ROCHESTER, New York- I really want to go back to where I began. Not to my family’s home. Not to Western New York. But to where I was 20-something years ago when I began the singular pursuit of writing. For ten years I would roll out of bed, flip open the laptop, and just write. I had no other ambition, no other goals. My pursuit was simple: explore something, talk to myself about it, transcribe whatever came out onto the screen.

While my first blog post was typed out as part of a night of otherwise forgettable drunken escapades in Japan on April Fool’s day in 2004, the real beginning of this blog didn’t happen until the following December. It was Christmas time. My parents had gifted me my first laptop to take with me on my first semester of university study in Hangzhou. It was a giant, two-inch-thick brick of Dell … an electronic monstrosity that today would be suitable for a nostalgia exhibit or on tucked in the messenger bag of the most tried and true of hipsters.

Later on that night, after everyone had given their presents and all the Christmas formalities were complete, I snuck away to my room and opened up that laptop, loaded Blogspot, and began writing. I remember … the keys felt electric, my fingers flew around as thoughts became words, as words became statements. Few things in my life had ever felt as good as hitting that publish button. All of my aimless ambitions up to that point — the marine biology, the archaeology, the months that I lived in the North Country thinking I was going to be a forest ranger — were relieved of their relevance. In that moment I knew that I had found what I was looking for.

For the next decade I was solely focused on writing. While I would still do my yearly stint of archaeology fieldwork for the next few years before I was sufficiently financially established as a writer (and in those days being sufficiently financially established meant making $15 a day), I knew then that it was just something temporary that I was doing for the money. I would quit for good at the end of 2008, putting myself in a sink or swim type of position: I would make it as a writer or starve trying. This is really the only way to do it if you want to make it at something.

I’m not going to claim that developing as a writer full time wasn’t a struggle. But I kept going and pulled it off somehow — the first book deal helped. Eventually, writing developed into a decent career, my stories were regularly on the front page of Forbes, I was doing features for the Guardian, I ran the gauntlet of other big media publications. But today this path has left me at a crossroads.

I am blessed / cursed with uni-focus — the ability to focus / obsess on a single task for a dozen hours at a time, everyday for weeks / months / years on end. My mind works best when it’s fed the same meal breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I am able to accomplish large tasks. I am able to learn difficult skills. I am able to do big things … but only when I do one thing.

Variety splinters my drive into frayed ends where the parts that don’t add back up to the whole. When I am passionate about multiple things, I am passionate about nothing. And I toddle down wayward paths and don’t accomplish much of anything.

I have second passion that competes with writing: filmmaking. At first, I didn’t think they would be at odds. It’s all just storytelling, isn’t it? These two pursuits seem as if they derive from the same source and arrive at similar destinations but the mental processes that go into them couldn’t be more different. Writing is an internal dialogue where you are the main character. YOU live your story. Documentary is a process of watching and observing, where the camera becomes an invisibility cloak, where the subject in front of the camera is the main character and you are merely pointing at the moon.

For whatever reason, I cannot think in both ways at the same time. Either I have the dialogue of writing going through my head for all of my waking — and, honestly, some of my sleeping — hours or I don’t. Likewise, I can not just flip a switch and feel the lighting and live in the frames as you need to do with filming. They both require extended runways … and I’m not sure why. The past ten years have been a battle between these two pursuits which has created some successes (a doc that aired in theaters, a narrative feature coming out this year) but, ultimately, I’m left disappointed.

I need to make a choice. Do one thing.

I worked a ton to end the year — the work for $$$ kind of work, the worst sort. I worked so much that I knew I was going to have to sit down and ask what the fuck am I doing?

I did too many small things last year. I set out with the goal of really make ground with my film company, and I did just that … in terms of earnings anyway. Not the kind of ground that I was envisioning … I traded too much time for money, a deal that you will never win.

This year will be different.

Vatican City — Country number 93.

I remembering being a kid in my religious ed class in Albion, New York being told that the Vatican was were the pope lived and how it was a city and a country all rolled into one. The teacher showed us a map of this red dot completely encapsulated in the bosom of Italy and I have to admit that it didn’t look like any sort of country that I’ve ever seen before. It was smaller than my dinky little Western New York canal town. It was inside of another country. It wasn’t much more than a church. How could that be a country?

What I didn’t know then was that nobody really knows what a country is.

Seriously.

What a country is or isn’t depends on who you’re asking — or, more accurately, what political entity you’re asking. Taiwan functions completely independently from the PRC and is administered by the direct political descendants of the government which once ruled just about all of China. Taiwan controls its own borders, runs its own customs, has its own military, it’s own currency, its own airlines, its own foreign policy, it’s own … everything. But,= according to 99% of the nation states on the planet, it’s not a country and is tossed into the same bucket as Transnistria, Abkhazia, and Elgaland-Vargaland.

Meanwhile, the countries of the EU, who don’t control their own customs and immigration, don’t mint their own currency, don’t have their own passports, can’t negotiate their own trade deals, don’t have their own monetary policy, don’t control their international destinies, and can’t even script their own product safety and environmental policies are considered independent and sovereign states.

The term “country,” is political. It’s subjective. It’s pliable. It’s bullshit.

To me, if it seems like a country, it’s a country. While I have to admit that this isn’t the most fail safe of definitions, it’s probably just as good as “we’re not going to call this a country because some jerkoff in Beijing will get mad at us if we do.”

Why is the Vatican a country?

The Vatican is a country because it is a sovereign state recognized under international law, established through the Lateran Treaty signed on February 11, 1929, between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. This treaty resolved the “Roman Question,” a decades-long dispute that began in 1870 when the Kingdom of Italy captured the Papal States, leaving the Pope feeling imprisoned within the Vatican walls. The treaty granted the Vatican City State full sovereignty, allowing the Holy See to maintain its independence, diplomatic relations, and spiritual authority.

Vatican City functions as a fully independent nation with its own government, territory, laws, currency, flag, postal system, and national anthem. It is governed as a theocratic absolute monarchy led by the Pope, who serves as the head of state.

In some ways the history of Taiwan does actually mirror that of the Vatican. A controlling entity is almost completely vanquished by a more powerful foe who leaves it with a sliver of turf upon which to continue existence. Where the story diverges is that the Kingdom of Italy seemed to have left the Vatican independent by choice rather than via a decades-long standoff at a chain of small islands and the inability of the PRC to fully win its civil war.

The Vatican is the smallest country on earth. Coming in at just 108 acres and a population that hardly tops 1,000.

I made the excuse to my wife that I wanted to go to the Vatican because it would make my mom happy. I don’t talk about religion with her. She has always seemed threatened by my Catholic upbringing — she has it in her head that Christians like to kill Jews — so it’s not something that I bring up very often.

When we first got married she was enthusiastic for me to adopt her Judaism, but the type that I was exposed to early on didn’t resonate with me. Reform Judaism — or liberal Judaism or progressive Judaism — seemed like more of a celebration of culture than a path to God. And the more serious sects that I would be more spiritually in tune with would be hard-pressed to truly accept me, a bonafide gentile.

While I’ve explored many paths to God throughout my studies and travels, I’ve ultimately concluded that the most direct, most vibrant route is the religion you’re born with. Spirituality is something that’s acculturated into you when you first constructed your initial worldview, and the wiring that’s installed during this time is set throughout your entire life … and those pathways can be triggered more deeply and kinetically than wiring that’s laid later on …

It’s all just infinite pathways leading to the same place anyway.

We researched visiting the Vatican about as well as we research anything else in travel — which is to say, not at all. Our MO: just show up. We arrived and and walked around the massive Piazza San Pietro for a while and eventually found a line of people waiting for something. We assumed correctly that this was the way in. It was a bright, sunny day … around 70 degrees — perfect. We wove our way up to the security gate — which basically just served the function of keeping tourists from hauling their giant rucksacks into the church and showing too much knee / breast / stomach — and made our way into the complex.

