The Gifted Traveler was a proposed project to travel from the southern tip of Africa to the eastern tip of China using only local transportation — participating in a series of spontaneous gift exchanges with local people along the way.

I planned to begin with a single gift — possibly an inflatable globe — and to offer it to someone in the small South African village of L'Agulhas, inviting the person to offer me something else in return, while documenting the exchange with a simple set of photos. Then, over the course of the next year, I planned to travel up through Africa, across the Middle East, to the southern tip of India, across Nepal and Tibet, and to the far northeastern corner of Shuangyashan, China — exchanging gifts along the way.

The project was going to be sponsored by Kodak, and ultimately shared through a website upon my return. However, during our discussions, Kodak more or less imploded, laying off ~3,000 employees, and subsequently withdrew their support of the project, so it was set aside.