Tag Archives: travel

Traversing Provence by Foot

28 Jan

In a blog post titled “Pilgrims in Provence,” Matt Goulding realizes his dream of vising Provence, France.

My first dreams of Provence came as a teenager, when I stumbled across a picture of a local market in one of my mom’s glossy magazines. The village was tiny and cobblestoned, dappled with a gentle light so perfect it looked like it had been painted onto the page. Everything in that picture seemed impossibly vivid: the Technicolor tomatoes and eggplants, the farmers with dirt still crusted on their fingers, the cafe on the side of the plaza with the chalkboard menu listing untold treasures du jour.

That picture drove me wild with wanderlust. I wanted to be there to smell those tomatoes, to pepper those farmers with questions, to wander back to a small country house with nothing but a dog-eared journal and an armful of ingredients. I’ve been carrying those images around in my head for the better part of two decades, waiting for the day when I could transpose them on to reality.

All of this sounds warm and fuzzy and ripe for disappointment, but the great majority of Provencal cliches exist primarily because it is exactly that fairy-tale region you imagine it to be. To paraphrase Bourdain, it’s what Martha Stewart sees when she closes her eyes.

Having spent some time in Provence (mostly in Avignon) a few years ago, this description is apt:

Avignon is the kind of town that brings Provence’s virtues into sharp focus: the old part of town, circumscribed by an ancient city wall, is home to leafy avenues, a sprawling central market housing the building blocks for historic feasts, and the types of cafés you’d sacrifice unspeakable things to have in your neighborhood back home.

On navigation:

No, your best friends in this mysterious new world are the maps you procure from the local Tabacs shops (or from excitable outdoorsmen in Avignon) and the colored lines that mark the trails at every turn: red and white for the GR 6, our path for much of our time in the Luberon, red and yellow for the long-distance GRP trail, and so on. It takes a bit of getting used to, but soon you learn that an x means you’re going the wrong way, that a 90-degree angle indicates an imminent turn, and that the absence of any color at all for more than, say, 100 meters means you’ve gone rogue.

A convincing paragraph on why it’s better to travel on foot than by car/bus:

Maybe it’s the rosé talking, but there is something undeniably magical about approaching a town on foot. You are invariably greeted by a host of intense, deeply conflicting emotions: elation (over the fact that you won’t be sleeping under a rock tonight), exhaustion (because you haven’t exercised this much in many years), hunger (because that pack is heavy and bread and cheese and sparkling wine only go so far) and, above all, wonder (at just how beautiful and poetic it can be to watch a town towering on the horizon grow closer and closer until the road between you and it has disappeared entirely).

A wonderful essay. Highly recommend reading the whole thing.

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(hat tip: @legalnomads/@MikeAchim)

 

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Eric Schmidt’s Daughter on North Korea

23 Jan

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s daughter Sophie has posted a lengthy account with photos of their recent trip to North Korea. Some highlights from a post titled “It might not get weirder than this”:

  • The English-language customs form for North Korea requires declaration of “killing device” and “publishings of all kinds.”
  • None of the buildings visited by the delegation was heated, despite the cold. Sophie writes: “They’re proudly showing you their latest technology or best library, and you can see your breath. A clue to how much is really in their control.”
  • The delegation had two official minders always present with them (“2, so one can mind the other”) and no interaction with North Koreans not vetted by officials.
  • Eric Schmidt’s “reaction to staying in a bugged luxury socialist guesthouse was to simply leave his door open.”
  • The group could make international calls on rented cell phones but had no data service.

This was my favorite highlight from her trip:

The Kim Il Sung University e-Library, or as I like to call it, the e-Potemkin Village…

Probably 90 desks in the room, all manned, with an identical scene one floor up.

One problem: No one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in–a noisy bunch, with media in tow–not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.

Of all the stops we made, the e-Potemkin Village was among the more unsettling. We knew nothing about what we were seeing, even as it was in front of us. Were they really students? Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care? Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.

Sophia’s takeaways:

  1. Go to North Korea if you can. It is very, very strange.
  2.  If it is January, disregard the above. It is very, very cold.
  3.  Nothing I’d read or heard beforehand really prepared me for what we saw.

Worth reading in entirety, especially for the photos. The only thing that sucks is the formatting of the post (google sites, what the heck?).

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Also worth seeing: these photos from North Korea.

