Travel

From a piazza in the town of Castellabate on the Cilento coast of Italy, you may lift your eyes over the rim of your cappuccino and drink in a panorama of sky and Mediterranean Sea from Salerno to the Gulf of Policastro. Looking way, way down, a fruited plain of vineyards, lemon trees and white fig stretches to the flanks of green mountains decked with wisps of vapor.

Standing at the same point in 1811, Napoleon's brother in law, appointed King of Naples in the early 19th century, uttered words that the town has engraved on a wall near the castle: "Qui non si muore." Roughly, Here you do not die.

Of course, people do die in the Cilento, a region south of the Amalfi Coast. But they also live longer than most, thanks to the Mediterranean Diet, first studied in these parts. It is more accurate to say that here, eternal life is a more appealing proposition.

Read the Rest here. 

There is a way through Spain that is all horseshoe arches, keyhole windows and bronze doors carved in Arabic script. It meanders into crenelated forts, Moorish castles overlooking the Mediterranean and grand mosques reconfigured by Christians into cathedrals.

As the child of an Iraqi woman and a Swedish-American man, I have always been drawn to places where West and East converge and dissolve into each other. The southern edge of Spain, where North Africa is just an hour away by water, is one of these places.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

May 10, 2022

The New York Times

Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers/ That grow so incredibly high.

-- "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" The Beatles

Picture yourself in a room by an ocean with pink-petaled trees and sapphire skies. Then imagine being surrounded by guides feeding you a powerful hallucinogen every 72 hours or so, to expand your consciousness and strip you of your ego "game."

For two summers in 1962 and 1963, at least 50 day-trippers retreated to the Hotel Catalina Beach Resort on the Pacific Coast in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, to do exactly that. The first known Western psychedelic retreat was organized by the soon-to-be-fired Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary and his partner in mind-expansion studies, Richard Alpert (renamed Ram Dass after a visit to the Himalayas). They called themselves the International Federation for Internal Freedom -- IFIF.

Read the rest here.

For the New York Times

By Nina Burleigh

New York Times

Feb. 8, 2022

I first heard of the Metochi study center on a dark, wet November afternoon in the cafeteria at the University of Agder. Sleet smeared the great windows, afternoon was already indistinguishable from midnight.

To get to Metochi one must travel an "unnamed road" according to the Google map on my i-phone. The dirt road winds for kilometers through stands of tall grasses, cucumber and tomato and pepper fields, and pear and pomegranate orchards, on a flat plane. Monks have walked this path for 500 years. Generations of olive-tending peasants in need of medicine, and pilgrims seeking spiritual succor also added their centuries of footsteps to the grooves in the rocky dry soil.

The van dumped me off at the end of the unnamed road. Up a steep little hill, and through a stone archway, I passed under a second, living arch, a giant fig tree, its trunk planted in the ground, apparently rooted there for a very long time, rising and then bending a great bough of leaves and green fruit over the entrance. Cats lolled here and there, eying me, tails switching. At the far end of the courtyard, I spied the tables and benches where we would eat al fresco, arranged under a gazebo laced with thick old grapevines heavy with bunches of green grapes. Just over a stone wall and down below the tables was an orchard of pomegranates and pears. Small and large stone urns nurtured bushes of rosemary and basil, their scent filled the night air.

Read the rest here

BLOOMBERG

It's a well-known fact among traveled women that the best-looking men on the planet can be observed at the Oslo Airport. Broad of shoulder, lean of shank, with the wellspring of Viking DNA still flowing in Norway. Less widely noted is that Norwegian women run the country.

Read the rest here

CILENTO, ITALY -- By the time my husband and I set off on our hike in the Cilento, an Edenic mountainous region of Italy where some of the longest-lived people on Earth dwell, we'd been in Italy gorging on antipasti, primi, secondi, dolci, and vino twice daily for almost a week. To say we staggered to the edge of paradise would be only a slight exaggeration. Read the rest here

Photo Credit: Erik Freeland

New York Times, Feb. 18, 2019 -- As the polar vortex bore down on the United States a couple of weeks ago, we left our home in New York via an ice-encrusted front door. We were lucky enough to have tickets to Bonaire, a little island in the Caribbean Sea. Seven hours later, including a layover at Miami International Airport, the plane landed on a sunny, flat field rimmed with pipe organ cactuses and scraggly shrubs. Bonaire looks like Arizona, except for the azure waters in the distance. It also happens to be showing the rest of the world just how to save coral.

