The post Top 10 Things to Do in Rio de Janeiro appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
From all holidays in the sun, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil might be the one with the most activities to partake in. With its vibrant nightlife, iconic attractions and one of the seven wonders of the world, the city, which was once the capital of Brazil, has a lot to offer travelers from all different tastes.
1) Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow)
Designed by the neo-futuristic architect Santiago Calatrava, the applied science museum aims to create an open dialogue about the next 50 years. It takes in consideration all of man’s alteration of the world in its primary state while emphasizing ethical values and shining light on issues that need our urgent attention. Aside from the expositions available, the museum also hosts year-round classes, workshops and discussion panels.
2) Parque Lage
Designed by English landscaper John Tyndale back in 1840, this park is surrounded by the Atlantic Forest and is located at the bottom of Corcovado mountain. Easily accessible to the general public, the park is also known as a cultural hotspot by locals, as it houses a 14th-century house turned into a visual art school. A popular place to take pictures or have a romantic brunch is at Bistrô Plage, located in the mansion’s central patio by the pool.
3) Hang Gliding
For the sports aficionado, hang gliding will be an exciting and unforgettable activity filled with the best views from above.
As one of the most popular wind sports in the city, there are a lot of reliable companies which you can hire hang gliding equipment from. The ones situated in Pedra Bonita have the easiest access, being only 20 minutes from the Ipanema beach, and are known for having the best views. During this experience, remember to wear comfortable clothes, sunscreen and avoid taking big bags.
4) Escadaria Selarón (Selarón’s Steps)
Jorge Selarón, a Chilean-born ceramist, immigrated to Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s. Years later, in 1990, he decided to decorate the staircase near his house – which connects the Lapa neighborhood to the Santa Teresa neighborhood – as a tribute to Brazilians.
The staircase took 20 years to be completed and is made out of tiles and porcelain donated by Jorge’s friends and supporters. The landmark of 215 steps and the wall of both sides are decorated with painted tiles, now known as one of the most popular postcards of the city.
5) Maracanã Stadium
Officially called Jornalista Mário Filho Stadium, the soccer stadium is the most famous and largest in the country. Specially built for the 1950’s FIFA World Cup hosted in Brazil, the stadium got its nickname due to its location, the Maracanã neighborhood.
The historic stadium is known for many matches and moments of soccer history, but the most iconic one might be the 1,000th goal of soccer player Pele’s career. The stadium offers tours, but the best way to enjoy the place is by watching a soccer match, as soccer is one of Brazil’s biggest passions.
6) Lapa’s Nightlife
The Lapa neighborhood is known for being the center of Rio’s nightlife. When in Lapa, some of the must-do’s are watching a concert at Circo Voador, going for drinks at Bar da Boa, enjoying great Brazilian music and partying all night at the nightclub Lapa 40 Graus.
7) Ipanema Beach
The most famous and iconic beach of Rio de Janeiro (maybe the world), is responsible for inspiring the Brazilian song “Garota de Ipanema.”
The beach is the best place to take the perfect beach vacation pictures, especially at the Arpoador, the large rock that separates the Ipanema and Copacabana beach. At Station 9, many tourists and locals get together to watch the sunset, an experience which always ends with applauds from the public.
8) Irajá Gastrô
Opened in 2011, the restaurant with dishes by Chef Pedro de Artagão and drink menu by Julieta Carrizzo, offers the perfect pairing between food and drink. The restaurant only works with fresh and sustainable ingredients and has a cozy environment; the perfect place to go should you start to feel homesick or you’re simply looking for great food.
9) Sugarloaf Mountain
The Sugarloaf Mountain is made up of three hills: Sugarloaf, Urca and Babilônia. To get to the top, you can hike a trail or take the aerial cableway. The view along the hiking trails and on top of the mountain are both breathtaking, one of the best you will see during your lifetime. To get the most out of the experience, choose to go around 5 p.m. so you can watch the day transition from day to night.
10) Christ The Redeemer
Hands down the most popular tourist attraction to see in Rio, the Christ The Redeemer statue is an Art Deco masterpiece created by the French sculptor Paul Landowski. It was built by Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and French engineer Albert Caquot, with the facial features fashioned by Romania’s Gheorghe Leonida. The sculpture was finished in 1931, eventually becoming one of the 7 Wonders of the World in 2006. You can enjoy a picturesque view from a few parts of town or get on the Corcorvado train to reach the top. If you plan on getting the train, make sure to purchase the tickets in advance as lines to purchase tickets can take hours.
/ 
Victoria Oliveira is a writer and translator from São Paulo, Brazil. Her first published article was for an international publication at the age of 14. She has since written for Matador Network, Youthgasm, The Culture-ist, and Elegant Magazine. She’s in love with desserts, learning new things, and exploring new places.
The post Top 10 Things to Do in Rio de Janeiro appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Myanmar Through an Ethical Lens appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Focus on the People, Not the Politics
“Hla de, hla de (beautiful, beautiful),” purrs photographer Nathan Horton. One of his Nikon lenses is focused on the ebony irises of a caramel-skinned woman from the Pa-Oh hill tribe in Shan State, Myanmar. Another protrudes from his hip, dangling from a second camera body like a bonus appendage.
The villager is shy, hesitant to engage with the camera. “I’ve grown old,” she demurs, remembering the British-born photographer from a previous visit. But Horton turns his once imposing lens into a bridge. With a little more encouragement in her native tongue, his subject’s eyes light up and thanaka-smeared cheeks crinkle into a smile, revealing stained teeth that have likely never seen a dentist.
Like many Burmese, the woman has indulged in the pastime of chewing betel, a blend of areca nuts and tobacco, guaranteed to yield vampire-red choppers. Her face is adorned with Myanmar’s signature thanaka, a yellow paste made from ground tree bark that serves as a multipurpose sunblock, moisturizer and decoration.
Horton has his shot. He shows the woman a preview, inspiring a reaction that’s almost better than the image itself. Out comes an iPad filled with portraits taken on previous visits. One shows the woman’s daughter, then pregnant, now a mother. Her three-year-old son greets us with a show of fingers.
Nearby, the toddler’s turbaned great-granddad sits cross-legged on a bamboo mat, shucking corn with the extended family, his lean body taut and tawny from years of working in the fields.
Typical of remote Burmese villages, four generations live together here, the able caring for the young and the elderly. Some of their homes are sturdy, multi-story affairs built with bricks fashioned from animal dung. Others teeter on bamboo stilts, partially open to the elements.
First World Meets Third
We’ve come from more refined accommodations in the foothills of Kalaw, an old hill station from the days of the British Raj — five photographers from the developed world, eager to capture the pagodas and people of Southeast Asia’s least visited, most mystical land in digital images. We hail from the U.S., England and Australia, all developed lands where we take modern conveniences for granted.
Our leader has a different story. After 16 years as a successful photographer, Horton traded soggy London for sunny Southeast Asia. Since 2006, he’s lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia with his Vietnamese wife and their three children. “I’m more Cambodian than British now,” he chuckles, adding that his photo tours are driven by a trifecta of passions for his craft, his adopted homeland, the gracious people and gritty edges of Southeast Asia.
About a kilometer before we reach the Pa-Oh tribe, Horton asks our Burmese driver to park our gear-stuffed minivan. With our local guide, Thun, we trek into the village with a chorus of “Mingalabar, mingalabar (hello, hello),” bearing tiny koalas from the Aussie in our entourage. The tribe has seen few foreigners like us since tensions increased in a distant region of their country. But few are privy to headlines in this remote village. There’s one TV in town, Thun reveals, but no one watches it much.
It’s dusk when the most able-bodied villagers are returning from the fields. Some steer bullock carts through dusty paths, others ride bareback astride massive oxen. In the village, women light campfires for the evening meal while kids scamper around in flip-flops, some with younger siblings slung on their backs, riding piggyback. After dinner, the village sleeps, as most days begin before dawn. It’s a rural lifestyle sans fast food, flush toilets, ovens, dishwashers and CNN. Yet no one seems bothered by what they don’t have here.
Responsible Travel or Guilt Trip?
Before signing on for this tour, I had the same questions many travelers ask when considering a trip to a nation engaged in appalling human rights violations. “How does one justify travel to a country that jails journalists and practices horrific ethnic cleansing?” I queried Horton’s team. “Will my dollars help support military dictators or trickle down to local communities?”
The response acknowledged the oppression of the Muslim Rohingyas under Myanmar’s military regime. “This has much sabotaged peace-building efforts of Aung San Suu Kyi’s fragile government,” it noted. Reassurances followed: “Tourism is employing tens of thousands of people across the nation and is one of the sectors that provides much-needed employment to help elevate lives.” Finally, the clincher: “We make sure not a single dollar or kyat will end up with oppressive military regime groups, individuals or cronies supporting this regime.”
Rewind to Mandalay
Cruising up the Ayeyarwady River from Mandalay on Day Two of my two-week Myanmar adventure, politics are far from my mind. We jump ship at Mingun, site of Hsinbyume Pagoda, where vermillion-robed monks stand out against whitewashed waves said to represent Mt. Sumeru, the mountain at the center of the Buddhist cosmos.
In predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, virtually every boy enters a monastery for a few weeks to several months. After immersion in the principles of Buddhism, he can return to secular life or choose to confirm his vows. Many girls, especially those from poor and rural regions, also are sent to monastic schools for spiritual training, as well as free education.
At Aung Myae Oo monastic school in Sagaing, we engage with students in a hive of classrooms. Founded in 2003 by a monk called Ponchi, the school now educates some 2,350 children, some from war-torn northern Myanmar, others poor and orphaned local children. Tuition is free, but the school relies on donations from visitors and the local community to survive. We drop ours into a collection box near a sign detailing costs for a 10-month course of study.
A Reverent Land
In the days that follow, we travel via boat, bike, horse-cart, plane and mini-bus through a reverent land that seems to spare no expense in building shrines of devotion. On the road to Monywa, the spectacle of Bodhi Tataung (1,000 Buddhas) rises from a hillside — a vast Buddha-rama with a golden, 424-foot standing Buddha at its center, complemented by a reclining Buddha and an unfinished sitting Buddha.
On a slope overlooking Bagan, we set up tripods before dawn to capture sunrise over a surreal profusion of ancient shrines against a backdrop of hot-air balloons. High above Pindaya, we prowl the maze-like Shwe Oo Min Cave, a cavernous display of floor-to-ceiling Buddhas donated by pilgrims and international agencies. Many sport knees with rubbed-off gold leaf — evidence of countless devotees who’ve touched the statues’ folded legs, hoping to receive blessings.
Inle Lake and Yangon
The small town of Nyaungshwe is our base for exploring Inle Lake, where long-tail boats transport us to cigar-rolling factories, weaving workshops and a home for Burmese cats. Along with a tiny arsenal of Burmese phrases, our cameras open doors to an enclave of long-necked Kayan ladies, weaving textiles to help support their tribe.
At sunset, we drop into boats with Inle Lake’s leg-rowing fishermen, hoping to capture Myanmar’s signature image: a fisherman balancing stork-like on one leg, giant conical net in hand, while steering his boat with the other leg wrapped around an oar. The following morning, we ride bikes to Shwe Yan Pyay Monastery, a 19th-century gem of Burmese architecture.
An hour-long flight brings us to Yangon, home of golden Shwedagon Pagoda and birthplace of our local guide. In gritty streets lined with colonial-era architecture, Thun shares episodes of his childhood, when his journalist father was jailed by the military regime. Fluent in both English and Burmese, the sturdy Burman has been a cultural go-between on our adventure, bridging connections with local farmers, fishermen, weavers, cigar-rollers and parasol-makers in his native land.
Should Politics Matter?
Should politics influence your choice of travel destination? As a responsible traveler, do you stay home to boycott an ill-principled regime? Or do you visit, hoping to better understand the culture and people it forcibly governs?
In a world riddled with extremism, bigotry and corruption, restricting your travel to countries with ethical regimes would prove limiting, if not impossible. All of Asia would be out, as would Africa, the Middle East, parts of Europe and many countries in North and South America. If travel truly broadens the mind, does staying home in protest effectively shrink awareness?
While some argue that visiting Myanmar condones a corrupt regime, others maintain that boycotts only hurt locals. As the Rohingya crisis has escalated in an isolated region, tourism has declined throughout the country, leaving the souvenir-sellers, street vendors and guest house operators who rely on it struggling to survive. Yet foreigners are safe and welcome in all areas open to tourism, where you’re far less likely to fall victim to pickpockets than in Rome, Paris or New York. In a country that embraces karma as spiritual currency, where people actively practice their belief of gaining spiritual merit by assisting others, theft is virtually nonexistent.
In the end, jarring headlines focus on only one aspect of the world’s most devout Buddhist nation. Its soul is revealed in markets, monasteries, factories, paddy fields and rural villages, where locals welcome foreigners to their troubled land as it fights for a future free of oppression.
/ 
Melissa Adams is an award-winning photojournalist whose travel and lifestyle features appear in numerous print and online publications. She explores the hidden gems, sexy secrets and colorful culture of her adopted city at UnClogged in Amsterdam: An American Expat Plumbs Holland.
Nathan Horton runs small group photography tours throughout Southeast Asia that focus on authentic interaction with local cultures, as well as camera technique. For more information about the Myanmar Classic tour, visit Nathan Horton Photography Tours.
The post Myanmar Through an Ethical Lens appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Rainbow Mountain and the Search for Ausangate appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Ausangate Mountain, an “Apu” (or holy mountain) in the Quechua culture, rises to 20,945 feet in the Peruvian Andes, hovering nearly 3,885 feet above Rainbow Mountain in the distance. For perspective, that’s 3,345 feet higher than the Mt. Everest base camp, 6,456 feet higher than the tallest mountain in the Continental United States, and nearly 15,665 feet higher than the “mile high city,” Denver, Colorado.
After a punishing two-hour trek straight up, sitting at the peak of Montana de Colores (Rainbow Mountain) next to a small stone wall built by the direct descendants of the Incan people, I popped open my first beer and spun in a dizzying swirl of colors. Ausangate rose in the distance like a giant, its glacier so massive that I mistook it for sky.
Standing below it, I now understood why the Quechua people called this mountain a diety.
I felt like a pilgrim, my body bruised, battered and broken, surviving the hike up Rainbow Mountain — like the Quechua do once a year — to stand at the face of the wise Ausangate, who is believed to hold the answer to any question.
Three and a Half Hours to the Trailhead
“Three hours,” the tour agent had said, with no mention of what was to come.
Jess and I sat on the other side of the desk, excited to see Rainbow Mountain but wary of a three-hour bus ride beginning at 3 A.M. the next morning. We had been traveling so much already, and we were not eager to feel like herded cattle again, jumping from bus to bus with strangers and having no idea if we were actually headed in the right direction.
She went on to tell us that lunch was included and they would pick us up from our hotel, but the extent of her English faded when our questions began. Still, we agreed, because the picture of Rainbow Mountain on the flyer looked too good to pass up.
“Three hours,” she said again as if to reassure us that we were doing the right thing.
There was no mention of one of the most dangerous roads in the world and our madman for a driver. There was no mention of marching through native people’s land without permission. And there was no mention of the breakfast of mystery meat and Tang that was supposed to fuel us for a strenuous day of bus rides and hiking.
If I would have known about the ill preparation and altitude sickness that would wait for us at the top of Rainbow Mountain, I don’t know if any photoshopped picture would have been enough to convince me to go.
Although, in the end, I’m glad that I did.
The Most Dangerous Road in Peru
The bus’s horn shook the gravel of the steep road. We had been speeding over cliffs, atop mountains and through deadly valleys carved by the rushing current of melted snow for an hour. The llama that often blocked our path gracefully charged out of the way of our madman driver as he threw us around turns with almost no regard for speed, sharing with us a sure image of our imminent bus crash.
I was silent, holding on to whatever control I had in silence, but others dealt with the terror of the road with laughter and jokes. We were all trying to pretend that our lives were not in danger, and we were all trying to hope that the ride would soon be over.
Bus after bus after bus moved through the villages in the valley like ants swarming a live beetle, honking their horns, telling the Quechuan people that they would not slow down — to get the hell out of the way. Sun-hardened faces peered up at us from fields filled with llama and sheep and crops still frozen by morning irrigation. We did not belong here, the faces said.
Children stared at us from fields or from the back of motorcycles that their elders drove, maybe wondering where we had come from. Of course, it wasn’t the first time that the indigenous people had seen a parade of buses move through their land like this. This road was built a couple of years before to shuttle tourists to the Quechuan scared site of Rainbow Mountain, and like everything else in Peru, sacred sites were big business: packaged, labeled and sold to the adventurous, first-world traveler, just like me. And judging from the number of buses that barreled through the villages, kicking up dust clouds that fell and covered the clay, hand-made structures of the Quechuan, business was booming.
“Three hours,” the tour agent had said the day before, but they were three hours that would turn into six. Two lanes that would turn into one. Hills that would turn into towering monstrosities of beauty. And ditches that would turn into chasms, showing us marveling views of our own possible death.
In the Shadow of Ausangate
“Everything conceals something else and there is no life without death . . .”
They were the words that I could not forget as I stumbled out of the van onto solid ground and stood at the trailhead before the Apu, the holy mountain.
Ausangate’s glacier scraped the sky and combined the line of earth and heaven. Its melting snow formed rivers that had cut the earth in half and created the life-filled valleys that the people we passed now called home.
It was no wonder to me that this holy mountain was a diety. It was no wonder to me that the people supposed that it could answer every question in life. It was no wonder to me that once a year the Quechua came from all over the region to search for answers and healing and life in this great Apu’s shadow.
The white of its peak was so untouched, so massive, that I double took. I had mistaken it for heaven.
Two Hours to the Top
The guide had said with broken English.
We had two hours to reach the top. Just two hours for a four-mile hike with a 5,000-foot elevation gain. Two hours of internal battle, broken spirits and escaped breath.
It’s right around the corner, I told myself.
But as I watched the mass of bodies move up the incline to where I thought the peak to lie, my heart dropped and my body shattered when the peak that I knew to be the top opened into a tundra wasteland.
To another peak.
To a distance that looked too far away to be real.
Each step brought us closer, but each step also brought us higher, toward thinning air.
I took my coat off, hoping that the fresh air and the lack of a heavy coat would help me breathe, but cold wind from the surrounding glaciers froze cold sweat to warm skin. My head was spinning from lack of oxygen and my fortitude was slowly leaking through the souls of my boots.
Caballito? (Pony?)
A Quechua man yelled at me.
Then another.
Then another.
They waited for my answer but ran past me when I didn’t speak. Some were wearing sandals. All were wearing short sleeves and did not seem to feel the cold or the lack of oxygen or the steep incline.
My eyes fell to my feet, hating the fact that I did not feel prepared. I was not used to the elevation, and I could no longer enjoy the beauty of the mountains with my head feeling like a balloon. With each step, my legs screamed and my lungs wanted for more . . .
Air, they said.
“Caballito?” another man asked.
“No, Gracias,” I said in my head, but the words would not come out. I could no longer afford to talk. The hike was becoming a lesson in suffocation.
“Caballo?” came a voice, then another, but I heard nothing. Only my own voice spoke quietly, telling me to put one foot in front of the other, to not look ahead. To just keep breathing. To take a break when you need it (which ended up being about every 20 steps).
This is only a small part of your life, I told myself, and I was right. The end was in sight.
When I finally looked up, when my eyes followed the line of bodies who were making the same journey as me, I knew that we were about to reach the top.
Steps rose before us, and we took them each with a painful gait, stopping every few to convince our legs to continue forward without air.
We were out of water. My legs felt broken. But there was light in the distance.
I saw a man selling beer at the top, and I felt a motivation to reach it as I’ve never felt before.
Rainbow Mountain
Rainbow Mountain sits roughly the same altitude as the Mt. Everest base camp. As I sat at the top of the mountain, cowering beside a small, stone wall that blocked the wind, my eyes beheld a sight that washed away the pain of the journey.
Red, yellow, green and blue combined on a ridge in stripes, each running into each other, each standing out from the other. The colors aligned in a sedimentary pattern that the wind had revealed over the ages, but it wasn’t just the colors that made the sight one to behold.
The Apu hung powerfully from the sky as if he had defined these colors. This place seemed to exist to grind a person to nothing. To make doubt of completion one’s singular thought. To crush one’s spirit so that they would be ready for the truth.
I sat at the top of the mountain with the woman I loved, gazing at the legend of an Apu who had the answer to any question I dared to ask. We had done the hardest thing that I had done in recent memory, and we had made it.
To ask a question seemed needless now.
/
Nathan Standridge is a traveling writer based out of Asheville, NC. He’s been seen trekking through San Franciscan streets at 4 A.M., drinking whiskey during a tornado in the Ozarks, and existing in silence among the temples of Chiang Mai. Follow his adventures through Thailand, Peru, and Italy at Foundinpursuit.com, or check out his book Change, available on Amazon.
The post Rainbow Mountain and the Search for Ausangate appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post 9 Tips for Your Trip to Machu Picchu appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
I went to Peru’s Machu Picchu and Sacred Valley with a dear friend of mine to celebrate the big 4-0. To mark this milestone birthday, I had a certain scenario in mind. After an absolutely punishing year that included a health scare, job loss, a move, the aftermath of a nasty breakup and a family tragedy, I imagined myself standing powerfully on top of Machu Picchu, where I’d throw my hands up in the air and shout: “Hey world, look at ME! I am a goddess! A superheroine! A doer of great things!” But then, something unexpected happened.
As I stood there nearly a mile and a half up in thin air, it became abundantly clear that this experience would be less about shouting at the world to pay attention to me and more about me paying much respect and attention to nature and Pachamama (the Inca’s Mother Earth).
Instead of shouting, I got quiet. I stood there tingling from the sly smack in the face nature had delivered. Before me were the hulking, lush Andean mountains so tall they brushed up against the clouds, some with snow-covered peaks. Below, the snaking café au lait-colored Urubamba River sustains the communities living in one of the most sacred spaces on earth.
That’s the wonderful thing about traveling. It sets you straight. Yes, I felt small in that space, but it was an appreciative small, a powerful small, a motivational small. Below are nine tips, if you’re seeking a similar experience in Peru and Machu Picchu.
1) Know the Machu Picchu Entry Ch-ch-changes
In July 2017, several changes were made to the Machu Picchu entry rules in order to help further protect the precious fortress of the ancient Inca civilization that dates back to the 15th century. Now, there are two blocks of visiting hours: 6 a.m. – 12 p.m. and 12 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. If you want to stay from 6 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., you’ll have to purchase an a.m. and a p.m. ticket. The total number of Machu Picchu entry tickets offered daily is 5,000 (2,500 per visiting hour block). In addition, it’s no longer possible to enter without a guide. And, if you thought you’d pop out and use the bathroom by the entrance during your tour, think again; once you’re in, you’re in.
My advice: Book a private tour and go after sunrise. Not only will you save time not having to navigate the government’s slightly awkward site to get tickets, but you’ll also be able to choose a less hectic time for your ascent. We booked a private tour for two from Aguas Calientes with Viator ($290), run by local operator Viajes Pacifico.
Not only was our guide Nelida knowledgeable and thoughtful, but she also served as our Machu Picchu bodyguard and photographer. When choosing the train to Aguas Calientes (Machu Picchu Pueblo), go with PeruRail’s Expedition — more spacious, cleaner windows and therefore better views, plusher and comfier seats than other options. With 1 million-plus visitors annually, best to book any and all tickets and tours 3-6 months in advance.
2) Get a Driver
Not only can drivers shuttle you between your home-away-from-home and the airport, but they may be able to take you on extended car excursions to spots like the Sacred Valley. Take down the driver’s name and contact info for future car sightseeing journeys and keep in touch using WhatsApp.
My advice: Snap a photo of the car’s license plate (matricula). Agree on the fare before getting in and as far as tipping your driver, it is not customary. Go with your gut but know Peruvians don’t.
3) Learn the Lingo
Spanish in Peru is to Spanish in Spain as English in the U.S. is to English in the U.K. — that’s my take anyway. Here are some distinctly Peruvian words to get you started: Chevere (chulo=cool!), jato (casa=home), chamba (trabajo=job), pata (amigo=friend) and palta (avocado). In Lima, you will find most everyone will tell you that something is located exactly 4 blocks away (a cuatro cuadras). A 1.5-hour flight away in Cusco though, most everything is 12 blocks away (a doce cuadras). Why? Ni idea (no idea).
My advice: For currency translations, try XE app. While U.S. dollars are accepted in most tourist areas and you can take out dollars from most ATMs, you should aim to use Peru’s sol when making purchases. Using a host country’s currency only helps to strengthen its value.
4) Go to the Sacred Valley of the Incas
Known as Willka Qhichwa in the Native South American language of Quechua, this area carved out in the foothills of the Andes Mountains by the Urubamba River stretches nearly 40 miles west to east from Machu Picchu to Písac. There are so many breathtaking vistas that you’ll certainly fall silent during the 5-hour journey from Ollantaytambo and its ruins built for Inca leader Pachacuti (The Earth Shaker) to Cusco, the former Inca capital known in Quechua as The Belly Button of the World. We paid $150 for a full-day car tour.
Explore the working Salineras de Maras salt mines that from afar look like white honeycombs stuck to the sides of Andean peaks. Stand amidst the extraterrestrial-looking landscape of a former Incan agricultural experimentation site in Moray. Visit the textile hub Chinchero, but be prepared to be approached rather aggressively by people selling their wares. After all, this is their livelihood, so they will do whatever they can to make a sale.
My advice: Get the entry pass to various sites (boleto or boleto turstico). And be sure to buy some chocolate with Maras salt for the folks back home (and yourself)!
5) When Taking a City Bus, Note the Landmarks
In Lima, know that your stop might not be announced. Best to know the nearby landmarks and name of the destination stop (paradero) — equally important is knowing that information for your departure point.
6) Eat. Drink. Repeat. And Say Yes to Coca
You will eat better than you ever have in Peru. Fact. There is a whole world of dishes to discover beyond ceviche made with sea bass (corvina) in the coast and trout (trucha) in the mountains. Try: aji de gallina (chicken in a creamy, nutty and spicy yellow sauce), anticuchos (skewered grilled cow heart), choritos a la chalaca (ceviche-like dish served in mussel shells), tiraditos (raw fish, sashimi-style drenched in a spicy sauce), papa a la Huancaína (boiled yellow potatoes in a spicy cream sauce), jalea (fried fish with ceviche lime, onion, and spicy flavoring), seco de cordero (lamb in a cilantro stew), tacu tacu (Peru’s take on rice and beans) and causa (layered tower featuring cold potato, seafood salad, and avocado).
You’ll quickly see that potatoes are featured prominently in Peru’s cuisine and that’s because of the more than 4,000 varieties of potato in the world, Peru produces 3,000 of them! Also plentiful is chifa (Chinese Cantonese cuisine reinterpreted using Peruvian ingredients). These dishes arose from the influx of Chinese immigrants, most of whom came to Peru as indentured servants in the 1850s. Chifa dishes include lomo saltado (sirloin stirfry with fries) and arroz chaufa (Peruvian fried rice). Wash down the delectable dishes with Inca Kola, Peru’s florescent yellow-colored, bubble gum-flavored soda that serves as the national drink, a Cusqueña (beer from Cusco) or pisco sour, made from the nation’s signature grape-based high-proofed spirit.
To keep altitude sickness at bay, drink coca tea made from the leaves that are used as the basis for cocaine. The leaves not only oxygenate the blood, a must in the thinner, oxygen and pressure deficient air, but also provide high quantities of nutrients like Vitamins A and B, calcium, iron and protein.
My advice: Get ceviche and causa at Lima’s Canta Ranita (located in an open-air market) and Punto Azul, jalea and seco at Isolina, tacu tacu at Punto Marisko, aji de gallina at Gastón Acurio’s Tanta. Acurio is credited with placing Peru’s cuisine on the world stage. Get chifa at Cusco’s Kion (the name means ginger).
7) Bring Mysticism Back Home
Want to bring prosperity and happiness to a home? Purchase a pair of painted ceramic pucara bulls, but do note that the luck won’t work if you buy them for yourself. Find someone else to make the purchase and gift to you. Stop at Machu Picchu’s sacred four-sided stone and meditate there.
8) Give back
Before your trip, scan the internet for nonprofits and organizations that align with your interests. Carve out time to visit the organization, volunteer your time, make a donation or do whatever is possible given your timeframe. We went to Asociación Pukllasunchis, a bilingual private school, which developed its own Quechua curriculum and focuses on preserving and honoring indigenous practices, as well as stresses learning through the arts. At Puklla, they are all about inclusion and togetherness. Cusco’s The Meeting Place, a travelers’ café in the San Blas neighborhood has a Pack a Bag initiative. Make a donation and a bag is filled with school supplies for a child in need.
9) Wander and Do So With Good Gear
Off-line wandering led my friend and me to Lima’s Rimac neighborhood, one of the city’s oldest areas and a World Heritage Site.
My advice: Get Osprey’s Fairview 40 women’s travel pack, a crossbody like these by Misako, a Zomake Ultra Lightweight Packable Backpack Water Resistant Hiking Daypack and Merrell Women’s Siren Edge Hiker.
/
Carey is a bilingual writer and editor with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Her writing has been featured on PBS NewsHour, Travel + Leisure, Untapped Cities, and Trip by Skyscanner, among other outlets. Carey currently calls New York City home and works there as a communications manager in Development for the American Museum of Natural History. When she’s not hanging out by the Museum’s life-sized dioramas, she’s plotting her next global adventure and working on a children’s travel book. Find her work at: CareyeReed.com.
The post 9 Tips for Your Trip to Machu Picchu appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post The Long Way to Sarajevo appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
She pretended to shoot me, the woman in the front seat of the car. She turned, eyes blue and hair white, cupping her arms with an imaginary machine gun. Pfoo, she said, jerking her arms in recoil. Pfoo, pfoo. I had told her I was born in 1992, when the siege of Sarajevo began. She was bringing us to this city, the capital of Bosnia.
I shifted next to my partner, Kenzie, in the back seat, my beard dusty and clothes worn from two weeks traversing the mountains of the Balkan peninsula. We were walking a section of the Via Dinarica Trail, Europe’s newest long-distance hiking route stretching 800 miles from Slovenia to Albania. The woman’s violent mime was not surprising but articulated what bullet-chipped houses had whispered throughout forested valleys. Violence was near and recent. We communicated this with hands and gestures.
We had walked through Bosnia step-by-step at three miles an hour, the same pace at which humans spread to every corner of the earth. Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust, points out that both our bodies and minds evolved at this swinging gate. “The mind,” she says, “like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.” At this pace, contemplation and observation merge, creating space for chance encounters, communication with strangers, and the occasional spontaneity to catch a ride.
“They must have lived through the siege,” whispered Kenzie before engaging in a series of gestures smattered with Bosnian phrases. The woman spoke with her husband and confirmed that they had lived in Sarajevo through the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.
Kenzie had charted our route, 150 miles from Montenegro into Bosnia. I was the dreamer who put the hike into motion. Like an itinerant few, we were drawn to this rare European wilderness, where dripping cloud forests and sunbaked plateaus shelter wolves, bears, and chamois, while cloaked nomads herd sheep from valley to peak, and pure streams glisten alongside ancient paths. Our feet led us through a vision of Europe from a distant time and the devastation of recent times.
Our first day hiking we entered the Durmitor mountains from Black Lake in Montenegro, where the mist glowed across the water under a 6 a.m. sun. We ascended quickly, bent under the weight of five pounds of peanuts, fifty tortillas, two jars of peanut butter, Nutella, forty snickers bars and several hefty sausages.
Cresting a ridge, pine forests gave way to an alpine landscape of green turf and white snow. We startled wild horses and spied a herd of deer tracing the slopes. Crossing a pass, biting wind and purple-tinged clouds fell behind, revealing icy peaks in a blue sky. The trail dropped between natural stone pillars to an emerald lake, where we made camp in the mouth of the valley. In the morning, we left this relative normality behind as we broke camp and traversed a misty plateau towards the border of Bosnia.
The next two nights we were stranded in an abandoned house near the edge of a steep gorge, huddled for warmth as we awaited the end of an incessant rain. We had arrived at sunset just as the rain began, ducking into the building for shelter. Cracked pink paint still decorated the entry, but the house was a shell without lightbulbs, doors, windows or furniture. Old cow dung made a soil across the floor. Straight pines dripped and rustled against the walls as gloom slipped seamlessly into night. Every creak in the darkness entered my imagination as the mysterious phantom lives which had animated, then fled this space. Why did they leave? The rain continued for 36 hours.
After this misty purgatory and a morning of slipping and clinging desperately to roots as our feet pondered the empty air of a yawning chasm, we stumbled onto a dam 1,100 vertical feet below. A dark figure stood in our path, tall and barrel-chested with a military haircut. Security. The skin around his eyes wrinkled in amusement.
“Kahva?” he asked. We knew that one. Coffee.
We sat on the dam, coffee warmth radiating through our hands into our chilled bodies. We were at a crossroads. To the left, our hiking path rose vertically back up the cliff. Wet rocks disappeared in clouds, obscuring a three-day wilderness of high elevation storms and ice. To the right, a road tunneled into the mountain and followed the valley.
We took the road and raised our thumbs.
Before long, we were zooming through the canyon in a clunky sedan, speaking with a Serbian journalist who had been visiting family in Montenegro. “Before,” he said, “when we were Yugoslavia, it was all like this. Everyone made family in different regions: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia. When we were under Tito, we were one.”
Tito is the man who unified the disparate regions of Yugoslavia. A guerilla fighter during World War II, he led a legendary army of men and women who would strike Nazi positions before disappearing in the misty peaks. Tito liberated the region without Russian assistance so, unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, his government did not fall behind the Iron Curtain of Soviet rule. Free from Soviet dictate, he instituted what is perhaps the most successful historical instance of a socialist regime, heralding a generation of unprecedented regional peace and prosperity. Statues, household portraits and the tones used when uttering his name almost deify the man. The shadow of this myth falls upon a darker reality, however, in which secret police imprisoned dissidents to uphold his power. Tito.
“And when he died,” said the driver, “everything fell apart.”
We crossed the border into Bosnia, and the road became rutted and bumpy as the sedan wove between mountains. When Tito died in 1980, the driver told us, politicians began to weaponize ethnicity. The Croat Catholics, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims were pitted against one another, fanning the embers of old anger which, in 1991, erupted into war.
He lit a cigarette and took a long drag.
“Look,” he pointed over a river, across the valley, where two houses occupied a green meadow within a black forest. “They may be cousins. They may be brothers. But when I was a boy, if one was Bosnian, one Serbian, they would be shooting each other.”
The cigarette sizzled with another breath. “We need to move past this.”
“People won’t move past this,” said a different driver late in the afternoon; a newlywed young man. We had been picked up, carried and dropped off by four drivers throughout the day, traveling between warm fields and verdant valleys. The newlywed brought us deeper into the mountains. He was born after the conflict. “Our generation wants to move on,” he told us.
He dropped us off in a town called Kalinovik, where we met our trail. High hills rolled towards the peaks we had circumvented that day. Lightning pulsed in those mountains as we turned and followed a dusty road in the other direction.
We stayed with a family that night, watching the World Cup on a small screen beside a wood-burning stove. Our hostess poured tea and I noticed a heavy wooden cross dangling from her neck.
The next day our feet carried us across an invisible line and we entered a world of different belief.
An Austro-Hungarian fort dominated a hill, solidifying the historical division between Christian and Muslim worlds, between the East and the West. I was reminded that this region was long a buffer zone, a convergence of worlds, where the Austro-Hungarian heritage of Vienna, Mozart and Franz Kafka met the mixed Ottoman heritage of Istanbul, Sufi philosophers and Ibn Battuta. Somewhere along the road, we passed to the other side.
Observation and contemplation merge when walking along a trail hour after hour, day after day. More than any form of travel, the pace and rhythm of moving step-by-step elicits the pulse of a place. Walking through Bosnia’s Muslim territory, I felt the region’s bleeding heart.
The signs were subtle, at first.
People were the same: tall, dark hair, striking bright eyes and reserved hospitality. An old man rumbling down a mountain on a miniature tractor offered us his umbrella with a toothless smile. Yet, in place of churches, mosques rose above village squares.
Paths were the same, winding through deep forests. Yet, across from wild strawberries, signs warned of mine fields blanketing the slopes.
Water was the same: pure and clear, drinkable without treatment. Yet, fountains were erected around the natural springs, etched with the names and ages of murdered Bosnian Muslims. The youngest victim was nine years old. For days along our path, life-giving water trickled from a memory of death.
8,000 Muslims were killed within a European safe zone during the war. U.N. peacekeepers formed a perimeter around the town of Srebrenica, protecting mostly-Muslim refugees and civilians who were fleeing the Orthodox Serbian military. The military surrounded the town and, on July 11, 1995, marched through the U.N. perimeter. Muslims were gathered and systematically killed in the largest European genocide since the Holocaust.
Later, I stood in a dim museum. The names of Muslim victims covered the wall in small font, rising from floor to ceiling, stretching down the hallway until they were lost in darkness. Small names, etched in gold, killed by Christians. As my feet carried me through this recent history, I was followed by the thought that any ideology, religious or otherwise, can be weaponized to justify violence. The oft-touted idea that Islam is inherently more violent than other religions seemed naïve in Bosnia, between landmines and strawberries as I watched the column of tiny names disappear in darkness.
And so we moved. Rain followed us, turning mountain villages into apparitions through the mist, hallucinations of life, warmth and possibility which quickly faded from view. It was difficult to disentangle whether I was viewing a state of the world or a state of my own mind.
Days later, the sun emerged as we entered a meadow of blueberries and flowers. A man was roasting a lamb over a fire. After a week of peanut butter and tortillas, my mouth watered. We approached him.
“I have 500 sheep!” he exclaimed gesturing towards the mountains. We ate one, washed it down with several beers and followed the trail through his pastures.
As we climbed, the bells and bleats of sheep followed us on the wind. We entered a sky shorn by sharp ridges, with clouds piling against northern slopes while the south stretched uninterrupted to a jagged horizon. In the distance, far below, a river cut between mountains, forming the deepest and least explored gorge in Europe.
The next day we followed the lip of this gorge, gazing into its depths. The river furrowed beneath forests which rose into avalanche slopes, trees giving way to turf which softened the faces of sheer cliffs. Millions of years of stratigraphy were exposed, stones twisting and bending across a scale of time and space that humbled me, stooped under the weight of my backpack.
We spent the night in the most isolated village in Bosnia, where stone homes emerged from a highland valley, and the Milky Way formed a solid band across the sky as I closed my eyes.
A feral roar and cries of alarm shattered this peace in early morning light. Rushing outside, I found two sheep dogs locked in combat. They were massive, probably 200 pounds with long white hair matted red with blood as fangs snapped and ripped. An ear was torn, a throat mottled, an eye gouged. An elderly shepherd woman danced futilely around the fray, a colorful shawl slipping from her face as she shouted and hit them with a switch. The dogs disengaged and circled, jaws quivering, teeth bared, crisp air vibrating from growls deep in their lungs. With a roar, they slammed back together.
“Will they kill each other?” I asked a local man.
“Probably,” he replied, arms folded in cool observation. “They are brothers.”
I felt ill and helpless.
Eventually, the dogs separated. Limping, they followed the old woman, who turned her switch on a herd of sheep she was driving down a path. The dogs kept pace, aligning alongside the herd. Kenzie and I followed at a distance. Blood speckled the stones at our feet. Brothers fighting brothers.
Reaching an asphalt road, it was time for us to leave the mountains. We found a woman, white hair and blue eyes, picking herbs with her husband along the road. They agreed to bring us to Sarajevo. I told her I was born in 1992. Pfoo, the woman said. Pfoo, pfoo.
Rounding a mountain road, Sarajevo filled a depression in the land before us. A river divided the city, where colorful columns of Vienna meet the tan markets of Istanbul, the East meeting the West. Hundreds of mosques mixed with orthodox cathedrals and at sunset, the Muslim call to prayer was punctuated with Christian church bells. These sounds rose to the mountains above the city, where the Serbian military had surrounded Sarajevo for four years.
Our drivers remembered the siege. Mortar explosions and sniper fire became a part of life. Schools, hospitals and apartments were reduced to rubble. As they drove us into the city, I saw walls chipped from machine gun fire. Snipers would target water sources, our drivers said, firing on people lined at wells.
Sarajevo’s beer brewery was particularly bullet-strewn. The Muslim Ottomans had built this brewery atop a well to provide beer for their Christian subjects. During the siege, Muslims and Christians together gathered at this well, risking bullets to carry water to their families.
As the rest of the region splintered along ethnic lines, in Sarajevo, the population remained unified. In the spirit of centuries of peaceful cohabitation between Christians and Muslims, the population even managed to build a sense of normalcy through the siege. Our drivers chuckled and smiled at some of their recollections, no doubt reliving memories of underground concerts, school lessons, birthday parties, romantic affairs and marriage ceremonies which kept joy alive for four years while the city was pounded from above.
Something in this elderly couple returning to Sarajevo with smiles on their faces and baskets full of herbs drew my mind to an evening in the mountains. We were camped on the porch of a dilapidated school. Near the door, in the dust, sat a tooth. It looked human. A few bullet-sized holes punctured the cement. I felt a somber darkness as I pitched my tent before dusk.
The mountains captured a cloud, carrying it down to the school. As the sun cast its final light through the valley, the world suddenly brimmed with color and swifts emerged from their nests to spin through the glowing mist. The air was filled with orange, blue and gold, sharpening the greens of the forest, the bronze spire of a mosque and the white thrum of the river. It was the sort of light that burned away the darkness of the school and the heaviness in my heart. It was the sort of light that I felt in the elderly couple’s smile on the road to Sarajevo. It is the light that we found at three miles an hour, step by step, with sore feet and swinging arms, at the confluence of thought and movement on the Via Dinarica trail.
Jordan Thomas is an anthropologist with degrees from Cambridge, Durham, and Kansas State. When not getting lost in random corners of the world, he teaches ski lessons in Utah and studies forest fires in California. Follow his work at lovestrangers.org and his photography on instagram at @ambling_anthro.
The post The Long Way to Sarajevo appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Top 11 Things to Do In Istanbul appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Finding the top things to do in Istanbul isn’t all that difficult since this is one of the great cities to visit in the world. If anything, the challenge is narrowing down which of the top things to do in Istanbul you can fit in depending on how much time you have there. With thousands of years of history, countless museums and attractions, dozens of interesting neighborhoods, a thriving restaurant, bar and cafe scene, and a population of over 15 million people, the number of things to do in Istanbul is endless.
For first-time visitors, or for those coming back again with the goal of seeing more of the city’s top sights, here are my picks for the top 11 things to do in Istanbul. Beyond this list, try to meet a local, strike up a conversation, and you will sure to have an another 11 ideas in a matter of minutes.
1) Süleymaniye Mosque
Standing at the top of a hill in Istanbul’s Golden Horn, Süleymaniye Mosque, or the mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent, is truly one of Istanbul’s greatest sights. Built by order of the sultan Suleyman I (also knowns as “the Magnificent”), the mosque was built over a span of 7 years between 1550-1557, and today still remains the largest mosque in the city — not a small feat given the number of mosques here.
Enter by way of the courtyard in the front, and once inside the mosque, you can gaze at the towering domes, the tallest of which rises 173 feet, and take in the ornately decorated ceilings covered in floral and geometric designs. Be sure to exit out the rear and visit the large terrace — a great spot to take pictures — where you will be greeted by a spectacular view of the Golden Horn and Bosphorus.
2) Hagia Sophia
Probably Istanbul’s best known attraction (next to its food), is the glorious Hagia Sophia (or “Aya Sofya” to the Turks). The building has a complex history. First built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian and consecrated as an Orthodox church in 537, the church was then converted over to a mosque by Mehmet the Conqueror almost a century later in 1453. Finally, in 1935, it was declared a museum by Atatürk and remains so for the foreseeable future. Declared a World Heritage by UNESCO, it is considered one of the greatest surviving examples of Byzantine architecture.
Make sure to set aside at least 2 hours when visiting Hagia Sophia. The lines to enter through security can be long, and once inside, you’ll want to take your time wandering the cavernous interior, including the upper floor where you can see the famous 12th and 13th-century mosaics depicting Christ.
3) Topkapi Palace
Between the 15th and 19th centuries when it was the court of the Ottoman empire, Topkapi Palace was the place to be and be seen. Built between 1466 and 1478 by the sultan Mehmet II and located on prime real estate on the Golden Horn, the palace remains a spectacle to visit. Surrounded by not one but two massive gates, Topkapi Palace was once home to over 5,000 people. Each successive Sultan that lived here added their own touch, helping to grow it to the size you see today.
With a regular ticket you can visit the large kitchens, the Council Chamber where dignitaries were received and official business was conducted, and the private gardens and living quarters of the Sultan. Though a separate entrance fee, you would be missing out if you didn’t also visit the Harem, accessible after the second gate. The 300-room harem is a labyrinth of enclosures where over 300 concubines and the Sultan’s extended family lived, and where you can visit some of the ornate rooms where he and his wives spent a good amount of their time.
4) Visit A Hamam
Not so long ago, back when fresh water was less plentiful, Istanbul was home to over 200 hamams, or Turkish baths, where locals could go for a full body wash. Today, around 60 still exist, and with the advent of indoor plumbing, most hamams exist as tourist attractions today. Nonetheless, this unique bathing experience is a fun way to steep yourself in a bygone era. Closer to what you would experience at your traditional spa, you can still expect a personal attendant who will rinse, scrub and wash you down thoroughly using a hamam towel (lightweight, flat-woven and traditionally made from Turkish cotton).
For a convenient hamam close to the major attractions, visit the Ayasofya Hürrem Sultan Hamamı. Built in 1556 and named after the wife of Süleyman the Magnificent, its welcome foyer itself is an impressive sight, consisting of a multi-domed ceiling and wooden stairs leading to your changing rooms on several elevated levels. Set aside at least an hour and a half to allow yourself time to decompress with a tea and snack following your group scrubdown.
5) Take A Bosphorus Cruise
An argument can be made that it’s the Bosphorus, the natural straight that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea beyond, that made Istanbul the city it became over the years. This natural waterway runs straight through the city, separating it from what is known as the European and the Asian sides. Most cruises on the Bosphurus last for about two hours and will take you north under the newly renamed 15 July Martyrs Bridge, further northward to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, then turn around and head south towards the Golden Horn.
Along the way you will be treated to views of the various palaces and estates that the royal families and the city’s richest inhabitants once used as summer homes, including Kucuksu Palace and Dolmabahce Palace. For a truly traditional experience, buy a Simit (a Turkish circular bread covered in sesame seeds) from one of the ubiquitous vendors, and throw bits into the sky to one of the seagulls that are sure flock your boat as it makes its way along (just be sure not to stand directly below any).
6) The Grand Bazaar and Spice Market
Perhaps nothing encapsulates Istanbul any better than its two most popular markets: the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market. Chaotic, confusing, colorful, aromatic — one step into either market transports you back in time. The much larger Grand Bazaar is comprised of over 3,000 shops spread out over 7 acres, with shops ranging from the tacky and basic to high-end and unique. Beginning at one of the main entrances, the best way to navigate is to simply let yourself get lost among the cramped alleyways.
When you’re ready to leave, try to orient yourself and exit north and head to the Spice Market, just a short walk away. Here the smaller market is made up of endless stalls devoted to selling various spices, Turkish delight, dried fruits, teas and other related items. Come hungry before lunch as you assuredly will be handed sample after sample from enthusiastic shop owners.
7) Karaköy and Beyoğlu
Beyoğlu, sometimes still referred to as Pera, and Karaköy are the pulsing heart of the city. Packed with restaurants, bars, boutique hotels, shops and non-stop foot traffic from both locals and visitors, these two neighborhoods are worth a day alone to wander around. Start by crossing the Galata bridge from the Golden Horn and into Karaköy and head to the one-stop Tünel, an 1,880-foot-long underground funicular dating back to 1875, making it the second-oldest subway in the world. From here you can backtrack and visit Galata Tower and the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. Then head to the famous İstiklal Avenue where at any given time of the day, tens of thousands of people are wandering along the pedestrian-only street. Finally, you will be let out at Taksim Square where you can take in the views of this giant open space.
8) Basilica Cistern
Just a short walk from Hagia Sophia and down a steep set of stairs is the Basilica Cistern, one of Istanbul’s most magical, subterranean sites. Built in the 6th century during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian, the Basilica Cistern was the largest of the many hundreds of cisterns that once stored fresh water for the city’s inhabitants. Visiting today, the underground expanse is moodily lit, giving it an air of mystery as you wander past the 336 columns that support the structure along the elevated plankways that separate you from the water below. For its most famous sight, head to the northwest corner and find the bases of the two columns that are decorated with the haunting image of Medusa.
9) Have a Giant Breakfast
Breakfast in Turkey, or kahvalti, is a daily feast that will make you forget all about the wimpy brunches you’re used to back home. Let’s start with the foods. You should expect lots of cheese, including beyaz peynir (similar to feta) and kasseri (a medium-hard cheese made from unpasteurized sheep milk), a variety of breads including simit, the sesame covered circular bread that is often used to make mini breakfast sandwiches, lots of flavors of jams such as fig, apricot and cherry, butter and other spreads to go along with said bread, a good variety of fruit and olives, and if you’re lucky, sucuklu yumurta, a mixture of eggs and spicy sausage. Of course, this is accompanied by caffeine, usually tea, but for tourists visiting the country, you can rest assured that you will be able to have a cup of strong Turkish coffee as well.
10) Visit the Asian Side
One of the most common refrains you will hear from local İstanbulites is that if you have time, you should make your way across the Bosphorus and visit the far less visited “Asian side” of Istanbul. Here, they tell knowingly, is where you you go to fall in love with Istanbul. Far from the crowds, the Asian side is much less busier, cleaner and more lush that its European counterpart.
Start by ticking off many of the grand palaces you saw during your Bosphorus cruise, including the ornate, 19th-century Beylerbeyi Palace and Adile Sultan Palace, the former royal residence of Ottoman princess Adile Sultan and a great place to have dinner (at Borsa Restaurant) with its unforgettable views. Be sure to wander around the walkable neighborhood of Moda with its sidewalk cafes and boutique shops. For a truly spectacular view of the city, make your way to Çamlica Hill. At 879 feet, the view south over the city is unparalleled. At the top is a public park with teahouses, cafes and a restaurant.
11) The Blue Mosque
Sultan Ahmed Mosque, but more popularly known by visitors as the Blue Mosque due to its distinctly blue interior, was built by Ottoman sultan Ahmed I between 1609 — 1616. If it seems as impressive as its neighbor, Hagia Sophia, there’s a reason for that: it was built in direct competition in an effort to surpass its beauty. Surrounded by six towering minarets and curvaceous exterior, the building was and remains today an architectural wonder. Inside, the mosque is decorated with over 20,000 İznik tiles and has 260 stained glass windows. Be sure to visit early as admission is regulated due to its popularity.
What to Fly
Turkish Airlines is the undisputed king when it coms to flying to Istanbul, the airline’s main hub. With over 338 planes flying to over 307 different destinations in 122 countries, it’s almost guaranteed that Turkish Airlines will offer you the best route to Istanbul. Even better, the new state-of-the-art, $12 billion Istanbul Airport will be the home for all flights beginning in March of 2019, and when it becomes fully operation in 2023, it will be the world’s largest airport. Turkish Airlines currently flies to nine cities in the United States and two in Canada, so it’s not only an airline with some of the world’s best service, it’s also one of the most convenient.
Where to Stay
If you’re looking to splurge a bit, the Raffles Istanbul is a great luxury hotel to call home in Istanbul. Located near the banks of the Bosphurus and above the Zorlu Center, a combined upscale shopping center and performing arts center, the hotel is located far enough from the bustle of the city to relax, but close enough so that most of the major sights are just a short trip away. Opened in 2014, the hotel features a spa, the mediterranean restaurant Rocca Restaurant, and the lively Long Bar. Be sure to try to book a room on the eastern side of the property that looks out over the water — the sprawling views of the Bosphorus and the 15 July Martyrs Bridge are spectacular both at night as well as during the daylight hours.
Special thanks to Turkish Airlines, Turkish Airlines New York Office Corporate Department, and Crystal Concepts for providing assistance with this article.
/ 
Matt Stabile is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Expeditioner. The Expeditioner began in 2008 and is headquartered in New York City. You can read his writings, watch his travel videos or contact him at any time at TheExpeditioner.com.
The post Top 11 Things to Do In Istanbul appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post The Top 50 Travel Blogs (2nd Half: 2018) appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Below is a list of the top 50 travel blogs for the 2nd half (July — December) of 2018 ranked by visitor traffic.
There are a few other sites that have put together their own lists of the “top” travel blogs.
However, each has their own subjective means of ranking sites, using everything from Alexa scores, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, estimated traffic, inbound Google links and even subjective design criteria.
My intention was to create the most objective and accurate list of the most popular travel blogs.
Therefore, this list is based solely on the number of visitors a travel blog receives. To read more about how this list was put together, please read below.
I reached out to a large sampling of travel bloggers and asked that they provide me with a screenshot of their Google Analytics page reflecting their site’s visitor statistics over the most recent quarters. The reasoning behind this method was that I wanted to obtain a rolling average to compensate for monthly spikes that may have occurred. Further, utilizing Google Analytics as the uniform measure of traffic helped to ensure uniformity of data across all sampling.
Of course, due to this method of collecting data, only those site owners that submitted their statistics were included for consideration in the rankings. Those that did not submit were not considered. Further, in an effort to maximize the number of participants and to protect specific traffic numbers that some site owners regard as sensitive and private, I agreed to keep all specific data confidential and not include those numbers in the rankings.
Why This Metric?
Simple, it’s the most accurate, best picture of a site’s traffic. As everyone knows, Alexa is not very accurate and can be easily manipulated. Inbound links are a great sign of SEO, but just because a site does well with Google doesn’t mean it has a lot of visitors. Twitter followers are great, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into site readers.
Quite simply, unique visitors is the one metric that most accurately reflects a site’s readership.
Who Cares?
I understand that just because a site gets a high number of unique visitors doesn’t mean it’s the highest quality site. There are plenty of excellently written, well-designed, engaging sites that may not have high traffic numbers.
My intention was not to create a list of the best, or the most useful, or the most professional travel blogs. I simply wanted to create the most accurate list of the most visited blogs. Just as the movie weekend box office results are reported every week, I simply wanted to create an unbiased, objective list of the most visited travel blogs for research purposes.
Finally, I hope this list will serve as a useful guide and a good starting point for travelers and readers around the world looking to explore the vibrant and eclectic travel blogging community, and expose them to some great travel blogs that they otherwise may not be reading.
*
If you are a travel blogger who would like to be considered for inclusion in the 2019 1st half list, please e-mail me a screenshot of your Google Analytics page reflecting your site’s traffic including the number of unique visitors (click on “Audience” then “Overview”) from January 1 — June 30 to: Matt@TheExpeditioner.com.
*
Click Here to Read the Complete Past Lists of The Top 50 Travel Blogs
/
Matt Stabile is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Expeditioner. The Expeditioner began in 2008 and is headquartered in New York City. You can read his writings, watch his travel videos or contact him at any time at TheExpeditioner.com.
The post The Top 50 Travel Blogs (2nd Half: 2018) appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post From Student to Teacher: My Yoga Journey in Kerala appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
I strained to hear my teacher over the construction noises next door and the birds calling out to each other as she explained the story behind the Bhagavad Gita to our group of 28 aspiring yogis. It was three in the afternoon and we still had another hour of lecture and two more hours of yoga to go before our usual evening routine of dinner, studying and a nice early bedtime. I squirmed to find a comfortable position on my wooden block, scarves tucked under my knees, then finally gave up and lay down flat on my mat, chin propped up on both my hands as I fought the afternoon snooze brought on by the relentless heat and humidity.
This was how my days were spent during the month of January as I made my way through my very first 200-hour yoga teacher training in Kerala, a state along the southwest coast of India. Despite the sweaty days and long hours spent on our mats, it was anything but boring and months later, I am still teasing apart all the lessons that came from this intense immersion into everything yoga. Although I had expected both physical and mental growth, I did not understand just how much it would seep into every other aspect of my life while setting me on a path of exploration to understand my place in yoga and its place in our Western culture.
I had long dreamed of becoming a yoga teacher, having started practicing 10 years prior, but somehow it always seemed just out of reach, an ethereal profession reserved only for the special few and not for me. It also seemed way too good to be true that anyone could actually get paid for leading yoga classes, despite the seemingly endless new studios popping up around my city every day.
It wasn’t until my friend Tayler told me about her plans to attend Padma Karma that I finally decided to take the plunge. She and I were planning separate trips to Southeast Asia, both with a flexible itinerary, and when I found out she was going to become a yoga teacher, it seemed as good a time as any to make it happen at last. I put surprisingly little effort into researching the school we ended up choosing; Tayler had narrowed it down to two options and both looked like official yoga schools to me.
In other words, I wasn’t picky, but I trusted my friend and was open to whatever was in store. If I’d been more discerning in my choices, I might have looked for a school with a stronger focus on anatomy and physiology, but what I got was a training deeply rooted in Yogic philosophies wrapped up in a completely authentic Indian experience. Disappointed at first by the lack of anatomical detail, I later realized that you can learn about the body anywhere, but the best way to fully understand the heart of yoga is through firsthand experiences with locals in the country of its birth.
We learned about sutras and vedas, memorized chants in Sanskrit, studied the chakras and energy lines in the body and delved deep into the stories behind many of the Hindu Gods. We practiced our pranayama and physical asanas for four hours each day and by week two we were leading our peers through set hatha sequences. Though at first most of us struggled to simply remember the moves, by week three we were cultivating our individual teaching styles and creating our own classes.
Because our training took place in January at the start of the new year, we had the opportunity to attend nightly showcases of dancing, soccer, martial arts, Katakhali and more, as part of the month-long festival taking place on the beach. We visited a local temple on a nearby hill where we stumbled through long-held Indian rituals to honor the Gods, each of us glancing furtively at the others to see if we were doing it right. And once during our training, a group of 10 Indian percussionists came to our shala and played energetic live beats just for us, their drumming and voices in perfect union with one another.
These experiences immersed me in Indian culture and the yogic lifestyle in a way that I would not have been exposed to had I done my training at home.
While yoga is about much more than just the physical practice, the asanas are of course an integral component and the aspect Westerners are most familiar with. In that one month of training, despite an unfortunate rotator cuff injury that slowed me down after the first week of rigorous classes, my physical abilities improved to a level I never would have imagined in such a short amount of time.
Most of our teachers were Indian men who seemed not to have gotten the memo that yoga teachers are supposed to be calming, encouraging and gentle. The teacher we called Freddy Mercury, on account of his substantial and impressive moustache, adjusted every single person in every single pose, calmly reminding you to breathe as you struggled to maintain your inner peace. He quickly became both our most loved and most dreaded instructor, often pushing us to contort our bodies into such uncomfortable positions I was certain something was about to break.
Ginu, another instructor, was small but mighty and I quickly learned to crave his approval. I carefully tracked the amount of attention I received compared to other students in each class and it was a constant battle for my ego not to feel hurt when I found myself lacking. The less he paid attention to me, the harder I worked to contort myself into poses I wasn’t sure I should be attempting. Though in class he could seem uncaring and unsympathetic, as time went on I discovered that his harshness came from a desire to see us improve.
Throughout the training, I developed a sense that each of our teachers had a much clearer idea of what we were capable of than we did ourselves. As such, I improved at a much greater speed in that one month than I had in the past ten years of practice. I became determined that I would be the kind of teacher who was willing to push her students to reach their full potential, which I felt was lacking in many of the teachers I had seen in the States.
Early on, a group of us who seemed determined to become experts or die trying were soon labeled “The Extremists” by Padma, the woman who ran the school and taught most of our lectures. Though a big part of me swelled in pride with this designation, I also felt the pressure of living up to the name which only added to my already intense desire to prove myself. To whom I was attempting to prove myself, I’m still not entirely sure; the teachers, the other students, myself? Most likely a combination of all three.
Every yoga class soon became a lesson in checking my ego and searching for what my own personal motivations truly were. Injuring my shoulder turned out to be a great lesson in listening to my own body and disregarding my desire to be perceived as “hardcore.” As I learned to make modifications for myself so that my shoulder wouldn’t get worse, I also had to learn to let go of the fear that others would perceive me as weak or think I was slacking off. My yoga practice was for me and me alone and pushing my body through an injury was completely counter to the goal of physical and mental wellness.
I still find myself fighting the urge to appear “good at yoga” every time I step on the mat, perhaps even more so now that I am a teacher and my skills have improved beyond that of many of my usual classmates. It is a constant practice in pushing aside the ego, listening to my body, and not worrying about how I am perceived by others.
On the flip side, I also have to remind myself that it is okay to try harder moves, that it doesn’t mean I am “showing off” just because I want to improve or work on something challenging in a class. One of the greatest lessons I have learned from yoga is to meet myself where I am at and to do so independently of what is going on around me or in the minds of others. This is a lesson that applies not only in yoga but in pretty much everything I do and for that I am incredibly grateful. It is also a lesson I do my best to pass along to my students, including the fact that yoga encompasses much more than just suave-looking postures that look good on social media.
Unfortunately, while the roots of yoga are aimed at achieving a healthy mind, body, and soul, Western adoption of the practice has created an entire industry based largely on appearances. Many studios promote yoga as a means to sculpt the perfect beach body or shed pounds and I have even heard of classes that operate more like a boot camp and push students to work through the pain and deny themselves water when they are thirsty. That may be one way to exercise, but it certainly isn’t yoga.
Yoga is intended to be accessible for anyone who wishes to increase their strength and flexibility and cultivate a greater mindfulness in their life, not simply those who can afford expensive spandex, mats made from recycled materials and monthly studio memberships (though I am certainly guilty of purchasing all of those things). It is for the young and the old, the thin and the overweight, the male and the female and everyone in between.
The word yoga comes from the root yuj which means “union”: union of breath and movement, union of the mind, spirit and body, union of the individual with the universal. It is so much more than the physical movements we practice and in fact, asana is just one of the eight limbs of yoga, a means of getting our physical body to a point where we can comfortably sit for long periods of time and meditate. The ultimate goal of yoga has nothing to do with impressing others by twisting into a pretzel for your Instagram account and everything to do with attaining deeper states of meditative awareness and overall contentment.
Yoga is a lifestyle, a philosophy, a way of living that has centuries-old Indian roots and has been alternately oppressed, idolized, borrowed and bastardized by Westerners looking to either demonize or profit from its seemingly mystical powers. Today yoga is as widespread in America as apples in a grocery store and in a similar way, many of us consume it without having any connection to or awareness of its origins.
I entered into this month-long training with the goal of becoming a yoga teacher, but what I didn’t expect was to work through so much personal shit in the process and come away with many more questions about both yoga and myself, many of which I am still discovering and working through. Tears were a daily occurrence for me, their cause constantly shifting: mental and physical fatigue, fear of not succeeding, news of a death back home, digging up of past wounds, lack of air conditioning, homesickness, spicy food.
