Independent Travel as a Female in Afghanistan, Hitchhiking Iraq, and Ex-Pat Life in Sudan with Jacquelyn Kunz

·1 hr 30 min·9 clips

A Taliban fighter spent four hours using Jacquelyn as a footrest on a bus in Afghanistan.

Jackie Kuntz has traveled independently to nearly 100 countries, including places most travelers avoid, and has built a life that defies easy categorization. She was the first woman to travel solo through Afghanistan after the Taliban retook control, and she shares a vivid account of sitting in a Kabul cafe when Taliban fighters arrived, one of them casually tossing a bazooka on the table beside her. Her travel companion panicked; she stayed composed. Kuntz chose to leave a stable career and move to Sudan after a chance encounter changed her perspective on what was possible — she bought a ticket to Khartoum and never looked back. She describes daily life as an expat in Khartoum: the rhythms of the city, how she integrated, the friendships she built, and the community she found. The episode was released as fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF, and host Jason Moore includes resources for listeners to support civilians affected by the conflict. Kuntz talks about hitchhiking through Iraq and reframes what safety means for a solo female traveler in high-risk environments — emphasizing preparation, local knowledge, and reading situations accurately rather than avoiding entire regions based on headlines. She is also on a worldwide quest involving tacos, which she declines to fully explain. Her approach to travel is deliberately slow: she spends months in places rather than days, tries to find a local cafe where the bartender knows her name, and asks herself whether she could actually live somewhere. Azerbaijan keeps drawing her back for its strange hybrid atmosphere, caught between European urbanity and Central Asian conservatism. The conversation includes a digression into generational labels and cassette tapes, setting a warm and candid tone throughout.

As heard by us

A travel episode that becomes a grounded account of daily life in Sudan during upheaval.

The episode works best when it stays with Jackie Koontz's day-to-day account of life in Sudan during political upheaval. It connects ordinary routines to the coup, repeated protests, roadblocks, bridge closures, and the strain of working when the current government is not…

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Why you'd press play

You want a travel conversation that gets into what daily life looks like under political instability.

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