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Paul Theroux’s Travel Wish List

14 Jan

Paul Theroux reminisces on his past travels in this piece for The New York Times. It’s a great essay in which he also considers his wish list for places to visit.

“You’ve been everywhere,” people say to me, but that’s a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long but, in many cases, blindingly obvious. Yes, I have been to Patagonia and Congo and Sikkim, but I haven’t been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho or the Dakotas, and I’ve had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I want to see them, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc …”

Nothing to me has more excitement in it than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much on earth can beat it in travel for a sense of freedom — no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then “Eat my dust.” The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American.

This was my favorite paragraph:

The ultimate travel fantasies are, of course, unattainable. William S. Burroughs said in the 1950s, “What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.” In that spirit, I’d like to spend a Sunday in the West Medford of 1951, play bocce with my grandfather and eat some of my grandmother Angelina’s tortellini; I want to revisit the jolly bazaars of the Peshawar of 1973, the hopeful Nyasaland of 1964, the bike-riding China of 1980 (no private cars on the empty roads), and while I’m at it, I would like to return to the Borneo of the 1960s and again climb Mount Kinabalu.

I agree with Theroux on this count: a return journey to a place visited in the past can be a wonderful experience. A wonderful read overall.

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Practical Tips for Traveling the World

26 Nov

Jodi Ettenberg, author of the Legal Nomads travel blog, offers some excellent travel tips in this blog post. She’s been traveling for more than four years, so she’s got some excellent tips/advice:

4. Everything else you can buy.

I didn’t believe it at first – “what if I forget to pack something!” But I’ve learned that most things can be bought abroad, from t-shirts to bras to new flip flops when a monkey throws yours over a cliff.

I like this tip about knowledgeable taxi drivers (my taxi story from my travels wasn’t nearly as pleasant):

6. Your taxi driver knows where to eat breakfast more than you do.

Swap this out for tuk-tuk driver, songthaew driver or rickshaw driver, where appropriate. When I go to a new place, I find the eldest cab driver possible and ask him where he ate breakfast.

And perhaps the best tip of all:

8. Oranges are the perfect public transportation snack.

I started bringing a bag of oranges with me for long bus rides, primarily because they quench thirst and smell delicious. I quickly learned that many Thai and Burmese busgoers sniff the peels to stave off nausea, and that kids love oranges. Really: kids LOVE oranges. So for those who want to bring something for the bus ride but rightfully worry about giving sweets to kids, oranges are your friend.

Read the rest of the tips here.

On another note: Jodi recently published The Food Traveler’s Handbook*, a guide on how to eat well (and safely) around the world (there is a strong emphasis on discovering great street food). I am about one third of the way through the book, and it is excellent so far.

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*Full disclosure: I helped Jodi with a few minor grammar edits of the book prior to publication.

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The Silk Road and Carpet Making in Uzbekistan

16 Nov

The Wall Street Journal has a short piece on the dying art of carpet making in Uzbekistan. Profiled are the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

This was the most fascinating bit from the story, I think:

Out of the 300 or so carpets the Samarkand workshop produces by hand each year, around 40% are private commissions. These range from ancient Persian designs to hand-drawn images sentimental to the person commissioning the carpet. One Japanese client, intent on creating one of the finest carpets in the world, has commissioned a 90-centimeter-by-55-centimeter piece at a cost of $85,000, which will take seven years to complete. It is so fine it can only be worked on an hour a day, so as not to ruin the eyesight of the weaver.

Click through to see pictures accompanying the piece.

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Wyoming and Yellowstone via Instagram

1 Oct At the West Thumb Basin.

I just recently returned from a fifteen-day road trip out West. Along the way, I ate amazing barbecue food in Kansas City, saw the most gorgeous sunset in rural Kansas, crossed paths with celebrity mechanics in Colorado, and made way too many photography pit stops while getting to the ultimate destination, Yellowstone National Park (where we spent seven days). I have been slowly editing the images I have taken in and around the park with my primary cameras (Canon 7D and Canon 5D Mark II) as individual posts on my photoblog, Erudite Expressions; that Yellowstone gallery is now complete. Here, I wanted to highlight some of the mobile photographs I captured during this trip, most of which were taken with Instagram on my iPhone.

Stopping in rural Wyoming

Stopping in Rural Wyoming.