We entered through the Vatican Grottoes, which is a series of underground passageways containing various forms of art — frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, inscriptions — and the tombs of 91 popes, various royals, and, behind the alter in the Clémentine Chapel, the tomb of St. Peter. Many of the tombs contained life-sized stone carvings of the popes within laying upon the marble or slate boxes. I lit a candle.

St. Peter’s Basilica is without question one of the most magnificent buildings on earth. It is the largest church in the world by volume … and is so beautiful that it’s almost difficult to look at. The gold trimming, the frescos on the ceiling, the statues of saints, the carved marble pillars, the windows emitting beams of light which cut through to the floor … Religious buildings are conduits.

I then tried to go in search for the rest of the Vatican … and I didn’t find it. For some reason I thought there would be at least a little square with a few little streets with vendors and restaurants that we could hang out in … but that didn’t seem to exist. It really is just a big cathedral complex, a museum, and some gardens which I hear are enthralling although I didn’t go to them.

ROME, Italy- People seem to go to Italy for the food — there’s a zillion restaurants to choose from in Rome … and they all look exactly the same …

… and they all serve the exact same things.

I’ve probably never seen such a monotonous culinary scene in all my travels. You have pizza, you have pasta, you have gelato … They’re served out of open front restaurants with white or red trimmed awnings. Over and over again, all the way down the street …

But this monotony is, paradoxically, what makes Rome unique.

In most places in the world it’s extremely difficult to truly sample local food short of storming into someone’s dining room. Almost all of the restaurants in tourist destinations now serve some misconceptualized variant of somewhere else: Chinese food, Greek food, Spanish food, Turkish food, Israeli food, American food, Italian food … (All of which should probably be put in the quotes of sarcasm.) Go to a place like Casco Viejo in Panama and you will find yourself in surrounded by restaurants but hardly a single one representing the culinary traditions of the place you’re standing in.

Wherever we go, we want the world, not the places we go to.

Granted, most traditional culinary options of the world do not suit the palate of the discerning foodie. The foodie wants something that tastes familiar and looks pretty so they can snap a photo and their IG followers can go yum, yum, yum (i.e. like, like, like). Like the conventional tourist, the foodie has next to zero interest in the places their passports claim they’ve been — they want to be satiated … they want to be entertained … they want to stuff their gullet and check off to-do to-eat lists … they do not want to be surprised, they do not want to be challenged, they do not want to be made to feel uncomfortable. They do not want to go to southern India and eat spicy slop. They do not want to go to Mongolia and eat a plate of smoked meat that’s been sitting out for three days. They do not want to eat the innards that the local people view as delicacies. They curl up their lips at curdled milk. They want global culture, not local. And there’s nothing wrong with this …

Rome has been a tourist destination for 2,000 years. It is what the place is. And this has made it resilient to this new wave globalized tourism. While Panama is doing Costa Rica while Costa Rica is doing Vietnam while Vietnam is doing Thailand while Thailand is doing India, Italy just does Italy. And it does it well.

But the monotony of Rome didn’t end at restaurants … and was something that I truly found remarkable about the place. The clothes that people wore, their hairstyles, their mannerisms were likewise the same, people were out in the streets doing the same things — same, same, same. During one brief stretch of walking down a busy bar street I counted five dudes wearing the exact same jacket. I don’t believe I saw a single attempt at individuality. I don’t recall anyone going out of their way to stand out. Coming from NYC — a place where everyone is bent on being their own little island of self-ness — being somewhere where the cultural soup was a little thicker was enough to satiate my discerning ethnographic palate.

I imagine that this is how all places were a hundred years ago. Places were distinct because so much about them were the same — they had identity. You’d go off to Shanghai or London or Baghdad and it would be completely distinct from all others places in the world, but within their respective liminal zones it would be same, same, same. Old photos attest to this. Everywhere was once the same as itself … now we live in a world where everywhere is becoming the same as everywhere … and places like Rome stand out.

For the past year and a half I’ve been zipping around the east coast of the USA filming for a documentary about off-shore wind development — you know, the infrastructural mega-projects flanking the entire east coast where foreign oil and gas companies take huge US government subsidies to build giant wind farms out in the ocean that don’t work so well, do nothing to move the needle on global warming, and are extremely destructive to marine life, the livelihoods of fishermen, and tourism.

My take on things — especially when it comes to making films — tends to be a little more nuanced, a little more balanced, slightly contrarian, but sometimes you need to call a racket a racket.

The trailer for this film is now out. Watch it here:

One thing that caught my attention was that YouTube flagged this video as being somehow anti-climate change … They put up a little knowledge graph saying, “Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas” and linking to a UN webpage.

What’s interesting is that there is literally nothing about climate change in this video.

In this trailer we touch on the origin of off-shore wind, the dimensions of the hardware, the gargantuan sizes of the project areas, how they seem to be killing marine life, how they are impacting fishermen, and how they are falling apart and littering the ocean. Nothing about climate change.

Now, I have to admit that there was actually a part in the first version of this trailer about how off-shore wind farms do nothing — according to a BOEM study — to impact climate change and actually increase surface temperatures in their proximity, but this got cut when I chopped the trailer down to two and a half minutes.

It’s very curious to me how YouTube simply gauged sentiment in this video and took it to the next step without anything in the video or audio that could be directly interpreted as leading to such.

Anyway, that’s just the way of our world. It doesn’t really bother me too much, I just thought it was interesting.

Back to the film:

We decided to put out Deadwind as a web series rather than a full-length feature for reasons that I outlined on the Real Life Cinema blog: Deadwind Offshore Wind Documentary Becomes A Web Series

The road of any documentary is more like a winding and pothole strewn donkey trail up the side of a mountain that repeatedly peters out into nothingness before becoming discernible again up around the bend.

ROME, Italy– Italy: country number 92. The entry process was perhaps one of the smoothest experiences I’ve ever had when coming into a new country. Immigration was automated with AI — I basically just walked right through. Once in the airport I hesitated for a moment while considering getting a local SIM card … but decided it wasn’t worth 40 Euro. Otherwise, I would have seamlessly strolled off the plane, through the airport, across the passenger pick up lane, down into a train station, and onto a train which took me into the center of Rome.

If only all airports in all cities could be as easy as this …

… and I’m not sure why they aren’t.

If you can build an airport and you can build rail / subway lines then why can’t you just connect the train to the airport?

The thing that really stands out to the foreigner about Western Europe is that the place just makes sense. These are cultures who can devise plans and execute them … for better or worse.

***
Travel is perhaps best when you don’t need to think about it — when you can just move through a place on autopilot, concentrating on the people, languages, food, architecture — the stuff! — that’s all around you.

While I like to brag about the fact that the first ten years of my travels were done prior to the smartphone era, where you had to be able to know how to read a map and use a compass, I’m not necessarily nostalgic for it. The work of travel — figuring out where you’re going, how to get there, finding places to stay, and places to get food — oddly does little to bring you deeper into a place.

In the everyday world, these are all considered chores, but when traveling this is what you’re paying for. I don’t want to pay for it.

It’s a distraction — something that occupies the mind and pulls your attention away from the wondrously confusing flow of human question marks that are flowing all around you. It’s only when you can relax and start looking around and engaging your surroundings that you really begin cashing in the currency of travel.

Something within me hates to say this, but when it comes to modern travel you can just skip the preliminaries and dig right in. There is a flip side to all of my complaining about smartphones and automated airport security and AI immigration. While you get drastically less cred for traveling these days, our digital tools allow for a deeper experience … if we use them right.

***
Italy has been a country that has been mocking me for many years … no, for many decades. It’s a first tier country on the international traveler’s map — one that travelers usually get to within the first few years of their journey — but I went 20 years on the road and 90+ countries and it was just never on the path.

And I have no idea why.

