Travels in the Riel World

Many of you are no doubt familiar with the travel writing of Rolf Potts, and perhaps of his website Vagablogging. My travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World, was recently reviewed on Vagablogging by another writer. Here is an excerpt from the review:

As a writer, Riel has a painter’s eye for the color and mood of life on the road. Here, for instance, is his description of an African sunset: “It began with streaks of light shooting down from thick clouds. As if the heavens had opened and hundreds of golden Masai spears were thrust down into the pale green dusk of the plain. Then a sunset exploded across the sky in streaks of mango and purple.”

As a result, veteran travelers will enjoy revisiting favorite places through his prose, while other passages can serve as a primer for your wish list of destinations. A freelance writer and consultant, Riel lets his own story unfold slowly through the book, which correspondingly ‘grows’ on you with a series of anecdotes and vignettes. If you love that sub-genre of armchair travel that involves stories of everyday adventurers circling the globe, then Two Laps Around the World is a keeper.

You can see the entire review here, and read more about my book, including some sample chapters, here.

Paul Theroux has, over the years, provided us with some wonderful literary accounts of his global travels. His latest venture, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, actually retraces a trip from Europe to Asia that he wrote about in his 1975 book, The Great Railway Bazaar. He talked about these journeys and other topics recently in an interview that he did with National Geographic Traveler. An excerpt:

In your latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, you retraced your 1973 Great Railway Bazaar journey. What changed between trips?

“Even a rickshaw wallah has a cell phone,” an Indian said to me. In 1973 I tried to make two phone calls in four and a half months—one, from Japan, succeeded, the other, from India, failed. Cheap watches and blue jeans were almost unknown in the wider world in 1973, but everyone has them now, in Americanized cultures. In 1973, China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution—the whole of China disrupted with mass hysteria—and now, of course, the Chinese manufacture most of our goods.

What’s stayed the same?

Undoubtedly village life in rural India—the pattern of harvest, or drought, debt, hunger, and the pieties of Hinduism. This in great contrast to parallel developments in information technology.

What surprised you?

The forgiveness in Vietnam. After we dropped over seven million tons of bombs, 13 million gallons of Agent Orange, and killed millions of their people, Americans are greeted politely, welcomed, urged to have some noodles. It’s a great lesson to anyone familiar with other wars and atrocities.

If you could retreat from the life you live now, what would you do—and where?

I have spent my whole life searching for the best place to live. I spend the summer on Cape Cod, where I spent my happiest childhood days. I spend the winter in happy Hawaii, bathed in marine sunlight. I make forays to the coast of Maine. These are sun-kissed days. Why retreat?

If you’re a fan of this blog, you might be interested to know about my new writing venture. I recently began penning a North American travel column for Examiner.com. It’s a bit of a departure from what I do here, but also a nice complement. Travels in the Riel World will continue to delve into cross-cultural topics and international travel, while my Examiner column will focus on travel in North America. It’s also another platform and audience for my work, so wish me luck. Better yet, come visit!

I’ve written about Pico Iyer a couple of times previously and he is one of the world’s more thoughtful and interesting travel writers. He recently gave an intriguing interview to Gadling that is worth reading. An excerpt:

One quality I’ve always admired about your writing is your ability to tap into the personality of a country. What advice do you have about tapping into the essence of a place?

Places are like people, with personalities just as distinct, and a travel writer, of course, is someone who aims to create not just a photograph of a place but a portrait. My advice would be to walk and walk and walk, as soon as you arrive, when the place is still new to you and every perception is fresh–the mind has not yet begun to settle into prejudices or arguments.

Take down everything and remember that anything (an Internet cafe, a Golden Arches, a shop selling TVs) is interesting, and revealing of the society around it. And try, wherever possible, to remember that you’ve come all this way–even if it’s only to another state–to enter a foreign state of mind, a different sensibility. The joy of travel is not being reminded of your assumptions, or being confirmed in your beliefs, but in being led out of them, to something utterly other and, perhaps, unfathomable.

As much as traveling can create the sense that one is connected to the world, it can also create the feeling of being unsettled. What do you do to stay grounded and keep track of yourself in the process?

