kottke.org posts about travel
I just wanted to let you know that I am going to be travelling for the next few weeks and the site's regular metronomic schedule is going to get a little...weird. I am currently halfway around the world in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam1 in the US east coast's Bizarro timezone (10am here, 10pm there). I'll be posting while I'm here but on a local schedule, so for many of you there won't be anything all day but you'll have a bunch of stuff to read late at night or first thing in the morning.
While I'm here, I might write about my adventures on the site but I'm not quite sure yet — this is an experiment for me all around: solo travelling, digital nomading, working on an iPad instead of a laptop, etc. But I'll definitely be posting photos and stories over at Instagram.
I'll be in Saigon for about 2 weeks, followed by a few days in Singapore and about 48 hours in Doha, Qatar. If you're a kottke.org reader and you live in any of those places, let me know and maybe we can meet up for some food, drink, or wandering around! Or if you've have tips for me (esp food and design/architecure stuff), drop me a line on Twitter or via email.
In the meantime, here's a photo of the bonkers waterfall and rain forest inside the Changi airport in Singapore.
I mean...
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From The Washington Post, an illustrated encyclopedia of sleeping positions on a plane. Economy only...we don't need to see how peacefully the lie-flat fancies in business are slumbering. Tag yourself! (I'm a Bobblehead.)
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Just before be died, Anthony Bourdain began work on a travel guide with his long-time assistant and coauthor Laurie Woolever. The book was to distill the lessons learned from his life of travel as a TV personality and celebrity food enthusiast. Based on their conversations, Woolever is completing work on World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, which will be out in October.
In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of his favorite places-in his own words. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid, World Travel provides essential context that will help readers further appreciate the reasons why Bourdain found a place enchanting and memorable.
Supplementing Bourdain's words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about a place.
Here's a brief taste of the kind of advice you'll find in the book:
Skip the touristy spots, he said: "If you spend all that time waiting to get into the Eiffel Tower, you've completely wasted a day"; and forget the concierge: "They're going to send you to the place with the clean bathroom. Some of the best meals I've had, you need a hazmat suit to go to the bathroom."
You can preorder the book on Amazon.
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Because of the climate crisis, Greta Thunberg doesn't fly anymore. Neither does climate journalist Eric Holthaus (aside from this recent trip). The flight shame movement and personal reflection on the climate has caused others to limit their air travel.
In this video, Joss Fong and her team at Vox look at the cost of air travel to our environment, investigate electric airplanes, and consider whether it's wrong to fly in the age of climate crisis.
Climate change implicates us all in a planet-sized injustice. If I fly, if I drive, if I heat or cool my home, if I buy stuff, if I eat stuff, all of this now has a cost that I'm not paying.
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Good God, these hand-drawn & painted notebooks by José Naranja documenting his travels are fantastic! From Colossal:
Formerly an aeronautic engineer, Naranja now archives his thoughts while visiting foreign countries by hand-crafting journals replete with items like collected stamps, an illustration of the periodic table, and a study of fountain pens. Each mixed-media page centers on a theme, such as the culture surrounding eating a bowl of ramen or the flamingos found in a zoo.
Whenever I see something like this, it makes me want to learn how to draw/paint better than my current 4th grade level.1 I spent about 45 minutes poring over his work just now. So creative & exacting...look at that handwriting! And check out the tiny box of watercolors he carries with him.
You can keep up with Naranja's latest adventures on his blog or on Instagram. If you'd like to buy some of his art — including a bound copy of some of his notebooks — there's a small shop. (via colossal, which is also endlessly creative & meticulous)
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Despite some reservations (a little too bro-y for one thing), I really enjoyed David Chang's Netflix series Ugly Delicious. So I'm happy to see that he's got a new series coming out called Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner. The trailer:
In this one, he's traveling the world with some non-food celebs: he hits Los Angeles with Lena Waithe, Marrakesh with Chrissy Teigen, Phnom Penh with Kate McKinnon, and Vancouver with Seth Rogen. Will watch.
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In late July after visiting my kids at camp, I flew into LA, rented a car, and spent two weeks driving up the coast from there to Portland, OR. Along the way, I visited old friends and made some new ones, got to see how some of my favorite movie magic is performed, ate very well, spent some time in an old neighborhood, drove 1700 miles, communed with the tallest trees on Earth, and watched the ocean churn and swell and crash and froth for a very very long time. Here are some reflections and observations from the trip, from my vantage point a month later.
To start off the trip I spent a little less than three days in LA, essentially my first trip to the second largest city in the US (aside from 24 hours spent there in 2005). It was...fine? The food was good, beach was good, museums were good, but I guess I didn't feel a whole lot of natural affinity for the place. Then again, three days isn't a lot of time and I will go back to explore more for sure. I somehow didn't even get tacos, an oversight I rectified once I got to Santa Barbara. But I was able to see a few friends, which trumped any possible attractions or sights I could have seen instead.
Aside from visiting friends, like 75% of the reason I wanted to go to LA was to see Chris Burden's Metropolis II at LACMA. I timed my visit for the weekend so it'd actually be running, and it did not disappoint. Could have watched it for hours:
Electric scooters (I used the ones from Lime and Lyft) made getting around LA a breeze. Cities need to figure out how to work these into their transportation infrastructure without clogging their sidewalks, keeping riders & pedestrians safe, theft/breakage, and not undermining other more accessible forms of public transportation.
Not much to say about Big Sur other than it's gorgeous but crowded. Around each curve was a seemingly better view than the last.
The redwoods. Where do I even start? They were my absolute favorite part of the trip. I spent the better part of three days exploring Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and Redwood National and State Parks and even at the end of the third day, I was looking up at these 300-foot monsters and saying "wow!" It was like going to church. I can't wait for my kids to spend some time exploring the redwood forests.
When I lived in SF from 2000-2002, my favorite place to visit was Muir Woods and I was really looking forward to seeing it again. When I swung by to visit on this trip, I was frustrated to learn from the friendly park ranger at the entrance that parking now requires advance reservations. So no Muir Woods for me this trip. Luckily there were many more redwoods to be had elsewhere...
Along almost the entire route of my trip (I stuck mostly to Highway 1 and the 101), I passed people working in fields. They were everywhere, toiling away to earn a hard living so their families could eat, so that they could pay their taxes, so that they could make a good life for their children. The news of ICE raids and the continued separation of children from their parents by the most inhumane administration in recent American history were never far from my mind.
Every summer when I was a kid, my dad, my sister, and I would take a roadtrip to a different part of the country: Florida, Virginia, Texas. Sometimes we took a car and camped along the way (with occasional motel stays) and other times we drove in a used motorhome my dad bought one year (approximately one of these). But the ocean was always a constant as a destination. My sister and I had grown up in Wisconsin but had never seen the ocean before, and after our first trip to the Gulf Coast of Texas, we were hooked. One year we drove out to California and up the coast to Oregon. I remember vividly the freezing cold ocean and the winding coastal roads — we almost got our camper stuck in a particularly tight hairpin curve. I loved those roadtrips...they are my absolute happiest memories from childhood. Driving some of those same curves in northern California this time around, I waved to pretty much any RV I saw, as if I were saying hello to my past teenaged self, who was getting a taste of what awaited him in this whole wide world.
When I was in the Bay Area, I got to fulfill a long-time dream of mine: visiting the Pixar campus in Emeryville. I gotta say, stepping into the main building, designed by Steve Jobs to foster collaboration among the company's employees, gave me goosebumps. I could have spent hours looking at all of the sketches, storyboards, and ephemera from Incredibles II that they had hanging on the walls. I visited the recording studios, the screening rooms, the secret speakeasy, and saw a few of the animators' wildly decorated cubicles. They told me how the process of making a movie at Pixar has changed from "laying down the track in front of a moving train" to "laying down the track in front of a moving train while also building the train"...it sounds like they've really worked hard on making their development process as asynchronous as possible. I was told that Pixar has an entire team just for making crowds now.
My tour guides showed me some of the company's favorite misrendered scenes culled from an internal mailing list, including an amazing rain tornado around a car in Toy Story 4. I saw in action the AI spiders that were designed to weave the cobwebs in TS4.
Typically, cobwebs must be made by hand, but, because of the number of cobwebs which the crew wanted to include, Hosuk Chang (Sets Extensions Technical Director) wrote a program to create a group of artificial intelligence spiders to weave the cobwebs just like a real spider would.
We actually saw the AI spiders in action and it was jaw-dropping to see something so simple, yet so technically amazing to create realistic backgrounds elements like cobwebs. The spiders appeared as red dots that would weave their way between two wood elements just like a real spider would.