Luckily, there is no better place to ride an emotional rollercoaster than in a room full of empathetic yogis who are currently on the same crazy ride, or at least attending the same carnival. One morning you’re being sweetly held by three classmates as you collapse into a flood of tears after morning practice and that evening you’re bringing coconut water to a friend who spent the day throwing up from heat exhaustion.
Knowing that I was surrounded by these loving, supportive individuals made it possible to push through all the challenges and show up in an authentic way each day. This was the community that Padma and her fellow teachers created for us and I could not have made it through that month without such a special group of humans by my side.
I’ve been back in Portland teaching yoga for almost six months now and I absolutely love it. There is something truly special about being paid to guide people through a practice that has such huge potential to be physically and mentally healing. That being said, I don’t have any illusions about yoga being infallible. I discovered first-hand during my teacher training that injuries in yoga are commonplace, especially when you push yourself too hard too fast.
Anyone who has completed a 200-hour yoga teacher training would probably agree that it’s less of a comprehensive guide to teaching and more of an introduction to all the topics and movements you now have to spend the rest of your life exploring and improving upon to remain an excellent teacher. You can only cram so much information into one month and the teachers I know who are truly effective have been immersing themselves in yoga for years.
In addition, yoga’s history in the West is complicated and as I continue to deepen my knowledge of this ancient tradition, I am learning to question my own connection with yoga and, as a white American, my ability to share it without disregarding the culture from which it comes. The more I learn, the more I struggle to understand the role I can play in the lives of others as a yoga teacher and the role that all of this plays in mine. I know I want to be a good world citizen, that I want my students to benefit from yoga in the same ways that I have, and that I want to be respectful to the culture from which I have gained so much.
Is it wrong for me to teach yoga if I’m not Indian? How can I bring aspects of Indian culture into my practice without sharing things that aren’t mine to share? How can I educate others about yoga’s history without coming across as preachy and holier-than-thou? Is it my place to teach the other aspects of yoga to students who came to my class just to get a workout?
These are questions I wrestle with on a daily basis now and I encourage other Western teachers to do the same. It would be easier to ignore these moral dilemmas, provide our students with a good class and call it a day, but if we are going to benefit from yoga then we owe it to the people from whom we have borrowed it to educate ourselves and honor their culture.
At the end of the day, I know that I have only scratched the surface of the crazy journey yoga has to offer. I am forever grateful for the role it has played in my past, the places and the people it has connected me with and I am curious to see where it will take me in the future. But of course, as yoga teaches us, the only thing that truly exists is the present moment, so for now I will continue to read, explore, practice, meditate and above all else, breathe.
/
Olive Ryan is a traveler, educator, blogger, photographer, lover of glitter and acroyoga enthusiast. Although her hometown is Portland, Oregon, she has lived in and explored many corners of the world and looks forward to spending the rest of her life doing so. Find more of her writing on her travel and wellness blog, OliveAbroad.com.
The post From Student to Teacher: My Yoga Journey in Kerala appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post In Search of the Origin of “Silent Night” appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Silent nights are an uncommon occurrence in The Big Apple, but on a frosty evening in late November, a group of people are gathered at a Colonial-Era churchyard cemetery on the grounds of New York City’s Trinity Church. There’s a nip in the air, but it has zero effect on the feeling of warmth and fellowship amongst the crowd standing under the bright lights of the giant towers of the city’s Financial District.
On this night, Lower Manhattan’s nocturnal cacophony of howling sirens, honking car horns and the bustling bleat of holiday shoppers will be stilled for a moment or two. The occasion: an outdoor concert celebrating the bicentennial of one of the world’s most beloved Christmas carols, “Silent Night.”
For most people “Silent Night” is associated with crooner Bing Crosby. Crosby originally recorded the song to help raise money for the St. Colomban Foreign Missionary Society in 1935. The song was an instant hit, but when Crosby performed it again in his hit film Going My Way in 1944, the song became an instant classic engrained in the holiday season psyche of Americans, and most of the English-speaking world.
The roots of “Silent Night,” however, are not American, they’re Austrian. The song we know and love today, was initially inked as a six stanza poem by a young assistant priest from Salzburg named Joseph Mohr in 1816.
Central Europe, for those of you unfamiliar with early 19th-Century socio-political history, was still reeling from the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, political upheaval and economic misery. Then, in 1815, an Indonesian volcano named Mt. Tambora popped its earthly cork, blanketing the skies across the globe with a deadly ashen shroud causing an eco-catastrophe that darkened the skies, dropped temperatures and destroyed crops, leaving millions hungry and destitute.
With rampant famine and poverty raging across Europe, and one of the coldest, darkest years in recorded history, the following year, 1816, would be remembered as the “Year Without a Summer.” It’s not a stretch to imagine how this terrible time may have affected a young priest, and inspired him to write a poem about peace on earth.
Not long after the final bell has tolled on Wall Street’s nearby stock exchange, and the masses of financiers, bankers and traders have gone home for the night, three smartly dressed women make there way through the Trinity churchyard gathering and turn to face the crowd in front of a stately stone monument belonging to Alexander Hamilton. The women are dressed in magnificent, brightly colored, traditional Austrian dirndl dresses. One of them, carrying a guitar, leads a group of angelic youth choristers dressed in deep red choral garb.
The three women, who are known in Austria as The Kroll Family singers, are joined by another tall Austrian soprano, and along with choir ensembles from Trinity Church they begin to serenade the audience and the departed souls memorialized on the weather-beaten tombstones in the churchyard, with heavenly renditions of “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”) in its original German before performing it in a host of other languages.
The relevance of the site chosen for this holiday concert is not coincidental. According to local history, the very location of the performance on this evening is the same one used by another Austrian singing troupe, The Rainer Family Singers. The Rainers, popular songsters in their native Austria, traveled all the way from the soaring peaks of the Tyrollean Alps to introduce Americans to their beloved song of peace way back in 1839, the first time “Silent Night” is believed to have been sung in North America.
The beautiful Christmas hymn The Rainer Family carried across the Atlantic was almost 20 years old when it was first heard on American shores. Not long after penning what would become the lyrics to “Stille Nacht,” Mohr moved to work as an assistant priest at a small church in Oberndorf, a small riverside town near Salzburg. While there, he asked a local teacher he had befriended to compose a melody for the poem he’d written. Franz Xaver Gruber took up the task, and on Christmas Eve, 1818, the song UNESCO has recognized as a part of the world’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, was first sung at the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf.
Inspired by the knowledge that this beautiful carol was created in a country I have come to know intimately over the years as a ski journalist, I decided to make a pilgrimage to its place of birth. So I added Salzburg and Oberndorf to a pre-Christmas ski trip I had been planning, and on a chilly December morning one week before the song’s 200th anniversary, I boarded a train bound for the birthplace of “Silent Night”
After of week of sunshine and hero snow in Austria’s spectacular Innsbruck, Oetztal and Arlberg regions, I pulled into Salzburg’s main train station on a crisp, sunny morning. Salzburg, if you’ve never been, is one of the most beautiful fairy tale cities on earth. Sitting in the shadow of the majestic Hohensalzburg Fortress, on the shores of the Salzach River, Salzburg and its colorful cluster of ornate Baroque buildings, towering churches and cobblestone squares is the jewel of the Alps.
Salzburg’s favorite native son is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and his presence is felt throughout the city, but nowhere more than on Getreidegasse, where tourists line up to take selfies in front of the bright yellow building he was born in. Any visit to Salzburg is a feast for the senses, with the music of Mozart always in the air, and the scent of chocolate Mozartkuglen (a dark chocolate marble sized ball filled with marzipan, pistachio and nougat) never far away, but in December during the Advent period it seems like the city turns the sensual dial up to 11.
Christkindlmarkts (Christmas Markets) can be found all over the Salzburg, in fact it’s hard not to come across one during this festive time of year. The scent of Gluhwein (mulled wine), roasted chestnuts, and the sounds of Christmas songs played by street musicians, outdoor choirs and random carolers is an unforgettable feast for the senses.
Unable to resist the sights, sounds and smells of the city’s Christkindlmarkts, I thought a little journey of yuletide fancy would be a nice way to begin my pilgrimage to Oberndorf later that afternoon. I took a stroll across the romantic Makartsteg Bruck, which is known as Salzburg’s bridge of love because of the thousands of tiny locks lovers have decorated it with. It led me into the Sternbrau Advent Market, a secret, off-the-beaten-path Christkindlemarkt a local friend had once shown me. This market is tiny compared to Salzburg’s two main and much larger Christkindlmarkts (Domplatz and Residenzplatz) in the city’s old town, but the stone arches and medieval-covered walkway onto Getreidegasse have an irresistible old world charm that must be seen firsthand.
After scoring a couple of Mozart figurine tree ornaments and coiffing a delicious apple flavored Gluhwein at the Stern Advent Market, I made a beeline for the Residenzplatz market where another local friend had told me I could find a decorative cowbell from a stand with a real live blacksmith on site. Upon finding said smithy, and convincing the friendly Austrian blacksmith to let me have a few whacks on the anvil he had set up, I waltzed over to a nearby stand with the most tasty and colorful pretzel shaped meringues my eyes had ever seen, and promptly gorged myself on two of these heavenly, scrumptious egg white-based confections.
My next stop was the famed Salzburg Museum and its “Silent Night” Exhibition (open until February 2, 2019) where I was told I would find two of the earliest manuscripts related to the song. Upon entry, visitors are told the goals of the exhibition are two-fold. The first is to explain the carol’s message, humanity’s universal longing for peace, quiet and security. The other and perhaps more important message is darker, and comes as a critical examination of how the carol has been misused through advertising, politics and industry through the years.
Seeing documents related to the song in Mohr and Gruber’s hand was impressive, but paled in comparison to a 5-minute 1942 Nazi audio recording of “Silent Night” made available to visitors on earphones. The Weihnachtsringsendung (“Christmas Ring Transmission”) features the voices of soldiers from different theaters of war, on various fronts, and even in U-boats singing “Silent Night” together. The twisted use of this song of peace to bolster the bond between fighters in the field and the Fatherland is testament to the depths to which the Third Reich would sink to win the war.
With a newfound appreciation of how a song of peace could be weaponized, I was more curious than ever to see the ground zero point of the carol I’d innocently sung every Christmas since my childhood. A 35-minute train ride later, I found myself walking along a levee on the shores of the meandering Salzach River on my way to the sleepy little town of Oberndorf where “Silent Night” was first sung.
As the winter sun was setting, I saw some twinkling fairy lights at the entranceway to a small cluster of buildings. At the center of this riverside hamlet, on a high hill flanked by a tall white water tower and Mesner House, the former rectory where Mohr once lived, stood a simple, tiny white chapel with a black dome. This was it, the place where the world’s most beloved song of peace was born.
The chapel, a memorial to the now long-gone original church of St. Nicholas where Mohr and Gruber serenaded parishioners after the Christmas Eve service of 1818, was a hive of activity. Tourists were streaming in and out, with a line to get in. After a large group of tourists who were on a guided bus tour exited the chapel, I walked in for my first look at the tiny chapel. No ostentation, just a few rows of church pews, two small stained glass windows, a simple alter, a few bouquets of flowers and two small stands where pilgrims could light small candles. This is what I’d hoped to find, a place without glittering statues, giants works of art or massive rose windows. Instead, a quiet little corner of the world to think about peace on earth and good will toward men.
As I lit a small votive candle and said a prayer for members of my family I’d lost over the years, the silence of the night that had fallen outside transported me back to places and things I’d seen before. Like the images of a small Bosnian girl who just had passed in her father’s arms — haunting video I’d chosen not to use in a television news segment I’d produced years earlier — or photos of the horrors of genocide in Darfur and starvation in Yemen. And finally, to the unforgettable images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center crumbling just steps away from Trinity Church where my journey had begun.
The message of “Silent Night” is as relevant today as it was when Mohr and Gruber first sang it, and in many ways the planet hasn’t changed very much. So if you happen to sing this iconic song of peace and love over the holidays, do it with joy and hope in your heart for a better world, just like the people who first heard it in a small Austrian village exactly 200 years ago this Christmas Eve.
/
Michael Mastarciyan is a Toronto-based print and television journalist with a passion for skiing, golf and general global wandering. When he’s not reviewing golf courses, chasing winter on the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup tour or working in television sports news production, you’ll find him reviewing skiwear for SNOW Magazine where he is Associate Fashion Editor. You can see where his latest travels take him by following @theskiwriter, @canadiandownhillers or @skigolfpostcards on Instagram.
The post In Search of the Origin of “Silent Night” appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Top 11 Free Things To Do In New York City This December appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Everyone knows New York City is an expensive town, especially in December around the holidays. To save some money, try these tips for free things to do this December during your visit.
1) 9/11 Memorial
The 9/11 Memorial, on the site of the former Twin Towers, opened on September 12, 2011, in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and was easily the most anticipated new project in the city for years. The memorial features two reflecting pools nearly an acre in size each, each filled with the largest man-made waterfalls in North America. Surrounding the imposing structures are the names of the nearly 3,000 victims inscribed on bronze parapets surrounding the pools.
Though entrance is free to the park is free, access to the new 9/11 Memorial and Museum must be purchased in advance. It takes about two hours to visit the museum, and you can purchase tickets in advance here.
2) The High Line
One of the world’s premier examples of urban preservation, the High Line is an elevated train line located on Manhattan’s West Side that has been transformed into a public park featuring Hudson River views, natural landscaping and a rotating collection of public art projects. Popular among city-dwellers and visitors alike, the park has become a major draw to a neighborhood once only populated in the evening hours.
The High Line is a perfect way to spend the afternoon with a coffee in hand, taking in the sights of New York in one of the most unique ways possible. Click here for dining options and things to do in the area.
For the High Line hours and directions click here.
3) Free Central Park Tours
Central Park, one of the world’s most iconic parks, not only offers hundreds of free ways to explore its 843 acres (which makes up 6% of Manhattan if you were wondering), but is also home to daily free tours led by park representatives.
For example, the Ramble Tour will take you over streams, under arches and through the woods along a maze of pathways in the secluded 36-acre woodland section of the park. The Iconic Views of Central Park Tour will take you to the park’s most iconic landmarks including, the Dairy, Sheep Meadow, Cherry Hill, the Lake, Bow Bridge, Bethesda Terrace, the Mall, and Literary Walk.
For a full schedule of all of the park’s ticketed and free tours, visit the Central Park tour calendar.
4) MoMA For Free
It’s nearly impossible to visit New York without spending at least one morning or afternoon visiting one of the world’s greatest collections of art at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art). If you’re visiting over the weekend, MoMA has free admission every Friday from 4:00 p.m. until closing at 8:00 p.m. Lines form quickly, especially during the holidays, so be sure to get there early to leave plenty of time to take it all in.
For hours and information about MoMA click here.
5) Christmas Markets
Remember when Harry Potter and the crew visited Hogsmeade Village and found themselves in a Dickensian Christmas wonderland? Well, this might be a stretch, but if you happen to go at night after some snow has just fallen to one of the various holiday markets that spring up around Manhattan every December, you just may get the same experience. I know, it’s a stretch, but it’s still a great experience to help get you in the holiday mood.
Head to the Union Square Holiday Market for the city’s largest holiday market with nearly 100 vendors selling everything from German chocolate to decorative socks. Nearby, on Broadway between 13th and 14th street, is Max Brenner, where you can pick up the granddaddy of hot chocolate drinks.
Visit here or a list of 10 of the best holiday markets around New York.
6) Ice Skating In Bryant Park
It may not be as well known as the one at nearby Rockefeller Center, but the free ice skating rink (or Citi Pond for you corporate-minded folks) at Bryant Park is a full $28 cheaper, saving you much-needed cash for the inevitable trip to the emergency room (come on, you haven’t done this since you were 10, you think you’re not going to take a few spills?).
However, take note that the skate rentals are $20 if you don’t bring your own pair.
For more information about the rink click here.
7) Christmas in Midtown
I wouldn’t normally advise anyone to spend too much time in Midtown in December given the throngs of tourists and exorbitant prices charged for everything from coffee to street pretzels. But, from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, a large swath of the neighborhood transforms into some the city’s most iconic holiday sights that even a travel snob/Scrooge would have trouble staying away from.
Start at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 50th Street to see Radio City Music Hall with its giant Christmas tree and tin soldiers decorating its marquee, then make your way down 50th Street and through the massive crowds to catch a glimpse of the ice skaters and Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center (last year’s tree was an 80-foot Norway spruce hailing from Flanders, New Jersey).
Across the street on Fifth Avenue are the iconic holiday window displays at Saks Fifth Avenue. After walking by them, head north on Fifth Avenue to see some of the country’s most expensive shops along the famed stretch of Fifth Avenue leading to Central Park. Here you’ll also see some of the most expensively decorated shops as well, including the Cartier Building with its red ribbon wrapping the entire facade and the window displays at Bergdorf Goodman.
Finally, eight blocks north at 58th Street, you’ll come to FAO Schwartz, the world’s most famous toy store (and site of some massive lines come Christmas). To wrap things up, take in the glitzy Plaza Hotel across the street (and grab a bite to eat at the new The Plaza Food Hall), then make your way through the 59th Street entrance of Central Park and stroll down to Wollman Rink and watch the ice skaters underneath one of the world’s most famous skylines.
8) Barbes
From accordion-playing divas to Slavic soul, Barbes in Brooklyn’s Park Slope offers some of the city’s best and most eclectic variety of free music every night. Drinks are standard price and collection hats are usually passed around after the performances.
If you’re staying in Manhattan, don’t worry about getting lost just because you’re leaving the island. Barbes is literally across the street from the F stop, a 20-minute ride from Midtown.
9) Free Juilliard Performances
Heading to Lincoln Center for world-class performing arts? Good news for you, many of the performers you’re paying to see started out just next door at Juilliard, and all of them spent a good chunk of their time performing for free at recitals open to the public. These free performances range from Jazz, Chamber Music, Orchestral, Solos, Dance, Opera and Drama.
For a full schedule of the wide variety of performances, click here to visit Juilliard’s calendar of events.
When you’re at Lincoln Center, stick around for a free performance by the new fountain in the center of the plaza. Designed by the same people who brought you the waterworks at Vegas’ Bellagio, the fountain’s 353 nozzles are able to shoot water 40 feet in the air to create an “aquatic ballet.”
10) A New England Winter In New York
A good majority of visitors to New York this time of year are from far-flung and usually much warmer locations, and for many of them, this whole northeast United States thing is a novelty to them. Why not try fitting in a whole other region, all while staying in New York?
Stay with me here. Take a short subway ride to Prospect Park, in the heart of Brooklyn, and get your Thoreau on by making your way to one of the four nature trails that meander through the woods — a spectacular sight in the summer, and simply magical in the winter. Snow-draped pines, squirrels foraging in the fallen leaves, a rastafarian drummer playing for loose change: just like a Frost poem.
Finish up with a stroll through scenic Park Slope (like Hogsmeade, but with strollers), and cozy up with a warm drink in front of a roaring fire at nearby Union Hall, New York’s preeminent winter bar.
For information about Prospect Park click here.
For information about Union Hall click here.
11) Arthur Avenue
Sure, Manhattan has Little Italy, Brooklyn has, well, Brooklyn, but many visitors don’t know that the Bronx has New York’s most intact, most authentic Little Italy this side of the Mediterranean: Arthur Avenue.
Head north to the outer reaches of the outer boroughs to this five-block stretch for the afternoon and wander in and out of the many delis, bakeries, and coffee shops, all with nary a tourist in sight. And dont’ worry, you can be sure every business will be decked-out for the holidays.
Visit here for directions and a list of businesses.
Miscellaneous Resources
For more ideas for free things to do in New York, check out these resources:
• NYCGO (New York City’s official marketing, tourism and partnership organization)
• Time Out’s Guide to Free Things to Do in NYC
/
Matt Stabile is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Expeditioner. The Expeditioner began in 2008 and is headquartered in New York City. You can read his writings, watch his travel videos or contact him at any time at TheExpeditioner.com.
The post Top 11 Free Things To Do In New York City This December appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post 10 Things to Do in Barcelona in the Winter appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Are you looking for things to do in Barcelona this winter? You may think of Barcelona as a summer destination, but except for the beach, the city doesn’t change much between seasons. In fact, the offseason in the Catalan capital has its own unique appeal. In the winter months, the tourist hordes go home and the city is friendlier and more laid back.
Popular destinations that are overrun during the summer turn calm and more authentic come winter, with the added touch of holiday festivities. Whenever you visit Barcelona, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a good time.
To help you get started, here are 10 things to do in Barcelona that are particularly fun to do in winter.
1) Visit a Christmas Market
It wouldn’t be winter in a European city without a Christmas market and Barcelona doesn’t disappoint. There are two big Christmas markets located in front of the two main cathedrals, the Sagrada Familia and the Cathedral of Barcelona. The markets are pretty much identical, so don’t feel like you have to go to both. Unlike Christmas markets in the north of Europe, Barcelona doesn’t get that cold, so you can linger without fear of frostbite. Grab a warm drink and get your Christmas shopping done, Catalan-style.
2) Buy Pooping Christmas Statue
Speaking of Catalan Christmas, there are some unique traditions here you should know about. For example, it’s a local tradition to give small statues of people pooping for the holidays. All over the city, and especially at the Christmas markets, you’ll find these statues of people pooping for sale. The statues are called caganers, which quite literally translates to “poopers” in Catalan. The traditional caganer features a Catalan man in a red hat squatting over a pile of poo. These days you’ll also find all sorts of famous people with their pants around their knees. Bonus points if you manage to slip one into a nativity scene when you get home.
3) Catch a Show
Barcelona is home to the Liceau, one of Europe’s most prestigious opera houses, which puts on popular shows throughout the year. The Liceu dates back to 1847 and the building itself is worth a visit, even if you’re not into opera. Across town, the Palau de Música Catalana is equally stunning and offers a variety of musical performances. Both put on holiday shows, and while tickets aren’t cheap, the performances don’t disappoint. Whichever performance you choose to pick, you’d be wise to buy tickets beforehand. Plan ahead and dress to impress.
4) Play in the Ocean
Sure, the water is a lot warmer in August, but even in December, the Mediterranean is still pretty mild by North American standards. The winter chill puts a stop to the city’s sun worshipers, but water sports remain popular year round. Walk along the beach you’ll find a ton of places happy to rent you a wetsuit and any sort of aquatic sports gear you might want to play with. If you get lucky, you might visit on one of the rare days where a storm pushes in surfable waves. If not, windsurfing, kayaking and standup paddleboarding are all available.
5) Drink the Day Away at a Sidewalk Cafe
Barcelona’s cafe culture is one of its big draws. Practically every street and absolutely every public square are filled with sidewalk cafes. It often feels like the entire city has breakfast, lunch, dinner and evening drinks outside. When the temperatures start to dip, many cafes pull out industrial heaters, blankets and sometimes even tents. No self-respecting Catalan would ever cede their outdoor seating to the weather. Pull up a chair, cozy up with a blanket, order a bottle of wine and watch the day slip by.
6) Head to the Slopes
You can almost see the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees from the beach. There are at least 14 ski resorts within a 3-4 hour drive of Barcelona offering some of the best skiing you’ll find in Europe. The resorts of Masella, La Molina and Grandvalira are all accessible via public transportation. While they’re close enough to make a long day trip feasible, you’d be better off doing an overnight if possible. If you do head to a resort in Andorra, don’t forget your passport.
7) Enjoy the Gothic Quarter
Barcelona gets mobbed in late June, July and especially August. Businesses close, locals rent out their apartments and flee the city in mass. This leaves especially popular neighborhoods like Gotica (the Gothic Quarter) feeling more like Disneyland than Barcelona. During the winter months, the neighborhood springs back to life and is one of the most charming areas of the city. Get lost in the area’s winding streets, do some shopping or plop down in a square for a beer.
8) Head to a Museum
As the streets thin out, so too do crowds at popular museums. Tickets to the Picasso Museum, a main stop for any visitor who reads their guidebook, are easy to come by in the winter. The Sagrada Familia is busy year round, but there are fewer busloads of tours in the winter. The National Art Museum, Parque Guell and the Maritime Museum are all solid bets in the offseason as well.
9) Celebrate Three Kings Day
Spain doesn’t do Christmas, at least not like the United States. The big day of the holiday season is Three Kings Day on January 6th, when children open their presents. On the night of the 5th, children leave their shoes by their doors, hoping that the three kings will fill them with presents. Processions fill the streets and bakeries do brisk business in ring-shaped cakes, which bakers decorate to look like a king’s crown. If you do buy a cake, chew carefully as they almost all have a small baby Jesus baked inside. If you happen to get the slice with Jesus in it, tradition dictates that you’re in for a good year. Just don’t swallow him or you’re in for a rough couple of days.
10) Go to Church
Even if you’re not religious, Barcelona’s cathedrals are awe-inspiring and even more so during religious holidays. If you can get tickets, the Sagrada Familia holds mass on Sundays and most religious holidays. Check their website for details, as space is limited. If you can’t get in there, the Cathedral of Barcelona and the Santa Maria del Mar Cathedral seem to hold mass daily, if not multiple times a day. When you go, be respectful: dress conservatively, keep quiet and put your camera away.
/
Anthony is a Barcelona-based writer and photographer focusing primarily on travel and technology. Originally from the US, he’s always up for a trip somewhere fun. If he’s not on the road you’ll likely find him hunting the streets of Barcelona for somewhere weird and unique.
The post 10 Things to Do in Barcelona in the Winter appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post In the Car with Kinga appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
The Transfăgărășan Road is the most famous road in Romania. Its twists and turns over the Carpathian Mountains are legendary and it is often dubbed the greatest road to drive on in the world. Tons of car commercials have been shot on it.
I was standing somewhere near the bottom, staring at a closed sign.
There was a single kitschy souvenir stand open near the final turn, guarded by an aggressively friendly stray dog. Our tour guide, Kinga, came back from speaking with the man running it.
“The road is closed,” she announced, even though she had told us as much this morning. Since it was the plan for the day to go drive it, we asked her what we were going to do. “Well, we will see.”
This led us to believe there might be a chance it would be open.
For three and a half hours from our bed and breakfast, we sat in Kinga’s station wagon. Transylvania’s landscape is lovely, but there isn’t a lot of variation. After the first hour of fields, mountains, fields and mountains, I fell asleep for a bit. We listened to the radio. This was our third day of touring with Kinga and I suspect she was growing just as tired of our constant presence as we were of hers.
We took a few half-hearted pictures of the surrounding woods, which had a certain charm. The air was mountain-crisp. There were patches of snow dotted between dark trees. Stray cats and dogs twined around our legs. Wood smoke added to the murkiness of the light.
But it was not nearly charming enough to be worth the drive there or back, we now realized with horror.
“You make picture,” Kinga said. “I smoke.”
“I am Kinga.” When I first shook her hand in the lobby of our hotel, I was taken aback. She must have noticed because she asked, “You were expecting a man?”
I had to admit I was. The owner of the company that connected us to her was male and I had never heard the name Kinga before.
I was on a trek through Europe with my husband Joe. We are, for the most part, do-it-yourselfers. We research the best restaurants online. We ask locals where to stay and what to see. We take buses and trains no matter how slow or questionable. When it came time to plan our trip to the Romanian village where Joe’s father was born, we dug into our travel guides and online resources and realized, abruptly, that we were in trouble.
The village was on the other side of a mountain range from where we planned to stay in Târgu Mureș. There was not, as far as we could tell, a single bus or train through the area. So, we would have to rent a car — but where? We weren’t flying into a major city, but instead taking a series of tiny trains from the Tokai region of Hungary. On top of which, neither of us had even owned a car in 10 years. We have licenses but are not drivers. We asked the internet. Renting a car was possible but expensive and after seeing the roads and driving habits of Romanians, it seemed best not to attempt it. We would have to go against our usual way and hire a guide.
Kinga was tall, with brown hair that she teased into a small bouffant, and a Natasha-and-Boris type accent. She was the daughter of a Polish father and a Hungarian mother and she spoke Romanian, Hungarian, Polish and English (which she claimed to have learned exclusively from television), as well as a bit of Czech. We heaved our suitcases into the back of her brown station wagon and were off.
The mountains were as intimidating as expected. Romanian drivers will pass each other at speeds and on curves that genuinely made my stomach hurt. I closed my eyes and wished for Dramamine.
We drove through small towns. We stopped and asked for directions. We turned around. This was not a place that Kinga, or most people, apparently, had ever been to. As the morning wore on, Joe wondered aloud if we should find an internet connection somewhere to try to download directions.
Kinga just shook her head and raised one sensibly manicured finger in the air. “Oh no. We will find. We will find.”
We rolled into Teaca mid-morning. It was tiny, just two streets really, and she identified the town hall by the flags out front. The roads were dirt — mud in October — but there were four cement block buildings that had likely been built just before communism ended, plus a church that looked even newer.
We followed Kinga inside and after just two brief exchanges, a man wearing khakis and a collared shirt led us into an office.
“What year was your father born?” she asked.
“1932.” Joe gave the month and day and his full Hungarian name.
The man ran his finger across the shelves, yanked out a large red tome and flipped it open.
And there, in black ink, was his father’s birth record, punctuated by his grandfather’s signature, a man Joe would never meet.
We stared for a moment. Just like that, so quick. 1932, not so long ago.
One of the biggest lessons we would learn on this trip is that the rest of the world feels the weight of time differently than Americans. Our country is just a few hundred years old. Most of us arrived much more recently than that, descended from immigrants fleeing wars and famine or seeking opportunities in the 20th century. Many of those immigrants, like my family, purposely let any history before that fade away.
Joe took out a camera and the man startled and waved his hand. He said something, and Kinga translated.
“No pictures.” Then still in English to us, “It’s like we still have communism. Everyone is afraid to do something wrong.”
So we stared for another minute. Kinga pointed at the record and said something to the man.
“He says the house numbers have changed but he knows where this was.”
We walked to a cement building, a medical clinic, one street over. “Here.”
Here my father-in-law spent his childhood collecting eggs for his family’s business, where he would steal secret sips of wine during winemaking. There was a farm right next to the building that probably looked just like the family farm would, with a small patch of grapevines stretching up the hill behind it and chickens pecking at the fence.
Kinga left us and Joe and I wandered around, hand in hand, feeling sad. Up to the 1930s, Hungarian Jews and Romanian locals lived peacefully side by side. There were clearly no Jews left here now.
We got back in the car, tired and thankful.
But Kinga was our tour guide after all, and now it was time to do some touring. By the time we got back to a more populated area, it was afternoon and we were starving. Kinga brought us to Dracula Danes, a lodge-like restaurant with a petting zoo out back. We gorged on a late lunch of meat pies and giant fried donuts that Kinga insisted were a house specialty.
An hour later, we arrived at our B&B in the town of Seibel, straight out of a storybook. The bridge we drove across to get to the pension was so narrow, I would have assumed it was pedestrian-only until Kinga eased her car across it. We waited for a cow and several dogs to move out of our way before pulling into Pensione Ramona.
Adriana was a round woman with short hair and sparkling eyes. Her husband Ionel (who knew exactly five words of English: “You can call me John!”) was small and wiry. Their genuine delight in having us stay with them was obvious the minute we walked in the door (tourists in the Romanian countryside are rare in October). Adriana announced, through Kinga, that dinner would be ready within the hour.
Joe and I looked at each other in despair. We were full. Not just not hungry. FULL. We begged her to push dinner back, which she acquiesced to with a smile.
Our room was simple and clean, with four twin beds. Thankfully, Kinga had her own room next door. We heard the TV blare on the minute her door shut. We didn’t see her again until dinner.
We were facing one of the biggest realities of travel: not everyone is fun to travel with. It is a reality that many people learn on a vacation with friends. A person might be perfectly enjoyable in normal life, but days and days together serve to accent your differences. Kinga was cold and closed-off. She was polite and basically kind, but not interested in becoming friends. As an introvert, you’d think I would appreciate the quiet, but instead I found it wearing on my nerves, leaving me on edge every night until we could finally close our bedroom door for hours of heavy sleep.
Dinner was the most perfect homemade meal I have ever had: sarmale (beef-stuffed cabbage rolls), homemade sheep feta and soft cow’s milk cheese, finishing with a slab of hand-formed apple strudel. The food just kept coming and I just kept telling my groaning stomach to shut up. Each meal we would each at Adriana’s table would be served alongside three tiny decanters: wine, pálinka and ţuică (a type of sherry), all made by Ionel.
The next two days were a series of more long drives and mostly forgettable castles: Hunedoara with its impressive views, Sighișoara Citadel (the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler), Bierten Fortified Church and the famously complicated lock inside, Sâmbăta de Sus Monastery, with newly restored buildings and cold, empty grounds.
At each spot, Kinga would tell us a few things about the place, both new and old. Sometimes she would even pull up an audio tour and hand us her phone.
Then: “You make picture. I smoke.” She would find a place on a bench with a view and wait for us to explore, buy snacks and take pictures. And each time we came back and told her we were finished, she said, “Okay. We go now.”
The drives were long and winding. I sat up front in a vain attempt to avoid car sicknesses. We listened to music by French and Romanian bands, all in English. One tape had songs about sex that were so hilariously graphic, my husband reached up and tapped my shoulder, a secret “what the heck is happening?” signal. Kinga didn’t appear to notice.
On one winding mountain road, there was a cheese stand on every corner, each staffed by a single woman who likely made the cheese herself. I finally pointed and said, “Can we get some?”
“You like cheese?”
“Yes!”
By then we were past the stand. Kinga slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the road. She then twisted around and reversed for about 100 feet, half on the road, half on the shoulder, until we were back at the stand.
I bought two fist-sized lumps of cheese, one with a hardened outside that tasted like smoked mozzarella and another wrapped in bark that tasted like bark.
Our last night, Adriana served us turkey and vegetable soup with thick dollops of cream, giant hunks of veal, silky new potatoes and an eggy sour cherry coffee cake. This time, Ionel helped instead of coming in late from working on the farm. Joe asked him, through Kinga, how he brewed the pálinka. He laughed and pointed at the giant soup pots, then mimed pipes that would attach and were now stashed away somewhere. The grapes for the wine came from the vines in their driveway. The plums for the pálinka came from their fields. Then, perhaps happy for such an appreciative audience, he topped off our decanters of pálinka and ţuică. Once, twice, three times.
We could only communicate through Kinga’s very literal translations, which, after a few glasses of pálinka, started to sound hilarious. Finally, Ionel pulled up a chair and sat with us.
“You need a website!” Joe told Ionel.
I agreed. “Everyone should know about your house!”
“Mmm, ok.” Kinga translated, her face and tone still neutral, and Ionel said, “yes yes yes!” and slapped Joe on the back.
After she served the coffee cake, and after much begging from us, even Adriana pulled up a chair and sipped delicately at the super sweet ţuică. Her round cheeks turned red and she started laughing too, as we grew impatient with translating through Kinga and instead tried to act out everything we wanted to ask them.
Finally, Kinga, allowed to stop working for the first time in three days, pushed back from the table and visibly relaxed for the first time. Not much of a drinker, she tried the pálinka we were all shouting about and nodded, smiled and said, “Yes, it’s good.” We laughed and cheered to this understated pronouncement.
It is typical of travel experiences that your favorite things are never found on any top ten list. That moment we saw a bit of history in Teaca during our pálinka-fueled dinner in Sibiel.
The next morning, Adriana and Ionel hugged us goodbye. We were off to Brasov. Kinga brought us first to our B&B to drop our luggage, then to the main square at Brasov. Our goodbye was not teary.
“Okay, market is here. I go.”
And just like that, she was off. The next day we would take the public bus to Bran to see Dracula’s castle, back to being do-it-yourselfers. We had never wanted a tour guide and we certainly would never have picked Kinga. But for the rest of the trip, whenever we struggled with finding our way we would look each other in the eyes.
“Oh no. We will find. We will find.”
/
Jasmine Smith is a former cheesemonger, transplanted Midwesterner, and world traveler. She has written for The Bold Italic, Kveller and Her View from Home. She currently lives in San Francisco, caring for many plants and one small human.
The post In the Car with Kinga appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post A Gaucho’s Life in San Antonio de Areco appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
When thinking about Argentina, what comes to mind? Americans will say meat, Europeans will think about football/soccer, and South Americans will mention tango — but locals will talk about the mythical gauchos.
In the middle of the Argentinian Pampas, only a 60 miles from Buenos Aires, stands a little town, to all appearances very quiet, but keen to preserve the country’s habits and customs. San Antonio de Areco was founded in 1730, and it is today probably the town that best symbolizes gauchos’ traditions of the past. For 80 years now, this town has held the Festival of Tradition every November, which is considered to be the oldest celebration in Argentina.
An Origin Dating Back to the 30’s
The origin of the festival is linked to the history of San Antonio de Areco. Located at the edge of the town, along the Camino Real, the Ricardo Güiraldes Museum is one of the unmissable places of interest in Areco. Its name pays tribute to the famous Argentinian writer, poet and novelist Ricardo Güiraldes, whose family owned estancias in San Antonio de Areco.
His popular novel, Don Segundo Sombra, drew inspiration from the way of life of a gaucho arequero (Areco’s dwellers), and was so successful that the mayor of the town at that time decided to establish the Tradition Day in San Antonio de Areco in 1939. This celebration originally took place in Areco and Lujan, a town only a stone’s throw away from Buenos Aires. It was only in 1984 that an ordinance law was adopted and ordered that San Antonio de Areco become permanent headquarters of the Tradition Day.
The first celebration was organized in the main streets of the town in 1939. Only a few horse shows, such as rodeos, were planned. At night, a barbecue (asado in Spanish) was made and traditional dances and authentic folkloric music were performed.
The Festival of Tradition today
Today, the Festival of Tradition is much more than a simple day celebrating traditions of a period kept in old ages. This unique cultural event gathers thousands of gauchos from all over the country, and of all ages and origin. It always takes place the week of November 10 to celebrate the birthday of José Hernandez, Argentinian poet and journalist, especially famous thanks to the poem Martin Fierro, which, just as Don Segundo Sombra, refers to the gauchos’ life in the campo. This date was chosen in order to pay tribute to this literary icon, who devoted his life to defend the gaucho’s identity and his role in the independence of Argentina.
All along the week, interesting exhibitions, captivating concerts and elegant dances are performed at the four sides of the town. During the weekends, horse-riding competitions, horseback games and jineteadas are carried out. Jineteadas refers to rodeos, in the style of South America. The gaucho attempts to stay on a young, wild horse from 6 to 15 seconds. This event is one of the most attended in the festival as it provides gauchos with the opportunity to challenge one another and to prove their strength, dexterity and bravery.
The show’s climax is the parade of gauchos throughout the town. Horsemen and horses get together under the crowd’s applause and march in the cobbled streets of San Antonio de Areco. Today, according to the tradition, the Argentinian flag should be held by Oscar Peyrena, one of the most emblematic gauchos of the province.
The festivities don’t stop when night falls. In the streets, a delicious smell of grilled meat permeates, couples chat and get drinks while rhythmic guitarreadas(folkloric music) play all day and curious travelers listen to the stories told by locals sitting around a bonfire.
Have a walk in the streets of Areco during the Festival of Tradition, and you will be carried away by this surprising festival. Only an hour away from the crush of the capital city, San Antonio de Areco is a journey back in the past and is a good example of the country’s cultural diversity. Peasants, craftsmen, dancers, musicians, artists and gauchos try hard to revive the old local habits, so as to preserve this unique heritage among a population, eager to protect all the legends of Argentina.
/
The travel agency Areco Tradicion was created with the idea of introducing a traditional town strongly marked by the gauchos’ footprint: San Antonio de Areco. It was founded in 2013 by Bertrand Mahé, a professional photographer and lover of the large wild Argentinian landscapes and Andrés Ferrante, founder of the Portal Areco, a tourism website about San Antonio de Areco and its surrounding regions. In 2015, Sarah Reynier decided to leave Buenos Aires, where she had been living for two years, and join the team of Areco Tradición in San Antonio de Areco. To learn more about the Festival of Tradition, visit Arecotradicion.com/en/homepage/.
The post A Gaucho’s Life in San Antonio de Areco appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post 10 Hiking Trails Around the World That Will Blow Your Mind appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
I have always been a nature person. Cities, for me, seem unnecessarily chaotic and at times, overwhelming. Nature, on the other hand, is simple, straightforward in its beauty and comes at no extra cost. There is nothing better than walking in the peacefulness of the mountains, around the calming sound of rocks and rivers, and having the front seat row to Mother Nature. Whenever I have a chance to disconnect from the world and go on a four-day trek in the mountain, I would do so with no hesitation.
I first discovered my love for hiking in 2014 in Nepal, when I decided to go hike the Annapurna Base Camp trail alone with no porter or guide. It was a huge endeavor for me since I never had any previous hiking experience and I never thought of myself as “outdoorsy”. Everything changed after that and now, I tremble with excitement every time I see a trail I could hike into the heart of the mountains.
After 6 years of traveling around the world from Peru to New Zealand, I have compiled a list of my top 10 hiking experience from around the world. The trails lengths range from 6 hours to 7 days, 1,000 meters to 4,700 meters high, and from a stroll to me dragging my feet to the top. Without further ado, let’s begin with my first trek ever.
1) Annapurna Base Camp Trek (Nepal)
Location: Pokhara, Nepal
Length: 7 – 10 days return
Highest Altitude: 14,107 feet
Distance: ~75 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
This was my first hike ever and it is still my favorite and most memorable out of all. The trail begins in the beautiful city by the lake with a view of the Himalayas, Pokhara. The trail is considered to be one of the most diverse in Nepal, even more so than the Everest Base Camp trail. You start walking through a lush green forest, going up and down valleys, crossing several massive suspension bridges and through the bamboo forest. Pace yourself past the avalanche-prone valley and eventually you will be surrounded by several 26,000-foot-high peaks of the Himalayas.
