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After missing the opportunity to see the last total solar eclipse in the United States back in 2017, I decided to add this experience to my bucket list and vowed I would do whatever it takes to see an eclipse in the future. A few weeks ago, I got my chance. Joined by my brother Drew and his friends Jeremy and Claire, I drove up to the woods of northern New Hampshire, and together, the four of us witnessed an event that far surpassed whatever expectations any of us had had. Here’s an audio postcard from our trip.
Visit my website at farfromhomepodcast.org to view more photos and videos!
On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Thor Pedersen always felt like he was born too late. He grew up in a world where other people had already done most of the amazing things, like venturing to the North and South Poles, climbing the highest mountains, following the longest rivers, and exploring the depths of the deepest seas. But in 2013, at the age of 34, he discovered one record that no one had yet managed to achieve. So he went to the store, bought a map, and began marking it with a blue pen and a red pen. Before long, he hatched a plan to make history and get his name “on page 506 in some little book,” as he saw it: he would travel to every country in the world without flying, in a single, unbroken journey.
On this episode of Far From Home, he tells the story of that journey and how it turned out to be way longer and more difficult than he ever imagined it would be.
Check out Thor’s blog, where he documented his entire, decade-long trip.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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After releasing my last episode where I shared stories from my time in Oklahoma many years ago, I came across one more short radio piece in my archives that I thought some of your might enjoy. It’s about another cultural phenomenon unique to Oklahoma that I experienced: the world’s only behind-the-walls prison rodeo. Before a stadium of 9000 cheering fans, a hundred inmates from around the state competed in events like calf roping, steer wrestling, a wild horse race, and “Money the Hard Way,” a competition where people tried to grab a $100 bill that was tied between the horns of a charging bull.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Two decades ago, I was just starting out as a public radio reporter, applying for literally every radio job opening I saw, and somehow I ended up getting hired by a small station in Norman, Oklahoma. Given that the culture, politics, and geography were so incredibly different from anything I’d been exposed to up to that point. moving there from my home state of New Jersey almost felt like going to a foreign country. Yet despite any initial reservations I had, it turned out to be a really great experience, and the five years I spent there ended up making me a better journalist and a better person.
On this episode, I’m sharing a couple of my favorite radio stories I produced during my time in Oklahoma, to give you a small sense of the culture of this region that many Americans on the coasts simply regard as “flyover country.” First, I get to experience the traditional sport known as catfish noodling. Then I go on a rattlesnake hunt in southwestern Oklahoma.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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If you listened to my last episode, you heard the story of my friend Jamie Yuenger, an American who moved from New York City to the Netherlands and was struggling to make the transition and figure out how to fit in. Following up on that theme, today I’m sharing a recent episode from my friends at The Bittersweet Life podcast, where co-host Tiffany Parks looks back at the past nearly two decades she’s spent in Italy and discusses the milestone she’s just reached of having now officially lived in Rome longer than she’s lived anywhere else.
If you enjoy this conversation, you can find The Bittersweet Life wherever you get your podcasts or delve into their archives of nearly 500 shows on their website, thebittersweetlife.net
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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From the age of 24 until she was 37, Jamie Yuenger lived in New York City. While she started out having a complicated relationship with the city, she grew over time to love her adopted hometown. Then a few years ago, she fell in love with a Dutch guy named Piet and decided to move to the Netherlands to be with him. That meant she’d be starting over in a new country where she didn’t understand the language or the culture. Jamie set about adapting to her new life, but it turned out to be way harder than she imagined.
Jamie has her own podcast called “If You Knew Me,” which features personal stories of the inner lives of women. And she also produced “Totem,” where she told the incredible story of how she met her husband Piet.
Were you able to relate to Jamie’s story, and have you ever experienced anything similar? Tell me about it by dropping me a line or -- better yet – recording a voice memo on your phone and sending it to me at [email protected]
You can also find Far From Home on Instagram or Facebook.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Last winter during the pandemic, Jack Boswell started to reevaluate his place in life and realize that at the age of 31, he still hadn’t chased his real passion of being a Hollywood screenwriter. So he decided to quit his job and hop on a plane where he lived in London to head to Los Angeles and give it a go. But instead of flying directly there, he figured he’d instead land in Boston and make his way across the United States by train, documenting the places he visited and the people he met along the way. Out of his experiences, he crafted the first season of his podcast “Off the Beaten Jack,” which ended up being nominated as best new podcast in the British Podcast Awards. On this episode of Far From Home, I chat with Jack Boswell and we listen to some excerpts from his show.
If you’re interested in learning more about Jack’s style of traveling, you can look into couchsurfing and Workaway volunteer opportunities (or Worldpackers, which is similar).
