Travel usually involves a lot of planning and packing and booking and backtracking. At age 70, though, there are many new ways to travel. For one thing, there is time travel, which is what I call revisiting a place that I visited long ago, just to see all the ch-ch-ch-changes, maybe even recognize somebody from the old days. I’d done this before and did it again during the pandemic, when my usual Asian haunts were locked down tighter than a you-fill-in-the-blank and so I reverted to my original routes in Latin America, which were more on the catch-as-you-can American plan—nice. But now I’d rather travel in my mind—and online—with the hope that something I write might strike somebody’s fancy and inspire them to read a story I write, most recently the story of 5th-century Buddhist pilgrim Fa Hien, who hiked from China to India just to search for the origins of Buddhism and translate the texts into Chinese.

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