He also used to work as a teacher, train loader, scale operator at a pig market, head of a distribution company, a part of the underground structure of
Solidarity and a shopkeeper. He travelled by bike through Central Asia, the Gobi Desert and China, and sailed through
Lake Baikal in a canoe. In winter 2007 he made a lonely car journey from Moscow to Vladivostok which was the background of his first book
White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia. In 2011 he made a solitary hitchhike across Russia – from Magadan to Yakutsk. Reports describing encountered people's everyday lives were published in
Gazeta Wyborcza during the journey and later gathered and released in the book ''Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia's Haunted Hinterland''. He is a two-time laureate of Polish prize for the best journalists - Grand Press (in 1999 and 2003). Most of his works are about Russia: "
(...) he describes the imperium from prospect of loitering dog, grasps mechanisms of thinking, behaviour, processes and a rat by its tail it addition." The journalist appeared in
blackface at a
Polish Independence Day celebration on November 11, 2016, as part of a reporting project on street reactions to a black person. ==Books==