I’ve been to the countries to the east, to the west, and to the north of Italy. My World’s Most Traveled People account has often mocked me by saying that Italy is the easiest country in the world that I hadn’t yet been to …

But not any more.

I’m here.

But I’m here for a slightly different reason than usual. It’s my wife’s 40th birthday, and rather than having a party and getting gifts and me taking her out for a wastefully expensive diner, she decided that she’d rather take a trip to Italy.

At first, my wife was actually undecided as to whether she wanted to bring me to Italy with her or not. The thought of just walking aimlessly around Rome with nobody else pushing or pulling her in any direction, where she could just sit in any restaurant without having to worry if it meets someone else’s dietary / sanitary / price preferences, where she could just hang out at a cafe without a restless person sitting across from her wanting to go somewhere else, where she could mindlessly cruise to the tourist attractions without someone commenting on how overpriced and understimulating they are, was rather appealing.

And I totally got it. I wouldn’t want to travel with me.

But in the end she decided that she’d prefer to abandon her personal preferences and have me along with her. Apparently, missing me trumped being able to do whatever she wanted.

That said, I took a back seat on this trip — I didn’t even wake up at six am to scurry off to a gym.

That said, this was all a bit of a different travel experience for me. Usually, I travel to collect stories and information for articles and films, or I travel with my kids and it’s all about playing around and having fun, or I travel with just my wife and I go to one of our … niche resorts, but I rarely ever just do pure, legit tourism. This isn’t for any idealistic reasons; I just usually have other things to do. I found the thought appealing.

“Allow yourself to be surprised.”

But if it wasn’t for my wife I probably wouldn’t have bothered. I probably would have set out to see the sites but ended up just aimlessly walking around taking pictures … in some of the most incredible natural lighting that I’ve ever experienced. Rome in early November — with the sun hanging low in the sky all day, producing these interesting, long shadows and casting everything in this shimmering golden hue — is really something special. You couldn’t paint this place any better …

The Colosseum was a good walk. The Pantheon — and especially the area to the back of it — was thoroughly relaxing. The Trevi Fountain was under construction and didn’t have any water in it, but for some reason people still lined up all the way down the street to look at it. I really don’t get that one.

I would recommend travel as a way to get healthy and fit … if most people didn’t use it as an excuse to pile their faces with food all day long. I’m not a foodie. I actually find the common traveler’s preoccupation with food disgusting. Unless you’re talking about a place like Mongolia or Tibet or Southern India, most of the food in the world is more or less the same: it’s noodles, it’s bread, it’s rice with some combination of meat, vegetables, oil, salt, butter, and sugar. I just don’t find it very interesting.

But my wife does. And a part of the joy of our walks around Rome was watching her sample all of the different pizzas, pastas, and gelatos. It’s alleged that I may have even taken a bite of a piece of Roman pizza … or licked one of her gelatos.

People come to Italy for the food. Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to get here.

I lived in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, over the summer of 2024. Like many countries, Ukraine has a 90-180 rule. As an American, I can stay in Ukraine for a total of 90 days within a 180-day period. In mid-August, the end of my allotted 90 days in Ukraine was approaching, so I began to plan my return to Bucharest, Romania.

After a couple days of research, I had figured out how to get to the closest border crossing between Ukraine and Romania. First, a train to Rakhiv, then a minibus to Solotvyno. From Solotvyno, it looked like I could just walk down to the border crossing at the Tisza River. Once at the border, I would go through the Ukrainian pass control, walk across a small bridge over the river, go through the Romanian pass control, and then take a taxi to the nearby town of Sighetu Marmației.

In Ivano-Frankivsk, I went to the main train station and purchased a ticket to Rakhiv and then, online, a minibus ticket from Rakhiv to Solotvyno. I had booked a room at a hotel in Sighetu Marmației, purchased a train ticket for the following day to Cluj-Napoca, and booked a room for the first night there. I planned to spend a few days in the city and then take a train to Bucharest.

So with everything set, on the morning of Friday, August 30, I checked out of the hotel where I had stayed for the summer and took a taxi to the main Ivano-Frankivsk train station. The train departed on time and before too long the landscape changed as we entered the  Carpathian Mountains.

*

Rakhiv train station

The train arrived in Rakhiv in the late afternoon. I had a couple hours before the departure of the minibus to Solotvyno, so I walked around the town. The sun was beginning to set by the time I climbed into the cramped, sweaty minibus for Solotvyno.

The bus followed a narrow road, often through valleys already dark, hidden from the last sunlight of the day. As we neared Solotvyno, it was pitch-dark. I was sitting in one of the seats toward the back and was trying to see outside. The driver was letting people off along the way. I knew that we were getting close to my stop.

At the stop I thought was Solotvyno, the driver stood up, looked at me in the back of the minibus, and then made swimming motions with his arms. What? I had no idea what he was trying to say. Standing up, I said, “Solotvyno.” He again used his arms as though he were swimming. Finally, I just shook my head and sat back down. The driver shrugged his shoulders, pulled the passenger side door shut, and pulled away from the stop.

We had been back on the road for about five minutes and slowing down for the next stop when I stood up again and said, “Romania.” As soon as the word was out of my mouth, the driver shot me a shocked look. Now he understood. He pulled the minibus up to the stop,stood up, and gesticulated wildly that I needed to go back to the last stop, where he had made the swimming motions.

Oh hell. I now scrambled, knowing that I had to get off the minibus immediately and somehow get back to the previous bus stop. As I dragged my suitcase and duffel bag off the minibus, there was a couple also getting off who spoke some English. I told them that I didn’t have a smartphone, so I couldn’t call a taxi. The man used his smartphone to call one, which arrived within ten minutes. He explained to the driver that I needed to go to the Ukraine-Romania border crossing.

I loaded my suitcase and duffel bag into the back of the taxi and climbed in. We went back to the last stop, but here the driver turned off the main road, now following a twisting road that was much longer than I had figured from the maps that I had used back in Ivano-Frankivsk. I realized that if I had in fact gotten off at the right stop and tried to walk to the border, I would never had been able to make it there without getting lost in the dark.

Later, when I had a chance to get online, I learned that there are, in fact, two Solotvyno stops, one for the Ukraine-Romania border and the other for people going to the nearby salt and brine lakes, where people swim in the muddy water for their health. Thus the driver was asking me which Solotvyno stop I wanted, the border stop or the one for the muddy lakes.

Anyway, I was now finally at the border. The taxi driver left me off in front of the entrance to the Ukrainian pass control. It was now around ten o’clock at night and I was the only person crossing with luggage. Two young women were in front of me, neither of them with even a purse. Our passports were quickly stamped and the three of us walked to the old,  iron one-lane bridge across the Tisza River.

I was not prepared for what I saw. The bridge was very close to collapse. Because it was between the two countries, neither country felt they were responsible, I guess, for the maintenance. The walking sections on either side of the lane for cars were unusable. Many of the short planks were missing and the ones remaining were hanging down. The two women and I had to use the one-lane section for cars. The planks here, too, were bowed and weathered. When I stepped of the first plank with my left foot, that section dropped down as the section to the right rose up. I quickly withdrew the pressure on my left foot and then gingerly made my way across the bridge, testing my footing along the way. I noticed that the two women were also doing the same, laughing as they did so.

At the Romanian pass control, the two women without luggage went to the window on the left and I rolled my suitcase over to the window on the right. The officer took my passport and began thumbing through the pages as he pulled up a page on the computer. He then told me that I had overstayed my visa and that he couldn’t let me enter Romania.

I handed him a small card on which I had listed the important dates and the numbers of the passport pages where he could find the corresponding stamps. I explained to him that back on May 31, when I flew from Bucharest to Warsaw, I was surprised when I wasn’t required to go through customs, which is normal, of course, when you move from a non-Schengen country to a Schengen Area country.

