna and I decided to sign up for a tour.

After driving 11,000 miles over the course of seven weeks, we finally reached the finish line of the Mongol Rally, and everything was suddenly over. There was no more waking up early to hit the road, driving 12 hours to make up for lost time, and arriving at our destination long after dark. No more tow trucks or tow ropes, restaurants serving meat from another strange animal, or sleeping in uncomfortable beds in sketchy hotel rooms that desperately needed a remodel. No more use for Google Translate or need to hand over bottles of vodka to police officers as bribes.  And you know what? As crazy as it sounds, we kind of missed it!

Against all odds, after 53 days on the road, we eventually managed to make it to the finish line in Ulan Ude, Siberia, and although it turned out in some ways to be a bit underwhelming, we were still thrilled and felt a great sense of accomplishment!

After a series of bad decisions, my brother and I had ended up stranded with our friends at the bottom of an incredibly steep and rocky hill in a really remote part of Mongolia. We’d sent a text by satellite to the American embassy in Mongolia’s capital who dispatched a rescue team, and when that team couldn’t find us, they sent a second team.  Help finally arrived after dark, but this would be no simple rescue.

After getting stuck while driving across a shallow river in Mongolia, my brother and I made the fateful decision to veer off the main path onto another trail that seemed like it might be easier. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before we realized we had made a terrible mistake.

Mongolia is a place with notoriously bad roads, where the main east-west routes are often little more than tracks through the dirt. Maps and satellite GPS are of little navigational help, and signs are few and far between. Throw in some river crossings for added entertainment, and traversing the country can be quite an adventure!

When my brother and I told friends we'd be driving across Kazakhstan, we got plenty of jokes referencing the cartoonishly backwards image they had of the country after watching Sacha Baron Cohen's 2006 mockumentary Borat. But we were about to find out that the real-life nation of Kazakhstan was almost nothing like what was portrayed on the screen!

We'd just received more bad news about our car. Ever since we replaced its faulty head gasket back in Uzbekistan, it had been acting a bit funny, and although we survived our latest breakdown, the mechanic was now telling us we'd probably only be able to make it another hundred miles. Our options were limited, so after mulling it over, we decided that the best we could do was to keep going for as long as our engine would last.