I tend to be too settled, so I seek out being unsettled–at the very least, that can test the ground I have. Everywhere man is settled, as Emerson says, and only insofar as he unsettled is there any hope for him. I hope I have solid ground within me–I do after all spend two months a year in a monastery, and eight months in a monastic life in Japan (a two-room apartment without cellphone or printer or World Wide Web or car or bicycle), and I have been living in these simple cells now for more than 16 years, so I feel that I am rooted, as much as I need to be, in what is real and stable.

But to stay too long in these places that I know as well as my heartbeat would be to risk complacency, blindness and inertia. So I try to force myself out of my grooves, feeling that groundedness is what I have, unsettledness what I need.

Is there a piece of travel wisdom someone told you that you took to heart? What was it?

The Dalai Lama always suggests that there’s no virtue in looking backward–the future is what we can change–and I suppose that is what has guided me in my traveling life. Most of the travelers I love and learned from are in some ways journeying back into the past, to explain the present; I, by making most of my central travels to places like Los Angeles Airport or the state of jet lag (or even to the monastery) have always pointed myself towards the future. My interest is not in what the world has been but what we can make of it, especially those 21st century citizens who are, to some degree, children of possibility (alarming or pretentious as that phrase might sound to some).

There is much more from Iyer in the full interview. Check it out.

I always love to hear stories of how other people discovered their love of travel, and a great source for this are the monthly interviews with travel writers that Rolf Potts publishes on his website. He recently interviewed Catherine Watson. Here is an excerpt:

How did you get started traveling?

By the time I was a teenager, we were taking a five- or six-week road trip every summer. Our family wasn’t one of those happy, totally in-sync Brady Bunches, but my parents did a remarkably good job of teaching my four siblings and me how to travel. We went all over the continent, from the Arctic Circle to the southern border of Yucatan…

I don’t know how my mother felt about it, but my father hated planning, and he liked getting lost. I picked up both those attitudes. He also refused to stop at any attraction kids like. There were no Treasure Caves, Mystery Spots or Reptile Farms for us, though he did break down once and take us to Wall Drug. Otherwise, it was Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Yosemite, the Great Smokies, and every historic town, village, national monument and battlefield in between.

Every trip was a crash course in geography, history, culture, anthropology, religion, even local politics. In the car, kids were assigned to take turns reading aloud to the rest of the family about the places we were coming to. Wherever we stopped, we had to go out in teams – big kids watching little kids – and find things out. In Mexico, for example, my parents routinely sent us off into crowded public markets to shop for food, and we learned first-hand how kind people could be, even when they’d never met us before and couldn’t understand what we were saying.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

The world. The whole, damned, beautiful, complicated, aggravating, incredible world. And the freedom that comes with it. I feel most alive when I am out there, on the road, meeting people, asking questions – not just for myself, but on behalf of readers. I’m a better traveler when I keep my audience in mind: They help me be braver, more curious, my best self – because I’m traveling for someone besides me.

There is an interesting and in-depth interview with travel writer Rolf Potts on World Hum. Potts covers a variety of topics and it’s worth checking out the entire piece, especially if you’re interested in travel writing. But here is a small excerpt from the interview about the transformation of travel in recent decades.

What major changes have you noticed in travel in general?

Electronic communication has radically transformed the travel experience. Fourteen years ago I took my first vagabonding trip, eight months around North America. That was before the ubiquity of email and cell phones; communication meant sending a postcard or jamming quarters into a pay phone, which meant I was usually out of touch with family for weeks at a time. Five years later, I was paying $15 an hour to send emails from a slow dial-up connection in Luang Prabang, and it seemed like a communication miracle. By contrast, just last month I was traveling with an AT&T BlackJack in East Africa, and I could use it to call home or check my messages in Juba, Sudan. This wasn’t just a one-way thing: The people in Juba may not have much in the way of indoor plumbing, but they love their cell phones, too; I lost track of how many little thatch-roofed kiosks I saw selling phone credits.

So that’s the main transformation I’ve seen. There have been other big developments in the past decade, including the boom in online travel-planning resources and the rise (and possible fall) of cheap airfares. But communication technology stands out. 

The new challenge here, of course, is learning how to wean yourself off this new technology as you travel. The charm of leaving home has always been that it transports you into new places and vivid moments; it makes you slow down and take note of your new surroundings. This can be hard to do if you’re always checking your inbox or texting your friends back home. If you can actually do that—if you can cut the electronic umbilical cord and embrace the moment on the road—travel can still be as amazing as ever.