In Warsaw, at the hotel, I went online and learned that back on March 31, Romania and Bulgaria had joined the Schengen Area. I had entered Romania on March 4, but Romania didn’t become a Schengen member until March 31. So what was my status? Online, I couldn’t find an answer as to when they started counting, so I decided to exit Poland and the Schengen Area as quickly as possible. From Warsaw, I took a train to Lublin, and from Lublin to Lviv, Ukraine.

He listened to my story and then said that they started counting my residence in the Schengen Area on March 4, meaning that when I exited Poland on June 4 for Ukraine, I was on Day 93, so I had overstayed by three days.

“But on March 4, Romania was not part of the Schengen Area agreement,” I argued, “so you can’t start counting from that date. I couldn’t be residing in the Schengen Area, from March 4 to March 31, when Romania wasn’t yet legally part of the Schengen Area. By my calculation, starting from March 31, I am now on Day 66, not Day 93.”

He called over his superior. Together they looked over my passport, flipping through the pages and then glancing back at the screen. I again laid out my argument. You can’t start counting my days of residence in Schengen when Romania wasn’t even part of the Schengen Area agreement. Now both the junior officer and the senior officer disagreed with me. They started counting my stay from March 4, not from March 31, so I was on Day 93, not Day 66.

Was this legal? I have no idea. For all I know, they may have changed this rule already. But I could see that, for this junior and senior officer, there was no chance of them ruling differently.

The senior officer now pulled me away from the window, walking me over to a bench outside the pass control building, where I sat while he started the paperwork for my denial-of-entry paper. Once he had completed the paperwork, he came over to where I was sitting and had me sign the document. In my passport, he had added a stamp for my denial of entry and, in pencil, had added the capital letter “F” next to it. I have no idea what the “F” meant, but probably not good.

As I was sitting there, I now finally realized that I was in a bit of a bind. Okay, so I couldn’t enter any of the Schengen countries, and I was almost at the end of my 90 days in Ukraine. I couldn’t enter Schengen and I couldn’t stay in Ukraine. What was the nearest non-Schengen country? Well, that had to be Moldova. But how to get to Moldova from where I was sitting on a bench next to the Tisza River?

When the senior officer returned with my copy of the denial-of-entry document, I told him that I didn’t have a smartphone and I needed to contact the hotel in Sighetu Marmației and tell them that I wouldn’t be arriving. I handed him the card where earlier I had written down the hotel name, address, and phone number. He took out his smartphone and called the hotel, telling them that they weren’t letting me into the country. He handed the card back to me and returned to the main building.

Getting up, I folded and shoved my copy of the denial-of-entry form into my backpack and then wheeled the suitcase and duffel bag back over the rickety bridge to the Ukrainian pass control. After getting my passport stamped, I asked the officer at the window if he knew of any nearby hotels. “Hotel Viza,” he replied. I thanked him and rolled my luggage to the entrance, where I had arrived half an hour earlier.

A single taxi was sitting there. I told him to take me to Hotel Viza, which he did. Ten minutes later, I was in a hotel room and sitting over my laptop. I saw that the best plan would be to take a minibus back to Rakhiv the next morning and, from there, work out the next step. Somehow I needed to get to Chernivtsi, the city closest to the first Ukraine-Moldova border crossing.

The next morning, Saturday, August 31, I was up early. I walked to the one-room minibus station and bought a ticket back to Rakhiv leaving in the afternoon. Later, when I got back to Rakhiv, I checked into a hotel and then walked to the train station, asking about traveling to Chernivtsi. They told me that I’d have to go all the way to Ivano-Frankivsk and start from there. I walked over to the nearby minibus station and bought a ticket for a minibus leaving the next afternoon, going due east in a zig-zag fashion to Chernivtsi. By my calculation, I was on Day 89 of my 90 days for Ukraine, which meant that I’d have to try to get into Moldova before the end of the next day. Was that possible?

The morning of Day 90, Sunday, September 1, was warm with a clear-blue sky. I walked around Rakhiv and snapped a few photos. Later, after checking out of the hotel and with a couple more hours to kill, I had lunch in a restaurant just two blocks from the bus station.

Looking west from inside the town of Rakhiv.

A coffee before climbing into the minibus for Chernivtsi.

After an up-and-down, zig-and-zag route from Rakhiv generally heading east, the minibus pulled into the main Chernivtsi bus station at eight o’clock. I went directly into the station and asked the woman behind the glass if there were any buses heading to the Ukraine-Moldova border. She shook her head. The last bus had already left for the day. Well, I had tried, starting from that bench at the Romanian pass control along the Tisza River. So I bought a minibus ticket for the next day. With minibus ticket in hand, I took a taxi to a hotel for the night.

The next day, Monday, September 2, was Day 91 for my stay in Ukraine. The minibus, almost full with twelve passengers, left on time and headed southeast out of Chernivtsi, destination the Mamalyga-Kryva border crossing.

Photo snapped through the dirty window of the minibus to the Ukraine-Moldova border.

An hour later, when we reached the Mamalyga-Kryva border crossing, the driver pulled up to the building for the Ukrainian pass control. He collected all of our passports and handed them to an officer waiting outside. He then got back in the van and drove forward a hundred yards to the Moldovan pass control.

He pulled the van to the side of one of the buildings and we all now got out to stretch our legs. Ten minutes later, the driver approached me with my passport in his hand. He gestured for me to follow him. He led me all the way back to the pass control building for Ukraine. He brought me to a door and told me to stay there until they came out to get me.

It must have been at least half an hour before a female Ukrainian officer came out and ushered me inside. I took at seat across from her. Sitting at the desk with a computer monitor, she informed me that I had overstayed my visa for Ukraine. She then placed a small video camera on the surface of the desk between us to record our conversation.

I told her the truth. I said that I knew it was Day 91. I had tried to exit Ukraine on Day 90, but when I got to the bus station in Chernivtsi, the last bus to the border had already departed.

She listened to me and then said she believed me and that she wasn’t going to charge me for the overstay. But this was an official matter and we had a lot of paperwork to complete, along with fingerprints and a mug shot. It took a long time to fill out and sign everything. At the end of the process, she handed me back my passport and a one-page document confirming her judgment in the case.

With passport and sheet of paper in hand, I jogged back, in the blazing heat of the afternoon, to the Moldovan pass control. I didn’t see the minibus. As I was looking around, one of the officers pointed to some luggage dropped next to the building—my luggage, suitcase, duffel bag, and backpack. I asked the officer where the minibus was. He gestured up ahead. I guessed that they had gone through and were waiting for me outside the pass control area.

I got through the Moldovan pass control quickly and then hustled up ahead with my luggage to rejoin the minibus. I rolled the suitcase with the duffel bag on top up around a corner and saw to my right a gas station with a few vans parked here and there, but none of them were my van. I rolled the suitcase further ahead, past the gas station and around a corner. I then found myself standing on what looked like a highway.

I stood there in the shade of a tree along the side of the highway, looking around and trying to figure out this puzzle. The minibus was obviously gone, but I had to get all the way to Chișinău, a good seven or eight hours away.

As it happened, while I was perplexed about how to get to Chișinău, it was also a beautiful late-summer afternoon. I dug my camera out from the backpack and snapped a few photos.

Looking to my left, back toward Chernivtsi, Ukraine.

Looking to my right, toward Chișinău, Moldova.

I have to assume that the late-summer afternoon was playing with me. As I was standing there, not thinking about much, just looking around, I must also have been oddly inattentive, because at one point I looked almost directly across from where I was standing and saw a red minibus pulled to the side of the road. Where did that come from? I then noticed that on the dashboard behind the windshield there was a sign for Chernivtsi. I watched the driver get out, open the passenger-side door, and begin cleaning the van.

Leaving my luggage on the side of the road, I crossed over to the van and asked the driver where he was going. He told me he was going to  Chișinău. What the heck. I asked him how much for a ticket. Fifteen Euros, he told me. He then explained to meet him over at the gas station. He needed to fill up there before returning to Chișinău.