One of the most fruitful stops was this unassuming place called Cowboy Cafe in the town of Dubois, WY. Don’t let the tiny size fool you: the food here is spectacular. We met a group of people inside who said they’ve been coming to Dubois for fifteen years, and for every year they come, they have their breakfast, lunch, and dinner here. The TripAdvisor reviews aren’t wrong here. This hole-in-the-wall is a must when stopping in Dubois (or perhaps even making a special visit out of your trip if you’re in the Jackson Hole/Grand Teton area). The pies here, made daily, are to die for.

Cowboy Cafe

Cowboy Cafe in Dubois, WY.

A horse farm in Dubois, WY.

Tire tracking in Dubois, WY.

Population: less than 1,000. Amazing small town atmosphere.

Perhaps a better view of this scene on my photoblog, but…

The Tetons.

Fall approaching in Yellowstone National Park.

Crystal clear lake.

The most popular feature of Yellowstone National Park (also presented here in long exposure form)

The world-famous Old Faithful geyser.

Because of the wind gusts, it was a not-so-uncommon occurrence with people losing their hats at the park. Here, I document a white hat lost in the Grand Prismatic Spring area. Compare to the photo of “The Red Hat” lost at Mammoth.

The Lost Hat.

A hot spring at the West Thumb Basin (next to Yellowstone Lake):

At the West Thumb Basin.

Fall colors at Yellowstone.

An out-of-this world scene at Mammoth Hot Springs (compare to this photograph):

Mammoth.

We spent a few days in West Yellowstone, Montana. Among other things, the town is famous for these decorated bison found on its streets. You can read more about this initiative here.

Buffalo statue at West Yellowstone, Montana.

Sunset in West Yellowstone, MT.

I took a late evening bike ride to the far edge of the city of West Yellowstone. I wound up on this rural road and saw an incredible sunset in the distance:

End of the road. Remains of the day.

On the way back from Yellowstone, we took a different road: I-90 in Montana to I-25. We stopped in historic Sheridan, WY:

Old railroad. Sheridan, WY.

Exploring Sheridan, WY.

This was a peculiar sight. The word pharmacy spelled in Russian Polish on the back wall in Sheridan, WY:

Pharmacy.

And what would a trip to Wyoming be without a stop in one of its greatest store specializing in barbed wire?

The best store in all of Wyoming.

I have dozens of more mobile photos that I captured on this trip, but the significant ones I’ve profiled in this blog post. If you’re still curious to see more photos, I highly recommend checking out my Yellowstone Gallery and reading through the captions of each individual post. This was an amazing road trip, if my photos are any indication :) .

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On Success as a Travel Blogger

24 Sep

Chris Guillebeau, whose World Domination Summit I attended earlier this summer, gave a closing keynote at this year’s #TBEX conference in Girona, Spain. I didn’t attend the conference, but I appreciate his message about becoming successful at what you do. It’s not about followers, but becoming better at your craft:

I hear from a lot of people who want to “get noticed.” They write in to ask, “How can I become more known?” Whenever I hear this question, I’m reminded of something that John Mayer said in a talk at the Berklee College of Music. As best as I recall, the quote was:

“The world doesn’t need more mediocre musicians who are really good at Twitter.”

His point was that musicians should focus on honing their craft instead of working on getting followers or mastering social media. I’d say something similar: the world doesn’t need more mediocre bloggers or writers who are really good at Twitter. 

What the world does need is storytellers. We need people to challenge us. We need people to explain how travel can be a force for good. 

Chris’s point about skepticism on the Internet resonates:

Don’t tell a story that isn’t yours. You have to remember that we live in a world of skepticism, so our task is to be authentic and congruous. There are blogs about making money online from people who have never made money online. There are blogs about being “location independent” from people who live in their parents’ basement.

You should read the entire post here.

 

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BAM: The Other Siberian Railway

14 Aug

This is a wonderful New York Times travel piece on the Baikal-Amur Mainline railroad, otherwise known as BAM:

When most people consider crossing Siberia by rail, they think of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the 5,000-mile-long rail line stretching from Moscow to the Pacific, which was finished in 1916. But two-thirds of the way through the continent from Moscow, the Trans-Siberian sprouts an artery — the BAM — that inexplicably darts north through a blank spot on the map with few towns or even paved roads, a mysterious and enormous railroad loop through nowhere.