In 1975, Paul Theroux published a bestselling travel memoir, The Great Railway Bazaar, about a train trip from Europe to Asia. In the years since he has become one of the world’s most successful and best known travel writers. He recently published a new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which he retraces much of his first route to Asia by train. He spoke with USA Today about the trip and his writing.

The most striking change you saw?
Without question, Vietnam. From a country that was a muddy, flattened, bloody, beleaguered hell hole … to the country it is today: flourishing, forward-looking and, almost incredibly, forgiving.

How tempted were you to try to retrace your 1973 route through Afghanistan?
After I read about the numerous abductions and killings of Western wanderers like myself in Afghanistan, it was an easy decision to detour through Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — some great train rides in those countries. And lately they have been in the news, so I think I was lucky in my timing.

Do you agree with The Guardian’s description of you as “the Indiana Jones of American literature”?
Very nice. I’m flattered. But I have only been shot at three times: twice in Africa, once in the Philippines. I have been bitten by snakes, and once by bats in an outhouse one night in Central Africa. I think Indy can top those.

Any advice to travelers?
If you’re planning to write something about your travels, go alone, go overland, go cheap, and leave all electronics behind. To all travelers, I urge patience.

I have to take time for a bit of book promotion here, as there was some nice press coverage in today’s Arizona Daily Star newspaper about my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

It was the trip of a lifetime. Two trips, actually. In 2002, Bob Riel and Lisa Higgins, wed the year before, embarked on a three-month-long trip that took them from Greece to Turkey, then on to Kenya, Thailand, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 2005 they did it again, this time traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Singapore, Egypt and Europe.

But this was no four-star-hotel experience. The couple traveled at times by rickshaw and rickety bus, flatbed truck and camel.

More than mere sightseeing, the trip, says Riel, was a life sabbatical — one that more of us should undertake to renew and refresh our lives.

You can read more about the book, including some chapter excerpts, at my other website, www.bobriel.com.

Everyone knows about the Frommer’s series of travel guidebooks, but what about the man behind the guides? Arthur Frommer just did an online interview for Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding site and talked about his life as a traveler and a writer. Some highlights:

How did you get started traveling?

By accident, and at the expense of Uncle Sam. I was drafted into the army when I graduated from the Yale University Law School. The Korea War was going on at that time, and I was trained to be an infantryman in Korea when someone in the Pentagon must have discovered some of my linguistic abilities. I was assigned instead to Berlin. I wanted to pinch myself for my good luck. I had never dreamed that I would ever be able to see Europe, as I came from a family of very modest income.

And there I was smack in the heart of Europe with a strong US dollar and I utilized every opportunity I could find, every weekend and three-day pass, to simply travel throughout Europe regardless of how little money I had. I was living on a PFC’s salary. And in the course of doing that it occurred to me that I should write a book about the experience.

I discovered that the fact that I had very little money had transformed the quality of my vacation and travels and made them far more rewarding and far more pleasant. I discovered that the less you spend the more you enjoy — the more authentic is the experience you have.

As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

My biggest challenge is to keep my own eyes and consciousness fresh. I’ve realized that there was such a thing as too much travel, which causes you to be jaded.

There was a moment when my plane landed at the airport of Amsterdam one day and I didn’t even take my eyes away from the book that I was reading because I was as familiar with Amsterdam as I was with my own home city. And I suddenly realized that that’s not the mood with which travelers approach a new destination — travel is exciting and novel and somewhat bewildering. And it’s very important, even for an experienced travel writer: not to become jaded and not to relax, but to keep in mind the tingling excitement that most tourists feel when they encounter a foreign destination for the first time.

That has led to a style of writing in which nothing is left out — in which you don’t assume anything, in which you take the reader by the hand and lead him through the steps he will need to absorb in order to enjoy a particular destination.

What travel authors have influenced you?

I don’t think I was influenced by any other authors of travel guides per se, but I loved reading general travel memoirs about trips that people have taken. I remember that Richard Halliburton had an immense impact on me earlier in my life when I read him as a young boy.

But I find that general reading, both novels as well as nonfiction books about different aras of the world, has had a great impact on my writing. I’ve been fascinated in recent months to read the Cairo Trilogy of Naguib Mahfouz, the great Egyptian Nobel Prize winner. I have also been influenced by the wonderful books written by Rory Stewart, who in the immediate weeks after 9/11 walked from one end of Afghanistan to the other and wrote a book, The Places In Between, that gives you a better picture of what’s going on in Afghanistan than any other deeper, more political tome could possibly bring to you.