Amazing. I crossed back over the highway and rolled my suitcase to the gas station, waiting inside the air-conditioned food court while he gassed up the van. Fifteen minutes later, he beckoned to me. At the door to the van, I handed him fifteen Euros and climbed in, his first customer.

So four days earlier, on Friday, August 30, I had boarded a train for Rakhiv. I had everything planned out in detail. Rakhiv to Solotvyno, then to Sighetu Marmației, then to Cluj-Napoca, and finally to Bucharest. All tickets purchased and hotels booked. By the end of that first day, however, that plan had been shredded by the Romanian pass control officials, leaving me to scramble to the border of another country, the closest being Moldova. Now, on Monday, September 2, sitting in the red minibus, heading south, I realized that I had overstayed my welcome twice, first for the Schengen countries, and then for Ukraine. No matter, I was now in transit again and going in the right direction.

Then, on the way to Chișinău, something very odd happened. As I looked out from the side window of the minibus, the landscape flattened out. I was born and raised in a small town in northeastern Iowa and now, out the window of the van, it looked like I was suddenly back home in Iowa.

Rolling hills, cornfields, and a large sky filled with a mix of clouds.

I must have been smiling the whole ride to Chișinău, my nose inches from the window as the landscape of my home and memories of my childhood spent there stretched out in front of me—an unexpected bridging between two distant points in time and place that sometimes occurs when traveling in foreign lands.

That night, I checked into a hotel and, the next morning, through an American met by chance, I was able to secure an apartment to rent for the next three months in Moldova.

*

After three months in Moldova—well, on Day 88 to be exact—I flew out of Chișinău to Athens. Moldova also uses the 90-180 rule and I wasn’t planning on picking up a third overstay within six months of living in Eastern Europe. At the pass control in Athens, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Would I be denied entry again due that earlier overstay? Would I be charged with a huge fine for that overstay?

When my turn came, I stepped up to the pass control booth and handed the officer my passport. He opened to the main page and placed it face-down on a reader. He then put the open passport down in front of him on the counter, stamped one of the pages, and handed it back to me.

I didn’t ask any questions. I simply thanked him, put my passport back into the front pocket of the backpack, and then walked around the corner to the baggage carousels to retrieve my suitcase.

Twenty minutes later, I was riding the M3 line into Athens. At the Constitution Square station, I transferred to the M2 line, riding to the Larissa Station stop, where I got off and rolled the suitcase and duffel bag one block over to the hotel where I always stay in Athens. In the basement of the hotel building were a bicycle and a bag of sundries and kitchenware waiting for me.

So had I snuck back into Schengen? Possibly. Had that overstay already expired? Maybe. I didn’t really care now. I carried the bike up out of the basement, dusted off the frame, pumped up the tires, and headed out for a ride in the neighborhood.

ROME, Italy- Every lifetime, every generation, has its signature span of technologies — the machines, tools, and gadgets that define who they are and their time on the planet. The Clovis people had Clovis points, the ancient Polynesians had double haul canoes, the people of the Renaissance had the printing press, the Industrial Revolution had the steam engine, and we have mRNA vaccines (just kidding …).

Each generation experiences the great round of once ubiquitous technologies disappearing and novel technologies becoming ubiquitous … before giving way to another novel technology. With each technological cycle patterns of thought and worldview and the psycho-social matrix evolves and changes. Culture creates technology and technology creates culture.

And at the close of each lifetime we can look back on all of the things that we made, used, consumed, and say, wow, so I guess that was us.

My grandfather was born in the middle of the second decade of the 20th century, right on the cusp of the proliferation of the automobile. He watched as horse trails turned into paved roads which themselves gave way to super highways. He was born into a time before telephones were in homes, where radios were the trendy central entertainment piece of a household, and indoor plumbing was a luxury. He watched the advent and rise of commercial air travel, the television, the internet, and the cellphone. His world started as being made of paper, steel, and wood and ended with polymers, screens, and wires.

My first career was as an archaeologist, and archaeology is primarily the study of prehistoric art and technology. But I was for some reason oddly removed from applying the ephemeral nature of technologies past to those of my own era. I simply hadn’t lived long enough to watch the technologies of my time fade into obscurity and irrelevance.

But at 43 I’m now old enough. The awestruck looks of sheer discovery on my children’s faces when they found my old Walkman one year at my parents’ house was enough to let me know that I, like all humans before me, am advancing through a technological time span.

There is perhaps no better way to measure time than with things.

When I was born, most homes still had a record player. Then came the cassette player. Beta and VHS video machines blew our minds. The compact disk seemed space aged. Atari, then Nintendo, then Sega connected our brainwaves with the screen in a way that was never done before. Phones were something that had cords that connected to walls — you didn’t call a person, you called a house. I was of the first generation that had computers in school. Then when I was a teenager we started having computers in our homes, and this coupled with the advent of the internet.

I am of the last generation that had an analog childhood. We grew up without the internet, and right when we were coming of age so too was this technology that would disrupt everything that we knew before it.

In those days we connected to the internet via telephone lines with a hideous sounding noise of grinding electronic gears that’s ingrained in the consciousness of my generation … but nobody will ever hear again. We would browse the web, which meant waiting for full minutes for pages to load, just to be wowed by aerial shots of where we lived, photos of naked ladies, and instructions on how to blow things up. That’s what we did on the internet back then. Search engines at that time hardly even existed and didn’t function very well. To find anything you went to topical directories and websites interlinked with each other via things called web rings.

It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I got a smartphone. I was blogging then and I discovered that I could get something called a BlackBerry Tour with a global mobile data plan and then be able to blog from anywhere. I still remember the shock and disbelief that I felt the first time I blogged from a moving vehicle going down the highway in the middle of nowhere in Maine. Or, a little later on, when uploading posts from the jungles of Guatemala.

But none of this was as much of a shocking sign of things to come — or what my own technological time span would come to look like — than what I experienced last week on a flight from JFK to Rome:

The TSA ID check at security was done by AI.

The boarding process was done by AI.

The immigration process upon arrival in Rome was done by AI.

As I previously covered, the identification check at TSA security at JFK was done by tablets that snapped a picture of you and then, presumably, ran it through myriad databases to ensure you’re who you claim to be. You didn’t even need to flash a boarding pass. It knew who you were and what flight you were going on just by looking at you.

But it wasn’t until I began boarding the aircraft that the reality of the future of travel began taking hold. You didn’t need to flash a boarding pass to get on this plane. You didn’t even need to show your passport. All you needed to do was look into a screen and a gate would open allowing you access to the jet bridge. The only role the gate agents served was doing last minute seat assignments and making sure nobody was carrying too much luggage onto the plane. This was an international flight to another continent. I was on my way to Rome. All boarding and exit formalities were completed instantly simply by logging the biometrics of my face.

I thought that this would be the end of the Brave New World portion of this journey, but I was wrong. Upon arrival in Italy passengers were divided into three columns — EU citizens, travelers from an array of 15 or so approved countries, and everyone else. I travel on a US passport, so I was directed to the left for expedited entry, which meant that all I had to do was scan my passport and, yes, my face. I looked into the screen and the gate opened, shuttling me down a little alley that ended in what was once a standard immigration booth.

Inside that booth was a bored immigration agent who had no other purpose than to stamp passports. He was basically demoted to the status of human machine. He didn’t even look at the photos or previous travel history — you just handed your passport over to him open to a page with a blank space and he stamped it. If it wasn’t for the fact that physical passports are still in use, I wouldn’t have come face to face with an actual human in the process of entering the EU.

Like the TSA agents checking IDs and airline gate agents, immigration officials will soon become a thing of the past … as will the passports they stamp. All tier-1 immigration formalities will be conducted digitally via AI, there will be international databases on everyone, and we will be able to seamlessly walk right off a plane and into a foreign country … unless, that is, your face has been logged as being somewhere it shouldn’t have been.

