The Size of the World: A Conversation With the World’s First Travel Blogger

In December of 1993, best-selling travel writer Jeff Greenwald embarked on a harrowing journey. Eschewing one form of modern technology while also pioneering another, he set out to travel from Oakland, California to Oakland, California, without leaving the ground. Carrying only a backpack, he stepped out of his Temescal flat and traveled nearly 30,000 miles, crossed two oceans, and visited 27 counties without ever setting foot on an airplane. His book about the journey, The Size of the World, was recently released in a 30th Anniversary Edition.

On his journey, Greenwald found himself at the precipice of an even greater technological revolution than air travel. Outfitted with the world’s first ultraportable laptop (a Hewlett Packard OmniBook 300), he sent back 20 dispatches to the newly-launched “Global Network Navigator” — making him the first travel “blogger” on the World Wide Web.

In “The Size of the World: A Conversation With the World’s First Travel Blogger,” Greenwald joins the Hidden Compass co-founders in conversation about the nine months he spent circumnavigating the globe, the lessons he learned, and what it all means looking back three decades later.

Bio

Jeff Greenwald is the author of nine books, including the bestselling Shopping for Buddhas, The Size of the World (for which he created the World Wide Web’s first travel blog), and Snake Lake (a memoir set in Nepal during their 1990 Democracy Revolution). His features, interviews, and essays have appeared in Wired, Smithsonian, Outside, Craftsmanship, Afar, the New York Times Magazine and NPR’s Snap Judgment.

Greenwald is the executive director of Ethical Traveler, an international alliance committed to promoting social welfare, human rights and environmental protection in developing-world destination countries. He has a bi-weekly Substack column, exploring his journey with Parkinson’s, which has thousands of international readers, called Jeffji’s Big World.