Curated Fernweh
Busan is an unexpected delight. From my window seat high above, South Korea's second-largest city was half a forested seaside paradise and half a fever-dream of identical skyscrapers. Homes with blue and green roofs filled any spaces in between, and tucked themselves all the way up to the foothills. A distant highway took the really... Continue Reading →
We went to China's Fujian province to look at trees, and ended up also seeing tulou and tigers and geoparks and...
Accepting an unsolicited invitation from a complete stranger to speak at a Shanghai conference after I published one single scientific article was objectively crazy.
You are presented with an endless series of open doorways. One will lead you into a slot canyon of carved walls and gnarled trunks. The next leads into a tumbledown courtyard filled with beehive temples. The next has you following the taffy-like trunk and roots of a single behemoth tree.
The wooden plank that served as my seat shivered in time with the longboat's naked motor as we shot across Cheow Larn Lake. Sheer limestone cliffs stabbed upwards from the jade water all around us. Every one of the hundred islands was shrouded in jungle trees that were shriveling their way through the dry season.... Continue Reading →
The second chapter of my 2024 Thai adventure was full of Khaos - Khao Lak and Khao Sok, that is, southwestern destinations near the ocean and jungle.
Traveling with Type 1 diabetes is always a delightful challenge, and hot climates can really kick the fun up a notch. Here are some hot tips I've learned from trial and error during my 20-odd years on the road through 40 countries and counting.
The perfectly-square Old Town of Chiang Mai is a compact 1.5 miles on each side, yet the density of temples apparently rivals the concentration of churches in Rome.
My final three days in Japan, which I spent patting wild deer amid temples in Nara, inhaling cheesecake in Osaka, and disintegrating in the volcanic hot spring waters of Kinosaki Onsen.
I'm a firm believer in letting myself be surprised by a destination rather than doing too much research beforehand, which can have either disastrous or amazing results depending on whether I happen to miss or find the highlights.
If I had to summarize my impression of Japan after my ten-day visit using only one sentence, it might be this: “I imagine Japan emerged from ancient East Asian culture in a similar way to how shibas somehow evolved from wolves.”
On my panicked internal response to the ubiquitous question of "How was your trip?" after I returned from a month traveling through eastern Asia.