***
I am feeling nostalgic. We are entering an age where all things — especially travel — will be very different than they have ever been in human history. Privacy will become an outdated concept and where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going, what you look like, what you do, what you eat, what mandated snake oil you have taken (or have not taken), what you think, who you vote for, and your favorite brand of underwear will all be tracked and filed all the time, everywhere. We are only in the first stages of this process, and we are the last generation that will view this as something obtuse. Not long from now, this will all be as normal as having a social security number.

It is a little ironic that I comment on this and then share elements of my life openly on the internet. (Although blogs and the world wide web that allows access to them are also on the cusps of becoming as much relics as the walkman that so amazed my children.)

I miss the freedom that I had when I first began traveling. I’d go way out there into the jungles and into the mountains and literally nobody would know where I was. I’d call home when I could find that odd international public phone maybe once every three months. I’d send a weekly email to my parents from a greasy Internet cafe and ship out a postcard from each new country I’d enter. There was no efficient way to contact me. I couldn’t be called. I couldn’t be texted. I couldn’t receive a letter. I felt so free back then because I was.

I don’t know why this really matters. I don’t go around committing crimes. I don’t violate immigration policies. I enter countries how I’m supposed to and leave when my time is up. Why do I care if I’m tracked and monitored and videoed and biometrically catalogued? Why did I even bother trying to opt out of the facial scan at JFK? Who cares? It’s not like I particularly enjoy interacting with TSA agents, airline reps, and immigration officials anyway.

It’s because I know where this leads.

Not being able to board an aircraft because of something you wrote is on the docket. Not being able to travel internationally because of a pharmaceutical that you refused to inject is a coming reality. Being fined or having your account seized by payment apps for expressing wrong-think has actually been tried. Not having access to banking because you donated to or participated in a protest movement that your government didn’t like or because you don’t have a fixed address will no longer be relegated to the realms of science fiction.

You will walk up to the scanner, look into the camera, and a red bar will suddenly appear across the screen and that will be it. There won’t be an explanation. A case number will be beamed to your phone with a link to a chat bot help line that will tell you nothing.

They know how to make us fall in line simply by flipping off our ability to interact in our world. And our world is now digital, administered and patrolled not by trained men and women in uniform but by AI concocted by some egghead in Palo Alto.

The underclass of the future will be the heretics.

… Like it was in the good old days.

JFK is an airport that does everything in its power to do all of the little things to ensure that your travel experience is as miserable as possible.

Terminal 4 wasn’t crowded. It was the second week of November, one of the least busy travel times of the year, and there wasn’t an overflow of people anywhere except at the security line. The monitors portended an ominous 40 minute wait, and they were surprisingly accurate. When I finally got close enough to the front, I could see why: only about a third of the security lanes were open. No big deal, it’s JFK.

That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that when I finally emerged to the front of the line I noticed that everyone was now complying with the biometric facial scans which confirm your identity. The previous time I had traveled through here there were these little signs posted at each counter informing passengers that they could opt-out and how to do so. This time, those same signs were still there but they were laying face up off to the side of the TSA agent’s counter out of clear view.

When it was my turn, I glanced over at it, read that if I wished to opt out I would only need to walk past the machine and hand my passport to the agent and tell them that I’d prefer a manual check. It was what I did last time, and I attempted to do so again. It was around 2:30 pm on Friday, November 8th in security lane #14. The lady who took my passport was an overweight black woman with a bad attitude.

“Opt out!?! You want to opt out!?!” she queried incredulously.

“Yes,” I responded.

“Ok, then, you gonna have ta wait. I’m gonna have to call my supervisor and you gonna have to wait for him to come over here.”

“What do you mean? I’ve opted out before and all the agent had to do was check my identification manually like they always used to.”

“That’s true, but you have to tell me that before you give me your identification. Once you give me your identification the process has already started and I can’t stop it.”

“But the sign here tells me to hand you my indentifi …”

“Please step aside, sir, and wait.”

I stepped aside. She began processing the passengers behind me. She didn’t call anyone.

“How long is this going to take?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she responded with an attitude and shrug.

“I feel as if I am being punished for opting out.”

“That’s just the way it is. You said you wanted to opt out so now you opting out.”

I didn’t wait to find out what happened next. I know better than to argue with anyone in an airport, so I walked over to the next security lane, butted in front of some lady with an apology — “Sorry, the TSA agent over there was being a dick so I had to change lanes” (she understood) — and went through the process with a different agent who acted professionally and courteously.

But when I informed several TSA agents further on in the security process that I would like to file a complaint, I was simply ignored. One told me that she had no idea how I could file a complaint. Another told me that she would call over a supervisor and then did nothing.

According to TSA regulations, nothing about this experience was supposed to have been standard.  Passengers are permitted to opt out without punishment, and those signs letting passengers know that they have this right are supposed to be clearly posted. But regardless of what the TSA has told congress, this isn’t the case. Opting out of these facial scans is about as optional as not taking the Covid vaccine for state workers in places like New York during the pandemic. Sure, you can opt-out, but you will pay the price. Even US senators are being harassed when they try to opt out of these biometric scans at airports.

There is a card informing you of your opt-out rights here and there’s an opt-out club that you can join here.

But, ultimately, this is the future. Those screens snapping mugshots in TSA lines are merely the first step, and are more than likely temporary. Not long from now TSA will be able to gather all of the info they need simply by walking into an airport.

And for that TSA agent with an attitude, it is I who will probably have the last laugh. Her days of employment with the TSA are likely numbered. I would have thought that she would have been delighted to actually serve a function as she sits in her little box all day doing nothing as passengers stream by interacting with the technology before them rather than the human. Those machines that she rallied in support of will someday soon render her redundant.

We are in the Brave New World.

A common misconception that I often hear expressed is the idea that travel is a good way to learn a foreign language. It simply isn’t. You can spend years traveling through the same language region and come out of it not being able to speak more than it takes to order a beer and ask where the John is. Many — if not, most — travelers fall into this category. How many people have you met who have been living in Mexico, China, Japan for years who can’t mutter much of anything in the dominant local language?

Primarily, the reason for this is that you don’t need to learn the local / regional language if you speak English in most parts of the world. And if it’s not something that’s needed then it’s really difficult to stay motivated to invest the thousands of hours and pain, frustration, and embarrassment that it takes to learn a foreign language.

We all see these ads from companies promising that you can learn a language fast and easy, “speak Spanish in 30 days,” but the fact of the matter is that learning to speak a foreign language well is one of the most difficult things that a human can do. There are very few intellectual challenges that even come close to it. Even babies and children have to put a lot of time and effort into it. I mean, it takes a person at least two years of constant immersion in their native language before they can say much of anything and a full five years before you can really say that they speak it.

I do not believe that immersion in a foreign language helps all that much until you are at a high-mid to advanced stage in your study of it. It can help you get a feel for the beat and the rhythm of it, but gibberish will always be gibberish.

To learn to speak a foreign language you need to put in thousands of hours of study and targeted practice and, oddly, travel can sometimes get in the way of this.

The following video from Steve Kaufman got me thinking about my own language learning journeys and how I mistakenly thought simply going to a country was enough to learn the language. I learned this the difficult way when studying Mandarin in Hangzhou. At one point I realized that I could either go out and enjoy the city or I could actually learn to speak the language by sitting in my room studying. It seems contradictory at first, but sitting in that room like a hermit for months and months pouring over books was how I was eventually became able communicate in the language well enough to travel to remote areas, work as a journalist, and write books about the country.

What’s interesting is when he mentions how he feels his Turkish had actually gotten a little worse from traveling in Turkey, which flies in the face of the role that we assume travel has in language learning … but is something that I can really identify with.

I’ve always felt this way with Spanish, a language that I speak at a B1 / B2 level. Whenever I put off tutoring sessions and formal study and go out for a stint of travel in Latin America I always come back feeling a little rusty. I thought this was an odd quirk but, apparently, other people experience it too.