They showed me a scene from TS4 and how it was made — the different layers of shading and lighting, storyboards, effects, the different cameras and lenses that were available for the director's use. One cool tidbit: the virtual cameras used in the Toy Story movies are human-scale and shot from human height so that the toys actually look like toys. Ok, another cool tidbit: the virtual cameras & lenses are based on actual cameras and actual lenses so the directors know what sort of depth of field, angle, and views they're going to get with a given setup. The software is incredible — they showed me a screen with like 30 different camera/angle/lens/focus combinations so that a director can simultaneously watch a single scene "filmed" all those different ways and choose which shot they want to go with. I mean...
To get the motion just right for the baby carriage scene in the antique store for TS4, they took an actual baby carriage, strapped a camera to it, plopped a Woody doll in it, and took it for a spin around campus. They took the video from that, motion-captured the bounce and sway of the carriage, and made it available as a setting in the software that they could apply to the virtual camera. I MEAN...
I also heard a few Steve Jobs stories that I'm going to keep to myself for now...they are not mine to tell. Thanks to Tom, Ralph, and Bob for showing me around and being so generous with their time. Ok,
I had forgotten that driving though the groves of eucalyptus just north of San Francisco was so wonderfully fragrant. Way better than one of those Muji aroma diffusers. But I'll tell you: I do not miss living in SF. I spent a lovely afternoon walking around my old neighborhood, wandering in Golden Gate Park, and stopping in to check out the Dahlia Garden (my favorite place in SF), but that was enough for another few years.
While driving, I listened to To Kill a Mockingbird on audiobook; I'd never read or listened to it before. A favorite line: "Delete the adjectives and you'll find the facts." I'm not sure I've been successful in curbing my adjective use in this post.
At dinner one night, I asked an LA pal about work and she said she'd quit her bartending job to deliver weed — better schedule and pay. There were cannabis dispensaries everywhere in California and Oregon. The one I visited in central CA had a security guard outside checking for IDs and weapons, a double door system in the reception area, and once you got into the retail space, you could find out more about a product by placing it on a sensor and the info would appear on a nearby touchscreen. But at other dispensaries, like the one I walked past in Arcata, the door was wide open and you could just mosey on in. Let's just say I slept pretty well on this trip.
After seeing the 45-minute-long line for lunch at the Tillamook Creamery (and a 20-minute-long line just for cheese samples), I decamped to a local Burger King to try the Impossible Whopper for the first time. All the people saying that the Impossible patty tastes just like a real burger have either never tasted meat before or don't pay a whole lot of attention when they eat. It's the best veggie burger patty I've ever had, but it sure ain't beef.
A few small towns caught my attention. Cambria, CA was a cool little place I would gladly spend more time in — Moonstone Beach was beautiful. Los Alamos, CA is possibly the quaintest town I have ever seen — ate a great breakfast at Bob's Well Bread Bakery. I breezed through Arcata, CA and explored the downtown a bit, but it had such a cool vibe that I'd definitely go back for another look.
Sometimes the problem with going on vacation is that you have to take yourself along with you. No matter how astounding the sights, how engaging the catchups with friends, how relaxing it is, and how far away the rest of the world seems, your thoughts and anxieties and hang-ups come with you everywhere you go. Near the end of my trip, I splurged on a nice hotel room for two nights in Yachats, OR and mainly sat on the rocks and watched the waves crash. It was perfect. The ocean remains my ultimate happy place and I need to find a way to spend more (or perhaps all) of my time closer to it.
And then it was time to head home. You can check out a bunch of my photos from the trip on Instagram and in this Instagram Story. Thanks to my friends Alex, Michael, and Matt for the accommodations & fellowship along the way. This trip was not the once-in-a-lifetime experience that last year's western roadtrip was, but I did feel similarly at its conclusion:
Doing this roadtrip reminded me of many great things about this country & the people who live in it and gave me the time & space to ponder how I fit into the puzzle, without the din of the news and social media. If you can manage it, I encourage you all to do the same, even if it's just visiting someplace close that you've never been to: get out there and see the world and visit with its people. This world is all we have, and the more we see of it, the better we can make it.
Thanks for following along with my journey.
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From Dina Litovsky, photos of Amish and Mennonite families on their annual Florida getaway. Her photos were recently featured in The New Yorker. I first read about Amish spring break in 2012 in the NY Times.
Walking around Pinecraft is like entering an idyllic time warp. White bungalows and honeybell orange trees line streets named after Amish families: Kaufman, Schrock, Yoder. The local Laundromat keeps lines outside to hang clothes to dry. (You have to bring your own pins.) And the techiest piece of equipment at the post office is a calculator. The Sarasota county government plans to designate the village, which spreads out over 178 acres, as a cultural heritage district.
Many travelers I spoke to jokingly call it the "Amish Las Vegas," riffing off the cliché that what happens in Pinecraft stays in Pinecraft. Cellphone and cameras, normally off-limits to Amish, occasionally make appearances, and almost everyone uses electricity in their rental homes. Three-wheeled bicycles, instead of horses and buggies, are ubiquitous.
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I occasionally fantasize about ditching my iPhone and all related apps for a flip phone and fewer distractions. In this dream life, I have no notifications blinking at me, I don't care about exes liking old Instagram photos of mine after months of not talking, I have no inbox anxiety, and I never experience a phantom buzz (currently listed on WebMD as Phantom Vibration Syndrome). I sit with a contented smile cross-legged pose overlooking a cliff. I go on long walks, surrounded by exotic flora and fauna, with big, open skies overhead. Gazing at cloud formations becomes a meditation in itself.
Please consider this my formal pitch to The New Yorker: recovering tech worker of almost a decade and a half leaves the modern world behind to look at the sky, be with nature, and attend talks amongst other cloud enthusiasts. For several blissful days on a mostly-uninhabited island (unless you count the puffins) off the North Devon coast, she exists with only a notebook, disposable camera, and her conscious awareness.
Read more about the upcoming sky gathering of the Cloud Appreciation Society on the isle of Lundy and see my earlier post on this very website from the fall. There's a lot more cloud content on kottke.org if that's your thing.
(First image via AMC, second via CAS)
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National Geographic sent illustrator Christoph Niemann to Cambodia and Vietnam and he returned with this series of drawings and observations. He talked about the trip in this behind-the-scenes video.
In a region with so much natural beauty, ancient architecture, and vibrant culture, travelers can easily get stuck behind their viewfinders — consumed with capturing the most vivid moments for their photo albums and Instagram feeds. But over the years, Niemann has developed a different method of documenting his trips.
"I always drew when I traveled ... I draw just to calm down essentially, so I'm not constantly checking my phone," he says.
Niemann believes that painting and drawing his experiences creates a dialogue between his mind and a place — this process ultimately allows him to turn the lens on himself. "Essentially the drawing is like a visual filter," he explains. "You take the world — and you take it through the abstraction of your drawing — and you start seeing differently."
Some my favorite posts I've written over the past few years have been about my travel: my western roadtrip, Berlin, Istanbul, the solar eclipse. Aside from the eclipse post (which gives me goosebumps every time I reread it), I hadn't intended to start writing about travel. Ostensibly these trips are supposed to be vacations, my time off from constantly sifting through culture for observations. But Niemann is right...there's something about applying the creative process to unfamiliar places that that makes the experience more worthwhile. For me, photographing and taking notes for a later post gives me a much better sense of a place, forces me to pay more attention & be more open, causes me to learn about myself, and produces a written document of my trip that I can go back to and experience again.
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This commercial from Mexican airline AeroMexico cleverly reminds some Americans of the melting pot nature of our nation, where even "white" folks living near the border share significant amounts of DNA with those in Mexico. According to this piece in Adweek, the ad features non-actors and their actual DNA test results.
For those wondering how legit the scenarios shown in the ad are, Agost Carreño says it's all real and that each person featured in the video was a non-actor who did have a 23andMe DNA test done in advance of the reveal.
Update: A possible inspiration for the AeroMexico video is The DNA Journey commercial by travel search engine Momondo:
The folks in that commercial may seem a bit naive about how DNA and ancestry works, but I took the 23andMe DNA test many years ago and was also surprised to find a few significant possible geographic outliers (British/Irish, Dutch) that were not accounted for in the handed-down family genealogy. (via @rudhraigh)
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Just like last year, I kept track of almost everything I read, watched, listened to, and experienced in my media diet posts. In this post, I'm gonna share some of the very best of that content, stuff that stuck with me in one way or another. I marked my absolute favorites with a (*). (Above, my #bestnine Instagram images of 2018.)
