Inspiring travel sites

A couple in their Pissos, France home

Bert Teunissen photographs people in their own kitchens and dining rooms in a series called “Domestic Landscapes.” The photos are gorgeous, shot inside by natural light, but they’re also uncomfortably intimate like we’re looking at the inside of a person’s skin, not just their kitchen. Most of the series are shot in Europe (it’s broken up by country on the website) but there’s one series from Japan during which I kept asking, “Why is he shooting these people at a restaurant?” I guess I’ve never been in a Japanese home….

I’ve spent a lot of time in people’s houses as well, but in the US I rarely come across a home that exhibits a personality’s corners the way Teunissen’s European homes do.

The other website I’ve been loving is the David Lynch Interview Project. The filmmaker has sent a team across the US to conduct four-minute interviews with locals and they talk on a variety of subjects, but often about themselves.

While window washing I’ve had a lot of four-minute conversations and though I don’t think such passing glances can give a full picture of a person’s life, it tells you what they want you to hear in four minutes.

So, I was in India during the tsunami

by Mike

I was in India during the tsunami. I was eating dinner with a friend in a restaurant that sat at the top of the beach and we started hearing waves, the Arabian Sea, which was a surprise because it was low tide. People were shouting and I ran to the front of the restaurant to see Indian men knee-deep in water, grabbing chairs and tables as they drifted away. I thought, “How desperate they must be to think about chairs and tables when this is happening!”

We’ve had health care abroad.

If there is a god, then why do stupid things happen to smart people?

by Mike

Azure and I have had plenty of health care encounters abroad, so I thought I’d tell some of the fun stories about how we get treated when we leave our own country.

Chatter

It was light at 4am because we were so far north and I laid on the couch where I woke and watched the men get ready to go fishing. For a few minutes I pretended I was doing serious independent travel and imagined describing the scene in my dispatches home: “These men are obsessed with coffee. They drink it every morning, at least two cups, and then bring a thermos with them on the boat. When they run out of coffee on the boat everyone crashes and takes turns napping on the narrow benches. They play cards late into the night and laugh constantly and have dedicated their lives to fish.”

Here’re 20 tips for traveling Europe on the cheap (Dang that’s a lot of tips!)

You have to be pretty cheap to find places like this.

Y’all want to know about our finances anyway. I’ll keep it oblique so there’s still a sense of wonder and enchantment.

Az and I budgeted about 50 Euro per day for us as a couple this winter, which works out to about $1000 per person per month, not including airfare. We spend less traveling than we do at home.

A contract for traveling with someone you love.

Azure’s shadow against a home in Cartagena, Colombia.

Whether you’re traveling with your partner, a family member or a close friend, you GOTTA establish expectations beforehand because chances are you’ll want to tear their throat out just because they eat pudding with a Swiss army knife or something like that. Love the people you love. That’s my motto.

I wrote up these points in the first person (“Here’s what I promise I’ll do”) because I can only be responsible for my own actions & reactions.

Quarter Year’s six rules for independent travel

I read somewhere that to travel well you need patience, tolerance, respect and a sense of humor. To that I’d add a Rolex and rock-hard abs, just in case. But I’ve been thinking about some actual travel advice we’ve developed for ourselves over the years. Here they are. Just below. Right… now. Below. Look down there now, the next few words don’t matter. Slicey trickster temple mat. See? They didn’t matter.

Universal Language

Barcelona 2004

Bogota 2008

An Ethnologist’s Take on Peasant Corsica

By Mike Goldstein

“Granite Island: A Portrait of Corsica” is a beautifully written chronicle of Dorothy Carrington’s time in Corsica (which spanned decades). Even after the second world war Corsican peasants were living very much in the same way their ancestors had for centuries. In the following paragraphs Carrington, visiting from London, writes about her experiences living with a Corsican peasant family near Sartene.

Bonifascinating

Azure and I agreed that Bonifacio is one of the most spectacular cities we’ve visited – it’s built on a cliff that’s surrounded by water on 3.5 sides and it’s pretty much waiting to fall into the water, as you can see above. From Bonifacio you can see Sardegna, Corsica’s Italian sister to the South. Bonifacio is hundreds of years old, of course, and somewhere up here was found one of the oldest inhabitants of Corsica, a woman whose grave was dated to ~9000 years ago.

We found the town itself to be one of those annoying seasonal towns that’s a shell in the off-season, so there’s nothing to do, nothing that sustains people. Tourism keeps em going the rest of the year, of course, so when we were walking around the town our interactions felt uncomfortably artificial. We were much happier in Sartene where there was a university and some commerce and free wifi only half an hour away.

