Tag archives for travel
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Perhaps the greatest advantage to my semi-nomadic lifestyle is that I am prevented from watching too much news. Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I turned on a hotel television (I don’t have time) or listened to any of the running drivel that spills from the airport CNN (thank goodness for noise-cancelling headphones). Only…
What’s the best job in the world? (Well, besides mine?) How about inventing new ice cream flavors for Blue Bell?
I came to Dallas with no expectations, and despite some disparaging tweets and comments from the online peanut gallery, most of my well-traveled readers eagerly guided me through the third largest city in Texas, pointing out where to go and what to see and do. I was grateful for their advice and how it reinforced…
I was born in Texas. It was the Seventies, Gerald Ford was president, and my father worked for an oil company. Beyond the distinct toddler memory of my crawling on the brown shag carpeting of our Houston home, I remember nothing of my birthplace. I remember leaving, though. Our family piled into our big Dodge…
When Darwin camped in Galápagos back in 1835, the young British traveler found it difficult to pitch a tent given the incredible number of iguanas and their burrows. Nowadays, there are fewer lizards crawling around the islands, but there are still colonies where the lava rock is literally blanketed in iguanas. Climbing so closely to…
Ladies and Gentlemen, for this next assignment, I will be breaking all of my own rules. Those of you who follow my travels regularly know that I a man of habit. For example, 1) I never divulge my destination or travel plans ahead of time, 2) I always work alone, and 3) I typically travel…
Never judge a town by its exit ramp . . . . . . because at night, every exit looks the same: fast food beacons and glowing gas stations with trucks steaming in the cold. I spin away from the dark rush of the interstate and down the town’s widest avenue—to the snow-crusted parking lot…
I love toponyms (place names), because they reveal so much—and yet so little—about the places they are meant to typify. It was snowing in Minneapolis (Sioux Mni = “water”; Greek polis = “city”) when I boarded a flight for Kalispell, and briefly imagined that Kalispell was the name of some flaxen-haired, rose-lipped pioneer beauty in…
“You’ve come at the wrong time.” This is what everyone tells me. They don’t say, “Welcome to Shetland!” Instead they say, “It’s such a pity you came right now, in January.” Then, like an answering machine instructing you to call back later, they tell me to come back in summer. Some insist that June is…
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. Robert Louis Stevenson penned that lined back in 1881 (Virginibus Puerisque) and as I drive east on Scotland’s A1—in the hopeful direction of the Scottish author’s boyhood vacation home—I am following his wise counsel. I never actually arrive at his home—the one rented in summertime…
Well, my dear friends, it has been one absolutely incredibly full year of intense round-the-world travel. As you may recall, I jumped into 2012 by venturing to southernmost Mexico and retracing the history of the Mayan calendar in anticipation of the final day in the final year of year of their final baktun. All year…
Wandering Tanzania’s national parks for an entire month taught me many things—like how to stay very quiet and still when there’s a 7-ton elephant rubbing against your tent. In all my travels in all the world, I have never had such rich and fulfilling wildlife encounters as I did in Tanzania, which is why I…
Dear @6thGradersRule, Greetings from Mikumi National Park, where I continue my exploration of Tanzania’s natural wonders, one park at a time. I love it here because I am surrounded by animals all of the time, day and night. Every minute, a new creature reveals itself to me. Last night, after a day of wildlife-watching, I…
Over-quoted and underfollowed, the Chinese sage Lao Tzu famously expounded that, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” I remember this every time I pass through an airport’s metal detector—to affirm that I am not merely a passive subject of security screening, but rather an intrepid traveler breaking the threshold of a…
It takes nearly six hours to fly across the Sahara Desert — —about the same distance it takes to fly across the United States. Indeed, the biggest desert in the world is as wide as the continental U.S., and from high up in the sky, I was able to take in the sea of sand…
On the morning we arrived in Cairo, someone threatened to kidnap me. Not me individually, but all of us, in fact. Like some distorted welcome nod, on the same day our private jet landed in Egypt’s capital, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri posted a video online urging Egyptians to kidnap Westerners. Frankly, I am flattered…
We speak of the blue planet, and praise the beauty of our living green Earth, but I am swiftly discovering that much of our world is simply brown. This is not a bad thing. Brown can be beautiful when it goes on forever, as it does on the plains of the Serengeti in Tanzania. The…
This voyage feels like I’m flying through the pages of the National Geographic Atlas. I love it. Every other day we move many inches across the map, jetting away from one intricate landscape of the Earth, soaring high overhead, taking in the scenes of mountains and rivers and sea below and then coming back down…
From the air, India is an immense puzzle— –a hazy puzzle of dusted field and clustered village, with broken beige roads like sun-bleached branches on a dead tree. Down below, pixelated city blocks resemble the square doodles I draw and fill in mindlessly when I am back at home, sitting on hold and waiting for…
How do you get a panda to sit still? With lots of honey. This is what I learned while visiting the Chengdu Panda Base during a morning layover on this, my extraordinary expedition around the world by private jet. That’s right. I got to cuddle a baby panda on my private-jet layover in southern China.…
Not once while I was in China did I eat rice. Perhaps I was ordering wrong but I also don’t remember seeing it on any menus. Instead, I was fed a steady diet of delicate dumplings and noodles so long it took me ten seconds to slurp a single spoonful. Chinese food may have already…
I enjoy being a tourist. Too often, the word tourist becomes an unfavorable accusation—perhaps understandably but not always fairly. Frankly, I find the whole tourist/traveler debate to be tiresome, and I am the first to admit that in most cases, I am nothing more than a tourist. Tourism demands different priorities than mere traveling. Instead…
Sleep is entirely overrated—travel is not. While both sleep and travel share priority status in my life, the latter tends to beat out the former in every case. For instance, after flying more than 18 hours from San Francisco (with a water and wi-fi break in Korea, as it were), I touched down in the…
Seconds after updating my Facebook, San Francisco comes out to play. Don is back from Bali, Spud invites me to the office, George texts “Drinks in the Castro!” and Jason wants to grab lunch. Andrew Nelson is in New Orleans but delivers one of his no-fail food missions (Go to Tartine! Get the orange rolls).…
So far, I have never missed a plane in my life. Ever. Perhaps this is because all my journeys begin in the still, black hours of pre-morning, when not even the rats are roaming the streets of our nation’s capital. If I start early enough—say, 4 AM—I can usually make it from my doorstep to…
