When dreams come true, they no longer seem like dreams. For me to imagine that, when I first took an airplane abroad alone, to Paris, that I had no friends anywhere in Europe or Asia. Now, years later, another early dream involved weddings. It seemed like the ultimate way to show that you'd been accepted into a culture, to take part in one of its most personal…

Life is a variety of experiences – depth, quality, lived in the details. In a previous post I talked about how I want to be defined by actions, not interests. Here, I want to talk about how those actions are defined not by what they are, but how they are done.



Not long ago…

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Nithin Coca is a Freelance Writer and author whose traveled to over 44 countries. This is an excerpt from his first book, Traveling Softly and Quietly, now for sale on Amazon.

I looked up as a cute girl walked…

Nithin Coca's first book, Traveling Softly and Quietly, is now for sale on Amazon and Createspace. This is an excerpt from that book. 

We were waking down an alley in the albaicin, the old, Arab quarter of Granada, a maze of brick walls, enclosed, classical white Arab compounds with lovely courtyards, small hidden city squares, all built…

Traveling to discover - the essence of adventure - is what I seek to capture with this idea. 

It all started when I first learned, six years ago, that chilies were from South America, not, as I always assumed, Asia.

After I accepted that fact, which shook my worldview, I searched long and hard for a book that would tell this story. I wanted to know HOW this was possible. After all, there…

It all started one day in Malaysia while I was traveling around the world, over a bowl of roti canai at a guesthouse breakfast. A fellow traveler, from Britain, who had just come from a India, and I began talking, until he made a statement that seemed so ridiculous, so far-fetched that I refused to believe it could possibly be true.…

In the middle of the wedding, my friend's grandma, a short, stocky, but strong aboriginal Taiwanese woman in her 80s, went up on stage. She grabbed the microphone and, after a short introduction in Mandarin, the dominant language in Taiwan, began a Christian prayer in the Atayal language.

The fluid, slightly raspy words sounded quite different than the varying toned, short-syllables of Mandarin. I was in Taichung, Taiwan, a groomsman at the wedding of my good friend. Here, the…

It often seems that at least 90% of foreign tourists only step into one part of Indonesia – Bali, the formally Hindu majority paradise just to the east of Java. But by the time I finally took the ferry across the narrow waterway between the two islands, I'd spent three months in Indonesia, all in Java.

I was truthfully, scared to come here. It features heavily in classical writing about Asia, a tropical paradise, Shangri-la, with an…

I saw this at the Asian Civilization Museum in Singapore:

I sat there for a few moments, thinking about what this meant. Why do people like me, travelers, choose to be so far away from the people they love, first and foremost, our families? It seems like a cruel way to pay back those who helped raise us, helped us become the people we are today.…

Today I left Taiwan. For three weeks I was there, taking each day one by one. The reason, a wedding, a reason I turned into an excuse, an opportunity, to turn this trip to Asia into something far greater.

It was my second time to Taiwan, a fact that never ceased to amaze Taiwanese. But, in reality, it was me who never ceased to be amazed by Taiwanese people, who by the end of the…

It's now been more than five years since I returned from my first great voyage, my around the world trip. It often feels like it was much further than that, mostly because of how much my perspective on traveling has changed.

During that trip, I visited 28 countries. Of those 28, I spent more than a month in six. Of those six, none was an unexpected as Malaysia. I knew, beforehand, that I'd spend time in Spain, Italy, Turkey, and…

Never have I traveled to a place so unprepared.

I barely touched any guidebooks. Nor did I look up information online. Few of my friends had ever been to South Africa, and none that I knew of had been to Botswana. I'd been traveling long enough to not trust the media, or unverified word of mouth.

What little I knew came indirectly. Last summer, in Indonesia, at the sparse, overpriced bookstores, I found several cheap copies of Nelson Mandela's biography,…

Afrikaners (including the Boer subgroup) are a Germanic ethnic group in Southern Africa descended from Dutch (including Flemish), French and German settlers whose native tongue isAfrikaans: a Germanic language which derives primarily from 17th century Dutch, and a variety of other languages. Mainly Christian, Afrikaners developed in much the same way as the New England colonies in North America. The original South African Boer republics were founded on the principles of the Dutch…