My apologies for the long delay since my last update. I’ve been in Japan for the past couple weeks and just returned home. We’ll get back to North Korea very soon. But first I’d like to share with you a few images from this last trip… Let’s begin with sumo. I got hooked on sumo while living in Tokyo between 2000 and 2002. As a martial artist the technical aspects of...
Surrealism supplanted reality the moment I landed in Pyongyang, North Korea. In front of the airport terminal, beneath an enormous painting of Kim Il-Sung, a long line of women in traditional dress chanted “Welcome Pyongyang!” as they pumped their fists in the air. At the airport I was paired with an “escort” who wouldn’t leave my side the entire time I was in the...
If you follow my News page, you’ll have heard that my latest feature article was just published in the current issue of Outpost magazine (July/August 2009). You can find it on newsstands for the next month and a half, or if you’re not in Canada or near an international magazine store you can read it right now on the Articles page of my website. It’s always nice to see a piece...
Enormous trees with wide buttressed roots propped up the canopy: giants draped with vines, mosses and epiphytes which hung in tangled green confusion. All the way down to the impenetrable jungle floor, life grew upon life in one symbiotic Gordian Knot. The forest floor absorbed our footfalls: mine and two Embera hunters from a tiny village deep in Panama’s Darién Gap. The jungle crouched...
In the Black Hills of South Dakota, not far from the patriotic visage of Mount Rushmore, the curious traveler can find the growing realization of one man’s dream. In 1939 Chief Henry Standing Bear of the Sioux asked Bostonian Korczak Ziolkowski, already a well-known sculptor, to come west to carve a mountain. Standing Bear wanted him to tell the story of his people, “So that the white...
The endless steaming ribbon of road unrolls before you like a film. Heat haze shimmers and distorts the horizon, breaking the asphalt into tiny lakes which dissolve into nothingness as you rocket on through. A lanky saguaro cactus seems to nod at your passing; but maybe that’s just the red shift. Your hair whips and flutters in the slipstream, bleached blond by the desert sun. The land...
In the lost paradise isles of the Turks and Caicos an empty curve of icing-sugar sand gives way to the salty tongue of turquoise surf. Distant white caps crash mute on the barrier reef, where dolphin and stingray cruise in endless procession. The island of Providenciales and the smaller cayes are host to upper crust resorts and the posh vacation homes of Bruce Willis, Donna Karan, and my friends...
In keeping with yesterday’s entry on the Anthropology of Drink, I’d like to share with you the Top 3 strangest “local” drinks I’ve consumed on my travels. It’s a rogue list of tipples sure to turn even the most determined of stomachs — although I remain convinced that a few of them truly are an acquired taste… 1) Airag (Mongolia) – At the top...
I’m a firm believer that a nation’s drink is shaped by its landscape and climate, and that its drink in turn shapes its culture. According to my theory, the world can be neatly divided into several distinct zones of booze… The UK and Ireland are home to warming whiskeys, dark heavy ales and stouts. Just the thing for when the perpetual damp soaks through your bones: a sip...
The Landscape: Stony Adriatic islands scattered along the length of Croatia’s coast. Coarse green shrubs and olive trees whose thin leaves flash silver undersides to the breeze. Translucent blue: a breath would cloud that water of glass. Light has a clarity there that is like no place else, and it provokes a clarity of thought. Priorities and needs slip so easily into place. You realize the...
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