Featured Travel Blog Entries
The mo' problems we see
Shiny. Shiny and new and big. That’s America.
Driving home from the airport, I was amazed at how wide the roads are. How you actually have room to drive on them. How clean and new everything seems. How open and spacious it all is.
There are things I appreciated immediately after landing in the great big U.S. of A. I can read that entire sign! I know how to work a pay phone! I can eat uncooked food and not get typhoid! And there is so much diversity here! Any given crowd is full of so many colors of people. You don’t really appreciate how great that is until you experience being an outsider in an ethnically homogeneous country.
From Easter Island to Beirut, Lebanon
Before the plane takes off for the 10 ½ hour flight to Santiago, the LAN Chile flight attendant wants to take my entire food and drink order while we’re still waiting to take off at JFK. I tell her I’ll have the pasta, but I can tell she’s waiting for something else.“Do you want bread with that?” she finally asks. Sure, OK. “Brown or white?”
“Uh, brown is fine.” Dinner is three hours away, but I need to place my order now in great detail.
This conversation goes on for a while in a mixture of Spanish and English. She asks if I’ll want breakfast in the morning, which is nine hours from now. “What kind of cereal? Café con leche or tea?”
I find it amusing that I have to order everything I want over the next 10 ½ hours before we even leave the ground. What if I want a Diet Coke in the middle of the flight—should I page the attendant again to let her know now?
Antalya, Turkey: silhouettes and beers at sunset
I can't get enough of the sunsets in Antalya. Early evening, an hour or so before the sun goes down, we wander down to the old harbour, a ten minute walk from the house we're renting. During the day Terry and I are so focused on work, that apart from our coffee and lunch breaks, our bend-and-stretch moments, and our breaks to play with the kittens (when we arrived four weeks ago we were asked to babysit a cat and her four newborn kittens; the offer was too good to refuse), we rarely speak and our eyes barely leave our laptop screens.
Eyes of the West Indies, Part III
A few days ago, I was with my family on mainland Abaco, driving to Crown Point, the northernmost town in the Abacos. We stopped in Coopers Town, which happens to be the hometown of the Prime Minister.
Coopers Town is a lovely place of about 900; it is small, it is colorful, it is clean and it hangs along a beachless stretch of the Abaco sea. We stopped the car when I saw something strange.
I approached it as unassuming as possible. A loggerhead sea turtle, quite dead, its shell was removed. Killing sea turtles is legal in the Bahamas (all but the Hawksbill), even though sea turtles are protected nearly universally throughout the rest of the world. In fact, not only is it legal, on mainland Abaco, evidence of sea turtle slaughter is everywhere. In Sandy Point and Marsh Harbour, we were offered sea turtle soup. In Treasure Cay, a man was displaying a green turtle shell for three hundred dollars. In Coopers Town, their carcasses lay out in the open.
Hoi An: Hello, you buy someting?
Wake up! We are in Hoi An. We would like for you to get off of the bus now to look at this hotel. This hotel has pool, bicycles, is your home away from home. It is very cheap, very nice. The places in the center of Hoi An are many more expensive and very bad.”
I woke up from the brief nap I’d been enjoying on the bus ride from Hue (say it: Hway) to Hoi An to find that the rickety bus had stopped in front of a large hotel just outside of the old city center, and a bus company representative was starting his sales pitch. Unfortunately, along with those friendly convenience store stops you have to endure when riding a bus in SE Asia, you also have to put up with stopping at some hotel that has bribed the bus company.
“Seriously?” I said to Ben, groggily. “We have to deal with this crap again?”
Boab Trees (funny things), Western Australians (even funnier)
So, roll down the invisible hill again, straight outta Darwin, to Katherine. Or just get straight Outta Katherine if you’re already there already. Like you didn’t know to (get Outta Katherine, that is). Head west, which means south, but those people got it all upside down already, because this time it’s Western Australia that you have in your sights, which is of course West, but the road from the Katherinites perspective somehow departs from Katherine South. Go West - where the big brown land gets bigger and browner and like a gameshow in the outback the rising escarpments say “Come on Down”.
So get set for adventure, boab trees (you’ll like this one) and the best weird post-Brutalist sculptures on any roadside ever. Anywhere. Guaranteed.
A place like no other
As we pedal through the remote mountains of Northern Laos, up and above the clouds, an air of mystery and stillness surrounds us. There is barely any traffic along this road, barely any villages. It's just us, surrounded by strange intimidating limestone cliffs that loom up around us. As we pass through villages, the quiet, strange air is even more pronounced. Villagers strap baskets and babies to their backs and walk for miles along the road collecting plants.
Outside of the villages young boys gather in groups along the road, sporting large military guns, and we say a nervous "sabaidee" (hello) as we pass.
Recent Entries
Sponsors
- Travel Insurance - by Insure & Go
- Travel Insurance - by Cheap Travel Insurance
- Travel Books - by Books.co.uk