Read the rest here.

NEW YORK TIMES: Most Americans come from somewhere else. That is as true of presidents as it is of newcomers reciting naturalization oaths across the United States today. Donald Trump, the 45th president, is a second generation German-Scot -- two nationalities that happen to be the first and tenth most common in the United States. Trump's mother and grandparents arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th century from Scotland and Germany. Two of his three wives are relatively recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and four of his children are half Slavic.

Last fall, researching a book on the women of the Trump clan, I set off on a three-week dash to the remote corners of Europe from where the Trump family hails. Besides interviewing people who knew them, I wanted to capture the history and rhythm of life in areas where the Trumps have roots, and so I wandered, sampling food, culture and ambience.

Read the rest here:

Norwegian flies direct from JFK, there's no reason not to go to this little French bomb in the Caribbean.

IN NEWSWEEK: The billboards start appearing miles from Kruger park: "Poachers will be poached." For illiterate poachers, another sign announces, "Dehorned zone," with a picture of a living rhino without its horn. (Some private game owners remove rhino horns to deter poaching.)

The iconic Big Five animals trophy hunters covet are lion, rhino, elephant, Cape buffalo and leopard, but it is the endangered rhino that has become a potent symbol for the ugly inequality between whites and blacks in post-apartheid South Africa.

The rhinoceros's bloodlines stretch back to a giant relative that roamed lush grasslands 30 million years ago. "It is a miracle that this prehistoric idiot still exists," wrote T. Murray Smith, former president of the East Africa Professional Hunters Association. For thousands of years, the primeval beast's descendants roamed the grasslands of Asia and Africa by the millions, but now fewer than 20,000 of them roam free. South Africa is home to 79 percent of the world's rhinos, and half of them live in Kruger park. Rhino numbers there and worldwide have been plummeting since Asian demand for their horns exploded about 10 years ago, after a Vietnamese general declared that powdered rhino horn had cured his cancer. Rhino horn sells for $3,000 a pound, which can turn poachers into kings in villages without running water or electricity.

Read the rest here.

After four countries in four months, there's no place like home.

Newsweek

In the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf pointed out that one of the greatest differences between male and female life was the ability of young men to travel and experience the world, while women feared for their safety on the streets even at home. More than a hundred years later, women in Western countries like Woolf's England have advanced considerably in terms of access to adventure and experience.

But in most parts of the developing world, women remain severely restricted by open or implicit gender violence. Few nations are as saturated by rape culture as India, where one woman is estimated to be raped every 15 minutes. The notorious 2012 gang rape and murder of a Delhi woman on a bus led to mass street protects, prompting the Indian government to increase jail terms for rapists. But those changes have not altered India's ingrained rape culture. Amnesty International reports Indian authorities have still not effectively implemented their new laws on crimes against women. The numbers of reported rapes increased by more than 10,000 since 2012. There were 34,651 cases of rape reported in 2015. Many more incidents are believed to go unreported.

That constant physical threat makes independent travel difficult for most Indian women. For that reason, and because of traditional cultural pressure on young women to marry young and stay home, most families forbid their daughters from traveling very far, whether alone or with friends.

Now, a small but growing group of young women is leading foreigners around the teeming streets of Delhi, in and out of hotels, through grimy roadside rest stops, ordering for them at restaurants, or accompanying them to remote mountains or nature reserves, in addition to the Taj Mahal and the great Moghul mosques. In these roles, they are challenging old customs about women's place in public spaces.

Read the rest here

No story here, we were just goofing off. Missed the Oscars, and the Trump SOU while offline for a week. I might write about it someday, it's a magical place.

Newsweek, Dec. 2017:

After covering the too long, too mean presidential campaign, I fled New York City for Nicaragua.

Witnessing the collapse of the American system has an edgy vibe I've always found compelling and even sexy, but I now realize it's much more fun observing institutional mayhem in places where (a) it's hot outside and (b) you can check out early and hop a C134 back to high ground.