World Hum recently posted an interview with travel writer Laurie Gough. An excerpt:

In hindsight, can you explain how you knew you were destined to be a wanderer?

My Dad was a geographer and he was a lover of maps and any road leading to someplace new. Every summer we’d pack up our trailer and station wagon and go off somewhere. We’d go to the Maritimes, the Rockies, the Canadian Prairies, New England, the Great Lakes, Wisconsin, Quebec, the Appalachians. Every summer was different. We even went to Europe one summer when I was 13, rented a caravan and camped. My sister, who was older, hated those camping trips, but I didn’t. Those camping trips cultivated my love of the open road.

On your Web site, you offer 10 tips for travelers. How would you characterize your own travel philosophy?

I think we look for different things when we travel at different stages of our lives. When I was in my 20s and traveling, I was looking for answers to all the big questions. I was looking for adventure, love, meaning, how to live, where to live, how other people in the world lived. Now I’m just looking for a place with some sun and really good iced mochas.

Actually, no, I’m still looking for some of those big things. I’m definitely still looking for adventure, for that experience of living in the moment when everything feels brand-new and wondrous, and I’m still looking for the perfect place to live. 

2007 has been a big year. I recently wrote about the birth of my first child. Now, I’m here with news about a different type of birth - that of my first book.

Two Laps Around the World: Tales and Insights from a Life Sabbatical is now on the market. The book is about the experiences that my wife and I had when we decided to take a few months off from our careers to travel. The experience was so incredible that we repeated the experience less than three years later and so ended up traveling around the world twice - once in each direction.

You can read more about the book here. There are excerpts from a few chapters, a reading guide for book clubs, and information about how to buy an autographed copy. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope you’ll check it out! And when you do, please let me know what you think.

Some of the better travel writing on the internet can be found in the Dispatches section of World Hum. The site’s most recent story has Catherine Watson writing about a period of time that she spent on Easter Island. An excerpt:

By the time I got to the South Pacific, I was in my early 30s, and I’d been looking for home all my life, for the place I really belonged, the place where I should have been born. I felt I’d found it on Easter Island the instant I stepped off the plane. It was as if the island had been waiting for me, all that time, the way I’d been waiting for the island…

I began to exist in the present tense, as if I had no past regrets and no future fears. It was something I’d never done before. That, and the incredible distances surrounding us, lent me an exhilarating freedom. I likened it to hiding in a childhood tree fort with the rope pulled up. No one knows where I am, I kept thinking. No one can find me.

My days quickly fell into their own gentle rhythm: Go out walking after breakfast. Explore a cave, a volcano, a vista. Take pictures. Talk to people. Go home for lunch. Nap or write or poke around Hanga Roa. And in the late afternoon, walk over to Tahai, the row of giant statues, called moai, that stood closest to town, and watch the sunset paint the sky in the direction of Tahiti…

From the beginning, Yolanda had been urging me to stay longer. I’d only planned on a week, but as plane day got closer and she kept talking, I weakened. Yolanda was right, I decided. There was really no reason to leave so soon. The only thing waiting for me was a small internship on a newspaper in Buenos Aires, and the start date was more than a month away. Besides, there was no penalty for changing my reservation. What harm could it do to wait?

I missed one plane. And then another. And another.

And while I waited, my newly simple life grew complicated. I was enmeshed in a love affair, all right, but it wasn’t exactly with the man I’d met. It was with Easter Island itself. My island.

Holland Carter had an interesting piece in the NY Times recently, in which he reminisced about a Greyhound bus trip he took across a good portion of the U.S. in the 1960s when he was still a teenager. The story is a worthwhile read for Cotter’s descriptions of American life as viewed from the road a few decades ago.

Next I crashed with a cousin, John, a young professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smart, tense, busy with summer school, he gave me a tour of the neat, green campus, then said, ”I want to show you another part of town.” He drove me a short distance from the university to a road lined with falling-down houses, where African-Americans lived. I had never seen such poverty.

He asked to look at my Greyhound map, and he traced with his finger the route I was taking to Texas. ”Look,” he said, ”when you get to Mississippi, stay on the bus. Don’t get off. Go straight through.” Just a few days earlier three civil-rights workers, two of them white and from the North, had disappeared near Meridian. The word was that they’d been murdered. This was Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Bad things were happening, beatings, burnings. John was afraid the South was going to blow.