Books. I made an effort to read more books this year, particularly those written by women. Hope to continue both of those trends in 2019.
After years of reading the entire Harry Potter series with my kids, we spent several months reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey. I was unsure whether they would be into it, but they'd routinely ask for some extra reading time before bed.*
Charles Mann is one of the best nonfiction authors out there, a master of combining culture, history, and science into compelling stories. The Wizard and the Prophet is his latest book and I recommend you read it.*
Normally I shy away from terms like "must-read" or "important" when talking about books, but I'm making an exception for this one. The Wizard and the Prophet is an important book, and I urge you to read it. (The chapter on climate change, including its fascinating history, is alone worth the effort.)
(The theme of the book also popped up in Avengers: Infinity War.)
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin. I will always be a total space nerd and this is a great history of the Apollo program.
Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin. Lots for me to chew on in this one, not least of which is the value of a non-traditional childhood.
I listened to the audiobook version of Kitchen Confidential read by Anthony Bourdain. This book is 18 years old but aside from some details, it felt as immediate and vital as when it came out. What a unique spirit we lost this year.
Circe by Madeline Miller. A fun and engrossing "sequel" to The Odyssey.
In response to this post about They Shall Not Grow Old by Tim Carmody, Stephan Pimpare wrote: "Howard Zinn is derided for a sometimes simplistic and sloppy history, but his singular contribution was a kind of historical Rashomon -- the urgent lesson that the shape of all histories can and should be inverted." Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs is an inversion of sorts of the traditional history of Silicon Valley.
Movies. Geography has hindered my movie choices since moving to Vermont, and I haven't seen many of the movies on everyone else's best of lists. But my movie-viewing has also been less adventurous this year; I've preferred less challenging fare after long work days.
Somehow, Black Panther came out this year? It seems like it's always been with us. BP is the 2018 movie I'd most like to erase from my memory so I could watch it again for the first time. (Honorable mention to Avengers: Infinity War.)
Isle of Dogs. The cinematography and production design of this were just so good. I left the theater wanting to make great things.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? I waited to see this one at home because I didn't want to be caught sobbing in public.
Even in the age of Netflix, going to the theater can still be a lot of fun. I saw Bohemian Rhapsody on opening night with a bunch of Queen fans and they made the theater shake with their singing, clapping, and stomping.
Three Identical Strangers. A fascinating documentary about nature vs nurture.
TV. I watched a lot of TV this year, perhaps too much. But not a whole lot of it ended up being that substantial...I saw nothing this year as good as Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, or The Vietnam War. Maybe I should watch a little less next year?
The Americans. An excellent final season and a very strong and heartbreaking last episode.*
My Brilliant Friend. I spent the first 3-4 episodes disappointed that it wasn't the books, but by the end, I was ready for a second season. The two lead actresses were excellent, particularly Margherita Mazzucco as Elena Greco.
The Handmaid's Tale. Many people felt this stumbled this season, but I was not one of them.
Music. Not a musical year for me. The only thing I would single out is Kendrick Lamar's album for Black Panther.
Podcasts. I like listening to podcasts with discrete seasons or topics these days...so not a lot of Reply All or Radiolab but more like the following...
Seeing White. Recommended by a reader, this 14-part series on race and whiteness is essential listening.*
Slow Burn. Two seasons, one on Watergate and the other on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. Both excellent.*
Caliphate. Upsetting and important. This is a look at ISIS you don't get on cable.*
Experiences & misc. Most of my favorite stuff falls into this category this year.
An Incomplete History of Protest. This exhibition at the Whitney was up for a long while, so I got to see it a few times.
Alto's Odyssey. Perhaps one of my all-time favorite games. Several months ago, I made it up to #2 on the global high score list. I deleted it from my phone last week because I was playing it too much.*
Kennedy Space Center. Hoping to go back for a launch sometime soon!*
Lots of things about Istanbul, including the Hagia Sophia, my breakfast at Van Kahvalti Evi, and having dinner on a tiny street of tiny businesses, loosely joined.*
While I waited for my food, I noticed an order of köfte going out of the kitchen...to a diner at the restaurant across the street. When he was finished, the staff at that place bussed the dishes back across the way. Meanwhile, my meal arrived and the köfte were flavorful and tender and juicy, exactly what I wanted...no wonder the place across the street had outsourced their meatballs to this place. I'd noticed the owner, the waiter, and the cook drinking tea, so after I finished, I asked if I could get a tea. The owner nodded and started yelling to a guy at the tea place two door down. A few minutes later, a man bearing a tray with four glasses of tea arrived, dropping one at my table and the other three for the staff.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. What Chrysanthe said.
Electricity. Ok, let me explain. I live in a rural area and work from home so when it's really windy or there's an ice storm, the power goes out. Sometimes it's out for an hour or two, sometimes longer. It would be quaint if I didn't have stuff to do. When electricity isn't the default, you come to appreciate it a lot more.
The Deutsches Technikmuseum. Science and technology museum in Berlin. Along with the Topographie Des Terrors, this was my favorite thing from my stay in Berlin.
Foggy hikes. I'd never hiked in the fog before and now I think I might prefer it to sunny days?*
My new electric toothbrush. I've had it for months now and I still look forward to brushing with it. My mouth and teeth feel so much cleaner.
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Florida. After spending so much time in the Wizarding World on the pages of books and on movie screens, it was a complete trip to wander around Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, and the rest.*
Solo roadtrips across the United States. Probably my favorite thing of the year. Can't wait to do this again, perhaps in the American Southwest.*
SpaceX launch of Falcon Heavy. Watching those two boosters land back on the surface at almost the same time was mind-blowing.
Sleep. Getting at least 7 (and often 8+) hours of sleep every night has transformed my life. This is even lower-hanging self-help fruit than yoga or meditation.
Goodthreads t-shirt. I'm heading into uniform territory and having plain white t-shirts that fit me perfectly is essential.
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For more than 20 years, Christian Moullec has been flying with migratory birds in his ultralight aircraft. He raises birds of vulnerable species on his farm and then when it's time for them to migrate, he shows them how, guiding them along safe migration paths. To support his conservation efforts, Moullec takes paying passengers up with him to fly among the birds. What a magical experience!
My passengers come from all over the world and are all kinds of people, especially Europeans. The flight inspires in me a huge respect for nature and I can communicate this respect to my passengers. There are also people with disabilities and those who want to experience a great time in the sky with the birds before leaving this world. It is an overwhelming spiritual experience. The most beautiful thing is to fly in the heavens with the angels that are the birds.
When watching the video, it's difficult to look away from the birds, moving with a powerful grace through the air, but don't miss the absolute joy and astonishment on the faces of Moullec's passengers. This is going right on my bucket list.
See also The Kid Should See This on Moullec's efforts, the 2011 documentary Earthflight that features Moullec, and Winged Migration, a 2001 nature film that features lots of stunning flying-with-birds footage. (via @tcarmody)
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For GQ, Drew Magary talked to the family, friends, and coworkers of Anthony Bourdain for this piece on the life of the late chef/traveler/writer/explorer/whatever. Here's how he got his big writing break, which led to so much else:
David Remnick (editor in chief, 'The New Yorker'): My wife came home one day, and she said, "Look. There's a really nice woman at the newspaper. Her son is a writer. She wanted you to take a look at his work," which seemed...adorable, right? A mother's ambition for a son. I took this manuscript out of its yellow envelope, not expecting much. I started to read. It was about a young cook, working at a pretty average steak-and-frites place on lower Park Avenue. I called this guy up on the phone. He answered it in his kitchen. I said, "I'd like to publish this work of yours in The New Yorker. I hope that's okay." That was the beginning of Anthony Bourdain being published. I don't know if there's any way to put this other than to say he invented himself as a writer, as a public personality. It was all there.
Prior to becoming the best-ever host of a travel show, he'd actually traveled very little internationally (only France and Japan) and his first go of it wasn't successful:
Tenaglia: Japan was a fucking disaster.
Chris Collins (co-founder, ZPZ): The mistakes were very clear. He did not engage with us. He would not acknowledge our presence and that we were there working together.
Tenaglia: I think he was thinking, "Great! I just got a free ride to all these countries."
Collins: It was a ruse. It was, I'm gonna double dip here. I'm going to be able to get paid to go make something, and I'm going to write articles.
Tenaglia: We would go back to the hotel and say, "We are so screwed."
But it turns out this inexperienced traveler & newbie TV host was the exact right person for the job.