The last time I paid attention to Nicaragua was in the 1980s, when the ostentatiously austere Colonel Oliver North was helping President Ronald Reagan covertly fund the rightist Contra death squads in their civil war with the Sandinistas, while his Farrah Fawcett-haired secretary Fawn Hall was shredding incriminating documents. As far as I was concerned, Central America--other than Costa Rica--is still, "Send lawyers, guns and money--Dad, get me out of here" territory.

But "Nica," as the natives call it, is now postrevolutionary. During the decades of the left's bloody effort to throw off a succession of dictators and their American-backed death squads, the literacy rate nearly doubled. Agrarian reform temporarily gave peasants a couple of acres and a rifle each. That experiment ended in national bankruptcy, and the oligarchs were invited back in. Nicaragua now has some peace, and a little prosperity. It also boasts thrilling apolitical diversions, like world-class surfing, "ash-boarding" down one of 17 volcanoes, zip-lining over jungles and sipping tropical cocktails made with the national rum at infinity pools overlooking crashing surf in the sunset.

Read the rest here.

New York Times Sept. 6, 2016:

A few days after first grade ended, in June 1967, I boarded a train pulling out of Union Station in Chicago with my parents, younger brother and baby sister. My father, a University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate, had decided to bail out of academia and move to San Francisco, where he planned to devote himself to writing poetry and where, coincidentally, the Summer of Love was about to commence.

The counterculture meant nothing to me then, but that summer in San Francisco was to be historic. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of young people across America left their own cities, parents and schools and hitchhiked to the area around the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets to tune into drugs and music, and tune out of "square" society. They converged there, having heard about free food and free love. In that summer of 1967, Haight-Ashbury transformed into the epicenter of the counterculture movement.

Read the rest of the journey here.

Way, way out in the Atlantic Ocean, at a point where one of Earth's four cold water currents meets the searing African desert winds, nights are dark as prehistory. Once the sun sets on the volcanic archipelago known as theCanary Islands, a misty net of extraterrestrial white light blankets the sky from horizon to horizon. Until dawn, every ray of visible starlight in the entire Northern Hemisphere and much of the Southern Hemisphere gathers overhead. That sprawl of sky over a small island speck on the black ocean suggests, like few other experiences, the nanosecond that is human life.

Such black nights and clear skies have beckoned astronomers to install some of the world's most powerful telescopes on volcanic peaks in this archipelago off the northwestern coast of Africa. As scientists use these state-of-the-art observatories to search out signs of the Big Bang, at sea level 8,000 feet below, tens of thousands of mostly British pensioners and brides-to-be on "hen parties" are getting drunk and sunburned.

Five million tourists annually visit this Spanish territory from colder climes to bask in Europe's only subtropical weather. The port at Tenerife, the largest island, is the third-most-visited cruise ship destination in Europe.

Read the rest here.

As world leaders started heading to Paris to discuss climate change, I boarded a plane last night going in another direction: south to Antarctica. From 30,000 feet, on a clear, moonlit November night flying south from New York City, the density of the lights along the eastern seaboard form a stunning lace trim along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Each of the twinkly whorls and grids represents millions of Americans living along the sea, populating a megalopolis stretching from Boston down to Richmond, and points even further south.

The heartbreaking beauty of our great eastern cities from the sky at night sometimes brings tears to my eyes. It's moving to behold what we, the thinking animals, have built and placed against that great black void of cold water.

All that, and even the jet from which to view it, we have accomplished in little more than a century. But the pace of human progress brought its own fragility, in the form of climate change.

Gazing down on those lights from the porthole of a jet brings home just what catastrophic sea level rise means.

Scientists believe that as the frozen Poles melt, which they are doing at a phenomenal rate, the sea will, like a glass of water into which ice cubes are dropped, surge upward and overflow its edges, extinguishing the lights and the great cities.

Read the rest here.

It is still Earth, but Antarctica is an alien land. In his book Future of Life, Nobel-winning American biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote of Antarctica, "On all of the Earth, the McMurdo Dry Valleys most resemble the rubbled plains of Mars."