A weekend in Yakutat, Alaska

I was lucky enough to win* (* from my dad) a trip to Yakutat, Alaska last weekend! The first day we got in we went to the Hubbard Glacier and navigated small icebergs to get close enough to hear the thunder of ice breaking down. The glacier is 70 miles long and we were looking at its mile-long face.

I should be a TV host

From the town of Troo, near Tours, France.

Wood-cut-like chateau

Gadling photos of the day!

In the last two weeks two of my photos have been named Gadling Photo of the Day! Gadling’s one of the biggest travel ‘blogs’ on the ‘internet’ so I’m pretty excited about this development. All the more reason to start trying to sell these things.

The New Global Student

Azure & I visiting 2/3 of the Frost family in Buenos Aires last year.

by Mike

Thaipusam is a Hindu festival in which revelers purify themselves through fasting & prayer. Some of the devout make shrines on platforms that are hooked into their skin and they carry them in a circuit to the temple while their family cheers them on. The only reason I have any idea this exists is that I accidentally stumbled onto a procession in Little India in Singapore – they had shut down one lane in either direction to allow the march, but cars still buzzed by.

There are literally thousands of other examples of how travel has educated me in ways that a traditional education simply never would have. I think of it as education by proximity and experience.

My cousin Maya Frost is doing her part to encourage this method of learning. She’s written a book called, “The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition and Get a Truly International Education.”

She explains how to study abroad in a way that’s CHEAPER than paying tuition at home! Azure and I travel every winter for less money than it would cost to stay at home. We travelers know the tricks – and Maya’s put it in a book. If you’re a student at all interested in seeing the world, and you want to do it in a way that doesn’t break the bank, then you should check out her excellent book. Parents of students should check it out as well so they know what options are available for their kids internationally.

Don’t you want to be here?

Some town in SW Corsica.

Olive tree above Dolceacqua

by Mike

Little did I know at the time that this was the first of many many olive trees we’d take pictures of. This tree was on the walk down from the amazing howevermany course dinner high above Dolceacqua to which we had to hike… and from which we had to hike back. Drunk. We walked on stone walls that lined olive tree orchards that spanned the terraced hillsides.

It was interesting to cross the border from France to Italy and see an immediate difference. Physically, there was much less emphasis on aesthetic beauty, powerlines were all over the place and the hillsides were mostly terraced in this region (which was beautiful, but not natural). At the same time you cross the border and the people are much warmer and the food has different emphases as well… freshness rather than alchemy.

Cap Corse Sunset

On our way back from the brocciu making we stopped at this strange fake windmill that had the best view on the island. Well, I say that, but there were tons of great views there. The windmill had one of them.

When I picture Mediterranean islands, I usually imagine looking down at them from above, as if I’m floating above and getting to inspect the valleys and smell the trees on the wind… When we pulled to the top of a hill and saw this view I knew I’d have to take some time to experience it.

That’s one of the reasons I love night photography. When the shudder opens, you have nothing to do but be still and wait and watch. It’s a situation where taking it all in – really appreciating the scene – is automatic and easy. Night photography is also a little magic. The camera picks up light that you didn’t know was there in the first place.

Up on this ridge there was a stiff wind and there were old stones scattered down the hillside that had at one point been structures. There were wind farms on the hill and the moon was rising behind them. We could somehow see all the way down to L’Ile Rousse at night – it’s the collection of lights on the right side of the picture. That was the town we’d slept in the night before, hours away by scooter. But there it was, under our noses like we were floating above the island inspecting its coasts.

Snow on the olive farm

by Mike

Azure and I, picking olives, noticed that the sky was getting dark up the valley. We asked Margarite, “Is it going to rain?”
“No, it won’t rain,” she said.
We didn’t really believe her, so we kept working. But the darkness grew and we were startled to feel an icy wind flee down the valley in front of the cloud.

We looked up and saw that the darkness had crossed a ridge and was heading for us and whether it was rain, it was serious. Claude screamed orders to get the full olive caisses up and we scrambled to move our equipment inside, protected, and to get the olives out of the cold. Then it hit – snow rioted through the orchard and the temperature must have dropped 25 degrees.

There was a lot of confusion but we eventually got everything moved in and spent the rest of the day wide-eyed at the snow falling just 30 minutes from Nice.

Of course Margarite was right – no rain.

L’Ile Rousse plaza

We pulled into L’Ile Rousse (on the west coast of Corsica) late in the afternoon and immediately headed to the cute center of town. There were bunches of people playing petanque (bocci) in the main square, old men of course, and many just hanging out watching. That’s not our scooter.

We watched for a little while then walked down the two small streets that make up the centre ville and of course (of course) discovered nothing was open.

It’s an interesting little town.