Another thing that Kaufman says above that I like is basically that travel isn’t the best way to practice a foreign language but it is a good way to get a deeper impression and understanding of a language. Like he said in the beginning of the video, both travel and language learning are ultimately about the same thing: exploration. They go hand in hand, and once you’ve put in the time to learn a language a new world of travel that you never knew existed will open up before you.

While travel isn’t the best means for learning language, it can be a means — and once you get to a more advanced stage in your learning it can actually be very effective. Here are some tips for utilizing travel to enhance the language learning experience.

Prepare in advance

Like Kaufman says, six months is a good runway to intensively practice a foreign language before traveling.

It’s dumb trying to make people speak to you in a target language when you can’t say or understand much of anything. While it can be fun to try out a new language while ordering in a restaurant or asking directions or something, this really isn’t going to get you anywhere. To really be able to practice a language when traveling, you need to at least be conversational — A2 to B1, ten to twenty thousand known words, and a firm grasp of the basic grammatical structures. This takes time.

Isolate people who speak the target language

Regardless of whether this is their intention or not, professional tutors may be native speakers but they are not live speakers. They learn to speak clearly in a way that a learner can more easily understand. They know the words and phrases that you know and adapt accordingly. A live speaker knows none of this, may speak with a regional accent, and ultimately isn’t being paid to make you understand him. Going from a tutor to a live speaker is like the difference between practicing in a rifle range and going into a war zone. You have no idea what’s coming next … and more often than not you get obliterated.

So travel for the purpose of learning a foreign language is often a game of isolating potential practice targets. Unless you’re at too low of a level, the person is busy, or you’re not understanding what’s being said, you will often be responded to in the language that you start speaking with someone.

Basically, what you want is a space where it’s just you and a local who’s full attention you have. Empty cafes and bars are good places to chat with workers, long bus or train journeys are good for conversing with the people sitting near you. My favorite option is to take Ubers and taxis rather than busses, subways, and trains within cities because this is basically the height of isolation — you have a person stuck in a small vessel with you who can’t do much else other than respond to all of your stupid questions. I have to admit that I’ve taken Ubers to places I had no interest in being just to have a low-cost tutoring session with a live speaker.

Record your conversations

Another thing that I do when practicing language when traveling is I record my conversations with people. When entering into a potential conversation where I have someone isolated I hit record on an audio app on my phone. I’ll then listen to it later to identify my mistakes or try to decode sections of dialogue that I may not have understood properly the first time around. Listening to yourself speak a foreign language is also a good way to improve your pronunciation and speaking rhythm.

This is a method that was outlined in Kaufman’s book, The Linguist, and one that he applied in the 80s and 90s with a big tape deck or dictaphone. We can do this much more easily and discreetly with our smartphones today. I wouldn’t worry about privacy issues because it’s not like you’re going to be sharing what’s being said or anyone but yourself is going to listen to it. Asking permission to record some stranger talking about nonsense with a foreigner is a good way to weird them out.

Conclusion

We think that traveling the world is akin to cultural immersion. It simply isn’t. When you travel, you often do so in a bubble. The people that you meet are ultimately the same, the conversations that you have are ultimately the same, and the pigeon way that you develop for speaking the local language becomes effective enough to get by and justifies avoiding the effort needed to improve. But you don’t get to break out of the bubble until you speak the local language well, and the only way to do this is through concentrated study and practice rather than osmosis.

A feature film that I was a camera op on was released in theaters last month. It’s called 64 Days and it’s the story of the political / social upheavals between the presidential election of 2020 and the riot / siege / insurrection of January 6th. It premiered on September 30th at SVA Theater in Manhattan and then had a run at Cinema Village near Union Square and other small theaters.

I first began working on this topic in the spring of 2020 with thoughts that I may do a film on international culture wars — the peculiar left / right divides that are remarkably similar in many different countries. We were still at the height of Covid pandemic then and one of the only public activities that people were apparently permitted to do in many cities was go out into the streets, yell and scream, destroy property, loot, and kick the shit out of people who disagreed with them. The lockdowns had made us all collectively insane. It was a wild time to be a guy with a camera on his shoulder.

64 Days premiere.

I spent this period zipping around NYC and other parts of the country. As media, I had carte blanc to go wherever I wanted without restriction. I flew on planes that literally had more flight attendants than passengers. I never quite knew if I was making a film about the culture wars or if I simply didn’t have anything better to do.

Either way, I thought that I could split the difference and offer a unique perspective that was neither on this side or that — very much like I made a career doing in Asia — but I got smoked. There is no nuance in the culture war. There just wasn’t a thirst for a deeper understanding. And no market for it either.

This project culminated in three demonstrations in Washington DC following the contested results of the 2020 election — a period of 64 days that later became the title of the aforementioned film. At that time, it was seeming as if challenging the results of the vote was going to be a new normal in America — the previous losing candidate spent two years contesting the results based on documentation that ended up being a complete and total hoax — and I kind of just did an eye roll and went out into the streets and did my thing. Did these people really believe elections were real?

Two gangs had formed which represented the fringes of each side of the political divide and most of the action centered around them moving through the capital trying to brawl with each other. More often than not, they seemed more akin to soccer hooligans than radicals representing anything political. I was able to develop some rapport and embed myself with one of the groups. They walked through the streets all day and night, chatting what amounted to war cries, tore down and burned some banners, got fucked up on booze and drugs, and every once in a while would find a group of “enemies” and a scuffle would break out.

I use the word scuffle intentionally here, as there really weren’t any incidents of true all out combat, which was a little interesting as there were literally hundreds of actors on both sides who were apparently out looking for blood. Once in a while ANTIFA would find a group of elderly Trump supporters and dump garbage on them or try to steal their flags. Once in a while a group of Proud Boys would come across a stray clad in black and kick him around a little. I did film the aftermath of a stabbing, which is featured in the film, but that was the height of the violence.

The DC police were on point, virtually materializing out of nowhere decked out in their Ninja Turtle get-up whenever contingents of these groups got too close to each other. Their level of organization and execution was almost unbelievably impressive.

64 Days at Cinema Village

But at times I found things to be a little suspect as well. I recall one incident where I was filming a group of Proud Boys from Richmond and when they finally evaded police and had a clear shot at their ANTIFA foes they turned and ran the other way down an alley. This group had just spent an hour and a half marching through the streets looking for these dudes and when they found them they bolted.

“Weren’t you just looking for those guys?” I queried their chapter president as he was running away. It was at that point that I became aware that I may not have been filming what I thought I was filming. Or they were simply cowards. Or were just a bunch of drunken dudes who really didn’t care about politics and were simply out to have a good time and fuk shit up.

And then J6 happened.

I very nearly spent this historic event eating peri peri chicken at Nando’s. While there was open talk that some people may try to storm the capital and prevent the coronation of the president from taking place, my previous experience with DC’s public security apparatus gave me the impression that any attempts at doing much of anything would be immediately extinguished. It was my impression that those unarmed blockheads that I spent the past two months following around didn’t stand a chance to break through a line of ultra-trained DC riot cops and enter a building that contained the most important people in the US government.

Trump’s speech was drawn out and boring. The crowd was dead and listless. There was nothing to indicate that anything significant would happen. I figured they’d all just march to the capital, chant their slogans for a while, and then go home. I was over it — I’d collected nothing usable footage-wise so far that day, and I was about to call the trip a wash and split back to NYC …

But then I saw a Tweet from an independent journalist friend that made me think I should probably head over there …

And by the time I arrived all hell had broken lose.

