Tag Archive: traveling

A Phnom Penh New Year’s Eve

The sun never rose on our Monday, the calendar curtailed by humans’ clock cooperation, so Tuesday felt fifty hours old by the time we found the back end of dinner in Phnom Penh.… Continue reading

Why Cambodia? Why anywhere?

“Cambodia? Why would you want to go there?” asked a surprising number of people. The question baffled me at first, after all, one need not know very much about the country to understand… Continue reading

Guest Post: The Killing Fields

You know how you sometimes find pieces of fabric sticking out of the ground? Oftentimes it’s the remnant of some long-forgotten weed barrier creeping its way slowly back out of the earth. Others… Continue reading

Travel Questions

Ah, the particular questions of traveling. “What should I wear tomorrow?” is rarely worth asking, even less right now so since I’ll spend the whole day in a chair. This won’t be that… Continue reading

Happy new year! From a crotchety and grateful old man.

I don’t automatically care all that much about New Year’s Eve. I’m not much of a drinker, and I get queasy if I’m not in bed by about 3:00 AM, so not a… Continue reading

Puppy’s barbershop, Cuba

“Puppy’s Barbershop:You’re ugly when you arrive, but you’re handsome when you leave.”   My eyes wandered from the handmade sign, past photos of a younger Puppy, along the fuchsia bicycle with a handmade… Continue reading

Buckets of vodka and breasts like weapons

I was young until I went to Ko Phi Phi. I was young with cups of čai on Turkish wharves, and the same when I danced in Lithuanian discotheques. But faced with buckets… Continue reading

Campeche nights, snakes and ebola

August afternoons in southern Mexico are punishing, but when the sun goes down off the coast of Campeche, the air takes on an apologetic softness to reward you for surviving the broiler hours.… Continue reading

Gifts in Granada

That last post about Tarifa came from an old journal, a paragraph not relevant enough to include in my book, but I enjoyed giving it a little life somewhere else. Another such moment… Continue reading

Alone together in Tarifa

If Spain were a big, worrisomely lumpy breast, then Tarifa would be the downward-sagging nipple, poking across the Strait of Gibraltar at my goal for the day: Morocco. But Tarifa was also the… Continue reading