He came alive, because those frames of reference were starting to pop. His sudden inclination was to turn and share that with us. You could sense this excitement, like, "Holy crap, I'm actually on the ground in a location that I have studied, that I know, that I have references to." You know, Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness, Graham Greene, the Vietnam War. He was percolating with an excitement that was very genuine.
My only complaint about this piece is the length...I would have happily read on for hours.
Paula Froelich (author, journalist): I'll never forget laughing my ass off because he was obsessed with my dog, who's a small dachshund. He'd always walk my dog, and he was so tall and the dog was so long and short, they would look like this movable L.
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At the end of October, I spent barely 48 hours in Istanbul — too quick, but I saw a lot of stuff in a short time. When planning this trip, I had a lot of different thoughts about places I could go — the American Southwest, Barcelona, London, Edinburgh, Seattle/Portland, Miami — but the thing that really sold me was a relatively cheap plane ticket that would take me to both Berlin and Istanbul. A two-fer? Sign me up. I'd been to Berlin before, but I was a bit nervous about Istanbul because it seemed so culturally different than other places I'd been. I needn't have worried.
Just after I had checked into my hotel room, I heard a chanting voice over a loudspeaker coming from outside. I opened my window for a better listen — it was the adhan (the Muslim call to prayer) for the sunset prayer (probably from the Hagia Sophia, which was quite close). As I walked around the city for the next day and a half, I heard the adhan several more times. Watching the sunset in Kadikoy, you could hear the call ringing out from several mosques across the city, nearly in unison. I'm not Muslim or even remotely religious, so I was surprised at how much I liked hearing it. As with tolling European church bells, the calls to prayer knits cities together in an auditory way that secularism has yet to manage.
The nightstand in my hotel room had a sticker on it pointing the direction to Mecca. (There are apps to help with this as well.)
There are cats all over the place in Istanbul — I must have seen a dozen inside Hagia Sophia alone. My friend Jodi investigated why there are so many cats in the city.
My first morning in Istanbul, I headed to Van Kahvalti Evi for breakfast on the strong recommendation of a reader. What greeted me was an amazing breakfast, the best I have had in quite some time (annotated above). As I was dining solo, I wasn't able to get full breakfast (it was for 2+ people only), but I did pretty well. My favorites were the braided cheese, kaymak & honey, and the saltiest fresh cheese. The couple sitting next to me ordered the full breakfast and the waiter's tray was like a magical clown car...he just kept putting little plates of delicious cheeses and pastes and fruits onto the table until it was completely covered. The freshness of everything was underscored by that morning's food delivery coming in through the front door and streaming past me, a seemingly endless procession of fresh fruit, vegetables, and such. Highly recommended.
Everything I read about Istanbul taxis basically said to avoid them at all costs because they try to rip you off (and I'm not a huge fan of taxis on a good day), so that's what I did. Upon landing, I bought an Istanbulkart to use the metro & ferries the whole time I was there. Getting from the airport to my hotel was pretty easy on the metro (thanks Citymapper), didn't take too much longer than a taxi would have, and cost a lot less. Tip: machines are cash only, so you'd better have some Turkish lira on hand before exiting the airport.
Istanbul is not a bicycle city, at least not in the areas I visited. I saw maybe three people on bikes the entire time I was there? For starters, the city streets in the oldest parts of town are so small there's nowhere to even put bike lanes. And then there are the hills, which made walking challenging at times, never mind biking. Even where there are dedicated lanes, they can be overwhelmed by pedestrians. In a park in Kadikoy, the balık ekmek (fish sandwich) vendors set up their carts right in the bike lane.
Although the interior was being renovated when I visited, Hagia Sophia was staggeringly impressive. Originally built in just under six years by Emperor Justinian, ruler of the Byzantine Empire (aka what was left of the Holy Roman Empire after the fall of Rome in the 5th century), it was completed in 537 as the world's largest building and largest cathedral, retaining the latter title for almost 1000 years. Justinian wanted Hagia Sophia to be the biggest church in the world, partially for the glory of God and partially to best his peers. At the building's dedication, he was recorded as saying, "My Lord, thank you for giving me chance to create such a worshipping place" followed by "Solomon, I have outdone you." in reference to Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. IN YOUR FACE SOLOMON!
Hagia Sophia was Byzantine until 1204, Roman Catholic for more than 50 years, and Greek Orthodox for about 200 years after that. In 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror of the Ottoman Empire — wait for it... — conquered Constantinople and turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque. It became a museum in 1935. Walking around inside it, you can see and feel all of this history, layered all around you. The marble floors are worn down from centuries of devoted foot traffic. The wear pattern is uneven due to differing hardnesses of the rocks in the marble, giving the floor a marvelous wavy quality. The Christian aspects of the church were covered or destroyed when the church was converted to a mosque, but now they peek through here and there again. A remarkable experience of time travel through cultures, mirroring Istanbul's own long and varied history as a crossroads between East and West.
I pretty much had the They Might Be Giants cover of Istanbul (Not Constantinople) on repeat in my head the entire time I was in town.
Along with many of its tourists, the overwhelming majority of Turkey's population is Muslim, so it wasn't surprising to see women with headwear like hijabs and niqabs all over in Istanbul. I have lots of thoughts about this religious and cultural practice, but mostly it made me think about how the dress of women in the US and other western countries is also restricted by our culture in many ways.
As I had less than 48 hours to spend in Istanbul, I mainly stayed in the central part of the city where most of the tourists were. Walking around was unpleasant at times because it seems like almost everyone is trying to sell you something. In the busiest areas near the top attractions and restaurants, someone tried to sell me a tour, a rug, a meal, or some sweets about every 30 seconds. It was oppressive. I mentioned this to a friend of mine and she said, "Now you know how women feel all the time walking around pretty much everywhere."
The constant selling also put my guard up far more than it normally is (which is admittedly pretty high). In Taksim Square, a guy asked me for a light and we struck up a conversation. Super friendly guy, said his name was Ahmed, hailed from Qatar, in town for the day on his way to London, was a computer programmer, wasn't particularly religious, liked travlling alone because his girlfriend (a lawyer) worked and talked too much. He was pleased to find me because this meant us two solo travellers could hang out for the evening. He'd asked at his hotel where to go and was heading towards this place with whiskey and belly dancing. Now, this is the point in the story where I'm supposed to head off into the evening with Ahmed and have an adventure. But because of the constant barrage of selling (plus I was sick and tired and wasn't drinking), I mostly felt like I was being scammed and that "Ahmed" was actually pals with the guy who owned this belly dancing establishment and was tasked with suckering tourists like me into the place to spend money. Was he just a friendly guy or just another salesman? I still don't really know, but I bid Ahmed a firm goodbye and still have not crossed "see belly dancing in Istanbul with a stranger" off of my bucket list.
But the next day, I finally succumbed to the relentless pressure. As I was contemplating joining the longish line at the Basilica Cistern, I made the mistake of looking contemplative, as if I were perhaps confused. A man came up to me, asked me if I spoke English, and then said I should come back later when the line is shorter. "Don't worry," he said, "I'm not trying to sell you a tour. I'm just on my way back to work from lunch." Thus disarmed, we started chatting. His name was Musa and he had a business just up the street...perhaps he could give me his card and I could come for a visit tomorrow? Maybe, I said, wanting to be polite. We chatted some more, about other things. I agreed to go with him to get his business card; he still had not mentioned what business he was in...something to do with art, he said.
When we got to his place, it was a rug store. Musa's friendly onboarding process had worked to get me into the store, penetrating my defenses by using my midwestern politeness against me. We sat down on a nice sofa and Musa served me apple tea; it materialized seemingly out of nowhere, part of a practiced routine. We chatted for about 5 or 10 minutes, sometimes about rugs and sometimes about other things. He told me about watching a TV program that featured this strange street food from NYC: hot dogs. At this point, I was feeling totally suckered, helpless under the thrall of this master salesman. But then I had another thought: this guy is not actually in control of this situation because I'm never in a million years buying a rug from him. Emboldened by my newfound power in our relationship, I thanked Musa politely for the tea, accepted his card, and left to join the line at the cistern.
For dinner on my last night, I sat down at an outdoor table at Meşhur Filibe Köftecisi, figuring that one of the few restaurants where no one was trying to get me to look at a menu was actually a good place to find delicious food. It's a tiny place on a small street with several other restaurants filled with what looked like locals, another good sign. I asked for a menu but the owner shrugged me off with a friendly gruffness. "We have köfte," he told me. "Meatballs. Someone like you orders nine. Nine meatballs. Salad to begin. What's not to like?" I gave him a thumbs up and he yelled something to the chef, an older man who I never saw without a cigarette and had probably made about 10 million köfte over the course of his life.
