Popular Stories - Travel Stories

Thank goodness for famous divas and rock 'n' roll train wrecks. They're the sort of hotel clients who make us feel better about ourselves after we've pestered the concierge for last-minute Broadway tickets or complained about too-firm pillows. You see, we're not high maintenance:

(CNN) -- With a dozen humanitarian missions behind her, Ashley Judd has ventured to Africa to challenge the relationship between valuable minerals and unspeakable violence.

AT midday in July, the Tangier medina was a ghost town. With shadows reduced to slivers, even in the narrowest of the ochre alleyways, residents retreated to lunch behind thick wooden doors or to relax inside their antique silver shops. It was hot and still, despite the occasional breeze from the Mediterranean, and only fools dared venture out — fools, that is, like me.

Big storms hit Phi Phi Island, Katie & Harriet stand out as tourists that care

New York (CNN) -- Get in line, have your money ready and move to your extreme left -- Al Yeganeh, "the Original SoupMan," is back and re-opening his famed soup store Tuesday in midtown Manhattan.

Most people go traveling to get away from their job. Taking a break from everyday life to experience the extraordinary. For some reason that’s just not me. Traveling is when I like to work the most. The life of a travel photographer is a rather freakish existence. When those around us want to think of anything other than work we can think of nothing else. When others say they’d prefer to experience their travels through their own eyes we have our viewfinder placed firmly against ours as if it were super-glued to our face.

Travel is the perfect antidote for the mundane. But what happens when it takes over? Travel – the recipe for a broken heart, for being stuck, to fight a sense of boredom and "settling down." I’d venture that many of you who consistently read Matador have “used” travel for one or all of these reasons. Nothing wrong with that. Yet a conversation I had the other day led to a couple of eye-opening realizations about my own travel desires

It’s easy enough to see the world’s beauty while on the beaches of Thailand. But how do we keep this perspective once we return to the hustle and bustle of home?

THE crowd, all facing the same direction, waits nervously. Some fiddle with cameras on tripods while others sit in camp chairs, slapping at mosquitoes and checking their cellphones for updates. A voice comes over a loudspeaker: “T minus 9 minutes and counting.” After hours of excruciating anticipation, the final checks for the space shuttle launching have been made and all systems are go.

I moved to New York a year ago and felt at once at home. In the haggard buildings and bloodshot skies, in trains that never stopped running, like my racing mind at night, I recognized my insomniac self. If New York were a patient, it would be diagnosed with agrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment. An apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself.