Category Archives: Planning

Girona and Figueres, Dali and Picasso

We’re off on another day trip in our rental car.  First stop: Girona.  We heard good things, but we had no real idea of its history.  First, there were the Romans, then the Visigoths, then the Moors, and then finally a Catalonian county starting in the 8th century.  One part of the old city that was particularly interesting to us was the old Jewish Quarter.  It may be the best-preserved Jewish quarter in all of Europe.  A Jewish community had lived there until late 1400’s when the Catholic Monarchs gave Jews the choice to convert or leave.  The other highlight of Girona for us is the churro guy – freshly deep-fried churros sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar makes for a wonderfully warm snack on a chilly morning.

Not far from Girona, we continue on to Figueres, birthplace and now resting place of Salvador Dali.  There, Dali built a very eccentric museum to house much of his art.  In his words: “I want my museum to be a single block, a labyrinth, a great surrealist object. It will be a totally theatrical museum. The people who come to see it will leave with the sensation of having had a theatrical dream.”  We may have experienced that sensation, but we definitely left feeling that Dali was a weird, eccentric, egotistical artist.  Quote from Lindsey: “this guy’s nuts!”

On a different day, but related because he’s another famous artist who spent some time in Catalonia, we visit the famous Picasso Museum in Barcelona.  Along with enjoying one of the most extensive collections of his art anywhere in the world, we also enjoy learning a little more about him through listening to the fictional novel Cooking for Picasso in the car as we drive around Catalonia.  The book really paints a picture (pun intended) of how the artist had many mistresses in addition to his wives.  He was married twice and had four children by three women, or at least officially.  The book may suggest otherwise :).

Safari Life

5:00am – Wake up (This consists of a guide saying your name outside your tent until you wake up.)

5:30am – Breakfast

5:45am – Game drive (The animals stop moving mid-day, preferring the comfort of the shade.)

11:00am – Lunch

12:00pm – Siesta (It’s too hot to do anything. We recommend repeatedly soaking your shirt in water and standing in front of a fan until it’s dry.)

3:30pm- High tea (Botswsna was clearly colonized by the British.)

4:00pm – Game drive with a sundowner

8:00pm – Dinner

10:00pm – Bed (You must be walked back to your tent by a guide, because, wild animals.)

Story of a game lodge in the Okavango

Several very long flights later, our excitement for the trip only grows. To get ourselves mentally prepared for the adventure to come, we read a comical book by Andrew and Gwynn, a couple who become managers of a game lodge in the Okavango. From hearing their stories of all that goes wrong at the lodge from destructive baboons and hyenas to threatening elephants to never receiving enough shipments of food to disturbing an angry wasp nest and so much more, we’re now prepared to call any mishap just another part of the adventure. One of the wilder things, though, is how much goes on behind the scenes at these lodges for which the guests have no idea. And so we’re also excited that there’s a non-zero chance that we unknowingly participate in some of these “matatas” (meaning problems in Setswana).

In addition to enumerating their matatas, Andrew St Pierre and Gwynn White also share their love for the region in the below quote as part of their larger story in
Torn Trousers: A True Story of Courage and Adventure: How A Couple Sacrificed Everything To Escape to Paradise.

“There was a place so tranquil that angels went there to rest. It was a place of such singular beauty, even the lilies dressed for dinner. Yet the ebb and flow of its life-giving water was determined by a climate a thousand miles away. The water level was high during times of drought and low in times of rain. At its heart ran a river that sought the sea but never found it. Instead, it spilled onto a plateau of sand, spreading like an Eden across the desert until at last it vanished into the dust.

Animals, great and small, followed the river, each in pursuit of happiness. When they found it, they stayed. Fish swam in quiet eddies. There were birds so varied in hue they confused the rainbows. Vast herds of elephant, buffalo, and antelope made homes here, and behind them carnivores trod. Trees offered shelter to snakes and comfort to travelers.

This was where my heart lay, in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana.”

Botswana trip prep

Every trip requires preparation, but the level of prep can vary greatly. For our upcoming trip to Botswana, there were many more checkboxes on our pre-trip to-do lists than typical.

One example was that at the top of the packing list, it reads “pack lightly, max 15 kg”. However, kind of like when a parent tells you to do something, it doesn’t really hit home until you hear it from another source. In this case, my second opinion comes from Peter Allison in his book “Whatever you do, don’t run: true tales of a Botswana safari guide”:

Any travel agent stresses to a client that they will be traveling in very small bits of motorized tin, and their luggage weight should reflect that. In fact, it is set at a strict twenty-five pounds. But looking at the camera bags and tripods being wrestled from the cargo area, I could tell that this guy had gone well over that.

Then, in mid-flight, he started taking photos, which was no problem, but when I pointed out some hippos, he leaned over the top of me and shoved me into the controls. Not one of them screamed when we went into a dive. What sort of people are they?

I like to think we’re not those sorts of people. I’m not too worried about interfering with pilots as I’m typically good at following most common sense rules, but the weight restrictions hit home. Just one of my several camera lenses I plan to bring weighs almost 4 lbs, or ~10% of my total limit. And this doesn’t include the monopod, computer, external HD, and other camera necessities. Uh oh. But luckily, I learn one of the perks of marriage: when Lindsey asks how much luggage we can bring, without hesitating, I turn and tell her 12 kg. I find myself an extra 3kg!

Allison, however, didn’t only scare me about how to prep, he also excited me about the things we might get to witness while there. And although most of his book detailed hilarious stories of tourists rather than inspiring tales of animals, this one stuck with me:

A great trumpet came from the elephants, as if in celebration, echoed by us on the vehicle, many of whom were in tears (and that unashamedly includes me). The baby sat looking bewildered at its ejection after twenty-two months in a comfortable womb, then started comical attempts to get up. Its ears were still plastered to the sides of its head, making it look like a squat sea lion, and it moved in the same humping legless manner.

After half an hour the baby stood, to more cheering from our vehicle. And it seemed to spawn a celebration from the elephants as well, as they started picking up dust and spraying themselves with it. This coats their skin and helps protect them from parasites, but each blast knocked the little baby down, and she (by now I had seen that it was a girl) struggled valiantly back to her feet and watched the enormous battleship-gray cruisers that were in a paroxysm of excitement around her.

Being in Africa will undoubtedly be humbling. We will almost always be the slowest and sometime even the smallest animal around. And yet in the end, some of our most primitive emotions will unite us all — excitement over a newborn, caring for one another, protecting one another, competing for resources and food, communicating and working together.

We’re prepared and excited to gain an appreciation for all animal species. A couple numbers to put ourselves in perspective: the human population nears 8 billion while the total wild lion population is estimated under 40 thousand, leopards under 15 thousand, cheetahs under 8 thousand. As Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert writes about in “The Sixth Extinction”, there have been five mass extinctions over the last half billion years, and today, we’re currently seeing our 6th, which may be as devastating as when the asteroid impact ended the reign of the dinosaurs. I’m hopeful that the world can rebound again, but it may require its latest invasive species, homo sapiens, taking more of a backseat.

 

How we chose Bhutan

We love debating our next destination.  Figuring out how to balance all that we might want out of a trip – adventure with culture, good food with new food, convenient timing with favorable weather, popular with obscure, and cityscapes with nature.  So why Bhutan?

We selfishly and semi-ironically want to see a culture untainted by the West while at the same time bring with us all of our ideals, clothes, tastes, and biases.  We want to visit a culture that still resembles how it might look if the influences of TV, media, super brands, and western fashion had never infiltrated.  We think we might come closer with Bhutan.

It’s a country that didn’t “modernize” until the 1960s.  A country that didn’t have TV until 1999.  A country that opened up its doors to foreign tourists in 1974, but even through today has very few come visit each year.  A country that believes in Gross National Happiness before Gross Domestic Product.  A country that is home to the highest unclimbed mountain.  A country with a capital city without a traffic light (they tried and took it away).  A country with a name that translates to “land of the thunder dragon.”  It’s impossible to be untouched by Westerners and for us to still be going, but without a McDonald’s or Starbucks, it at least comes close to having some of that authenticity we seek.

In addition, as it has been engrained in all Americans through the Declaration of Independence, I’m a little obsessed with the idea of the pursuit of happiness.  Bhutan, with its Gross National Happiness, is supposed to be incredibly happy.  Did they have to pursue it to get there?  Are they actually happy?  Does happiness mean the same thing across all cultures and languages?  These are just a few of the happiness-related questions I’d have.

And finally, it’s beautiful.  Nestled in the Himalayan mountains, no path will be flat, all will be either up or down.  Like the culture, the people, and their happiness, their terrain will be forever interesting.  We have so much to learn, live and love about Bhutan, and we look forward to exploring.

Myanmar

“The control measures on the Rohingya expanded and tightened as time went on, and by 2016, 86 checkpoints had been set up in northern Rakhine State.  The routine stop-and-search of vehicles to check for Rohingya passengers greatly amplified the perception of the group as a security threat.  This in turn fed the narrative, made so explicit by their denial of citizenship in 1982, that they were a lesser people.  The process of distinguishing them so drastically from other groups in Rakhine State, not only in a religious or ethnic sense, but now legally, criminally, would provide more robust grounds for the violence that eventually erupted in 2012. They weren’t worthy of the same protections afforded to Rakhine, limited as those were, and they became, in the eyes of those who either participated in attacks or supported them from afar, subhuman.  They were animals, stripped of the qualities that normally inhibit the use of violence against a fellow human being.”

-Francis Wade in Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’

We bought flights for a late December trip to Myanmar back in April. Myanmar had been on our list for a while, and I was thrilled to find great tickets.  We were attracted by its beautiful landscapes, less touristy vibe, and unique culture, but through the summer, the Rohingya crisis escalated, and we faced an ethical problem of whether or not to go.  Whether it should be called an ethnic cleansing or genocide didn’t matter, the fact is that the Myanmarese were committing atrocities against the Rohingya, and we didn’t feel fully comfortable condoning this behavior by touring there.

Before deciding either way, however, we weigh the options.  We recognize that this trip to Myanmar won’t be all smiles, and some of the learnings we may get from this adventure will teach us how a culture can sub-humanize another culture.  We could learn how a population can be so marginalized that even “good” people view them as a threat to society.  On the other hand, do we want to support a country through our tourist dollars that is systematically pushing out and eradicating another group just because they have differing beliefs?  We realize that our own government is pushing out ‘other’ as well as not letting them into the country for reasons not terribly different from that of the Myanmarese; however, at least for now, the degree to which the U.S. government is willing to go is not as extreme.

The biggest surprise is that we felt that Myanmar was improving.  Back in 2012, President Obama visited Myanmar, and he praised the government’s progress in shaking off military rule.  Just a couple years later, things seem as bad as they’ve ever been.  Clearly, in 2012, a lot of the story was missing.  As highlighted in the quote above, it takes half a century to develop these deep-rooted feelings against an ethnic group.  In a time of fake news and tampered elections, I’m embarrassed that I believed what I had been reading about Myanmar on its surface – that it was on a good path forward.  I believed what I wanted to believe.  I wanted to visit this beautiful country and I wanted it to embody the transformation story that was being shared.  I was wrong.

To go or not to go?  In the end, we just couldn’t.  We heard our rationales starting to sound like excuses.  We were never worried for our safety because we didn’t look or believe in anything that was controversial, but that doesn’t mean we should then feel okay going – just because we weren’t going to be in danger.  We still wanted to go to a similar part of the world, but we wanted to support a nation where we felt comfortable in the actions that the government and their people were taking.  We wanted to go to a nation where we were felt proud to emulate many of their traditions and beliefs.  And we wanted to go to a nation that we felt excited to support.

It was back to the drawing board for us, but with one caveat – if possible, where could we go so that we wouldn’t lose the full deposit that we’d already put down on Myanmar…

In trying to understand what was happening, I feel Wade’s book “Myanmar’s Enemy Within” does a nice job of explaining how today’s situation came to be.

 

 

 

Getting ready for Norway

Trying to find a book on Norway, I came across many of the history books that write of the many battles that occurred through the Viking Age and into the Middle Ages.  Although the blood and guts seemed exciting and although it is clearly an essential part of Norwegian history, I decided to take a different route.

Jostein Gaarder, originally from Oslo and a long time history teacher in Bergen, eventually wrote the best selling book across the world by 1995.  Sophie’s World, which is subtitled “A Novel About the History of Philosophy” tackles 2000 years of philosophy through the relationship between a philosopher teacher and a 14-year-old girl, Sophie.  Through this book, I obviously learn a thing or two about some of the greatest philosophers of all time, but I also get a sense of a peaceful Norwegian village.  One that is next to a lake and filled gardens and trees, so many trees that it becomes like a forest.  The village is safe and idyllic and she and her friend Joanna walk down the streets together.

Although from this book, I don’t learn the great history of the Vikings, I do get a sense that the Norway will be a thoughtful place full of nature and adventure, and I am ever more excited to go.

(Next book on the list: Growth of the Soil, a book that describes the simple life of a Norwegian man who settles and lives in rural Norway, stressing the relationship between characters and the natural environment more than anything else.)

An unexpected detour

A disclaimer: I will discuss the events that start our journey to Hanoi with a much calmer disposition than we felt while living through them.   That said, I wouldn’t mind if a couple of the airlines find this post so they can hear some of my frustrations with the events of today.  And with that, here goes my story.

We are so excited for our next adventure – Vietnam and Laos.  Bags packed, reservations made, itinerary printed, and we even get to the airport early.  That’s where the plan goes awry.

At SFO, Virgin American refuses to check us all the way through the Vietnam.  Something about being co-operators with China Southern, it being an international flight, and not actually listening to us when we try to see if there’s any way to help us.  We get to the terminal and all Virgin America flights are delayed (or cancelled).  They give some excuse about winds being stronger than usual, but we’re skeptical.  Flights coming in from all over (East, South, and North) are impacted.  It’s the merger – thanks Alaska Air.  The systems are so broken, they can’t even assign us seats until 30 minutes before boarding, which doesn’t happen until almost 3 hours after our scheduled departure.  The biggest cause of our delay is there’s no crew available.  It’s an operations nightmare, and we’re the unsuspecting bystanders.    

Only 50 minutes to LAX, but just late enough we can’t make our connection on China Southern.  And to add insult to injury, China Southern and Virgin America keep sending us back and forth as no one wants to claim responsibility.  I guess that’s what co-operators means.  Good to know.  The China Southern flight hasn’t taken off, but despite two-dozen angry passengers arguing with the check-in folks, no luck.  Apparently Virgin America had given out some boarding passes, but not to everyone.  And to those folks with boarding passes all the way through to their final destination, China Southern checks them in.  Reminder: getting checked-in to our final destination from Virgin America was something that Lindsey and I couldn’t get, and when we ask Virgin America’s customer service, it’s something that they say is impossible.  Oy.  I think the situation hits its climax when one very unfriendly China Southern attendant rips up a teenager’s boarding pass right in front of her.

We do find one person at Virgin America who is trying to fix everyone else’s mess.  After waiting almost three hours, she sets us up with flights on Korean Air for the next day.  We spend the night in La Canada (thanks mom and dad), and when we wake up the next morning, we find that our latest flight arrangement also delayed, meaning we’ll miss our connection in Seoul.  Not our day/weekend.  We head to the airport to work things out. When we arrive, Korean Airlines says that our flight was never actually was confirmed and that the plane we were supposed to be on is full. It’s infuriating. Mom has thought ahead and taken a defensive position in line at Virgin Airlines. Eventually we have the two airlines talking on our two phones (mine and Mom’s), duking it out. Both want to pass off responsibility and we’re not sure we’ll ever get to Hanoi, let alone in a timely manner. After over an hour of back and forth, we get seats on a plane to Seoul that afternoon and decide to make the most of our 36-hour layover.

Sentiero degli Dei

Trying to prepare for this trek the night before, I realize that the internet provides me with only little and dispersed information about the hike.  Therefore, I will dedicate this post to providing a little more information for those that in the future might want to try the trail, one which I highly recommend.

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The trail begins in Bomerano.  I take it to the beaches of Positano through Nocelle, and then figure out the public busses for my return route.  Some guides will say the trail starts in Bomerano, and others will say Agerola.  Conveniently, they are the same thing—Bomerano is a part of Agerola.  If you have a car, there is a free, nearby parking lot.  If you are on foot, there are buses that run to Bomerano from Almalfi.

From Bomerano, there is a small sign off of the main piazza that indicates the trailhead.  Ask any shop owner and they will point you in the right direction; otherwise, the rather understated sign is easy to miss.  Luckily, from this point, the trail is remarkably well indicated to Nocelle.  There are signs, there are red and white paint marks and there are decent trails, which help to differentiate what is the path versus everything else.  At Nocelle, there is not necessarily one route down to Positano and all routes require a nice descent.  Some options are more road-based while others are more stair-based.  I took the stair option and loved the views that it provided.  Again, if you ask local shop owners how to get down to Positano, they can be very helpful.  I have also included the path that I took in this post for reference.

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elevation-map

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Upon reaching Positano, get on the bus to Almalfi and then connect from there to Bomerano.  There are not too many busses to Bomerano and they fill up quickly so be sure to check the schedule and to board the bus with some buffer so that you have a seat.

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Different sources that I used while researching the trail included these helpful sites:
giovis.com
walkopedia.net
ondaverde.it

VW Caddy

In only a short time, we cover a fair territory in our rented VW Caddy, from Dublin to Cork to Galway and back. The roads are beautiful even if a bit narrow and with cars on the wrong side. We pass countrysides filled with farm animals, forests in the Ring of Kerry, and rocky rolling hills in the Barren. We sing along to the great tunes of our youth (the 90’s), laugh to comedy tracks, and otherwise just give each other a hard time. Susie announces each animal, Nick checks us in, Chris captures the moment on CMOS, Megan guides us, and Gabe and I alternate between driving and navigating. As far as teams go, this one ain’t bad.

ireland-map

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