TWO MEN WITH SLRs and wide-angle lenses were photographing the cafe. The waiter, a balding man in a blue-and-gray argyle sweatervest and red skirted apron, brought them drinks to shoot: a small cappuccino, a frothy latte, a mélange topped with milk. They snapped photos of the decadent chocolate and jam cakes, the curved chandeliers and the broad dark wood walls that framed the morning light … Continue reading My Meta Viennese Breakfast
I DECIDED LONG BEFORE this journey began that I would not shave until this trip is finished. It was a silly and useless oath, but something to hold onto and a barometer of progress beyond simply maintaining this blog and tracking how much money I bleed. Each day I do not cut my facial hair is one more day I can claim to have lived … Continue reading On Travel Beards
EVERYONE AND HIS BROTHER owns a silk shop in Varanasi. Walk down the street and you will be personally invited to one every few paces, told “No pressure” and “Just take a look” when you hesitate, persuaded when they explain the secret to proving real silk from polyester knockoffs (the threads burn into ashes) and allowed to see the weaving factory because somewhere down the … Continue reading How We Spent Ten Dollars On Scarves in Varanasi and Why We’re Okay With It
IN MAY 2011, I was sitting across from four editors in the startlingly modern private boardroom of the Chronicle Herald newspaper in west end Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’d prepared for this job interview all week. The Herald isn’t an especially well-regarded publication (it’s locally nicknamed “The Chronically Horrid”), but holds the distinction of being one of Canada’s oldest daily papers, and the largest of the … Continue reading A Postgrad’s Travel Tale: The Aimless Twenty-Something Life
A VERY PARTICULAR DARKNESS envelops Guinsa at night. Arriving after sunset, I was met by the few dozen parked cars surrounded by something smaller than a village—a smattering of homes and restaurants, maybe 30 in all, mostly closed up by 8 p.m. The temple complex itself lies one kilometer uphill, wedged within a valley surrounded by mountains on the eastern border of North Chungcheong, the … Continue reading Guinsa, South Korea: Accidentally the Only White Guy Among 8,000 Koreans in an Extremely Holy Temple in the Middle of Nowhere
ACROSS THE STREET from the Taitung County airport, in a rural patch of southeast Taiwan, sits a gift shop-slash-restaurant that is in no way discernibly Taiwanese. On its walls hang aboriginal-style handbags of primary colours, generic landscape paintings, kitschy bamboo scrolls and an inexplicable amount of Snoopy paraphernalia. My notes on the contents of this gift-shop-slash-restaurant are extensive, because I sat there for two hours, … Continue reading Taitung, Taiwan: Wherein Nearly Everything Goes Wrong (or: How I Learned to Never Stop Worrying and Love Itineraries)
WE HADN’T SLEPT longer than an hour when the disinterested, pale-shirted, tired-eyed Chinese airport security guard padded over and shook us awake. I knew immediately that our plan had failed. When you travel like this, very rarely do things go as expected. Flustered by interrupted sleep at 1:30 a.m. and a lack of ability in any Chinese language, we tried to explain, to plead that … Continue reading Qingdao, China: Sleeping Everywhere But in a Motel
ACCORDING TO GOOGLE MAPS, Chen Yang’s farm is situated in the middle of a patch of complete, unblemished grayness. There is no Street View. Driving directions on his website are an exhausting 368 words long: Jingzang Expressway to Badaling, a tunnel to exit 62, keep right after a U-turn 200 meters after a toll booth at a fork in the road. It’s safe to say … Continue reading Chenjiapu Valley, China: A Refreshing Take on the Great Wall
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN Hue, Vietnam’s pre-communist capital, and Savannakhet, a sleepy Lao city by the Mekong River, is over 400 kilometres of thick tropical forest. The border checkpoint, somewhere in-between, lies truly in the middle of nowhere. Four hours got us this far, and it would be longer until Savannakhet: five hours by bus, and unimaginably longer if the bus, say, left without us. Which, … Continue reading The Viet-Lao Border: Wherein Our Bus Deserts Us on a Remote Mountain Range
Let me be clear: the lads only went to see boobs. This is why, after two-and-a-half hours of drinking through one of South Korea’s most notorious and least desirable red light districts—and having eyeballed disappointingly zero nipples—it seemed a good idea to ask the six-foot-two, black-leather-jacketed Russian man stumbling down the street at 2:30 in the morning: “Do you know where a strip bar is?” … Continue reading Busan, South Korea: Texas Street is an Angry, Lonely Place
A Long Way Back 