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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As you may have seen in my feed, I recently teamed up with my colleagues at NPR’s Planet Money economic podcast to report a story that prominently featured the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan — which is probably one of the most obscure countries in the world, and certainly not a place that most of us hear much about, much less visit. Only about 10,000 tourists a year cross its borders, but in the summer of 2016, my brother, my friends Rosi and Jane, and I were some of the lucky few. We drove across Turkmenistan as part of an 11,000 mile road trip we were taking from London to Mongolia, raising money for charity.
I documented that journey on the first season of this podcast, and today — for all my new listeners — I’m re-releasing an excerpt of one of my favorite episodes (#11) called “Turkmenistan: Just Plain Weird.” If you enjoy this, I recommend going back to the very beginning of my feed and listening to my first season in its entirety!
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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A few months ago, a friend of mine named Oraz who runs an autobody repair shop in Turkmenistan came across a kind of puzzle. A new vehicle had just arrived on his lot. A white Lexus SUV. He could see by the registration sticker that it came from my home state of New Jersey, but the even stranger thing was the shape it was in. It was practically brand new, unlike like the dented and mangled cars that usually come to him for repairs.
Oraz wondered: how did this car get here, to his shop? And what kind of place, what kind of person, casts off such a nice new car? Those questions led me on a journey through the international used car underground... all the way back to a pleasant, two-story home in suburban New Jersey. To find the answers, I team up with reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, which features fun and surprising stories about the global economy.
To hear the complete story of my road trip from the UK to Mongolia — when I broke down in the middle of the desert and first met Oraz — scroll back to the beginning of my feed and check out the first season of my podcast.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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I’m always open to listener feedback on Far From Home, and I heard from someone recently who’s given me a new perspective on one of my past stories and forced me to see things in a new light, so I wanted to share it with all of my listeners.
Several years ago on the show, I featured a series of stories about Lucho, a traditional medicine man from Peru who describes himself as a "curandero," or someone who heals. Using medicinal herbs, archaeological relics, and hallucinogenic plants, he claims to have rid himself of diabetes and his father of cancer. He regularly travels around his country treating people with all sorts of ailments.
In part one of my series, I joined Lucho as he embarked on a journey up the coast, searching for a star-shaped stone with supposed magical powers that he saw in a vision.
Then I accompanied him to a healing ceremony in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima where he served participants a hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca. I’d originally planned on simply observing and documenting the event, but once I was there, I decided to take Lucho up on his offer to consume a small amount of the potion myself to understand what the experience was like for everyone else. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on me, however, and I wondered in the story whether I might be somehow immune.
In a bonus episode, I also shared the story of my friend Dennis, who similarly tried ayahuasca during his visit to Peru and felt like it didn’t live up to his expectations.
But after chatting recently with Nora Dunn, I’ve realized that perhaps my takeaways from my experience as well as my presentation of the topic might not have been entirely fair. Nora’s been traveling the world as a digital nomad for the past 17 years, blogging as The Professional Hobo, and she also spent several years working with shamans in Ecuador and Peru. On this episode, I revisit my previous reporting and get Nora’s insights on what I might have gotten wrong.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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While I’ve been hunkered down these past few years, avoiding traveling and staying home while I rode out the pandemic, I’ve been incredibly lucky that I’ve had a safe and comfortable place to live. But what has this experience been like for people in living situations that failed to provide basic levels of safety, privacy, and comfort?
On this episode of Far From Home, I play an episode from the Shelter podcast series that I co-produced with Rutgers University, coLAB Arts, and the New Brunswick Theological Seminary looking at the topic of housing insecurity in the era of Covid-19.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Over the past 2 months, more than 5 million people have left Ukraine, and another 6-and-a-half-million have fled their homes and are now displaced elsewhere within their own country, making this Europe’s largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. Neighboring countries are struggling to keep up with the exodus, but they’ve generally been fairly welcoming, which many critics have pointed out is a markedly different approach from how they’ve treated African and Middle Eastern refugees in the past.
With so much of the world’s attention now focused on Ukraine, I thought I’d spend some time this episode featuring the voices of refugees from other parts of the world, since their stories are of course equally important. The recordings come from the Sound Seekers Audio Festival and were produced by refugee, asylum, and migrant communities in partnership with community radio stations, the Irish Research Council, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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On this episode, I speak to Savelli and Olexander, two Ukrainians who’ve suddenly had their lives upended after the Russian military invaded their country.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Central Asia is not a place that most Westerners know or think about very often. But now that I’ve been there, my ears perk up on the rare instances when it makes the news, as was the case on two separate occasions over the past few weeks. In light of recent developments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, I re-play excerpts of some episodes I featured several years ago on the first season of Far From Home, where I documented an 11,000 mile road trip my friends and I took from the UK to Mongolia in a couple of really tiny cars.
