Far From Home – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Technical and general information from the podcast's RSS feed.

Far From Home

Scott Gurian

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/35d. Total Eps: 101

An immersive travel and culture documentary podcast where Peabody award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian reports fascinating stories from faraway places and makes you feel like you’re really there! On past episodes, he’s road tripped 18,000 mi. (29,000 km) from the UK to Mongolia and back, visited Iran as an American tourist, wandered through abandoned buildings in Chernobyl, and participated in a hallucinogenic healing ceremony in Peru. Learn more and view bonus content at farfromhomepodcast.org

Read moreCollapse

Site

RSS

Apple

Recent rankings

Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.

Apple Podcasts

🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
22/08/2026
#53
🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
19/08/2026
#83
🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
14/08/2026
#66
🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
04/08/2026
#77
🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
28/07/2026
#90
🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
02/07/2026
#80
🇨🇦 Canada - placesAndTravel
31/05/2026
#84
🇨🇦 Canada - placesAndTravel
30/05/2026
#47
🇨🇦 Canada - placesAndTravel
20/05/2026
#60
🇬🇧 Great Britain - placesAndTravel
20/05/2026
#72

Spotify

No recent rankings available

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.

See all

https://farfromhomepodcast.org/
72 shares
http://www.farfromhomepodcast.org
29 shares
http://www.teamdonundestan.com
29 shares

https://www.instagram.com/farfromhomepodcast
7 shares
https://www.instagram.com/terrelljstarr
1 share

https://twitter.com/scottgurian
3 shares
https://twitter.com/cwmiii3
1 share
https://twitter.com/hickeycommamike/
1 share

RSS feed quality and score

Technical evaluation of the podcast's RSS feed quality and structure.

See all

RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 89%

Publication history

Monthly episode publishing history over the past years.

Year

Latest published episodes

Recent episodes with titles, durations, and descriptions.

See all

Christiania bonus episode

Season 4 · Episode 2

Tuesday, October 8, 2024 • Duration 22:53

In the course of reporting my documentary about Freetown Christiania -- Copenhagen's famous anarchist commune -- for the 99% Invisible podcast, I took two trips to Denmark and recorded many hours of interviews that unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor. In this bonus episode of Far From Home, I present some of the highlights as well as some additional context and backstories of the people I interviewed. [N.B.: This episode contains some explicit language.]

If you enjoy this podcast, please post about it on social media and tag @farfromhomepodcast (on Instagram or Facebook), and also consider texting or emailing a friend!

On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

Read moreCollapse

Freetown Christiania

Season 4 · Episode 1

Tuesday, October 8, 2024 • Duration 43:40

In 1971, a group of squatters took over an abandoned military base just across the harbor from downtown Copenhagen, Denmark. They created a politically autonomous anarchist zone -- in other words, a commune -- with its own flag, marching band, and consensus-driven governance process, and they decided to call their community Christiania. The thousand or so residents were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted as long as it didn't infringe upon the rights of other people. There were just a few rules: no private ownership of land or housing, no weapons or violence, and no vehicles. But as the years went on, Christiania faced a number of challenges, and now -- more than half a century later -- it's at a turning point where some people question how much longer it will be able to survive.

This first episode of Far From Home's 4th season was produced in collaboration with 99% Invisible. Thanks to my editor Joe Rosenberg and the rest of the 99pi team for their assistance. Be sure to listen to my companion bonus episode that I'm releasing simultaneously with this episode, containing more content about Christiania that I didn't have room to include in this documentary! Also, in case you missed it, check out the last story I produced for them a few years ago about the peace walls separating Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Read moreCollapse

Turkmenistan Revisited

Season 3 · Episode 33

Tuesday, September 13, 2022 • Duration 20:11

As you may have seen in my feed, I recently teamed up with my colleagues at NPR’s Planet Money economic podcast to report a story that prominently featured the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan — which is probably one of the most obscure countries in the world, and certainly not a place that most of us hear much about, much less visit. Only about 10,000 tourists a year cross its borders, but in the summer of 2016, my brother, my friends Rosi and Jane, and I were some of the lucky few. We drove across Turkmenistan as part of an 11,000 mile road trip we were taking from London to Mongolia, raising money for charity.

I documented that journey on the first season of this podcast, and today — for all my new listeners — I’m re-releasing an excerpt of one of my favorite episodes (#11) called “Turkmenistan: Just Plain Weird.” If you enjoy this, I recommend going back to the very beginning of my feed and listening to my first season in its entirety!

————-

Read moreCollapse

The Salvage Car Silk Road

Season 3 · Episode 32

Tuesday, September 13, 2022 • Duration 29:46

A few months ago, a friend of mine named Oraz who runs an autobody repair shop in Turkmenistan came across a kind of puzzle. A new vehicle had just arrived on his lot. A white Lexus SUV. He could see by the registration sticker that it came from my home state of New Jersey, but the even stranger thing was the shape it was in. It was practically brand new, unlike like the dented and mangled cars that usually come to him for repairs.

Oraz wondered: how did this car get here, to his shop? And what kind of place, what kind of person, casts off such a nice new car? Those questions led me on a journey through the international used car underground... all the way back to a pleasant, two-story home in suburban New Jersey. To find the answers, I team up with reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, which features fun and surprising stories about the global economy.