While I waited for my food, I noticed an order of köfte going out of the kitchen...to a diner at the restaurant across the street. When he was finished, the staff at that place bussed the dishes back across the way. Meanwhile, my meal arrived and the köfte were flavorful and tender and juicy, exactly what I wanted...no wonder the place across the street had outsourced their meatballs to this place. I'd noticed the owner, the waiter, and the cook drinking tea, so after I finished, I asked if I could get a tea. The owner nodded and started yelling to a guy at the tea place two door down. A few minutes later, a man bearing a tray with four glasses of tea arrived, dropping one at my table and the other three for the staff. Just then, a server from the place across the street came over to break a 100 lira bill. Me being a big nerd, this all reminds me of Unix and the internet, all of these small pieces loosely joined together to create a well-functioning and joyous experience. There's only one thing on the menu at Meşhur Filibe Köftecisi, but you can get anything else within yelling distance. I declined dessert...who knows where that would have come from.
I also visited the Basilica Cistern (impressive ancient infrastructure), The Blue Mosque (under construction and so underwhelming), Topkapi Palace (underwhelming, but I was pretty museumed out by this point so perhaps an unfair assessment), Taksim Square (very crowded on a Friday night), and walked the length of Istiklal Avenue (very commercial in a Western sort of way).
Getting to my departure flight from Ataturk Airport was the tightest security I have ever gone through. To even enter the airport, you go through a metal detector. Then in the line to check into the flight, my passport was checked by three different people before my boarding pass was issued. Passport & boarding pass were checked again to get into the security line and then went through security, where most people's bags got searched (but not mine). At the gate, my boarding pass was checked by at least six different people, who each put a different mark or stamp or signature on it, and then my carry-on luggage was searched (mandatory search...everyone got this treatment). Only then were we allowed on the plane. (Upon arrival in Boston, after waiting in a massive line, the border control officer barely glanced at my passport before waving me through.)
I only posted a couple of Istanbul photos on Instagram but posted a bunch of Instagram Stories (collected here). And big thanks to everyone who offered advice on where to go and what to eat. I really enjoyed Istanbul and hope to make it back someday.
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Even for a city almost 800 years old, Berlin has seen more than its fair share of history, especially in the 20th century. Watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on television 29 years ago this month was one of my most memorable experiences as a teen. In 2001, my girlfriend and I visited Berlin, loved it, and wanted to return soon. But you know how that goes sometimes, and I didn't make it back there for a visit until mid last month, when I spent the better part of a week exploring Germany's largest city. Here are of my impressions from the trip.
Museum-going is one of my favorite things to do when travelling and Berlin has a bunch of great ones. And they're not generally these behemoths like the Met or Louvre...they're reasonably sized places you can knock out in a couple of hours. The recreation of the Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon is one of my favorite things at any museum I've been to.
The public transportation in Berlin is great. One ticketing scheme covers buses, trams (in the old East Berlin), surface trains (S-Bahn), and subways (U-Bahn). I bought a weekly pass and used it to travel all over the city. One afternoon with no fixed agenda, I explored by randomly hopping on trams and trains and getting off when things started looking interesting...navigation by an arbitrary stupid goal.
Yes, I had the currywurst. And a kartoffelpuffer (served with a massive dollop of delicious sour cream w/ herbs in it). I preferred the knackwurst I got from Konnopke's Imbiß and the schnitzel from Scheers, which reminded me a bit of Crif Dogs (but for schnitzel). The guy at Konnopke's made an "ick" face when I asked for ketchup with my knackwurst instead of mustard. *shrug*
According to Pedometer++, I walked 65 miles over a 7 day period in Berlin.
At the Neues Museum, I read a bit of Homer's Iliad on a papyrus scroll from more than 2000 years ago. The kids and I have been reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey so that was a nice moment of connection across the centuries. (I also saw the bust of Nefertiti there.)
My favorite thing about public transport in Berlin is that instead of having entry turnstiles and swiping your ticket when you get on the bus, you simply buy a ticket and get it stamped on the platform to validate it. That's it. With my weekly pass, I had to stamp it once to "activate" it, but after that, I could just get on the tram or subway without worrying about it. I love this system...it eliminates so much infrastructure, makes it easier to use public transport, and doesn't track you around the system like smartcards do. It also makes it easier to ride for free, although there are teams of ticket inspectors moving throughout the system checking for valid tickets. Fines of €60 on up are assessed & paid on the spot.
A team of three undercover ticket inspectors got onto a tram I was riding...they were young, dressed a bit like hooligans, and looked way more like they were gonna steal wallets than officially check tickets. After nonchalantly boarding, they announced themselves to the passengers, pulled out their badges, and worked very quickly, impatiently looking at tickets before the tram pulled into the next stop and scofflaws could escape.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is an open-air memorial of more than 2700 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern. While I was there, I saw it being used as a bench, a picnic area, a playground, a hide-n-go-seek maze, a selfie background, a parkour apparatus, and as the backdrop for Instagram influencers...pretty much everything but thoughtful reflection about the murder of 6 million people. See also Yolocaust.
Everyone kept telling me that the city had changed so much since I'd been there, but one of the only differences I could detect was that in 2001, it was pretty easy to tell which parts of the city had been in East Berlin and which had been in West Berlin, just by looking at the buildings and streets. Now, aside from the presence of random Soviet monuments and the tram in the former East Berlin, I couldn't really tell. After almost 30 years, Berlin finally seems like a single city again (at least to this outsider).
The Deutsches Technikmuseum (German Museum of Technology) is actually huge and completely amazing, especially the collection of trains and train cars housed in the massive buildings of a former railway company. The smell of grease and oil that hit me walking into the exhibition took me right back to when I was a kid, helping my dad fix cars in the garage. As I mentioned in this post, the exhibition included a freight car that was used for transporting Jews to concentration camps that you could walk inside of "and try to imagine, in some small way, you and your children cheek to jowl with 80 other people, on the way to be murdered". An intense experience.
The massive seven-story KaDeWe department store has an entire floor dedicated to food (in addition to the eatery on the top floor) and the butcher cases must have featured over 120 different kinds of sausage & wurst...it was unbelievable. I spent more than an hour wandering through and ended up having dinner, some scrambled eggs with a side of potatoes and onions — the menu had a disclaimer on the bottom of each page: "Of course our potatoes and onions are made with bacon!" Duh, this is Germany.
The permanent exhibition at the Topographie Des Terrors is a must-see presentation of how the Nazis persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered millions in the 30s and 40s. While sobering and completely gutting in parts, this was one of my favorite things I did in Berlin.
While not quite public transport, Berlin has a thriving bike share scene. I signed up for Mobike because they seemed to have the most inventory. As a bike-friendly city to begin with, there are lots of places on the streets to park these dockless bikes, although locals have complained about bike littering. This was my first time using a dockless bike, and like with WiFi on a laptop or pairing a Bluetooth speaker, the first time feels a little magical.
My favorite meal was at the restaurant in my hotel. That's a bit of an odd thing to hear because we're used to hotel restaurants being kind of a default mediocre. But the food at the Michelberger's restaurant was delicious, surprising, and inventive. I had the burrata w/ pear & dukkah and the arctic char w/ smoked mashed potatoes & buttermilk. Just thinking about that meal is making me hungry!
Berlin reclaimed Tempelhofer Field as a public park after the Tempelhof airport closed in 2008. I'd never walked on a large runway like that before...they're huge! I was supposed to meet up with Felipe of Fotostrasse to take a more extensive tour of the area, but it was rainy and I was sick, so I only managed a quick solo visit. Next time!
I only posted a couple of pics from Berlin on Instagram, but I did post a bunch of Instagram Stories (collected here). And thanks to everyone on Twitter and Instagram who offered suggestions for my trip! I had a great time and I will definitely be back, hopefully before 17 more years have passed.
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In a piece called The Algorithmic Trap, David Perell writes about the difficulty of finding serendipity, diversity, and "real" experiences while traveling. In short, Google, Yelp, Instagram, and the like have made travel destinations and experiences increasingly predictable and homogeneous.
Call me old-fashioned, but the more I travel, the less I depend on algorithms. In a world obsessed with efficiency, I find myself adding friction to my travel experience. I've shifted away from digital recommendations, and towards human ones.
For all the buzz about landmarks and sightseeing, I find that immersive, local experiences reveal the surprising, culturally-specific ways of living and thinking that make travel educational. We over-rate the importance of visiting the best-places and under-rate the importance of connecting with the best people. If you want to learn about a culture, nothing beats personalized time with a passionate local who can share the magic of their culture with you.