After North Carolina the trip was different because I was different, on the alert. In Atlanta, on Peachtree Street — a name I knew from ”Gone With the Wind” — I saw a restaurant with a side window for serving blacks and drinking fountains labeled ”black” and ”white.” I lost my wallet there and slept overnight in the bus station and then later in a park in Montgomery, Ala. A recruiting street preacher found me there, brought me to a soup kitchen breakfast, then gave me the third degree: ”Have you found the Lord? Are you saved?” I honestly didn’t know.

Of course I got off the bus in Mississippi, more than once. In Jackson I wanted to find Eudora Welty, but her name wasn’t in the phone book. By this time lack ofsleep, combined with hot weather, gave the days a kind of hallucinatory looseness. I was at ease on the road for the first time.

I also found this other paragraph interesting, because of the author’s sense that his experience may be difficult to re-create in the contemporary U.S.

I couldn’t know that within the year Malcolm would be dead; that the bombing of North Vietnam, and the anger in response to it, would begin; that Kerouac’s Beat would become a period artifact, replaced temporarily by something called Flower Power. Or that in a new century Americans would stop making quest-journeys, would spiritually stay put, put on weight, wait for the world to come to them.

What do you think? Have Americans become complacent? Have we stopped making quest-journeys?

Tom Haines of the Boston Globe, one of the country’s better travel journalists, is currently wandering about in the Arctic regions of Norway. He’s blogging about his experiences for the Globe, and also just did an online interview with World Hum:

World Hum: Where in the world are you?

Right now, at the harbor in Vardo, an island town a mile or so offshore at the far northern edge of Norway. It’s the end of the road—E75—which begins in Greece.

What are you doing there?

I’m here on assignment for the Boston Globe with photographer Essdras Suarez, and we spent a night on Hornoya, another island a 20-minute tug ride from this harbor.

Hornoya is home to a lighthouse and more than 10,000 nesting seabirds. On Hornoya, watching the high summer drama of life for puffins and guillemots, kittiwakes and cormorants…

The puffins and friends are just one part, though, of a look at life at this edge of Europe. Third part of a series that so far has landed in Romania and Turkey. Here we’re hanging out with scientists and miscellaneous locals to see how nature and the life settled in it are changing these days. It will all go toward a package for the Globe in a few weeks.

What did you experience in the last 24 hours that you’d recommend?

Stood in the tundra just south of Vardo and watched an eagle owl fly low in search of prey. Fog had lifted a bit, the 11 p.m. sunset blazed—literally, as the cliche comes from somewhere—over a low ridge, a cool breeze dropped the temperature from a midday high near 65 down into the 40s. The tundra is tree free in this part, so I could stand and watch the owl cruise a mile or more south—always just a few feet off the ground—then angle back.

There are so many places in the world to visit, aren’t there?

Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Confederates in the Attic and several other popular travel books, stopped by Rolf Potts’ website recently to talk about travel and travel writing.  Some excerpts from his interview:

As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?

Wearing down, mentally and physically. Travel comes from the French word, travail; it can be hard work. … Improvising in strange places makes for the best stories, but it’s also exhausting. You’re never really off work; everything that happens from the moment you wake to the moment you fall asleep is potential material. You’re also planning ahead — where do I go next, how do I get there, what will I do there? — while trying to milk the most out of the place you’re in.

What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

Take risks. Not necessarily physical risks, though that often comes with the territory. Rather, personal and professional risks. And do it while you’re young. Travel is potentially punishing: to your body, to your relationships, to your bank account. … If you do it young, the worst that can happen (apart from death, dismemberment, or chronic dysentery) is that you’ll suffer for awhile and find something else to do, which is better than being filled with regret years later over never having tried.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

Seeing the world at someone else’s expense, and having something to do while you’re out there. Writing about travel makes you pay closer attention, and it gives you a way into whatever place you’re visiting. It makes you a traveler rather than just a tourist, or a vagrant. As Raban puts it, taking notes on the road “gives me occupation and identity when I might otherwise recognize myself as an ageing unkempt drifter without visible means of support.”