Nothing will make you feel accomplished and humbled at the same time as conquering the Annapurna Base Camp trail and still being towered by not one but several higher ones. It’s even more intimidating to know that one of the mountains surrounding you at the base camp, the Annapurna, is one of the least climbed and the deadliest out of all the 26,000-foot peaks with the highest fatality rate at 40.8%. That feeling of accomplishment will be with you for several months to come after.
2) Ala Kul Trek (Kyrgyzstan)
Location: Karakol, Kyrgyzstan
Length: 2 – 4 days return
Highest Altitude: 11,600 feet
Distance: ~33 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
For such a small off-the-beaten-path country, Kyrgyzstan has a lot to offer for nature lovers with stunning canyons, pristine alpine lakes and plenty of hiking trails, all tucked away in the unexplored mountain range of Central Asia. One of that trail is the Ala Kul trail, a two to four-day hike that starts from the city of Karakol. This route will take you through one of the most stunning forests rich with vegetation and wildlife, then you get to camp under the stars at Ala Kul Lake. The best way to end this three-day hiking trip is to make your way down to Altyn Arashan, where you can soak in a nice natural hot spring.
The highlight of this trek though, is the Ala Kul Lake. You will have to hike along the side of a mountain passing the lake to the 11,600-foot-high pass and from there, you will be rewarded with a panoramic view of this alpine lake and the mountains behind it.
3) Grand Balcon Sud and Lac Blanc Trails (France)
Location: Chamonix, France
Length: 8 – 10 hours return
Highest Altitude: 7,716 feet
Distance: ~9.3 miles
Difficulty: Moderate but Long
The French Alps offer hikers plenty of opportunities to get lost in nature for a few hours with several trails for both single and multi-day hikers. One of my favorite single-day hikes is a combination of the Grand Balcon Sud trail and the Lac Blanc trail. The Grand Balcon Sud trail will take you up and along the side of the mountain overlooking the city of Chamonix and Mont Blanc. Throughout the trail, you will be rewarded with the beautiful jagged peaks on your right and colorful vegetation and wildlife on your left. If you are lucky, you might be able to witness the Chamois like I did when I was hiking up the Grand Balcon Sud trail in the early morning.
Towards the end of the Grand Balcon Sud trail, you can continue on the Lac Blanc trail to see the White Lake where the magic of this trail is. If the weather is calm enough when you arrive at the lake, you will be rewarded with a perfect reflection of the French Alps on the lake. It was quite a sight to behold.
4) Santa Cruz Trek (Peru)
Location: Huaraz, Peru
Length: 3 – 4 days return
Highest Altitude: 15,583 feet
Distance: ~22.3 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Huaraz in the north of Peru is one of my favorite places on Earth. I spent almost twoeeks alone in this city, exploring some of the best trails in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range. When people come to Peru, they always head for the south for the Inca trail and call it a day. What they don’t realize is that the true beauty of Peruvian mountains lies in the North, in Huaraz.
One of the treks I did was the Santa Cruz trek. I spent four days hiking in the solitude of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range through a beautiful canyon, stunning valleys and a pristine blue lake that serves as a great spot for camping. You will pass through one of the most beautiful scenery you will ever see in your life, sleep under the shadow of the towering Taulliraju mountain and be rewarded with a panoramic view of the mountain at its highest point of Punta Union Pass.
The experience of hiking this trail alone, carrying all my gear and food for four days, made it even more challenging and left me in awe for the rest of my trip in South America.
5) Routeburn Track (New Zealand)
Location: Te Anau, New Zealand
Length: 3 – 4 days return
Highest Altitude: 4,117 feet
Distance: ~20 miles
Difficulty: Easy
The Routeburn Track is one of New Zealand’s best great walks and for good reasons. The trail is located in the beautiful South Island starting near Te Anau and ends near Queenstown.
The trail will take you to the Key Summit on your first day, back down to sleep by the MacKenzie Lake, passing through the valley along the exposed Hollyford Face with expansive views over the Darran Mountains. Then it’s up to the Harris Saddle Shelter before coming down to Routeburn Falls Hut for your last night.
Your last day will be a casual walk down through the stunning beech forest, with a view of the Humboldt Mountains and ending at Routeburn Flats Hut. The Routeburn Track sure is an action-packed trail for you to do in New Zealand.
6) Tongariro Crossing (New Zealand)
Location: Lake Taupo, New Zealand
Length: 5 – 7 hrs return
Highest Altitude: 3,674 feet – 7,516 feet
Distance: ~ 12 miles
Difficulty: Easy to Moderate
Another great trail in New Zealand is the Tongariro Crossing trail, located in the North Island of the country near Lake Taupo. Like most trails in New Zealand, the Tongariro Crossing trail has a well-paced climb with casual walk up and steep parts all scattered throughout equally.
Starting from the Mangatepopo Valley, you will go through a series of gradual and steep climbs until you reach the saddle between Mount Tongariro and Mount Ngauruhoe. From here you can take a side trip like I did to go up Mount Ngauruhoe or to Mount Doom for Lord of the Rings fan. The trip will take two extra hours to do so but you will get a stunning view of the crossing in one whole swoop.
From the saddle, you will have to go through the South Crater before climbing again to the Red Crater. You will be able to see two lakes from up there, one in emerald green and the other in pristine blue. When you pass all the lakes, you will then have to zigzag your way past Ketetahi Shelter and down to the end of the trails.
The scenery is so diverse, it will have you thinking you were trekking for several days instead of five to seven hours.
7) Mount Rinjani (Indonesia)
Location: Lombok, Indonesia
Length: 2 – 4 days return
Highest Altitude: 12,224 feet
Distance: ~ 21 miles
Difficulty: Moderate to Hard
Possibly one of the toughest hikes I have ever done, not because of the trail itself but due to the condition I was in while doing the hike. Hiking while suffering from good poisoning is not an ideal situation, to say the least.
That said, it is one of the best hikes you can do in Southeast Asia and you will be rewarded with a view of a volcano on an island inside a mountain on another island. Yes, that is indeed what you will see from the 12,224-foot-high summit of Mt Rinjani. The view is definitely better at sunrise when the shadow of the Mt Rinjani will be slowly receding from the volcano.
You will spend four days climbing up the ridge of the volcano, sleep under the stars, wake up early for a push to the summit and then down to the lake before climbing up again to another ridge and down, ending your trip. There is nothing more painful and rewarding at the same time than to climb up a volcano on a forever falling volcanic ash and then get to see a volcano on an island in a volcano on an island.
8) The Schwarzsee and Hornlihutte Trails (Switzerland)
Location: Zermatt, Switzerland
Length: 8 – 10 hrs return
Highest Altitude: 1,695 feet
Distance: ~15 miles
Difficulty: Moderate but Long
This is a combination of two trails that will get you the closest to the famous Matterhorn peak in Zermatt, Switzerland. The first part of the trail starts from the city of Zermatt and as you follow your way up the gondola line, you will arrive at Schwarzsee Lake where you can rest, have coffee at the mountain hut and continue your way up to the Hornlihutte. This is the exact location where one of the first climbers set off for their first ascent on the famous mountain in 1865.
You will go through a small traditional village before climbing up through the forest out into the exposed area at the Schwarzsee Lake. The landscape will become more rugged and rocky as you make your way up to the Hornlihutte mountain hut. If you decided to take an alternate route back via the Glacier trail, you will also be able to admire the mountain from the bottom of the glacier looking up. That was quite a sight to behold.
At the end of the Glacier trail, you will arrive at the Trockener Steg Lake where you can see the Matterhorn’s east face reflected off a body of water. There is no better way to see the Matterhorn than to hike this trail.
9) Laguna de los Tres trail (Argentina)
Location: El Chalten, Argentina
Length: 7 – 11 hrs return or 2 days
Highest Altitude: 3,871 feet
Distance: ~7.7 miles
Difficulty: Easy
Of course,Patagonia has to be on the list, but maybe this might not be the trail you are expecting. There are plenty of hiking opportunities in Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia, but the one I like the most is the Laguna de los Tres trail on the Argentinian side, starting from the quiet town of El Chalten.
This trail is my favorite because unlike the Torres del Paine and W Trek in Chile, the experience of hiking the trail is not ruined by the massive crowds that come with the peak season and has been plaguing those trails. Laguna de los Tres trail is a little less crowded, but offers you a similar experience as the trail will take you up close to the 3 famous landmarks of Patagonia, Mount Fitz Roy, Aguja Poincenot and Cerro Torre.
The trail is relatively easy compared to the other ones listed here with the majority of the trail pretty flat with two steep climbs at the beginning and at the end. You will pass through beautiful native woodland along the side of a mountain, coming across vast glaciers, frozen lakes and a few granite spires. As you continue on, you will pass through two camps where the last camp, Campamento Poincenot, is where you can stay overnight should you decide to extend the trip to two days. If you do so, I would recommend you go up to the Laguna de Los Tres as early as you can for the sunrise.
At the end of the trail, you will be rewarded with a stunning view of the impressive cobalt blue lake and icebergs of Laguna de Los Tres in the background. Over the icebergs, look up and stare at the looming spires of Fitzroy and its neighbors in awe and realize how fortunate you are to be able to see such beauty with your own eyes.
10) Laguna 69 (Peru)
Location: Huaraz, Peru
Length: 6 hrs return
Highest Altitude: 15,000 feet
Distance: ~7.4 miles
Difficulty: Moderate
Last but not the least, we are back in Huaraz again for another of my favorite trail, the Laguna 69 trail. This time, it only requires a day to complete but you will be rewarded with such a diverse scenery and plenty of photogenic mountains that you might forget you are doing a day hike. The trail begins slowly climbing through the valleys with several steep climbs along the way. Halfway through the trail, you will find a great spot by an alpine lake for a lunch stop before continuing on through a vast grassland. Push through the small granite path and head in to the heart of the mountain, where you will find a pristine blue glacier lake tucked away in between snowy mountains.
The moment you start to approach the lake, you will see a bright blue color, like nothing you have ever seen in nature. That’s when you will realize that you have finally reach Laguna 69. There is no mistaking it, the technicolor from the melted glacier is out of this world.
***
Nature has a way of rewarding you if you try hard enough and that is what I feel about hiking. The harder you work for it, the more rewarding it is. The mountain tests you, makes you lose your ego and you humbly appreciate both your own physical condition and the wild beauty of the world. I encourage you to go out there, get your hands dirty and start climbing.
/
Pete Rojwongsuriya is the founder of BucketListly.Blog, a place where he writes about his travel adventure and life stories he learned for the last 6 years on the road. He is also a travel filmmaker, photographer and a digital nomad, traveling from one country to another, making inspiring travel videos, taking stunning photos and telling a travel story of the world. His work in travel films has been featured on National Geographic, BBC, and Vimeo.
The post 10 Hiking Trails Around the World That Will Blow Your Mind appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post A Jaws-Dropping Encounter in Gansbaai appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Ten minutes into the boat ride toward Dyer Island, across the schizophrenic waters off Gansbaai where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans collide, I realized the most menacing creature encountered while shark cage diving isn’t below the water, it’s above it. Dozens of seagulls fluttered and squawked as their droppings smacked down like a hailstorm.
You’re gonna need a broader hat.
Shark cage diving is one of South Africa’s most popular activities for travelers. Known as South Africa’s unofficial cage diving epicenter, the infamous “Shark Alley” stretch off the coast of Gansbaai, about two hours southeast of Cape Town. Shark Alley became world-renowned due to its recurring role on Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week extravaganza — which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary this summer — and a big reason why cage diving sits alongside safaris on most travelers’ South African bucket lists.
“The cage diving industry has gone from strength to strength,” said Chris Fallows, owner of Apex Shark Expeditions. “The need to deliver a polished, educational and professional product in a competitive environment has led to several companies ticking all these boxes.”
Fallows is one of the key players in the cage diving industry that serves in excess of 100,000 people each year within South Africa. He is the first person to ever photograph breaching great whites and the creative force behind Air Jaws: Sharks of South Africa, the high-flying 2001 documentary that aired during Shark Week and introduced the world to the acrobatic predators. Fallows’ Apex Shark Expeditions handles 2,000 clients each year and emphasizes a small (12 clients maximum per boat), personalized approach to cage diving as travelers look to live out a Shark Week-esque experience.
“I think the general population is rapidly starting to look at sharks in a very respectful and positive light,” Fallows said. “Great whites are incredible, majestic, and powerful predators and it is a privilege to have them off our coast.”
Apex is one of a dozen cage diving operators in the Cape Town area. Depending on the operator, cage diving costs between $130 — $200 for a half-day excursion and includes transportation to Gansbaai from Cape Town.
“Cage diving is one of the few wildlife experiences where people can see the creatures in their actual ecosystem,” said Alison Towner, a biologist with Marine Dynamics Shark Tours. “It is a really unique opportunity that brings people from around the world to South Africa.”
I dove with Sharklady Adventures, one of the original cage diving operators founded in 1992 by Kim “Sharklady” MacLean who is known for her pioneering research and conservation involving the great white. In the #MeToo era, a female-owned and operated charter may appeal to a number of travelers as much as the opportunity to dive in the cage.
Shark sightings are not guaranteed and breaching sharks are incredibly rare, but I saw at least 10 great whites swim, bite the dummy seal, and attack the chum bait during my 20 minutes in the water. The sharks came within inches of the cage and a few thrashed up against it. The cage had a bottom bar to stabilize your feet and a middle bar for your hands so they remain inside at all times. Sharklady boasts a 100% safety record and I was not about to drop it to 99% by sticking my finger between the bars to touch a shark. Great whites are chaotic yet beautiful in their attacks and this primal force is best appreciated from underwater.
The only drawback of my cage diving experience was seasickness. The haphazard sea, fish smell and unpredictable boat movement caused me to contribute to the chum stream off the port side of the boat. I took Dramamine prior to departing and it did nothing for me. Other travelers, particularly those who have experience on the ocean, may not suffer as much as I did, but seasickness is so common most charters post tips for combatting it on their website (Apex Shark Expeditions politely notes: “just make yourselves as comfortable as possible by opening buttons or belts.”).
My recommendation: seasickness, if it hits, will pass. Do not let the temporary discomfort stop you from a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
As with many forms of wildlife tourism, shark cage diving is not without its detractors. Cage diving has been criticized for desensitizing sharks and conditioning them to associate humans with food. This criticism, according to cage diving operators, is as misplaced as an exploding scuba tank in a shark’s mouth.
“The shark doesn’t say, ‘well, I stole a bait from a shark boat, therefore, I now associate food with a swimmer,’ that’s crazy,” Fallows said. “Most people who conjure up many of the misconceptions that have in the past occurred in our industry have never even been out to see sharks, let alone the way we operate. A lot of the science points to the exact opposite: sharks do not associate cage diving with people and people as food. There is no scientific evidence cage diving has led to an increase in attacks on humans.”
In short: don’t be scared to hit the Muizenberg or Camps Bay beaches when you return to Cape Town.
Conservation-minded travelers will also appreciate cage diving in Gansbaai. The cage diving industry, according to Towner, is one of the best ways to protect sharks from poachers and acts as an unofficial security force against overfishing and hunters.
“Cage diving is a USD $70 million-industry and it is one of the strongholds keeping sharks worth more alive than dead,” Towner said. “If you took cage diving away there would be no policing and you would have constant pillaging of sharks in the oceans.”
Cage diving is the big draw in Gansbaai but the town and surrounding area offer activities for those preferring to stay on land. The Fynbos Trail, a few miles north of the town, provides lush hiking trails that are not as strenuous as Table Mountain or Devil’s Peak and the Lomond Wine Estate offers 11 different wines from one of the southern-most vineyards on the African continent. Gansbaai is a much smaller town and less wealthy than some of the other towns in the Western Cape, but it offers a number of pleasing activities that won’t bite your budget.
But just as one goes to Paris for the art or Las Vegas for the gambling, sharks are the reason you visit Gansbaai. Along with the southern right whale, another recurring Gansbaai resident, the great white is part of South Africa’s “Big Five” ocean creatures, and if you go cage diving between March and September there is a good chance you will see more than five great whites. Book a charter, grab a waterproof camera and live out Shark Week in a half-day at sea.
Just watch out above.
/
Kyle Gillis is a freelance writer and communications professional from Sterling Heights, Michigan. He’s covered a variety of topics in his journalism career and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Washington Examiner and Nevada Journal, among other publications. His first novel, No Worries, is available for purchase on Amazon and other booksellers.
The post A Jaws-Dropping Encounter in Gansbaai appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Lost in Bosnia appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
A friend once said to me, “You’ve traveled so much, I bet you don’t even know how many countries you’ve visited.” I shrugged and pretended she was right. But I knew. I knew exactly.
As I suspect is the case with many other compulsive tourists, I keep a list of the countries I’ve entered. I started counting in 1968, when I left the U.S for the first time as a Peace Corp volunteer to Kenya, and of the 193 nations with seats in the UN, I have visited 50. The number isn’t extraordinary, but it pleases me. Or at least it used to. It cost me many days of jet-lagged, foggy-headed, new-city wandering, and I have always insisted to myself that my travels have broadened my sense of the world. But since my errant visit to Bosnia, I’m no longer sure that’s true.
I keep my list of countries high on a closet shelf folded into my copy of Patricia Schultz’s fat compendium, One Thousand Places to See before You Die. (I’m at 214.) With it is a passport that expired in 2010, a document recording my travels to so many countries that I had to return it to the State Department in 2007 to have additional leaves attached. Each page is covered with stamps or stickers or stapled visas, and I recall my self-satisfaction whenever I stood before a frustrated customs officer who thumbed through page after page, looking for a place to add one more rubber stamp to the array of destinations already before him. That iconic blue American passport doesn’t define me, I told myself. I am so much more than an American; I am an international traveler, a global adventurer, an economy-class Odysseus. I am a Citizen of the World.
But there’s a question I’m now asking myself: What exactly constitutes visiting a new country? When can I add to the list? Do I count my trip to Tahiti in French Polynesia? An exotic destination for sure, but by international law I was visiting France, and since it is located exactly 12 time zones from Paris, the French don’t even reset their wristwatches when they arrive. And there’s also my obsessive visa-collecting behavior when I walked the bridge over the Zambezi River leaving Zimbabwe and entering Zambia for no other reason than to have my passport stamped. I remember a vertiginous view of Victoria Falls and an unpredictable return trip in a rusty Datsun taxi with an engine that only came to life when the driver joined two wires that hung from the dashboard, but have I really visited Zambia?
I have one traveler friend, an ever-contentious guy, who seems perpetually dressed in comfy, long-flight sweats and shoes easily slipped off for TSA scanners. I always imagine him with one hand grasping a carry-on spinner-bag. He once asked me straight out, “Tell me, how many countries have you been to?”
I was shocked by his blunt curiosity. Important as it is to me, my list is my secret, a private matter, like my salary or my weight. How could a fellow Citizen of the World pose such a crude question? How could he display such a lack of sophistication? But I answered him with whatever my number was at the time.
“62,” he replied with a raised eyebrow. “Gotcha beat!”
“Wow, that’s great,” I said with no conviction. Then, like a righteous fifth-grader confronting a bully on the playground, I challenged him. “How do you count them?” I said. “Legal entries, right? Passport stamps.”
He looked annoyed, ignored my question and started a long tale about a rude customs officer on a recent trip to Nepal. Clearly he’d been padding his count. He was a cheater who included every place a plane he’d flown had touched down.
I remembered my brief sojourn in Reykjavik, Iceland, where a charter flight in the 1970s landed to refuel. I would never consider including Iceland on my list. Clearly, I was superior to this crude braggart. But what about Vatican City? I’ve seen the complacent angels on the Sistine Ceiling and the Laocoön’s struggle against divine power, but does a 100-acre religious enclave really count as a country? And Monaco. I definitely saw an exit for the principality as I cruised the autostrada between Genoa and Nice, but did I cross its border? I’m not sure whether I should add it to my list or not.
The conversation with my hoaxer-friend made me realize that I needed some standards. I pondered this issue for months and decided on two requirements to have visited a country: First, I needed a legal entry and second, I had to have a witty or adventurous story to take home to admiring friends. So Bolivia, where a wandering flight itinerary took me south from Peru before I flew back to Miami, doesn’t count. Legal entry, but no story. And Tanzania doesn’t count. My oddly nationalistic Kenyan guide had walked me to an invisible line in Maasai Mara Game Park and invited me to pee into neighboring Tanzania. I crossed into Tanzania and peed back into Kenya. So I had a story, but no legal entry.
So I’ve given my list a lot of thought, and I’ve created standards. But not long ago I took a trip to what was once Yugoslavia and got lost in Bosnia. Since then I’ve stopped counting.
My journey started simply enough with a drive from Split to Dubrovnik, both in Croatia. My yellow Suzuki Swift rental was living up to its name, and my recurring American anxiety about a stick-shift had faded in the soothing sunshine. I whizzed across an autocesta so smooth and so traffic-free that U.S. interstates should crumble with envy. I was at the top of my tourist game with no fussy tour-bus co-travelers and no annoying guide to direct my interest or redirect my impulsive sightseeing inclinations. I was making good time, and the prospect of Dubrovnik, an Adriatic tourist mecca, lay before me.