There's one problem with this strategy: this kind of travel doesn't scale. It's in efficiency and doesn't conform to the 80/20 rule. It's unpredictable and things could go wrong.
Travel — when done right — is challenging. Like all face-to-face interaction, it's inefficient. The fact that an experience can't be found in a guidebook is precisely what makes it so special. Sure, a little tip helps — go here, go there; eat here, eat there; stay here, stay there — but at the end of the day, the great pleasures of travel are precisely what you can't find on Yelp.
Algorithms are great at giving you something you like, but terrible at giving you something you love. Worse, by promoting familiarity, algorithms punish culture.
While reading parts of this, I was reminded of both premium mediocre and the randomness of this approach to travel.
I took the photo above in the Beartooth Mountains on my recent roadtrip. This was one of the surprise highlights of my trip...I wouldn't have known to take the road through those mountains had it not been recommended to me by some enthusiastic locals.
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In 2008, corporate lawyer & city slicker Jodi Ettenberg quit her job to travel the world for a year...and then just never went back to her old job (or self). For 10 years, she traveled and ate her way through the world, documenting her adventures at Legal Nomads. For the 10-year anniversary of the site, Ettenberg has posted a retrospective highlighting some of her most memorable times.1
Writing in a true voice was important. Presenting a glimmering version of yourself that doesn't feel real is an easy path to discontent. You can follow your passion all you want, but if you're not expressing it authentically, in a way that is indisputably you, the gap will catch up with you. The space between who you are and who you express yourself to be exists in varying degrees. But if it's too large, especially if your work involves sharing your thoughts creatively, the disparity can easily engulf you.
As I've been lucky enough to travel a bit over the last couple of years, this post about The Overview Effect, Mindfulness, and Travel particularly caught my eye.
You cannot ignore the happenings in other places, or stick your head in the sand, because it's too late — you've stepped away and looked at the planet in a different light. (Or, as I said to someone recently "once you're a pickle you can't go back to being a cucumber.") While far less vivid or spectacular than a space trip, travel does tend to push people to think about the forest through the trees and to constantly pin current observations against past experiences. We all do this, naturally. But I think that the more you see, the more you have to compare 'against', which then permanently alters your views of the planet and of its people. The ultimate example of this, of course, is seeing it all from above, an orb glowing in the darkness of space.
This reflection on her travels in Mongolia also had my head nodding.
I included this post because nothing since has compared to the magic of simply watching the identity I had dissolve, replaced by pure wonder. Who I was shortly prior didn't matter, because everything in front of me felt so intensely new that it blotted out anything familiar.
These wonder-filled moments, large and small, have happened to me while traveling, looking at art, lost in the company of others, watching heavenly bodies eclipse each other and even while working on this here website...and that's a perfect succinct description of how it feels when it happens.
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For more than 30 years beginning in the 1960s, photographer John Margolies criss-crossed the USA documenting the roadside architecture of a pre-corporate America, taking photos of diners, weird sculptures, mini golf courses, and signs that don't exist anymore in great numbers.
Before the advent of corporate communications and architectural uniformity, America's built environment was a free-form landscape of individual expression. Signs, artifacts, and even buildings ranged from playful to eccentric, from deliciously cartoonish to quasipsychedelic. Photographer John Margolies spent over three decades and drove more than 100,000 miles documenting these fascinating and endearingly artisanal examples of roadside advertising and fantasy structures, a fast-fading aspect of Americana.
In addition to publishing his work in a book, Margolies released his images into the public domain. The Library of Congress has posted over 11,000 of his photos online, a treasure trove of 60s & 70s Americana. Good luck spending less than 30 minutes poking around in there...
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Back in February, Maria Bustillos was set to interview Anthony Bourdain and she figured she'd get about 15 minutes of his highly scheduled time. Instead, the pair spent two-and-a-half hours chatting about anything and everything and the result is this great dialogue, one of the last extensive interviews Bourdain gave before he died in early June.
I like the idea of inspiring or encouraging people to get a passport and go have their own adventures. I'm a little worried when I bump into people, and it happens a lot — "We went to Vietnam, and we went to all the places you went." Okay that's great, because I like those people and I like that noodle lady, and I'm glad they're getting the business, and it pleases me to think that they're getting all these American visitors now.
But on the other hand, you know, I much prefer people who just showed up in Paris and found their own way without any particular itinerary, who left themselves open to things happening. To mistakes. To mistakes, because that's the most important part of travel. The shit you didn't plan for, and being able to adapt and receive that information in a useful way instead of saying, like, "Oh, goddamnit, they ran out of tickets at the Vatican!" or whatever, "That line at the Eiffel Tower is you know, six hours!" and then sulk for the rest of the day.
On my recent trip, I had some things that I wanted to see but largely ended up playing it by ear. And that thing about the mistakes...that hits really really close to home. I also loved his recontextualization of luxury:
I do find that my happiest moments on the road are not standing on the balcony of a really nice hotel. That's a sort of bittersweet — if not melancholy — alienating experience, at best. My happiest moments on the road are always off-camera, generally with my crew, coming back from shooting a scene and finding ourselves in this sort of absurdly beautiful moment, you know, laying on a flatbed on those things that go on the railroad track, with a putt-putt motor, goin' across like, the rice paddies in Cambodia with headphones on... this is luxury, because I could never have imagined having the freedom or the ability to find myself in such a place, looking at such things.
To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it's a story you can't tell. It's a story you almost by definition, can't share. I've learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.
Luxury as freedom of time, place, and companions. Read the whole thing...lots of great stuff in there. Like: he gave away all the royalties to Kitchen Confidential to "various deserving people".
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Last week, I stood in the middle of the caldera of a supervolcano, walked on rocks billions of years old, and traveled back in time simply by driving down a mountain. I looked a bison in the eye at five yards. I witnessed the final resting place of a 12 million-year-old fossilized horse buried in volcanic ash. I saw a rainbow emerging from a mighty thundercloud — powerful with a little bit of tender. I talked civilly with red hatters in red states and found some common ground at least. I drove across the western United States, from Iowa to Oregon, over the course of 10 days. Here is some of what I saw and learned.
Biggest surprise of the trip, part 1: The Bighorn Mountains and The Bighorn National Forest. I had planned to just drive though, up and over, on my way to Yellowstone, but I ended up stopping here for quite a while. The Bighorns aren't as spectacular as Yellowstone or some of the other parks, but it's a hell of a lot less crowded. I'd go back and spend a few days here easy.
Surprisingly, despite spending 57 hours in the car, I was not bored a single minute of my trip. I marveled at the landscape, played music, and thought. I thought a lot. I expected to listen to a bunch of audiobooks but only managed to finish one I was most of the way through and the first third of another...the landscape was just too distracting most of the time. My experience leads me to believe I might be a good candidate for a solo Mars mission (aside from the one-way thing).
Animals seen on my trip, a partial list: rabbits, prairie dogs, antelope, ducks, geese, pelicans, pheasants, a moose, a wolf, elk, bison, deer, and a bunch of birds I couldn't identify. The prairie dogs sat near their holes peeping at each other...it was really cute. The moose was a juvenile male in Yellowstone who looked lost & confused; he trotted alongside the road for a bit, then swam across the river and took off into the woods. I was apprehensive about not seeing a bison on my trip, but I shouldn't have worried...Yellowstone was lousy with 'em. Pro tip: bring a good pair of binoculars, possibly left over from eclipse-watching.
Yellowstone was one of the highlights (with a caveat that I'll get to in a second). A single park containing all these different landscapes, from volcanic wastelands to mountain peaks to verdant river valleys to evergreen forests to grasslands...it's a geographic marvel. But here's the but: it's also really crowded in the summer. At times, it felt like a nature mall, with herds of consumers moving from the bison shop to the geyser store. Reminded me a bit of my experience at the Louvre, itself a wonderful place too crowded to enjoy.
Final roadtrip stats: 2748 miles driven in 10 days and a total of 57 hours in the car. 718 photos and videos taken. I visited seven states — Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon — and spent at least one night in each save Idaho. Lowest point: 810'. Highest point: 11,070'.
Somewhere west of the Missouri River, which separates Iowa & Missouri from Nebraska & Kansas, the dominance in the eastern US of human activity & organization gives way to geology and geography. Even in the sparser areas of the Midwest, you look down from an airplane and see the Jefferson grid: square parcels of land, each with a group of buildings contained somewhere within it. Further west, hills and mountains and volcanoes and rivers and streams and forests and plains dominate the landscape and how people move within it. The West is not yet tamed, not by a long shot, and acknowledging this goes a long way toward understanding the people who live here.
