On my own travels, from Lamu to London to Lijiang, it's rare that I don't run into Berkeleyans. The conversation turns to a study they're doing or an untrammeled spot they've found or, invariably, a great meal they've eaten. These encounters may be born of simple serendipity or a shared taste in travel, but it's also because we're a wandering tribe. I'll tell three stories.

The Gorges de l'Ardèche in southwest France shows up in travel books as "the Grand Canyon of France." That's a bit of a misnomer. It is a beautiful and deep gorge that carries the Ardèche River into the Rhône River, but the pocked limestone bluffs, brushed with patches of green, are mellowed with geologic age, more Appalachia than Rockies. Narrow canyons soften the sunlight during the day and turn the valley forest a little spooky at night.

Some years ago, driving south along the Rhône on a summer afternoon, I spied a café among the vineyards. Made of stone and wood, it was little more than a hut with a few tables scattered outside in the shade. The menu was spare, mostly local vegetables simply prepared—I remember a ratatouille and tomatoes in vinaigrette—local breads and cheeses, and a spicy Côtes du Rhône made from grapes grown in the surrounding vineyard. Toward the end of lunch, the cook sat at my table to share the bottle and chat. Berkeley guy, it turned out. Driving through the river valley like me, he'd fallen in love—first with the land and later with a local mademoiselle—stayed on, and opened his modest café.

Several years later, I covered a conference in Chile on the then-emerging field of ecological economics. It probably won't shock you to learn that one of the organizers and founding lights was a Berkeley professor, but that's not my story. In Santiago, I spent an evening with a group of Chilean photographers, some of whom had risked their lives to document the detentions and murders of the Pinochet regime. A few in the group were headed south to Pucón, where there are slopes for skiing in the winter, a lake, and a casino. With other friends, they were shareholders in a cooperatively run hostel in the small town, and had planned a weekend retreat. They invited me to join them.

That evening, we cooked and drank and ate and swapped stories. But it was a few hours and several glasses of cabernet into the evening before I discovered that two of them were from Berkeley. On a nearby mountain they'd established an experimental forest ecology project. Not only "from Berkeley" but "how Berkeley."

In China this spring, 3 of the 30 people in my tour group, organized by a national science group, turned out to be Cal grads. Two regularly read California magazine (the third just subscribed). A recent survey of our readers confirmed my intuitions about Berkeley travelers—the numbers of you travelling in Europe, Asia, and North America are, to borrow the student vernacular, awesome.

We shouldn't be surprised. Berkeley has long attracted a multiplicity of cultures, and that in turn has become part of its attraction. Our professors and students traverse the globe, studying insects and old bones and the changes wrought by post-modernity.

Essayists in this issue address some of those changes in personal terms. Sarah Pollock and Eleanor Black Watkin ruminate on the dislocations of living in two worlds thousands of miles apart, while Laurie Becklund and Cynthia Gorney travel in time as well as space. Becklund retraces her youthful romance with Chile to its source and wonders "What if?" Gorney finds in Chiapas traces of the grandfather whose escape from Poland made possible her life.

Berkeley not only travels, but brings the world home, constantly refining its cosmopolitan culture if not its essence. Pico Iyer writes of Cuba as a place whose imagination defies its boundaries. Berkeley is not an island, but like Iyer's Cubans we live in permanent rebellion against any attempt to pin us down.