The route? No problem, I thought. My iPhone was mounted on the dash and the imperturbable Siri, with her mellifluous voice and her GPS certainty, assured me of the shortest, speediest route. I would just adhere to her unobtrusive urgings and follow the familiar blue line that I knew led straight to Dubrovnik and the comfortable apartment I’d reserved behind the city’s ancient walls.
My mood was so euphoric that my mind drifted. I’m not sure whether it was thoughts of a tasty dinner or Diana Krall’s seductive American voice from the CD player, but I completely missed Siri’s faithful reminder that my exit was approaching in two kilometers. I also missed her warning of the exit in 500 meters and her final exhortation to take the next off-ramp. I zoomed happily forward, anticipating and indulgent evening downing fresh Dalmatian lobster and sipping slivovitz.
After a few moments, I wondered if perhaps I’d missed my exit. Never mind, Siri would reroute me.
The tires hummed on the even pavement, but now the highway signs acquired odd, unexpected names: Čapljina and Stolac and Trebinje. What happened to Dubrovnik? Where was Siri taking me?
I touched the “repeat direction” icon, but she didn’t respond. I tapped a second and third time, and it dawned on me that Siri’s faithful voice had failed me. She was gone. There were no more directions, not a word of guidance. A moment later, Siri’s ever-dependable map vanished from my screen. Exits, roads and town names all evaporated, replaced by a vacant grid. According to my muted iPhone, I was driving across a vast sheet of beige graph paper on a lonely blue line that directed me mysteriously forward.
I recalled the cautious internet search I made before leaving home. Yes, I had assured myself, Croatia would supply Siri’s turn-by-turn navigation. Wherever I went, she would show the way. But then I had a darker thought: Perhaps I was no longer in Croatia. How close to the border had I been? I tried to recall my mental map of what was once Yugoslavia. I knew Croatia was the old country’s shoreline, the area that was a haven for tourists from all over Europe. And just inland, I remembered, was Bosnia. The name made me shiver.
For the first time ever, I didn’t know what country I was in. I was a world traveler, a counter of countries, a Citizen of the World, and I was lost. Tourist-friendly Croatia had vanished. I grew suddenly nostalgic for what I had seen the previous days: Roman ruins, ancient cathedrals and most of all, the inviting and vibrant blue of the Adriatic.
As I drove, the terrain changed, or perhaps I imagined it changed. The scenery looked sparse, arid. Green turned brown and plants appeared to struggle in the heat. Life seemed to have given up in this place, yet there was a kind of mournful and austere beauty to it.
Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Two lanes in each direction, a rocky median strip, and no way to turn around. The blue line on the iPhone grid pointed through the barren landscape outside my windshield.
Finally in the distance, I saw a gray structure spanning the highway. I approached, and it became a border crossing, an imposing mountain of concrete and steel designed to intimidate tourists, smugglers and perhaps invading armies. I pulled cautiously into one of its gates and looked up at a swarthy man with a gaunt, no-nonsense face and a crisp uniform who spoke a word he expected to be universally understood.
“Pasoš!”
I dug through my pockets and handed over my blue passport. Surely, I thought, he’ll be impressed when he sees how many places I’ve visited. He’ll welcome a cosmopolitan sophisticate like me to his homeland.
“Where am I?” I asked hopefully.
He twisted his mouth and pointed at a slack flag on a pole just ahead. It looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure: Bosnia? Croatia? Montenegro? I made out some stars, a blue background and a yellow triangle. I was pretty sure the Croatian flag was mostly red and white. The man gave my passport a firmly officious stamp and handed it back. The look on his face said he was through with me. Time to move on. I made a final try for help.
“Dubrovnik?” I said.
He held up four fingers, all the reply he was willing to give, then used the same four fingers to wave me away. I stepped on the accelerator.
Four kilometers? Four hours? The fourth exit? Who knew? The last glimmer of information from Siri had been that I was two hours from Dubrovnik.
I sped along, becoming more convinced that I was in Bosnia. What I knew of the country was what I recalled of the war in the 1990s. I scoured my brain. The Yugoslavian breakup created several new countries, but how many? What were they? And why had I ignored the history chapter at the back of my Lonely Planet guide? It had been over 20 years since the war, and all I recalled were horror stories about Serbian Christians, Muslim Bosnians, smashed countries and a bloodbath that was in the news for months — maybe years.
I remembered a Serbian general, ”The Butcher of Bosnia,” a war criminal responsible for the deaths of thousands. In Croatia, the grim past was obscured in a lucrative vacation paradise of quaint cities and a glorious coastline. Not so with Bosnia. From some dark corner of my brain came the memory of a play called Blasted by an English playwright whose name I’d forgotten. It was the most unsettling evening I’d ever spent in the theater: two hours of characters haunted by the violence and depravity of the war where Yugoslavia had been. They played out their atrocities and nightmares: rape, blood, murder and worse. Now I was where it all happened.
I followed my iPhone’s blue line across its beige grid, then suddenly it directed me to an exit. I had no real choice. Beyond the off-ramp, the broad even highway ended. I was on a two-lane road that became narrower as the kilometers passed. The blue line swerved to match the route I saw ahead but provided no further help. I climbed hills and threaded through curve after curve. A dark forest surrounded me then loomed above me. The sound of my tires on the tarmac rumbled unevenly as my little yellow Suzuki bounced and shook on pavement that alternated between wheel-grabbing ruts and bone-jarring potholes.
As I rounded a turn, a shabby building with peeling brown paint appeared at the edge of the forest. My path narrowed to a single lane and a gate swung down to block my way. The knot in my stomach made me imagine the worst. Was it some kind of ambush? An attack by unreconstructed soldiers who hadn’t given up their war? A shadowy figure in a uniform that looked official but not particularly military emerged from the building. His tan outfit was wrinkled, but he was well fed with a gut that swelled over his belt.
Another border crossing? My speculation seemed confirmed as I stopped and the man extended an open palm, so I handed over my passport. He gave the document a perfunctory glance, a quick stamp and handed it back.
I sighed with relief and pointed ahead. “Dubrovnik?” I asked.
“Ravno. Ravno naprijed. Jedan ili dva sata,” he said pointing straight ahead grinning with a row of tobacco-yellowed teeth.
“Okay,” I said, “sounds good.” And I was on my way.
The dark forest brightened, and I relaxed as the road widened and grew smoother. Then Siri’s comforting voice descended from heaven.
“Merge left onto Highway E65 ahead.”
I did as I was told, and a glorious roadmap of Croatia materialized on the screen of my iPhone. It was all there: my road, the roads that crossed it, happy towns and finally the joyful information I’d longed to see:
Distance to Dubrovnik: 97 Kilometers.
Time to arrival: One hour and 34 minutes.
My heart leaped. I was safe. I was back in Croatia. I had emerged unscathed from my imaginings of a war-torn wasteland and passed from fear into safety, from darkness into light. I cruised rapturously onward, my Suzuki humming effortlessly along the flawless pavement, and within a few kilometers, the Adriatic gleamed to the right of the roadway. Once again, I was a global traveler, a stalwart World Citizen boldly (but safely) seeking adventure (and dinner).
Within a couple of hours, I’d bid my rental Suzuki farewell, passed through the gate in Dubrovnik’s massive old walls and joined a frenzied crush of European and Asian tourists. The apartment I had reserved, with its wide bed and conditioned air, was tourist nirvana. I collapsed into a long nap before dinner.
***
That evening I sat in a restaurant that my Michelin Guide recommended as a good bet for dinner. Before me on a wide dish was the Genghis Khan plate: a heap of grilled rump steak, turkey, and chicken, that included sausage and minced meat with names that I couldn’t pronounce and spicy aromas that I couldn’t resist. I’d been sipping on a crisp pilsner with a name that intrigued me: Sarajevsko. Sounds like Sarajevo, I thought; that’s the capital of Bosnia, where I’d had my afternoon escapade. The name of the restaurant roused my curiosity, too, so I asked the server about it. He was a bright, amiable young guy, probably 25, who seemed willing to charm an older diner in hopes of a good tip.
“Why is this place called Taj Mahal?” I said.
“You know the Taj Mahal?” he replied in near-perfect English I expected in a tourist town. “In Agra? In India? It’s the most beautiful building in the Muslim world, maybe the whole world.”
I remembered. When I had stood before the building years earlier, the dawn light tinted its marble walls to a miraculous shade of rose. The rumble of the tourist crowd and the prattle of nearby guides went away, and I was speechless.
“Well,” my server continued, “we are Bosnian Muslims. We want our restaurant to be the best in the world, so we named it Taj Mahal.”
“You’re saying the best place to eat in Dubrovnik, Croatia, is a Bosnian Muslim restaurant?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “Now, would you say your desserts are the best in the world?” He smiled and handed me a menu.
Waiting for my baklava and an espresso, I pulled out my passport and thumbed through the pages until two smudged stamps, each obliterating a presidential face on Mount Rushmore, documented that I had actually entered Bosnia and returned to Croatia. With a legal entry and a tale to tell when I got home, I’d met my criteria for adding one more country to my life list. Country number 50, I thought. Half a hundred. What should have felt like a tourist milestone somehow didn’t.
My espresso arrived and I took a sip. In a few days I’d be home. One of my travel rituals is to come up with a quick answer for the inevitable question: “How was your trip?” Usually the answer is easy. “Oh, Chile was amazing,” I’d say condescendingly, “Alpine mountains and that vast rocky desert.” Or: “Cambodia was astonishing. Angkor Wat and the unbelievable green of those jungles.” Or: “Croatia was sensational. The Adriatic and those ancient Roman ruins.” I touted every trip as amazing or astonishing or sensational. But that kind of glib response was wrong for Bosnia.
I had a story and two blurry stamps on my passport, but while I was there, I thought only of getting out. All I wanted was Siri’s reassuring voice. I’d been lost and scared, and for no real reason. What had I missed? I knew that terrible things had happened there, but I’d come and gone without even touching the ground. My single-sentence summary should be something like, “I didn’t have any idea where I was or what I was doing.” I’d seen nothing. Maybe, I thought, I needed to come up with some new travel rituals, something better than country-counting or a reductive catch-phrase.
I looked up, saw my server helping diners at the next table and did some math. He had to have been born during the Bosnian War and grown up in its aftermath. What would today’s drive have been then? I tried to imagine thundering tanks, rocket attacks, concussive explosions, crumbling buildings and shattered lives, but my imagination failed me. I knew nothing about him or his home.
My mind drifted to the first time I’d ever left the United States. After weeks of training, I traveled with a jetload of Peace Corps volunteers to our teaching assignments in Kenya. When we made a stop long after midnight in Entebbe, Uganda, I got off the plane to stretch my legs and wandered away from the cluster of chattering fellow volunteers.
I stood on the tarmac in the middle of an African night, inhaled deeply, and looked up at a strange sky with new constellations and the moon tilted at an odd new angle. Songs of a thousand insects thrummed from the grass beyond the runway. Everything before me — the one-room air terminal, the curve of the palm trees, the warm moist air that enveloped me — was unlike anything I’d seen before. The world was suddenly vaster than I’d known.
Other than the control tower, the air terminal was a single-story wooden building that was bordered by a neat, low hedge. At one end, an open-air bar filled the night with blue-white florescence and Afro-pop jukebox rhythms. I took a seat near a couple of Ugandan men huddled over beers and engaged in a mysterious conversation in an even more mysterious language. Again and again they eyed a nearby woman with an immense purse and a red miniskirt marking her as the first prostitute I’d ever seen. I was a nervous kid from a California suburb sipping a Tusker lager and savoring his first moments on the continent. In the months ahead, Africa would open me to new landscapes, new languages, new cultures and new ways of living. It was exotic and frighteningly exciting, but I embraced it. Unlike my trip to Bosnia, the last thing I wanted to do was leave.
Decades later, sitting in this fancy Dubrovnik restaurant, I understood that all my travels had been failed attempts to recapture that single exhilarating moment at the airport in Entebbe. When I traveled now, the wonder was gone, replaced by zippy rental cars, air-conditioned rooms, guidebook-recommended restaurants and Siri, who prescribed my every move. Plus, of course, there was the mindless arithmetic of country-counting.
When my server brought my baklava, I looked down at the syrupy confection, but I knew its easy sweetness wouldn’t satisfy me. I’d gotten it wrong. My travels had become about visas in a passport. The hotels and guidebooks had obscured the delights of meeting new people, seeing new landscapes, gaping at new architectures and learning exotic histories. How was I different from my friend who padded his country-count to impress others? I felt no different at all, and I was humbled.
It’s time to lose track of how many countries I’ve been to, I thought. Instead, I’ll try to gather moments like the one in the Entebbe airport bar. I’ll avoid my petulant tales about hotel rats in Kathmandu or filthy café toilets in New Delhi. Now I’ll try to come home with stories that I’ll remember because I’ve learned something, not because they impress friends — memories of people and places that amaze or bewilder or maybe scare me a little. I’ll try to slow down, stop obsessing about where I’ve been and pay attention to where I am.
I looked up at my young server and decided to ask him where he went for an after-work drink. I was looking for a place, I’d say, for some conversation with ordinary Croatians. Maybe he could recommend something.
Paul C. Dalmas is a freelance writer who has made his living as boilermaker’s helper, a fry cook, and a high school English teacher. His work has been broadcast on KQED-FM and published in Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle and California Magazine. He lives in Berkeley, California.
The post Lost in Bosnia appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Walk in the Footsteps of the Gods On Sri Lanka’s Holy Mountain appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
The stone steps grew steeper and narrower, climbing ever higher. As the hours passed, it seemed they would never end, fatigue and strain tearing at my muscles. Keeping up a steady pace and not stopping was the key. High up on the peak many were struggling, some literally using the railings to try and pull themselves up the holy mountain.
The 4.2 miles straight up to the summit of 7,359-feet Adam’s Peak didn’t seem that daunting to me. But the final segment, the thousands of steep stone steps to the top of Sri Lanka’s legendary pilgrimage site, an incredible 5,500 of them, slowed even the youngest and fittest.
Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians all have deep-rooted religious ties to the mountain, so pilgrims suffer the grueling climb for their beliefs. But outnumbering the pilgrims these days are Westerners, mostly 20-somethings, who trudge up the mountain in the middle of the night just to be able to say that they did it.
Sri Pada (Adam’s Peak) is not only a soaring natural landmark but also one of Sri Lanka’s most revered places. The footprint discovered on the summit is claimed as Buddha’s by Buddhists (from one of his three visits to Sri Lanka), the god Shiva’s by Hindus (who ruled the island from the peak during Ramayana times) and as Adam’s by Muslims and Christians (his first step after being tossed from paradise). The majority of the pilgrims, however, are Buddhists, including some from far away lands.
Weaving through precipitous hills carpeted with endless rows of tea bushes, riding in the back of a three-wheel tuktuk that often sped through the curves of the serpentine road on two wheels, I arrived at the White House Hotel in the village of Dalhousie. Named for its imposing, four-story, white exterior, it was a bustling hub of activity, with travelers of many nationalities coming and going. But every guest at the White House, and every other hotel in the area for that matter, was there for only one reason: to hike up Adam’s Peak.
All of the guests gathered on the large, open-air terrace in the evening for a tasty and extensive buffet dinner of Sri Lankan curries. Immediately after dinner, things got serious. Niman, the hotel’s owner/manager, gathered his guests, as he does each evening, around an eight-foot-tall illustrated map of Sri Pada to give a lively, somewhat cheeky, dissertation on climbing Adam’s Peak. He established his credentials by professing to have hiked the peak 1,500 times, and then proceeded to describe the route in detail, including the landmarks we’d pass and when (to make sure we stayed on the right path), the thousands of challenging stairs, what we’d find on top, etc . . . The diverse group listened in awed silence but were apparently so intimidated by the mountain that they heard little.
At one point he identified when we would pass a tall statue of Buddha and immediately cross a wooden bridge. Then he asked: “So what are we looking for at this place in the journey?” No one spoke up — until I parroted what he had just told us. This scenario repeated itself several times; I was the only one to answer his sarcastic and obvious questions, earning a series of high-fives from Niman. The travelers — a mix of Sri Lankans, various European nationalities, a group of Indonesians and one Californian — were edgy, nervous. The mountain can do that to you.
Niman undoubtedly stoked some of that fear when he noted that the ascension was not so glorious for some: “On a number of occasions over the years, foreigners have had to be stretchered off the mountain carried by porters, some Sri Lankans as well, because they took terrible falls or had heart attacks.” He then pointed to a stack of walking sticks and recommended we use one, which I took him up on.
Surprisingly, his sternest warning was to “watch out for pickpockets preying on pilgrims among the crowds on top.” As he put it: “Sri Lankans are good people” — decidedly true, making it one of the safest places to travel — “but among 100,000 there may be one bad person.” He advised us to carry nothing of value in our pockets and reverse day packs so they are in front rather than on our backs.
And that was that; everyone was now on their own to climb Sri Pada, most planning to head out around 2:30 am to be sure of reaching the top in time for the reliably glorious sunrise.
Much of the path up is lit with fluorescent tubes and, in the lower half, dotted with kiosks selling hot food and tea, tchotchkes and warm clothing. During the December-March season, there’s a nightly parade of pilgrims and Westerners, more than 100 the night I was there. The path was a teaser, rambling along at a gentle incline at first, lulling me into complacency, before beginning to climb a little, then more, and more. The steps at first are widely spaced but become progressively sheerer and narrower. After thousands of steps, even the strongest hikers feel the effects: my pace slowed to a trudge, breath shortened with each step, legs began to ache, strength waned. My heart began pounding so hard that more than once it crossed my mind whether I was going to be the next foreigner to have a heart attack and be stretchered off the mountain.
Suddenly, I could see the summit, only some 100 steps away. Just below the top, a Sri Lankan policeman — echoing what Niman had said — was telling all who passed to watch out for pickpockets. I had made it in just 2 1/2 hours, a very fast time. I was greeted at the summit by a fierce, freezing wind that blew right through my layers of clothing. Hiking up, we were on the lee side of the mountain protected from the elements.
Reaching Adam’s Peak was anti-climactic. The summit houses only a few small shrines, colored flags ripping in the wind and several Buddhist bells. You don’t even get to see the famous footprint because it’s hidden inside of a metal cabinet. The sunrise was still nearly an hour away, so I crammed into one of the few sheltered spots and shivered while waiting for the warmth of the new day.
Pinks and reds streaked the sky first, giving way to pale oranges before a blazing yellow ball broke the horizon. Jostling for the best views, pilgrims were madly capturing the spectacular 360-degree panoramas with their phone cameras (incongruously, it was Buddhist monks who had the professional cameras with sizable telephoto lenses). The sun’s emergence brought a glorious, bright and clear morning of shimmering colors.
Within minutes, there was a mass movement to descend, creating a human traffic jam, though few departed without ringing one of the bells. The purpose, as one Buddhist pilgrim explained to me, is to “wake yourself up” as you continue on your journey to find wisdom, compassion and the path to enlightenment.
Was Adam’s Peak worth the draining exertion, loss of sleep, aching legs and knees, and the brutal cold? Absolutely. It was a seminal experience that defined my trip to Sri Lanka, a spiritual as well as physical journey with people from many nations, connecting with the country’s multi-cultural, multi-religion persona. Plus, for the rest of my life I can say I climbed to the spot of Adam’s first step after being ejected from the Garden of Eden.
/ 
Freelance travel writer/photographer Edward Placidi discovered his passion for exploring the world as a teenager and has gone on to travel in nearly 100 countries, mainly on solo, independent adventures. He has penned articles for numerous newspapers, magazines and websites. When not traveling he is whipping up delicious dishes inspired by his Tuscan grandmother who taught him to cook. A passionate Italophile and supporter of the Azzurri (Italian national soccer team), he lives in Los Angeles with his wife Marian.
The post Walk in the Footsteps of the Gods On Sri Lanka’s Holy Mountain appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post Paddling With Ghosts in Tennessee appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
My arms burned each time I plunged a paddle blade beneath the surface of the river, pulling myself toward whatever I might find ahead. This five-hour kayak journey down Tennessee’s Wolf River traverses a cypress swamp crossed by channels and tributaries that lure paddlers down their path, only to disappear into the landscape, earning this ecosystem an eerie name: the Ghost River Section. I had carried my ghosts for years; I brought them into the swamp with me.
My father loved to canoe and traveled with a group of men to the Boundary Waters, a million-acre wilderness in northern Minnesota. He came back to our home in Indiana with rolls of film to develop, most with pictures of still water, spruce trees or a solitary moose, but my favorite were the loons.
As a child, I couldn’t imagine anything so exotic, with their black-and-white feathers and garnet eyes. When he played footage from the trip, I knew I would never forget the sound of their wild and mysterious call.
There were always a few pictures showing my father’s friends, who were married to my elementary school teachers or members of our church, making silly faces or laughing at someone just out of frame. These pictures were a glimpse into a forbidden world where the men told bawdy stories I wouldn’t be allowed to hear.
He returned an evangelist from his first trip, determined to share his watery gospel with my mom, brother and me, so he planned a family canoe trip at a nearby state park. He coached us on strategy, showing us how to hold the small souvenir paddles he’d bought for us at a gift shop.
We rented two heavy green canoes, with dusty life jackets and scuffed plastic oars. The creek, we quickly realized, was nearly dry. The canoes scraped across the pebbled bed until my father would call out that it was time to carry the boats.