Biggest surprise of the trip, part 2: High altitude wildflower meadows. When I stopped my car at a scenic overlook at 9400' in the Bighorn Mountains and saw a path down a gentle slope through a meadow of wildflowers growing very close to the ground, I didn't think a whole lot about it. Pretty scene, right? I grabbed my daypack from the car and as soon as I stepped down onto the path and into the meadow, this amazing smell sent me reeling. For 20 minutes, I walked in an olfactory daze to the crest of the next hill and back. OMG, what an amazing sensation...a definite high-water mark.
The speed limit on the freeways in South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho was 80 mph. On some rural undivided two-lane highways, the limit was still 70 mph, which I found astounding. But the lanes and the shoulders were way wider than in Vermont, the roads flatter and straighter, and traffic was few and far between most of the time. Still, even just that little extra speed really cuts down on drivers' potential reaction times.
I had high hopes for the Badlands, and it lived up to the hype. Magnificent desolation, accessible, and not super crowded. I could (and probably should) have spent a couple of days there easy.
Food was not a highlight or a focus of this trip, mostly because I didn't spend a tremendous amount of time seeking out good places to eat. I had some Thai lettuce wraps w/ bison in SD that were pretty good, some just-fine sushi in Missoula, and a delicious tostada scramble in Rhododendron, OR. Maybe the best thing I ate was a homemade breakfast burrito I bought at a gas station in Red Lodge, Montana. It was a struggle to find non-meat things to eat — I'm not a vegetarian, but man cannot subsist on burgers & hot dogs & steaks & BBQ for a week and a half w/o GI discomfort. With some notable exceptions, food in the US is more homogenous than ever...you can get anything almost anywhere.
Biggest surprise of the trip, part 3: The hosts at the B&B I stayed at in Wyoming advised me to enter Yellowstone via the Beartooth Highway and I am so glad I took their advice. The 68-mile drive was called "the most beautiful drive in America" by former CBS correspondant Charles Kuralt and he might be right. At the top of the pass, you drive just short of 11,000' above sea level; I climbed above the 11K mark for a stunning 360° view of the entire area. Reader, I may have done the arms-wide-on-the-bow-of-the-Titanic gesture on top of a rock at the top of the world...no apologies.
About 5 minutes after I checked into my B&B near Cody, WY, I looked out my window to see a rain cloud off in the distance with a rainbow coming out of it. Chuckling, I asked my host if that was a common occurence around here. "Pretty much," he replied, "especially with climate change." A life-long resident of the area, he went on to explain that it rains a lot more there now than "20-30 years ago". "See all that grass out there? It's supposed to be brown this time of year."
Several people told me before my trip that Devils Tower was worth the effort, but as I spotted it off in the distance on my approach, I had my doubts. But as it got closer, I realized they'd all been right. Totally crazy geological thing worth seeing in the flesh.
At a gas station in southern South Dakota, a man noticed the Texas plates on my rental car and asked, "What's the price of gas in Texas these days?" I explained my situation, and he said, "I'm from Texas originally and I can tell by your accent that you ain't. What're ya doing in this godforsaken country?"
In Wyoming, I stayed less than a mile from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a WWII Japanese American confinement site. From 1942 to 1945, this concentration camp held almost 14,000 people, making it the third-largest town in Wyoming at the time. The majority were American citizens and had done nothing wrong and committed no crimes...they were put there for being of Japanese heritage. I regret that my plans didn't allow for a visit; if I'd had known beforehand that it was going to be so close, I would have made the time, given our present administration's treatment of its Muslim citizens and asylum seekers from Central and South America. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
I saw some cool thunderstorms:
If I had a time machine, I would tell myself from two weeks ago to skip Mt Rushmore, Wind Cave, and the volcanic stuff in Yellowstone. And perhaps Wall Drug. I also would have opted to fly out of Salt Lake City instead of Portland, OR to give me more time to explore Montana and Wyoming...the trip ended up having too much driving and not enough being out in nature.
You can see more photos from my trip on Instagram and in this saved Instagram Story. I feel very lucky to have had the time and resources to take this trip. It definitely took me out of my comfort zone in both good ways and bad — the journey definitely wasn't all sunshine and lollipops, despite what my photos might indicate. To many of us, it seems like a perilous time in our nation's history, with many debts, old and new, coming due in rapid-fire succession. Doing this roadtrip reminded me of many great things about this country & the people who live in it and gave me the time & space to ponder how I fit into the puzzle, without the din of the news and social media. If you can manage it, I encourage you all to do the same, even if it's just visiting someplace close that you've never been to: get out there and see the world and visit with its people. This world is all we have, and the more we see of it, the better we can make it.
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National Geographic recently announced the winners of the Travel Photographer of the Year contest for 2018. You can look at the winners here and the people's choice awards here.
You can also download the winning images as wallpaper for your computer, phone, or tablet.
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After the success of their book about the world's most unusual places, Atlas Obscura is following up with an illustrated book aimed at kids showcasing "150 of the world's most mesmerizing and mysterious wonders": The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Guide for the World's Most Adventurous Kid.
Travel the world through common points of interest, from strange skeletons (Trunyan Tree cemetery in Indonesia leads you to India's Skeleton Lake, for example) to wild waterfalls (while in Peru visit the Gocta Waterfall — and then move on to Antarctica's Blood Falls) to ice caves to bioluminescence.
The book comes out in September but you can preorder it here. The first Atlas Obscura book was my son's favorite for several months...he must have read it 8 times cover-to-cover. (via @kathrynyu)
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Meet Mario Salcedo, who has spent the last 20 years as a full-time resident of Royal Caribbean cruise ships.
For nearly two decades, Mario had been living out of his suitcase, traveling extensively for his corporate job as the director of international finance at a multinational corporation. He spent more time in and out of hotel rooms scattered across Latin America than he did at his home in Miami. After working nonstop for nearly 21 years, Mario — burned out — decided it was time to pursue a lifelong goal: to travel around the world, without leaving home. In 1997, he quit his job, packed an even bigger suitcase and quietly disappeared from the lives of his friends and family to pursue a new life on the open water.
You wouldn't think that watching a video about "The Happiest Guy in the World" would be so depressing. Maybe he's happy but observing him through filmmaker Lance Oppenheim's lens sure didn't make me happy. I don't know quite why, but this reminded me of the writing room for The Onion, where none of the writers laugh at any of the jokes that make it into the paper or onto the website.
Update: 94-year-old Morton Jablin has been living on the same cruise ship for the past 13 years since his wife died. It's basically a floating assisted living facility for him.
Seven Seas Navigator is an all-suite luxury ship. The cruise line has made minor stateroom accommodations to make things easier for the Captain, one of their most loyal passengers. "They've installed brighter lights in my cabin, handrails in the bathroom and a special shaving mirror," he says.
To stay fit, he exercises regularly. He knows his way around the ship and walks about two hours daily, usually on Deck 7 where the shops are located. "I'm intelligent enough not to walk where I'd have a problem. Nobody is on that deck during the day and as an ex-Navy man, I have my sea legs," he says.
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Ten years ago this month, Jodi Ettenberg left her cushy lawyer job in NYC to embark on some traveling she wanted to do. But just for a year. Well, one thing led to another, and she never went back to her old life. She wrote about her travels on Legal Nomads and eventually turned the site into her full-time profession. Jodi recently marked this anniversary with a post about the nearly unbelievable parade of challenges she's been dealing with over the past several months: The Spinal Tap That Changed My Life.
Enduring a potentially terrifying home invasion, a botched spinal tap, a debilitating condition that only allowed her to sit or stand for minutes at a time without excruciating pain, unsuccessful operations, almost dying in the operating room, and countless other setbacks in the space of a few months, Jodi has plumbed the depths of her soul in an attempt to ready herself for a future that looks very different than the one she'd envisioned.
I reread Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search For Meaning during these difficult months. Frankl's time in Auschwitz led to his development of logotherapy in his psychiatry practice, but the book delves into his theories of why certain people managed to survive the Nazi camps. Frankl saw life as a quest for meaning, found in work, in love, and in courage during difficult times. Among his beliefs was that suffering itself is meaningless, but we give suffering meaning by the way we respond to it. Or, as Harold S. Kushner writes in the introduction to the latest version, that "forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation."
