Lake Titicaca family
[Bolivia] My ambivalence about myself as a wealthy traveler emerges. It was late afternoon, and I was walking a huge windy expanse of tundra sitting above the lake. To one side the oddly metallic and bright lake, to the other the drama and magnificence of the Andes. A place of supreme, open beauty. I came […]
Gypsy women
[Romania] Maybe it’s just that we do a better job of hiding our various prejudices, but I was continually uncomfortable at the ethnic stereotyping and expressions of dislike for others who were different. Maybe it was the lack of social taboos about these things in eastern Europe. And so it was a constant stream of […]
The town of Veliko Turnovo
[Bulgaria] I met two brothers on the street. We went to the family home and ate a huge meal prepared by their mother. Whatever a Babooshka is, she was it. She prepared food in a spare, concrete floored kitchen with walls covered by Playboy and Penthouse magazines full nude centerfolds. Our conversation was entirely focused […]
Empty road beneath Fan Si Pan near the town of Sapa
[Vietnam] I heard there was this incredible single lane paved road that wound its way around Vietnam’s highest mountain – Fan Si Pan – and headed toward the Laos border. There was a place in Sapa that rented Russian motorcycles, and so I set out. It was empty road winding through jungle and mountains in […]
Halong Bay (2)
[Vietnam] Utterly perfect weather. We periodically climb off the boat and fool around on various islands. We hike on some, explore caves on others. Huynh tells me of his desire to work for one of the new hotels. Getting any sort of entry job requires an enormous bribe to the manager – roughly $500. It […]
Five of us motor through Halong Bay
[Vietnam] I rent a boat, and with it comes a boatman, a guide, a cook, and the boat’s owner. We meander for several days among and through hundreds of islands, stopping to buy meals from floating seafood farms. Shrimp, eels, fish, crab, scampi. As we wind our way through the limestone karst formations that make […]
The town of Bai Chay
[Vietnam] I walk out of the small, dilapidated Hanoi terminal, and find the first taxi that will drive me the four hours directly to Halong Bay. Later, I find myself in a tiny three room hotel on the shore of the seaside village of Bai Chay. Only this morning I had woken up on the […]
Guilin, China – Along the River Li
[China] What brings a place or location into the scope of my attention? My earliest enthusiasm for travel was through pictures in a book about Guilin, China. I got it at a garage sale when I was 20. I looked at the pictures about once a year. But with the exception of London, I didn’t […]
Train through Yunnan Province
[China] I walked across the bridge between Lao Cai, Vietnam to Hekou, China to find my 37 hour train to Kunming. We’d stop at every town, and I’d stick my nose out the window or walk out on the platform. In addition to the smells, the architecture, the clothing, and the faces, the real fun […]
Man and Mosque in Kashgar
[China] This far western part of China is strongly Islamic. I’d been on the road for four days, coming from Islamabad, Pakistan. The buses were filled with Pakistani silk traders who cursed at the slow Chinese driving. I breathed one long sigh of relief as we puttered our way along at about 40 MPH. How […]