Begun under Joseph Stalin as a northern alternative to the Trans-Siberian, the BAM was finished only in 1991 though it’s still being tinkered with to meet growing Asian demand for Siberian lumber, gas and oil.

The author posits that the BAM isn’t so tourist friendly, and that it doesn’t offer all the plush comforts of the Trans-Siberian. The BAM:

…[W]as built for freight and people who have business in the wilderness. The dozen cars on the first leg of our trip were half-filled with workers and managers destined for Siberia’s lumber camps and oil and gas fields, as well as people working on the train line itself. As such, it is more of a utilitarian train, with a nothing-fancy dining car that served essentially as a round-the-clock bar, a couple of packed third-class wagons with clothes draped across bunk beds crowding dormitory-like spaces, and a few second-class cars with four comfortable berths in separate minivan-size cabins.

My favorite portion of the article, the camraderie offered on the train:

Thanks to the dozen passengers who rotated into our coupe during the weeklong journey — among them an engineer heading to the oil fields north of Lake Baikal, a navy officer on leave, a college student who didn’t say a word — our table was a perpetual buffet of pirogi, boiled chicken, pickles, hams and lots of tasty things I couldn’t pronounce. Our contribution was whatever local snack we could buy from the babushkas during the 10- to 15-minute stops the train made at various stations, and the omnipresent, daily replaced bottle of vodka. 

I’ve added this piece to the travelreads collection on this blog.

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On Ski Masks in China

9 Aug

The New York Times details a peculiar phenomenon in China, where beachgoers are shy about getting a tan at the beach, so they resort to specialty ski masks:

For legions of middle-class Chinese women — and for those who aspire to their ranks — solar protection is practically a fetish, complete with its own gear. This booming industry caters to a culture that prizes a pallid complexion as a traditional sign of feminine beauty unscathed by the indignities of manual labor. There is even an idiom, which women young and old know by heart: “Fair skin conceals a thousand flaws.”

With the pursuit of that age-old aesthetic ideal at odds with the fast-growing interest in beachgoing and other outdoor activities, Chinese women have come up with a variety of ways to reconcile the two. Face masks like Ms. Yao’s have taken this popular beach town by storm. In cities, the summertime parasol is a more familiar accouterment, many adorned with rhinestones, lace or sequins (and sometimes all three). Those who need both hands free are fond of the tinted face shield, the perfect accessory for riding a bike — or welding. The fashion-conscious favor a chiffon scarf draped over the face.

Since the masks only protect one area of the body, this is a booming business. Gloves, for example, are making a resurgence for beachgoers.

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Hidden Tokyo

26 Jun

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this five-year-old New York Times article profiling hidden Tokyo, but it’s a good one:

Tokyo, especially after dark, is notoriously hard to penetrate. With its winding mazelike streets, the city is a challenge for even seasoned taxi drivers. (Many bicyclists have GPS devices on their handlebars.) So imagine hunting down the restaurants, bars and clubs that are stashed away in patchwork alleys, nondescript apartment buildings, faceless office towers and basement stairwells illuminated by red bulbs.

Discreet, out-of-the-way bars have been a staple of Japanese culture for decades. Before World War II, Tokyo was filled with these pocket-sized dives — called nomiya (counter bars) — with space for just six or seven stools. Behind the counter was a proprietor, whose role was both confidant and caregiver to the regulars. When the city was rebuilt, however, most were bulldozed in favor of larger, glossier, more Westernized offerings.

Now a younger, postwar creative class is reviving nomiya culture — with a decidedly modern spin.

There’s a store called Not Found:

Not Found, an appointment-only clothing boutique that opened last winter, is among the latest to play this card. Wander down a main thoroughfare in Azabu Juban near Roppongi and you might stumble across it. From the sidewalk, it looks like just another concrete office building with a signless door. The rail-thin space, which carries only a few articles of precious clothing hanging behind thick-glass displays, was opened by the 33-year-old founder of a tech company as a sort of luxe closet for his closest friends.

“Imagine trying to find the words ‘Not Found’ on Google,” Ms. Fall said. “There’s about a million entries. It’s brilliant camouflage. Japanese are hobbyists and obsessives. They’ll trek to a little town so they can eat a certain type of asparagus or mushroom that’s only available a few days out of the year because that’s when it’s in season.”

Whenever I make my first trip to Tokyo, I’ll come back to this article.

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