Hello, it's me, Lale Aricoglu, and welcome to a new episode of Women Who Travel.

Today, I'm talking to a journalist and author who is best known for her eclectic and eccentric subjects.

She said, best known for her eclectic and eccentric subjects. She's Susan Orlean, who's written for Rolling Stone, Vogue, and The New Yorker.

And there are, you know, these fertility festivals, which were wonderful, and you get bonked on the head with a giant wooden phallus.

Even in the airport, there are penises drawn everywhere, penis sculptures everywhere.

Well, it was hilarious because coming from a Western culture where you think,

oh my God, this is insane, but literally everywhere.

She's passionately curious.

Do you consider yourself a travel writer?

I absolutely think I'm a travel writer in a somewhat eccentric definition of the term.

People often say to me, what do you write about?

What's your topic?

And I'm always a little bit at a loss because I write

about the things that interest me. To me, every story involves travel in the existential sense

of the word travel. You are journeying into another world. I don't write about

people who are very much like me. So even if I only go a mile away, I am journeying into a very

different universe. Right.

And I guess it's like, you know, how does one define travel in itself?

You know, does travel writing have to be covering one particular type of moving around the world and one particular type of story?

I mean, there's so many different ways in which people travel and also reasons that they travel.

And surely that extends to writing, too.

And often the travel is time travel.

...