There was a wonderful in-depth interview recently on World Hum with the travel writer Pico Iyer.  He is the author of Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling Off the Map, and a number of other titles.  Some excerts from the interview:

How do you think travel writing has evolved over the past 20 or 30 years?

I think it’s evolved a great deal. Partly because even when I was growing up, travel writing was mostly white, nearly always male, often from England, and about going to Africa and Kenya and surveying the strange customs of the natives. And I think now it is more and more about a half-Thai, half-German girl living in Iowa City, going to an Afghanistan full of German aid workers and Japanese businessmen.

And what used to be a very simple discussion between, in some ways, colonizer and colonized, is now a dialogue between a multi-cultural society and a multi-cultural person. All of which has made the texts much more interesting.

I think travel writing is also having to confront a challenge, which is a good challenge, namely the fact that it is not a remarkable thing now to describe Mongolia or Tibet because anyone can access them on the Internet or their TV screens. And so the person who goes there has to do something more and other than just bringing back the sights and sounds. … the travel writer has to extend the form and refresh it, to write a more inward kind of travel.

You are very adept at noticing trends, global trends, not only in cultures and how they’re exchanged, but also in people, and how they travel. Have you noticed anything in terms of after 9/11 versus pre- 9/11 about how that changed?

In the rest of the world, I don’t see much of a change in perceptions of America except perhaps a hardening of that fundamental disjunction … which is that most parts of the world are quite skeptical or hostile towards the American government, but those same people love American culture and love nearly every American individual they meet.

A few years ago I went around to all the countries then covered by the “Trading With the Enemies Act” - Cuba, China, North Korea, and Vietnam - and I found … those people were more keen to meet Americans than anyone else.  And that’s something … that many people in this country who don’t travel, don’t know.

I suppose the only thing I notice is that the gap between America and the rest of the world does seem to be increasing. … The country that most wants to change the world is also the country that least wants to see or learn about the world.

The most recent Washington Post travel section carried a fun story by Ben Brazil about a journey he and his wife took through southern Mexico, entirely on their own and via public transportation.

For nearly a week, my new wife, Laura, and I had been traveling Mexico’s Carretera Fronteriza del Sur — the Southern Border Highway — a 262-mile route that hugs the border between Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. We had climbed the Maya pyramids at Palenque, studied the ancient frescoes at Bonampak and taken a sunrise boat to the riverside ruins of Yaxchilan, where howler monkeys roared from the treetops.

Between ruins, we visited a shaman, forded a jungle river and hitched a ride with a cool 43-year-old Mexican hippie and his hot 24-year-old Swedish girlfriend. …

If you just want to see the highlights, scads of tour operators in Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas — Chiapas’s main tourist hubs — sell reasonably priced package tours. But we wanted to see the whole highway on an unscripted journey open to chance encounters and random weirdness. As such, we opted to travel on public transportation and eschew reservations, following an itinerary so vague that it verged on impressionist art. … 

I loved the do-it-yourself approach, but it’s not fast, efficient or even marginally luxurious. Almost no full-size buses serve the remote border area, so travelers rely on combis — vans and microbuses that comfortably accommodate about 15 passengers. In practice, this means that “full” combis carry up to 25 passengers, and often their poultry. It can get tight.

It’s not recommended travel for everyone, but it’s a fun read.

I’ve been doing a bit of my own traveling the past couple of weeks.  Lisa and I have been meaning to explore more of South America and so we decided to take a bit of time to see part of Argentina.  It’s too big of a country to explore in one trip and so our focus, in addition to Buenos Aires, has been to experience Patagonia.  We’ve spent time in El Calafate and in nearby Glacier National Park, as well as at the “end of the world” in Ushuaia and Tierra del Fuego.

The Patagonian landscape is something to behold.  Spectacular and stark, dramatic and barren, all at the same time.  While traveling here, I’ve been reading Bruce Chatwin’s famous travel narrative, In Patagonia, which is a worthwhile companion for any trip to this part of the world.  Here is one example of how Chatwin describes the region:

The Patagonian desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed.  Unlike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience.  Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible.  In summing up The Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these arid wastes had taken such firm possession of his mind.

While in El Calafate, we experienced some of what Chatwin wrote about.  On the Patagonian steppe, the land stretches vacantly for miles and the wind howls.  The solitary homes of the local farms are all protected from the wind by rows of planted trees.  Otherwise, there is little vegetation aside from grass.  It’s an apt landscape for the southernmost region of the world.