Antarctica is not as uninhabitable as Mars, but almost. It's also a place that tricks the eye, it's a trompe l'oeil of nature. On land, the whites stretch on forever, and snow, peak and cloud mingle so voyagers lose track of the difference. At sea, icebergs loom out of the fog like Gothic castles or the Sphinx, or simply abstract art, open to interpretation. But if the icebergs are Picassos, their positioning with backdrops of Alpine peaks and melted marshmallow, meringue and dollops of cream are pure Dali.

Here while the mind and eye are tricked, the body suffers extreme discomfort, from seasickness to frozen hands to frostbite and death, which might explain -- logically -- why Antarctic exploration always includes some element of the uncanny.

Ernest Shackleton and his two partners managed a death-defying sail across 800 miles of rough sea in an ice-crusted lifeboat then trekked across an island mountain range for several days to finally reach help at a whaling station. After that insane feat, the men admitted to one another that they had all sensed the presence of a "fourth man" -- an unseen someone walking beside them the whole time.

T.S. Eliot was moved to mention the mystery man in his modernist classic, The Wasteland.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

-- But who is that on the other side of you?

More recently, in 2012, polar explorer Felicity Aston became the first woman to ski solo across the Antarctic Continent. In 63 days alone, she started talking to the sun -- and it talked back. Eventually, she had entire conversations with it.

While voyaging around the Antarctic Peninsula, I posted the above, and some other journal entries on the website Medium. Read them all here.

In all mythic, transformational trips--acid, ayahuasca, Mars or across the river Styx--the voyagers must, at some point, face down their deepest fears. For expeditions into Antarctica, the most deeply strange place on Earth, the Drake Passage is where that happens.

This tumultuous realm--where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans converge at a latitude where water unimpeded by land flows in a continuous circle around the globe--was first sailed by Sir Francis Drake, the storied 16th-century English naval explorer. Winds and swells in the passage are commonly "hurricane" on the Beaufort scale. Its harrowing reputation prompted a 19th-century theory that the Drake Passage was a planetary drain leading to the South Pole, a notion Edgar Allan Poe used to terrifying effect in his short story "MS. Found in a Bottle," in which a cargo ship passenger narrates the destruction of his vessel and the events before his death.

Read about Antarctica.

ASSISI, Italy -- For centuries, pilgrims have trekked to Assisi to walk the same steep and narrow lanes on which a rag-cloaked radical monk named Francis preached an antimaterialistic message 800 years ago, rocking the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

But lately, those visitors have included a new sort of pilgrim.

Read the full article here.

There's a reason why the Dutch have a saying, "living like a god in France," and if you want to understand it fully, spend a few days in Antibes or Juan Les Pins, sipping a cocktail in the soft-pawed night. Here's my story in the Times on the glorious little Mediterranean peninsula that inspired and soothed, for a time, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

After some delays, I got my visa and headed over to Lagos last month. In steaming equatorial heat, I met members of the petro-state's micro-elite. I'm afraid words can't do justice to the Chief's birthday party, but I tried. Here's the story for the New York Times.

I wrote an essay about a trip up the Amazon in Peru, exploring my ambivalence about nature. Besides anaconda, spiders, giant ants and sloth, I encountered river people whose lifestyles are as close to organic as one can find in the modern world. Read the whole story here.

I went to the Amazon jungle, brought back jungle viagra, piranha teeth, caught and released a rainbow catfish, and snapped many sloth pictures. I almost slept in The Mick Jagger Room at Casa Fitzcarraldo.

Part Uno: Adventures in Iquitos. 

My daughter and I took this amazing trip into the Arctic Ocean in June, getting up next to walrus and polar bear in bays and inlets only accessible thanks to the dreaded polar ice melt blamed on man-caused climate change. I hope these animals survive.
Here's the story in DuJour Magazine.

Image by Curious Expeditions via Flickr

Visitors to Italy tend to seek its sunny, Dionysian side -- vino, pasta, opera, Renaissance art, George Clooney on a Vespa. But, like a chilly draft on a hot day, Italy's gothic angle offers intimations of darkness that make a moment on the piazza even more delicious. Consciously or not, anyone sipping prosecco at sunset in Rome or Naples savors an extra spoon of dolce in their vita thanks to the contrast between the beauty of the present and the proximity of catacombs, ruins and sites of ancient suffering.
Read the rest of the article in the New York Times.