If you’re new to the program, I recommend going back to the very beginning of my podcast feed and bingeing the entire story of my journey. In particular, if you want to listen to longer versions of the stories I played on today’s show, here are the links:
“Kazakhstan: One Surprise After Another” (ep. 19)
“Turkmenistan: Just Plain Weird” (ep. 11) - go to that link also to see a video of my friends and I approaching the giant fire pit in the middle of Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Take Santa Claus. Then ditch the red suit and the flying reindeer, and you’ve got a guy who’s all about giving. On this last episode of my third season, I tell the story of the time my dad tried out the role and got more than he bargained for!
This story originally aired many years ago on NPR’s Day to Day. Thanks to my editor Russell Lewis.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Nearly 2 years into the Covid-19 pandemic, new waves of infection continue to spread around the world, and the Omicron variant is causing renewed fears in places that previously thought they had the virus under control. So I’m releasing another episode in my series where I check in with friends and colleagues around the world to get a sense of what things are like where they live. This time we hear voices from Thailand, Ukraine, Guatemala, Belgium, Finland, and Vietnam. If you’ve missed the previous three installments of my COVID Stories series, you can check them out in my season 3 archive.
If you’re a regular listener of my show, I’d love to hear your feedback on this series. Do you enjoy it, or are you tired of it, and you think I should move on to something else? You can let me know by emailing me at [email protected]
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Having grown up just outside of New York City, I visited most of the big tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center when I was a kid. But when you spend a lot of time in a place and get to know it well, you start to discover some really cool but lesser-known areas, and those are the ones I always like to share with friends when they come from out of town.
Recently, I played tour guide for my colleague Palle Bo, who’s the host of The Radio Vagabond podcast and has been to nearly 100 countries. If you’re a longtime listener of my show, you may remember his episode I shared a while back about the time he and his daughter joined a tour group in North Korea.
Palle had been to New York several times before, so I figured I would get him out of Manhattan where most of the other tourists stay and bring him to see some interesting sites in the city’s outer boroughs. He ended up making a podcast episode about our experience that I really enjoyed, so I’m re-sharing it in my feed. You can read more and see some photos from some of the places Palle and I visited on his website.
If you’re new to Far From Home and want to hear some of my past episodes that Palle mentioned, check out my first season where I told the story of my road trip to Mongolia including the time my friends and I were asked to pay a bribe in Tajikistan, my episode about the time I made a fool of myself trying to learn the ancient art of Tuvan throat singing, and the time I participated in a hallucinogenic healing ceremony in Peru.
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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When you travel, it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally have weird or random experiences, where you might have certain expectations before you arrive at a place, but then you’re totally thrown for a loop. Sometimes it’s frustrating, and other times it ends up being a pleasant surprise, but either way, it’s unexpected, and there’s this moment where you can’t help but stop, take a breath, and think, “Wait. How did I end up here again?”
On today’s episode, I talk about how I found myself in a swarm of Justin Bieber fans in Bangkok, Thailand, and Nisreene Atassi — host of Expedia’s “Out Travel the System” podcast — shares the story of the time she and some co-workers went to a sushi dinner in Tokyo and ended up having a night they’d never forget.
If you enjoy this episode, you might also like this story from my last season about the time I slept overnight on the floor of Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market to see an early morning tuna auction. And if all this inspires you to head to the nearest airport, check out this episode of Nissy’s podcast where she discusses tips for planning your own trip to Japan!
As always, you can find, follow, and message Far From Home on Facebook or Instagram or contact me on Twitter. Or you can drop me a line at [email protected]
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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In the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, President Bush vowed revenge against the perpetrators, but not everyone found his words comforting. Around this time, a small but vocal group of people got together to speak out. They were the parents, spouses, siblings, and children of people who were killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and they said they didn’t want the deaths of their loved ones to be used to justify military attacks that could harm innocent civilians on the other side of the world.
They called themselves “September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,” and in late November of 2001, they took part in a walk for peace from the Pentagon to the World Trade Center site. I was a young reporter at the time, and I tagged along and interviewed several members of the group, later producing an hour-long documentary featuring their stories.
On this 20th anniversary of the attacks, I’m re-releasing that documentary, along with an interview I conducted a few weeks ago with David Potorti, whose brother James worked on the 96th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. David has just co-edited an anthology of poetry from over 100 poets who’ve written about September 11th. It’s called Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 and its Aftermath.
As always, you can find, follow, and message Far From Home on Facebook or Instagram or contact me on Twitter. Or you can drop me a line at [email protected]
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
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Knowing the rules and being able to navigate them can be a big part of feeling safe in any city. On this episode of Far From Home, I share an episode from another great podcast I recently discovered called “Here There Be Dragons,” where host Jess Myers speaks to residents of Stockholm, Sweden trying to figure out the norms, how to use them, and how to change them. Will they have to bend to Stockholm or will Stockholm bend to them?
If you enjoy this episode, I highly recommend subscribing to HTBD wherever you get your podcasts to hear more fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories from cities around the world!
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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org
- Visa fler