Instead of thrashing around in grief, I've chosen to focus on the gifts that have come out of this very complicated year. With these facts, things could have been a lot worse. Instead of being confined to isolation, I have you to walk this path with me. My community around the world raised their voices and opened their pocketbooks to keep me afloat when I couldn't manage it. You respond to my progress walks on Instagram, you cheerlead every update, and your birding skills helped me identify the beloved marsh hens that I fell for during this recovery.
I don't really know how to finish this post. Jodi is a friend...we met in person for the first time last summer, just a few weeks before the spinal tap and I visited her in Montreal briefly during her darkest days. Maybe I'll just leave it at this: Jodi, I'm really proud of you and am looking forward to ten more years of Legal Nomads!
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Tyler Cowen has some advice for those looking to visit Paris.
My overall take is this: Paris today is fairly sterile in terms of overall creativity, or for that matter business dynamism. But Parisians have perfected the art of taste along a number of notable dimensions, like nowhere else in the world. If your trip allows you to free ride upon those efforts in a meaningful way, it will go very well.
I am not with him about skipping the Jardin du Luxembourg (it's one of my favorite places in Paris) and I would urge you to skip not only the Mona Lisa but the entire Louvre (go to d'Orsay instead). But eating cheese (and bread!), developing a "mini-Paris residential life", going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, seeing the cathedrals, walking everywhere,1 and skipping the expensive restaurants is all solid advice. Further Paris notes from my trip last October here.
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Now that leisure travel is widely accesible, the internet connects everyone, and most people have connected cameras on them 24/7, one of the side effects is that everyone's vacation snaps look pretty much the same. Oliver KMIA collected hundreds of travel photos from Instagram, grouped them together by subject — passport shot, Mona Lisa, side mirror selfie, Leaning Tower, ramen bowl — and assembled them into this two-minute video of our collective homogenized travel experience. And it's not just travel...vast swaths of Instagram are just variations on a theme:
Of course, my Instagram feed has no such cliches... *ahem*. (via @choitotheworld)
Update: In his book How Proust Can Change Your Life, Alain De Botton talks about the difficulty with cliches.
We may ask why Proust objected to phrases that had been used too often. After all, doesn't the moon shine discreetly? Don't sunsets look as if they were on fire? Aren't clichés just good ideas that have been proved rightly popular?
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.
In other words, taking a photo of a friend holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa or jumping in the middle of the road in Utah are really good ideas — that's why lots of people do it — but each successive photo of the same thing doesn't tell us anything new about those places, experiences, or people. (via mark larson)
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This morning on Twitter, I wrote out a list of places my brain thinks I have been to "recently":
Berlin (17 years ago)
Thailand & Vietnam (13 years ago)
Austria (12 years ago)
Ireland (13 years ago)
London (10 years ago)
Hawaii (18 years ago)
Alaska (16 years ago)
And it's true. I remember being in Austria not so very long ago, maybe five or seven years tops. Berlin is particularly vivid in my memory as a recent destination, perhaps because I loved being there so much.
So what's going on here? Why don't I have a proper sense of how much time has really passed between now and these trips? Cognitive psychologists have a name for this: the telescoping effect.
The telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) refers to the temporal displacement of an event whereby people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are. The former is known as backward telescoping or time expansion, and the latter as is known as forward telescoping. Three years is approximately the time frame in which events switch from being displaced backward in time to forward in time, with events occurring three years in the past being equally likely to be reported with forward telescoping bias as with backward telescoping bias. Although telescoping occurs in both the forward and backward directions, in general the effect is to increase the number of events reported too recently.
My faulty travel memories are a trivial example, but the telescoping effect becomes more important when people's political actions are tied to their memories of, say, the weather, acts of terrorism, or financial events. (via @pjdoland)
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In 2017, I kept track of almost everything I read, listened to, watched, and experienced. I don't know about "the best", but as the year draws to a close, these are the things that I thought about the most, that made me see things in a slightly different way, or taught me a little something about myself. I marked my very favorites with a (*). (Above, my #bestnine images of 2017 from Instagram.)
Books. I don't know how many books I read this year, but it was fewer than I wanted. My work demands a lot of reading online, so when I've finished with that most days, reading for leisure or enrichment is often not enticing.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann were perhaps the best books I read...you'll hardly find anyone who speaks ill of either one.
Wonderland by Steven Johnson pulls together technology, culture, and science in a way that I aspire to.
I enjoyed Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem when I read it early on in 2017 but it grew in my esteem as the year went on. Crazy, but I might reread soon?
The Devil in the White City. A masterful dual tale of two men who seized the opportunity due to cultural and technological changes in late 1800s America, told through the events of the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893.
I reread Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote...no recent book has helped me more in figuring out a path forward in life.
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book 2 blew my doors off. I have never felt so uncannily like a writer has been rummaging around in my brain. *
Television. What even is television anymore? To paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it. And I saw a lot of it this year. And much of it was excellent.
The Crown (season two). I kept expecting this to falter as it went on, but it never did. A keen portrait of changing times and a dying empire.
Mad Men. Rewatched it all the way through for the first time since it aired. One of the all-time great TV shows.
Halt and Catch Fire (season four). Very strong finish to a great series. I kind of want a season five in about 5 or 6 years that's set in 2002. Still can't believe I got to be on the show for like 2 seconds.
The Vietnam War. I feel like this didn't get the attention it deserved. Along with OJ: Made in America, one of the best documentaries of recent years in terms of understanding the United States culturally and politically.
Wormwood. What the hell is even a documentary anyway? Errol Morris is at the top of his game with this one.
The Handmaid's Tale. My favorite drama series of the year. So hard to watch but also essential and so well done. *
Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II. Incredible. Aside from the eclipse, these are the best things on this list. *
Honorable mentions: I anticipated Game of Thrones more than anything each week, but I've already forgotten most of what happened. There were dragons? Big Little Lies was very solid and enjoyable, but the last episode was some of the best television I've ever seen. Zoom out a little, and The Defiant Ones was actually about creativity, collaboration, and management.
Movies: Though I haven't seen many of the end-of-the-year movies yet, I felt like this was a strong-ish movie year. But only four films stuck with me.
The Handmaiden. I don't even know how to classify this film, but I wish they'd make more like it.
Maybe Blade Runner 2049 wasn't great, but I saw it twice and have thought about it often since. Amazing visual experience.
Paths of the Soul. A window into the lives of people very unlike mine. Underscores how much living "the simple life" in wealthy countries is made possible by good infrastructure, social safety nets, and privilege. The simple life in most of the world is neither a choice nor easy.
Dunkirk. Absolutely thrilling. My favorite movie of the year. *
Music. Let's be honest, Lemonade was probably the album of the year. But I guess some good music came out in 2017 as well. Oh, and I'm old so I still listen to albums.
Big Fish Theory by Vince Staples got the most airplay in my car this summer and fall. Early fave track was Crabs in a Bucket but BagBak came on strong later in the year.
DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar. Probably my favorite album of the year...every track hits the mark. *
4:44 by Jay-Z. The contrast between his last album (lazy, full of swagger) and this one (introspective, urgent) could not be more stark. This wasn't the best or even my favorite album of the year, but I thought about it more than any of the others I listened to this year. Worth noting this album was only possible because of Beyonce's superior Lemonade...imagine the hypothetical Jay-Z album had she not slammed him to the wall with that.
Experiences, etc. As I said on Instagram, I prioritized experiences over things this year. But because things like books, movies, and TV shows are easier to summarize and review, I kept most of the experiences for myself. You have to hold some things back or you lose your edges.
Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists and I'm grateful I got to spend a few hours witnessing how his career came together and his life fell apart. One of the best museums I've ever been to.
D3 Traveller. I travelled quite a bit this year, and it would have been more difficult without this bag. Worth the huge splurge.
Sainte-Chapelle. I am not religious at all, but you can't help but feel something in this wonderful building.
iPhone X. A remarkable machine.
Rijksmuseum. I keep going back to two works I saw here: Vermeer's The Milkmaid (I spent a good 15 minutes with this one) and this early self-portrait by Rembrandt (the lighting! the curls!).
The total solar eclipse. By far the best thing that I witnessed this year...or maybe in my life. It still gives me chills just thinking about it. *
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John Hodgman, formerly of The Daily Show and those Apple commercials, is out with a memoir of his middle-aged wanderings through New England called Vacationland.
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them.
Vacationland collects these real life wanderings, and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god.
Some of this hits remarkably close to the bone:
Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are.
I don't know about wiser, but weird dad with a failing body is pretty much right on the money. And I love that cover by Aaron James Draplin. *kisses fingers*
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