“Is this a portage?” I asked, remembering how he and his buddies had hoisted their canoes overhead and hiked through the brush.
“No,” he said, brusque and exasperated. “This isn’t how it is.”
I kept quiet about the heat and how the oar was hurting my hands and tried to prove I was as capable as those men who knew what a real portage felt like, but we never canoed together again.
When I was 17, he returned to the Boundary Waters with those same men. Two months after his return, he died in an unexpected instant. He didn’t know he would never again feel his oar break the water’s surface; he didn’t hear any foreboding significance in the cry of the loons.
I didn’t intend for my trip to Tennessee to be a pilgrimage, but as I saw the row of kayaks and canoes lined up to be launched into the Wolf River, I remembered that hot day at the state park when I felt like I failed my father.
Mark Babb, owner of Ghost River Outfitters, pointed to the kayaks and told me again to jump into whichever one I wanted. He and Jim Gafford, from the Wolf River Conservancy, were leading a small group of us down the 9-mile stretch between LaGrange and Moscow, Tennessee, where the silt-stained waters travel through five ecosystems, including the Ghost River Section.
I hung back until Babb and another man helped me into a kayak and pushed me into the river. Gafford sat solo in his canoe, with a white beard that rested on his chest. These men knew the river like a good friend, and they were at ease in their boats. I began to paddle hard, worried I wouldn’t keep up. Each time I dipped one blade into the river, the other flooded my lap with cold water.
Another paddler glided his kayak beside mine as I grimaced about my technique. “A lot of people think you have to lift up the paddle and dig, dig, dig,” he said, “but the trick is to keep it low and steady.”
The current was calm enough to hear a woodpecker drilling in the distance, and I practiced steering against it. I steadied my breathing, hoping to quiet my fears: we had five hours to go with portages ahead. I spent so many years hedging, afraid to push myself and then fall short, but now I was already on the river; the only thing left to do was paddle.
I followed behind Gafford, working to keep my paddling low and steady, listening to him point out a bush that would bloom scarlet later in the year and naming bird species by memory after claiming he wasn’t much of a birder. The day was pleasant, with sunlight filtered through the trees. I began to build a rhythm.
Before I had fully relaxed, we reached the first of several downed trees blocking our path. The current felt fast and unpredictable as I tried to steer towards the shoreline and avoid other people’s boats. I smacked against another paddler, and Babb reached out to grab my kayak.
“Sorry, sorry!” I said, feeling the first blush of shame.
“No problem,” assured the other kayaker, in a gentle tone. He hopped out onto shore and began pulling his kayak without pause. Babb cut a few errant branches from the fallen tree, clearing our way to shore.
“I was just wondering how many Band-Aids you go through in a year,” I said.
He smiled. “I’ve given up on Band-Aids,” he said, tossing his saw back into the front of his kayak and helping me up. My unsteady feet caught in the mud, and I tripped, grabbing onto a tree for balance. Babb had already pulled my kayak around the tree and positioned it for launch on the other side.
I realized then that none of these men doubted me. They weren’t waiting for me to fail: they were waiting for me to get back into my kayak so we could continue down the river together.
We continued through bottomland hardwoods and scrubby wetlands until we reached an unassuming sign hand-painted bearing the words “Turn Here” and an arrow pointing left. We were entering the Ghost River Section.
What had been a river flowing gently between its banks widened into a maze of cypress and water tupelo trees. Blue herons swooped and landed where we could barely see their dusty blue outline. Our loud laughter turned to reverent whispers amidst the slap of paddle blades against the water.
The cypress had just begun to push their needle-like leaves. In the summer, this swamp must be warm and green, like a pine forest soaking its roots to cool off. In early spring, the bare branches and thin trunks that widen at the base were other-worldly. We navigated between the trees, avoiding the cypress knees that poked above the water.
So many travelers before us had been fooled by channels inviting them to turn a corner, only to disappear into the reeds. But we had guides who wanted to share the river with us, no matter how choppy my paddling, how clumsy my portages.
The swamp opened into a broad lake, with no current to urge us along. My fellow paddlers in the group began to stretch their forearms, circle their wrists and check for blisters. These men were more experienced than me, and their navigation was more graceful, but I could keep up. My muscles ached, but determination welled up to replenish my will to keep paddling, low and steady.
The lake narrowed into the river once more, and we leaned back to stretch out over our kayaks, warmed by the sun and the promise of the home stretch. We reached the end of our journey tired and triumphant. I must have felt how my father did as he reached the shore to set up camp with his friends, telling forbidden stories for laughs, listening for the call of the loons.
/
Jessica Dixon is a writer living in Denver, Colorado. She loves traveling around the U.S. and abroad but is always happy to get back home, where you can find her hiking with her dog, Bella. Her work has appeared in publications including Indianapolis Monthly, Westword and Real Food Traveler. Read about more of her adventures at www.rockymthi.wordpress.com.
The post Paddling With Ghosts in Tennessee appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post A Winter in the Pit: Washing Dishes in the Alaskan Arctic appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
On a weekend holiday to Fairbanks, I stepped into Big Ray’s shop, where walls and racks were festooned with down jackets, wool hats, gloves, boots and face masks of every style and function imaginable. I have read that one measure of the dominance of winter is the number of words available to describe snow in the native languages of that region. I now knew that another indicator was the abundance and variety of long underwear available at local retailers. Each pair was categorized by the level of cold it was designed to withstand, one labeled “Very Cold” and the other “Extreme Cold.”
As I approached the man at the front counter, I explained to him that I was new to Alaska but I didn’t want to overdo it by getting the really heavy-duty stuff when regular heavy-duty would suffice.
“I’m from Chicago,” I added helpfully, to let him know I wasn’t a total wuss when it came to cold.
“I don’t think there’s anything you can do that’s gonna properly prepare you for what you’re about to experience this winter,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.
I opted for both pairs and some wool socks.
Coldfoot Camp is located on Mile 175 of the Dalton Highway. At 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it’s the world’s northernmost truck stop. It’s been featured on the show Ice Road Truckers, and its hiring website indicates (with wicked glee) that it is 260 miles north of the nearest stoplight, in Fairbanks.
The opening was for a dishwasher who could start that summer and stay on for the winter season. I’d previously dished at a four-diamond, all-vegan resort on the coast of Northern California. It would be difficult to find a more antithetical restaurant experience than a truck stop in the Alaskan Arctic, where an order of biscuits and sausage gravy with hash browns and two eggs any-way-you-like-‘em was listed on the menu as the “Trucker’s Favorite.” But dishing is dishing, anywhere you go. I applied. Two weeks later I was standing on the dirt runway of Coldfoot’s airstrip.
At each stop along my journey north the planes grew smaller until I eventually sat aboard a 9-passenger bush plane with a honking pair of headphones clamped over my ears. Once airborne, our pilot flicked the controls into autopilot and turned on the local sports station. It faded to static as we passed beyond the range of Fairbanks’s airwaves and into a sprawling landscape of boreal forest and tundra, pockmarked by lakes and slithering with rivers. The vista was daunting, but its most dramatic feature lay buried beneath a cloak of green. The presence of permafrost — a permanent layer of frozen ground beneath a thin slip of soil — was indicated by dwarf trees, blocked from digging deep root systems that anchor taller growth.
“Winter is a constant, though usually hidden companion during the short Arctic summer,” writes John Milton. “The quickness of summer intensifies an awareness that warmth here is only a brief respite from cold, that light will soon be followed by a deep and much longer-lasting darkness. This mood dominates the land and everything living in it.”
Or as MudD, our maintenance man would later put it to me, “Summer’s almost over before it begins.”
From the air, two feats of human industry can be traced zigzagging north towards the Arctic Ocean like scars on an otherwise unmarred landscape: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and its correlating artery, the Dalton Highway. The pipeline pumps oil from Prudhoe Bay 800 miles to the port of Valdez, while the highway supplies the truckers and pipeline crew necessary to keep it flowing.
Coldfoot Camp is the midway point for anyone headed north or south on the Dalton. It’s a big dirt lot with a little oasis of gas pumps — open pasture for semi trucks. On one side of this lot was the cafe where I would be spending much of my time. It was a modest building with a slightly less industrial feel than anything else around it and the only commercial enterprise for hours in either direction. Rising 20 or so feet from its roof was a conical red flag, the kind that inflates and turns its narrow end to indicate the velocity and direction of the wind. On breezeless days it looked like a sad, droopy hat.
Across the lot sat a pair of long, white buildings with a likeness to a couple of heavy-duty trailer homes. ATCO units installed in the 70’s for crew workers on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, they’ve since been rechristened as the Coldfoot Inn. Glamorous, not so much, but a person doesn’t come to the Arctic to admire the wall art.
Another set of ATCO units behind the cafe housed my fellow coworkers and me. Over the course of my time living in the crew quarters, I grew quite fond of my room with its decades-out-of-fashion, wood-paneled walls and ominous red carpet stain. Though I doubt I’ll miss the ancient heating system, which seemed to have two modes: Off or Inferno. There were -40 degree nights, window wide open, that I woke in a slick of sweat.
Coldfoot’s owners employ the word “rustic” to describe the feel of the place, though some might find that to be a coy description. Personally, I think it fits. The cafe was scuffed and chipped from the floor to the dinner plates, exactly how an Arctic truck stop ought to be. An amateur mural featuring trucks and mountains stretched the length of a wall. Laminated posters provided information on note-worthy events in the construction of the Dalton and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Pinned above a bay in the building was a large Christmas wreath with a toy semi truck inside of it. It was all wonderfully earnest. I would have been thoroughly disappointed had I come this far north only to find a brightly lit, standardized retail space across the street from a McDonalds and an outlet mall. There was an authenticity in the homeliness that reminded me why I continue to seek these kinds of places out.
Life at a Coldfoot was like life on a ship. You worked together, lived together, ate together and sat on the same toilets. Some co-workers dated each other. Several tied the knot. You had your own room, but walls with the soundproofing capabilities of cardboard meant privacy was limited. In the dead of winter, when gray light crept into the sky for no more than four hours a day and temperatures dropped below -40 degrees, taking a walk to clear your head became an expedition, conditions that reduced certain among us to periods of locking ourselves in our rooms, getting drunk and madly scribbling in Sudoku puzzles.
The job attracts interesting people. We went by a collection of names that, read off a roster, made us sound like a band of pirates. There was Maniac, the sweetest, most demure person I’ve ever met; MudD, a body-building movie-holic; and Tugboat, who spent over 100 days out of the year sleeping in a bivy sack on the side of the Colorado River.
Then there was Cast Iron, a big-bellied man in his 60’s enraptured by the Arctic. “I got up here late in life,” he liked to say. “There’s just too much for me explore to think about going anywhere else.”
Cast Iron put most of us to shame with the enthusiasm he displayed tromping out into sub-zero temperatures or riding his bike along the Dalton. He invited me out to his campsite in the woods where we heated our dinner over an open fire. Flames crackling in the fierce cold, we sipped our hot soup under a sky smattered with stars.
First it was a gold mine. Then it was a ghost town.
Miners settled what was originally known as Slate Creek in the final years of the 19th century. They established a gambling hall, two roadhouses, two stores and seven saloons. The name Coldfoot is supposedly a jab at the ones who got cold feet and tail-ended it back south. The area must have proved to be less a fountain of wealth than the miners had hoped, so the mining operations relocated to Wiseman, about 12 miles up the nearby Koyukuk River, between 1911 to 1912. Some of the local topography owes its name to the original camp’s ladies of the night. Today, Emma Dome looms over the highway.
In 1968, an estimated 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, inciting the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Coldfoot had a second coming as one of 29 camps housing some of the 70,000 pipeline construction workers from ’75 to ’77. The pipeline years were followed by another period of disuse.
Then along came Dick Mackey: Iditarod champion, Alaskan legend and an ambassador of sorts for the Dalton highway.
Mackey realized that Mile 175 was an ideal spot for truckers who needed to hit the head on the trip between Fairbanks and Prudhoe. So in 1981 he parked an old school bus there and started serving them coffee. Coldfoot’s wood center pole is inscribed with dozens of names, truckers who put a hand in helping build the cafe up from its humble beginnings. It is a chronicle of the Dalton Highway and the people who’ve driven it since its inception, as well as the literal backbone of the building.
Our main customers were those truckers driving materials up to America’s largest oil field by way of America’s northernmost state-maintained road. The road was completed in 1974 in preparation for the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Truckers still refer to it by its former name, the Haul road. By 1995, all 416 miles of the Dalton were open to the public. Anyone wishing to drive to its northern terminus at the gateway to Prudhoe Oil Bay, Deadhorse Alaska, (and grab a drink at the local Starbucks, I’m not kidding) can do so, but most of the road remains unpaved, and it is prone to chewing cars up and spitting them out.
Some say that the Dalton’s notoriety is overstated, but cars go off the road every year. Their metal carcasses haunt the roadside for months or even seasons on end before anyone gets around to hauling them out. Semi trucks command the Dalton, hurdling by, snow or dirt gusting up from their tires, engines bellowing miles off like gargantuan creatures prowling their territory. No surprise I found myself tensing up around a few curves while hitching a ride in one of these monsters back to Fairbanks one day.
As I gazed out his mud-splattered windshield, my ride Jim kept me entertained with stories of harrowing moments on the job. Heating a frozen jack with a blowtorch while changing a tire in -30-degree weather, flash blizzards that obscured visibility to the point that you couldn’t tell whether you were driving down the middle of the road or over the edge, and the rush of vertigo brought on by snow whipping sideways past your window.
In one particularly vivifying story, Jim had parked his truck on an icy slope after realizing he wasn’t going to be able to make it to the top. Just as he finished wrapping his tires in chains, the truck began to slide backward. Jim raced around to the driver’s side but couldn’t manage to jump in before it picked up speed. He watched in horror as the semi’s back end began jack-knifing towards the side of the road. Then the chains caught. The wheels rolled over on their brakes and ground to a halt, their back-most members dangling over a steep descent. Listening to him talk I couldn’t help sense the potential for a T.V. show. And then I remembered, there already was one.
So why live in a truck stop in the Arctic? The least romantic answer: It’s lucrative.
Many of us were travelers. With no rent, no grocery expenses and nowhere to spend our money (except the internet, thank you Amazon), saving up for future trips became incredibly doable. Zero commute and less commercial distractions allowed a person to focus on what’s important to them. The ability to come and go without the anchor of a lease agreement made the live-where-you-work factor ideal for roaming. All that being said, the most obvious reason for living in the Arctic was that you got to live in the Arctic.
The foothills of the Brooks Range rose up beyond the rooftops of camp, massive rock faces poised to capture an array of colors as resplendent as the Arctic is ongoing, from the deep pinks, reds and violets of dawn and dusk, to the burly slate and steel blue of frigid winter days. We name them, claim them, divide them by political boundaries, but all that seems like nonsense when you’re staring up at one. Nobody conquers a mountain. It gazes down upon our line drawing and nation building like someone watching a child carve moats and sandcastles on the beach. If you have any thoughts to the contrary, walking up one will help dispel the illusion.
A hike during the warmer months most likely means stream fording and bushwhacking, as this country is backcountry, and trail systems are almost exclusively the product of wildlife. There is no gift shop at the top of these Arctic mountains, no gondola ride from the summit. You earn only the steps you take.
In my case, I also earned an encounter with a very large brown bear. A bear can be happened upon in one of two states: either it’s hibernating or it’s hungry. I decided this one belonged to the second category, calculating how many seconds it would take to reach me if it charged (a bear can cover 40 feet in a second: so about two, I figured). The canister of bear spray that had cast an aura of safety around me up until then, bouncing on my hip like a trusty revolver, seemed about as useful as a can of DEET under the purview of an actual bear. After a few pulsing moments, the bear turned its nose down the mountain, a mutual disinterest in pursuing further relations with one another agreed. We went our separate ways but I was shaken for the rest of the day, glancing over my shoulder in case the hulking, furry animal changed its mind.
Beyond bears, the cold itself became a beast. As winter turned full tilt and temperatures fell below nose hair-freezing levels, the urge to escape the doldrums of the ATCO units during the slim hours of daylight grew strong enough to suit me up in nearly every article of cold weather gear I possessed and scoot me out the door.
This was, admittedly, on a warmer winter day, somewhere in the negative tens. The hike that followed took me through open tundra and over frozen lakes, at one point descending steeply through a strip of boreal forest in snow so deep and powdery that even with snowshoes I sank to my waist and on to the top of a deceptively squat-looking mountain called the Nub. Six hours round trip, during which I sweated through my down jacket and thanked my lucky stars I’d thought last minute to stuff another into the bottom of my pack, I stripped off one and pulled on the other. The wet rag (formerly my jacket) made a crinkling sound as it solidified into a hunk of ice.
It could be easy while among the creature comforts of a central-heated truck stop and crew quarters to feel immune to nature’s elements. During the short walk between the two buildings, the cold became a nuisance rather than a death threat. Hiking the backcountry, however, provided plenty of reminders that this was still the Arctic. It didn’t care where you came from or who you knew. It had no qualms turning you into a permanent fixture of the landscape.
Inside the main entrance of the crew quarters was a landline telephone. The sign posted next to it read: “Welcome to Coldfoot, one of the last places on Earth where your cell phone doesn’t work.” By the time I arrived, that sign was out of date. The first cell tower to be erected along Mile 175 had gone active a few months earlier. An outpost on the edge of human civilization feels a lot less rugged when the person next to you is thumbing around on Facebook.
Over the long winter haul, I woke in the dark, rubbed my eyes, pulled on my uniform and trudged to work. Some mornings, when I questioned what I was doing out there when I was feeling less like a frontiersman and more like a dishwasher, it was worth looking up. Within seconds, eerie rivers of green and pink light could flood the sky and just as quickly dissipate again. The Aurora appeared now and then as a kind of reassurance that the world was still a wild, beautiful place.
My bags were packed. It was mid-May and spring was just finally bursting up through the snowpack. People were outside in T-shirts tossing around a Frisbee. Incredible. An hour after clocking out of my final shift I was on a plane headed south. I was meeting a friend in Fairbanks for an Alaskan road trip, during which we’d both get miserably sick but have a hell of a good time anyways.
The plane pitched to turn us south, offering one last glimpse of the small cluster of buildings by the highway that was Coldfoot Camp: gold mine, truck stop, outpost, Alaska.
Maximilian Armstrong has a penchant for adventure and stories. He’s backpacked Canada, hitchhiked America, motorbiked Vietnam and wintered in the Alaskan Arctic. His current expedition is thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail.
The post A Winter in the Pit: Washing Dishes in the Alaskan Arctic appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>The post The Top 50 Travel Blogs (2nd Quarter: 2018) appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>
Below is a list of the top 50 travel blogs for the 2nd quarter (April — June) of 2018 ranked by visitor traffic.
There are a few other sites that have put together their own lists of the “top” travel blogs.
However, each has their own subjective means of ranking sites, using everything from Alexa scores, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, estimated traffic, inbound Google links and even subjective design criteria.
My intention was to create the most objective and accurate list of the most popular travel blogs.
Therefore, this list is based solely on the number of visitors a travel blog receives. To read more about how this list was put together, please read below.
I reached out to a large sampling of travel bloggers and asked that they provide me with a screenshot of their Google Analytics page reflecting their site’s visitor statistics over the most recent quarter. The reasoning behind this method was that I wanted to obtain a rolling average to compensate for monthly spikes that may have occurred. Further, utilizing Google Analytics as the uniform measure of traffic helped to ensure uniformity of data across all sampling.
Of course, due to this method of collecting data, only those site owners that submitted their statistics were included for consideration in the rankings. Those that did not submit were not considered. Further, in an effort to maximize the number of participants and to protect specific traffic numbers that some site owners regard as sensitive and private, I agreed to keep all specific data confidential and not include those numbers in the rankings.
Why This Metric?
Simple, it’s the most accurate, best picture of a site’s traffic. As everyone knows, Alexa is not very accurate and can be easily manipulated. Inbound links are a great sign of SEO, but just because a site does well with Google doesn’t mean it has a lot of visitors. Twitter followers are great, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into site readers.
Quite simply, unique visitors is the one metric that most accurately reflects a site’s readership.
Who Cares?
I understand that just because a site gets a high number of unique visitors doesn’t mean it’s the highest quality site. There are plenty of excellently written, well-designed, engaging sites that may not have high traffic numbers.
My intention was not to create a list of the best, or the most useful, or the most professional travel blogs. I simply wanted to create the most accurate list of the most visited blogs. Just as the movie weekend box office results are reported every week, I simply wanted to create an unbiased, objective list of the most visited travel blogs for research purposes.
Finally, I hope this list will serve as a useful guide and a good starting point for travelers and readers around the world looking to explore the vibrant and eclectic travel blogging community, and expose them to some great travel blogs that they otherwise may not be reading.
*
Click Here to Read the Complete Past Lists of The Top 50 Travel Blogs
/
Matt Stabile is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Expeditioner. The Expeditioner began in 2008 and is headquartered in New York City. You can read his writings, watch his travel videos or contact him at any time at TheExpeditioner.com.
The post The Top 50 Travel Blogs (2nd Quarter: 2018) appeared first on The Expeditioner Travel Site.
]]>