I'm Mara — I travel slowly, mostly by train and on foot, and write about the parts of a trip that don't fit in an itinerary: the wrong turns, the long waits, the people who feed you anyway.
Dispatches written from wherever I happened to be sitting when I wrote them.
The couchette had six berths and five languages. Somewhere past Villach a stranger passed me half a loaf of bread and didn't ask for anything back — that's the whole story, really, and I've been thinking about it since.
Read the entryWhat forty kilometres of wet stone steps teaches you about pace.
Read the entryArriving without a shopping list and leaving with a whole vocabulary.
Read the entryI waited nine hours at a crossroads outside Sucre for a bus that, it turned out, hadn't run in two years. This is about what you do instead — and who eventually stops.
Read the entryThree weeks in Nazaré with nothing scheduled, and how I stopped treating stillness like time wasted. Notes on the fishermen who still haul their boats up the beach by hand, the café that opens whenever the owner wakes up, and learning to let a place set the pace instead of the other way around.
Read the entryEleven years of trips, counted roughly by region. Not a bucket list — just a record.
I used to plan trips the way I planned everything else: efficiently. Then I spent a week stuck in a bus depot in northern Bolivia and realised the delay was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in months.
I trained as a cartographer, which probably explains the maps. These days I move mostly overland — trains where they exist, buses where they don't, and a lot of walking in between. I write here every few weeks, usually a while after I've actually been somewhere, once I've figured out what it was actually about.
No sponsored stays, no ranked lists of "must-see" anything. Just the trips, roughly as they happened.
One email, whenever there's something worth sending. No schedule, no noise.