To hear the complete story of my road trip from the UK to Mongolia — when I broke down in the middle of the desert and first met Oraz — scroll back to the beginning of my feed and check out the first season of my podcast.

————-

Read moreCollapse

Ayahuasca Reexamined

Season 3 · Episode 31

Monday, August 1, 2022 • Duration 27:12

I’m always open to listener feedback on Far From Home, and I heard from someone recently who’s given me a new perspective on one of my past stories and forced me to see things in a new light, so I wanted to share it with all of my listeners.

Several years ago on the show, I featured a series of stories about Lucho, a traditional medicine man from Peru who describes himself as a "curandero," or someone who heals. Using medicinal herbs, archaeological relics, and hallucinogenic plants, he claims to have rid himself of diabetes and his father of cancer. He regularly travels around his country treating people with all sorts of ailments.

In part one of my series, I joined Lucho as he embarked on a journey up the coast, searching for a star-shaped stone with supposed magical powers that he saw in a vision.

Then I accompanied him to a healing ceremony in a shantytown on the outskirts of Lima where he served participants a hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca. I’d originally planned on simply observing and documenting the event, but once I was there, I decided to take Lucho up on his offer to consume a small amount of the potion myself to understand what the experience was like for everyone else. It didn’t seem to have much of an effect on me, however, and I wondered in the story whether I might be somehow immune.

In a bonus episode, I also shared the story of my friend Dennis, who similarly tried ayahuasca during his visit to Peru and felt like it didn’t live up to his expectations.

But after chatting recently with Nora Dunn, I’ve realized that perhaps my takeaways from my experience as well as my presentation of the topic might not have been entirely fair. Nora’s been traveling the world as a digital nomad for the past 17 years, blogging as The Professional Hobo, and she also spent several years working with shamans in Ecuador and Peru. On this episode, I revisit my previous reporting and get Nora’s insights on what I might have gotten wrong.

What Shelter Means to Me

Season 3 · Episode 30

Wednesday, June 15, 2022 • Duration 34:24

While I’ve been hunkered down these past few years, avoiding traveling and staying home while I rode out the pandemic, I’ve been incredibly lucky that I’ve had a safe and comfortable place to live. But what has this experience been like for people in living situations that failed to provide basic levels of safety, privacy, and comfort?

On this episode of Far From Home, I play an episode from the Shelter podcast series that I co-produced with Rutgers University, coLAB Arts, and the New Brunswick Theological Seminary looking at the topic of housing insecurity in the era of Covid-19.

————-

Read moreCollapse

Refugee Stories

Season 3 · Episode 29

Friday, April 29, 2022 • Duration 50:07

Over the past 2 months, more than 5 million people have left Ukraine, and another 6-and-a-half-million have fled their homes and are now displaced elsewhere within their own country, making this Europe’s largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. Neighboring countries are struggling to keep up with the exodus, but they’ve generally been fairly welcoming, which many critics have pointed out is a markedly different approach from how they’ve treated African and Middle Eastern refugees in the past.

With so much of the world’s attention now focused on Ukraine, I thought I’d spend some time this episode featuring the voices of refugees from other parts of the world, since their stories are of course equally important. The recordings come from the Sound Seekers Audio Festival and were produced by refugee, asylum, and migrant communities in partnership with community radio stations, the Irish Research Council, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.

————-

Read moreCollapse

Ukraine

Season 3 · Episode 28

Monday, March 28, 2022 • Duration 21:21

On this episode, I speak to Savelli and Olexander, two Ukrainians who’ve suddenly had their lives upended after the Russian military invaded their country.

————-

Read moreCollapse

Revisiting Central Asia

Season 3 · Episode 27

Monday, January 17, 2022 • Duration 24:07

Central Asia is not a place that most Westerners know or think about very often. But now that I’ve been there, my ears perk up on the rare instances when it makes the news, as was the case on two separate occasions over the past few weeks. In light of recent developments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, I re-play excerpts of some episodes I featured several years ago on the first season of Far From Home, where I documented an 11,000 mile road trip my friends and I took from the UK to Mongolia in a couple of really tiny cars.

If you’re new to the program, I recommend going back to the very beginning of my podcast feed and bingeing the entire story of my journey. In particular, if you want to listen to longer versions of the stories I played on today’s show, here are the links:

“Kazakhstan: One Surprise After Another” (ep. 19)

“Turkmenistan: Just Plain Weird” (ep. 11) - go to that link also to see a video of my friends and I approaching the giant fire pit in the middle of Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert

————-

Read moreCollapse

Cell Phone Santa

Season 3 · Episode 26

Thursday, December 23, 2021 • Duration 06:43

Take Santa Claus. Then ditch the red suit and the flying reindeer, and you’ve got a guy who’s all about giving. On this last episode of my third season, I tell the story of the time my dad tried out the role and got more than he bargained for!

This story originally aired many years ago on NPR’s Day to Day. Thanks to my editor Russell Lewis.

————-

Read moreCollapse

Far From Home – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Far From Home – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

Instagram2

Twitter5

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Instagram2

Twitter5

Apple Podcasts

Spotify