The forets of the cross
Forster, New South Wales
Nobody knows Australia better than the Australians. The beauty of traveling alone is that you are far more likely to make friends with locals and wander of the tourist track. With this is mind I accompanied a new Aussie friend down the ocean highway to the unspoilt town of Forster. A precious town on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales that backpackers have missed, but native Aussies flock to for the summer holidays.
From Saigon to Angkor by bike
61 Stories at Once
We took the elevator up to the 61st floor of the Macau Tower and I wasn’t coming back down in the elevator. At 233 meters, it’s the tallest bungy jump in the world. Your ears pop on the way up. It was my birthday, and while I wasn’t trying to overanalyze it, I thought it would be kind of ironic on a tombstone if anything went wrong. From the view up, there you can see the whole city and beyond. I was starting to feel a little sick. Not from the height, but from the day before…
New Orleans Jazz Fest The Beat Goes On
When Hurricane Katrina called on southeast Louisiana on August 29, 2005, it didn’t knock first. The wolf-wild winds simply huffed and puffed and destroyed more than 350,000 homes. Almost 2000 people lost their lives in the actual hurricane and in the subsequent floods. New Orleans didn’t escape. Unlike the immovable house of bricks in the fairy tale, the city’s metropolitan area was battered then lost under fifteen feet of water, resulting in over 200,000 homes and apartments being damaged beyond repair.
The Royal City of Mysore
It was a wonderful weather when we reached the city of Mysore in Karnataka state of South India. The city wore a somber and sleepy look at thirty past six in the morning. The pavement vendors and hawkers were busy selling mysore mallige jasmines. Yeshtu beku.. mulaana..maara..? How much you want, a foot or meter length of flower chain? Though it was only a week ago that the city’s grand event of Dussera festival was over, the pomp and fervor didn’t appear to have decreased in any way. We traced the address of my cousin Suresh who works in CFTRI, a premier food research institute. It was a home far away from home when we reached his house. After a decade and half we made it again. The tour schedule was immediately sketched and not a minute was wasted. We planned to cover the farthest places in the first leg. Shravanabelagola, Hassan, Halaybeedu, Belur, Nanjangud, Chamundi hills, Lalitha Mahal, Krishnaraja sagar, Srirangapatna, Wodiyar Palace, Zoo, were listed out. For elders, Shravanabelagola hill would be challenging to climb on small frictionless steps and due to the risk of slippery path, the visit to the abode of Gomateshwar was dropped. Suresh took me around the massive corridors and through well maintained lawns of the Cheluvamba Mansion palace that houses the CFTRI.
The Poetry of Peru
I had spent nearly three months in Buenos Aires and couldn’t wait to get out. Originally enamored by the modernity and architectural charm of the city, the striking beauty of its women, the passion of Tango and a literary tradition that included the likes of Luis Borges, I had quickly fallen disillusioned with a place I had heard deemed as the “Paris of Latin America.” Coming from New York—where no man or woman appears the same—Buenos Aires seemed all too homogenous. While most Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) trace their roots back to different parts of Western Europe, almost everyone in the city was white. Furthermore, the people I had met didn’t seem particularly fond of Americans, a sentiment shared by much of Latin America especially during the Bush years, and yet, Buenos Aires reminded more of America than any other Latin American country I had been to. Men often went out to clubs dressed in shirt and tie and flashing business cards, women armed in high heels and stylish office attire upturned their noses as they passed by, high-culture types sat around daintily drinking cafés con leche at outdoor corner cafes. The city seemed to be in love with capitalism and the dance of the dollar, and eagerly trying to distance itself from the rest of Latin America.
The Great Big Nothing
If someone told you to fly half way around the world and spend thousands of dollars to look at nothing, to see empty, you might think they are crazy. You would probably even tell them so. But, I have experienced the nothing and I have felt the empty and it was one of the most incredible moments of my life.
This is the experience of being in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, thought to mean the driest of the dry, but often referred to also as the “The Great Big Nothing”. It lies in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. It used to be a great big sea millions of years ago, but now it is a vast, flat expanse the size of Switzerland. It is one of the only places on earth where you can see the horizon 360 degrees around yourself. Wherever you stand you can feel as if you are the centre point, but, simultaneously, as an insignificant dot in something far beyond yourself.
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