A sea of Silver - trobriand Islands
To spin a globe, choose the furthest place I could find and dive in at the deepest end.
The Trobriand Islands are a remote group of coral atolls off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The islanders live mostly in small villages scattered across the islands and maintain a life of subsistence, always in close relationship with the sea. Despite the encroachment of western values and, increasingly, modern technology, their language, tradition and culture remain largely untouched.
In our time of world-wonder checklists, we often dismiss the value of slow, immersive travel to places devoid of Instagram fame. On the Trobriand Islands, there are no extraordinary ruins, no exotic cuisine, no majestic landscape. Only a community of beautiful people largely forgotten by the frenetic waves of modern life. Their culture is their treasure, as worthy as any glorious temple, but harder to see. It takes patience, a love of questions and heartfelt intent. The world of full of Trobriand Islands, colorful shards from the cultural kaleidoscope of humanity. Find them, travel renouncing conformity and reap the benefits of your audacity.
One hundred steps - Bolivia
Scattered across the world there must have been thousands of hat factories like this one. All of them using brutish machines, steam and hundreds of hands to coax and threaten wool into different shapes and colors. Hands making hats in India, hats in London, hats in Istanbul. But the world of hats is gone, and the world of hands is almost gone. This factory in Bolivia was a glance in the rearview mirror, a portal to the past. And like every other hat factory, it will also disappear. But for now, it’s a reminder of a darker, harder, more physical world. A world we are happy to leave behind but not without stopping to glace back and appreciate the beauty in the craft of our hands.
A village by the STREAM- BANGKOK
How could you not love this village by a stream? Bangkok is a firecracker of a place. A candy shop of excitement. The streets swarm you with possibilities while you grasp, grasp, grasp but you’ll never get it all, or even enough. Here, the best satay of your life. There, a hidden bar behind timeworn wooden doors. Ancient temples scattered among neon lights. Golden flowers among golden statues. Always the thrill of death-by-tuktuk just a few boisterous feet away. It’s more than a great city. It’s the only one of its kind, a character as deep as it is unique.
Within an hour of arriving in Bangkok we hit the markets. Priorities. Every possible combination of meat and fire met Thailand’s love of spice in one maze of streets, stalls and smiles.
I felt a natural spirituality in Thailand different from anywhere else. Prayer candles are lit with the ease of breath. Taxi drivers wear bronze amulets for protection. Trees collect gifts. Temples of gold and intricate shrines are ubiquitous. It seemed like everything had a layer beyond the visible. Spirituality woven so tight into daily life as to make them indistinguishable.
A KIND OF BLUE - ISTANBUL
A place is inseparable from the memories you’ve made there. And Istanbul has always been magic.My favorite places are those created for confusion. Those mazes disguised as cities: the hills of Valparaiso, the Medina of Marrakech, the white stone streets of Dubrovnik. Urban planning be damned. Give me alleyways over avenues any day. No street signs required. Old Istanbul is paradise for misplacing yourself: the cobbled streets are madman’s scribble connecting bazaars and mosques and palaces and that little Turkish delight store that you’ll never find again in one happy jumble of secrets to uncover.
We were crossing Galata Bridge soon after the storm clouds disappeared. The rain had stopped but the air was still charged. The city lights crackled in the approaching darkness. That night, sky and water were steeped in color. There is a shade of twilight that only exists in Istanbul, a deep electric blue endemic to the city. As we walked the bridge, calls to prayer blossomed from minarets across town. The sound broke through the hustle of the streets, blanketing everything with music. We stopped to look at the lights across the water. And that’s my favorite Istanbul: that pause when the city, the blue and the song came together.
Dancers - Cusco
One bright morning back in 2016, I was catching up on emails at the lovely Belmond Monasterio in Cuzco when in rushed Isa and Fiore. “There’s your kind of mayhem outside”, they said. So out I went. Sucker for mayhem.
Beyond the colors, there is a story. With all the growth and progress of globalization, came cultural homogenization. Humanity loses a language every two weeks. “When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It’s like dropping a bomb on the Louvre” said MIT linguist Ken Hale is quoted in The Wayfinders. Can we count how many dances are left? How many rites and rituals? How many unique patterns of embroidery? For me, the same answer to all these questions: “Less than before. Far too few.”
In the dancers there was an intensity akin to the clenched teeth of survival. As if the furious sway of dresses could blow enough to keep the fire of their traditions burning. The dancers danced in the hot sun. We clapped genuinely and enthusiastically. They stood in front of the crowds on the cobblestone streets of the old city and smiled big smiles of pride and relief. The fire was alive, for one more day.
now you are in - Ethiopia
It’s been a little a few years since I traveled there with my brother on a dark, beautiful trip which was as challenging as it was rewarding. The country has been in the news lately as factions fight over control of the northern state of Tigray. Many of the towns and cities that I explored happily, Axum, Adigrat, Mekelle, now appear in the paper associated with heart-thumping words: rebel-held, escalating conflict, government troops, heavy bombardment, refugees. I’ve never looked back at photos and wondered if the building still stands or if the people I met are safe.
While scanning the photos I had published before, I felt something off. In the pursuit of the exotic, I lost track of the authentic. Ethiopia can be remarkably cinematographic with handsome faces in white shrouds illuminated by candlelight around every corner. But it’s also more complex than I presented. And in complexity lies humanity. Our ability to empathize is built on the foundation of shared human experiences, not on the color coordination of impossibly magical scenes.
The roads of Ethiopia brought mayhem. It started with the blue and white Lada taxis that sputtered their way around Addis, then the broken-down buses, followed by firecracker rickshaws. One night, we jumped into a small van with warm bodies in every corner. We intended to overnight back to Addis, thus making “the most” of our time in Ethiopia by traveling by night and exploring by day. Over the next 10 hours we raced on steep, winding roads, the driver high on khat, shouting at the wind through his open window, every curve a jaw-clenching lottery. Our legs, crushed, liquified, and jammed into an impossibly small space, alternated between pain and numbness throughout the night. Every couple of hours, once adrenaline subsided and exhaustion crept in, we would fade into a sad excuse of a sleep. And then, perfectly timed to our rhythms of slumber, the van would stop in some dark corner of the world and we would stumble out while armed soldiers checked the van for contraband. We arrived at Addis shattered, ready to murder for a coffee or a nap. But we kept traveling with the locals as much as we could. Because though that night was dark and full of terrors, we laughed about it then and now. And nobody laughs through a good night’s sleep.