On the one hand, this was a historic event that I was privy to observe and film. I was a part of one of the only professional crews on the ground that day and, to my knowledge, the only one working on a feature film. Legacy media was virtually nowhere to be found — and when a formal news crew was bold enough to make an appearance, they were quickly set upon by the crowd. Cameras were smashed, journalists were beaten, and even the director of 64 Days had the monitor of his FS5 snapped off as a rioter attempted to knock him down a set of stairs. It was the kind of moment that you get into this profession for and nobody was there …

It was just the same rag tag band of independent reporters who had been covering these upheavals the entire time. There was a crew of perhaps a dozen of us, and it’s through our cameras that this story was ultimately told.

On the other hand, the entire thing left me feeling a little sick to my stomach. How did a small handful of untrained, unarmed goons topple the US capital? This was an event that was loaded with nuance that I immediately knew would never rise to the surface. One side would have one position; the other side would have another. There is no middle road in a culture war.

64 Days at Cinema Village.

64 Days credits

You know that film project that hade me I zipping all around the northeast a little while back? The one that I kept going to DC for to interview those congressmen and think tank researchers? … The one that I lamented as being sunk when my car got rammed?

I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned what it was all about.

I should probably fix that now …

The film is a feature about offshore wind and the plan to essentially ring the entire east coast of the United States with a contiguous picket fence of colossal wind turbines. It’s a film about who these projects impact, the ecosystems that will be changed, the livelihoods that are to be lost, the people pushing the projects, and the people fighting against them.

At this point I believe it’s clear that I have a thing for the stories behind infrastructural mega-projects — new cities, land reclaimed from the sea, and continent-traversing trade corridors — and there may not be a bigger such undertaking in the United States right now than this. In the 21st century USA, we simple do not do things like this anymore. This is some real China shit.

When we look at the collective sum of the lease areas that are now reserved for offshore wind, this is going to fundamentally change the paradigms of life on the East Coast, how food is procured, who has rights to the sea, and who has the rights — and the moral justification — to damage the environment. This is the first step of the industrialization of the ocean. Remember those stories that I was writing about floating cities a while back? Yes, I believe the plan is bigger — much bigger — than wind turbines alone.

We build things and places change. There is no going back. And the story of this change is the story of human civilization … But we’ve always halted our developmental forays when arriving at the sea. Until now.

I need to state here that I don’t think wind energy in itself is an issue — or is even an interesting enough topic to make a film about. If some farmer wants to make a little extra money leasing out parts of his land for windmills, then good for him. If energy companies want to buy large swaths of forest and clear cut them to erect thickets of bird killing rotating blades to save the environment, then they should be regulated like any other company that wishes to do the same. I think windmills are ugly, yes; I don’t think they work very well; I think they’re more expensive than they’re worth, but I’m not going to complain about what someone else is doing on their land just because I don’t like it. But to go out into the ocean — an area that’s more or less free use for multiple industries — and damage the fishing grounds, kill whales, and muck up the view from otherwise beautiful beaches for a “climate crises” that will more than likely never really materialize is another story altogether.

And then when you dig a little deeper you find that the companies building these offshore wind farms are European oil and gas companies (i.e. the exact same bad guys of the climate crisis) who are coming over to the US and soaking up billions of dollars in government subsidies for a form of energy that shows little indication of ever being financially sustainable, does nothing to curb “global warming,” raises costs for rate payers, destroys the livelihoods of local fishermen, takes a massive amount of carbon to build, install, and maintain, is potentially a national security issue, needs to be backed up by fossil fuel energy plants, and doesn’t even last very long …

… and then you have the makings of a film.

But pursuing this story has firmly dropped me on one side of a political line, and this may end up being the most interesting thing about this project …

Politics are inherently dumb. And that’s ok. But what’s even more dumb is when complex, non-inherently political issues become politically polarized to the extent that people believe one way or the other based on what their politicians and supporting media say.

We don’t vote the way we think, we think the way we vote.

That said, the topic of off-shore wind has become politicized. Trump is known for being vehemently opposed to it, so I guess this means a critical mass of liberals are going to support it — even at the expense of contradicting all those “save the whales” t-shirts they’ve been wearing for generations.

Shouldn’t the energy modalities that we transition to be based on scientific and economic evidence? We can measure the cost / benefit of offshore wind. We can find out how much additional energy it provides, how much carbon it off-sets, how much more it will cost, and whether or not it will have a positive impact. We can calculate the lost revenue that fishing and tourism economies will face, we can figure out how it will adversely impact coastal living, we can put a valuation on the degree to which they further endanger maritime life … and come up with opinions on whether they should be pursued or not.

But all too often these cost / benefit analysis aren’t even being done. These off-shore wind farms are being fast-tracked via proclamations and decrees ala the emergency authorizations of Covid. Essential steps are being skipped, studies aren’t being conducted, and existing regulations are being sidestepped.

They are building first and asking questions later.

In other words, I’m standing on the precipice of a bonafide clusterfuck, the ideal position for a documentary filmmaker to be in.

JFK TERMINAL 7, New York City- “I’m just thinking about all the core memories we lost because of this,” a mother with two kids said as she choked back tears.

By this point she thought she would be on the beach in San Juan with her two kids, playing and making the priceless memories that vacations are built for. But instead she was still at her point of departure, stranded in the airport, having not gone anywhere, sulking in the knowledge that a full 25% of the vacation she spent many months planning and saving for was gone …

Because of airline incompetence.

Frontier 3545 was supposed to have departed from JFK at 11 am but didn’t begin boarding until after noon. We eventually were called to get on the plane and we all filed through and took our seats. And then we sat there. And sat there.

And sat there.

Where we sat for two hours.

I woke up from my nap expecting to be in the air somewhere over the eastern seaboard of the US but looked out the window to find that we were still at the gate. We hadn’t moved.

Eventually, the pilot came over the PA and said that they were having difficulties coming up with a flight path or something. But emails from Frontier said something very different:

“We’re sorry that your flight #3545 … from JFK to SJU – San Juan, Puerto Rico on June 26, 2024 has been delayed because of flight crew regulations.”

In other words: “We screwed up and you’re going to have to pay for it”

We were probably sitting at the gate because the airline was scrambling to source pilots from Philadelphia or somewhere. Eventually, people began getting restless. A woman began screaming about how horrible Frontier is and airline staff had to board to calm her down. Then another woman began screaming about how horrible Frontier is … Two hours ticked by and we were just sitting there.

“We’re not going anywhere,” I eventually said aloud to nobody in particular.

The passengers to my left and right looked at me with with horror in their eyes. “What do you mean?”

“This flight is a quick turn around, if anything goes wrong the pilots or crew time out. They’re going to kick us off.”

A little while back Frontier entirely changed their logistics model. Rather than having routes where the crew would have overnights in the places they fly to they would do every flight as a turn around. So a flight would leave from its base to another destination and then turn right around and come back on the same day. This model is designed  so the airline doesn’t have to put their crews up in hotels as often. However, it doesn’t really work very well — if anything goes wrong then the crew is going to go over the time that they are allotted by law to work … and when you’re flying Frontier there is a lot that can go wrong.

And a strategy that’s designed to save money often only results in a domino fall of delays and cancelations … and pissed off passengers.

On a recent earnings call, the Frontier CEO tried to blame this issue on air traffic control — not the fact that he runs a poorly organized airline that can’t get out of its own way.

While my general position is that all airlines suck — at least those based in the USA — Frontier sucks with a particular intensity and flare. They are America’s worst airline for a reason. This isn’t hyperbole — they’re so bad they actually win awards for it. Based on criteria including reliability, comfort, safety, price, customer reputation, airline lounges, professional reviews, family travel, and traveling with pets, AirAdvisor found Frontier to be at the bottom of the pack — even below Spirit.

And keeping to their form, Frontier left us sitting on the plane for another hour. Eventually, a flight attendant got on the PA and directed her team to “prepare the cabin for arrival.”

Prepare the cabin for arrival … for a flight that didn’t go anywhere. A stale joke that nobody found funny.

Twenty minutes later the pilot came on and stated that we were going to begin the de-boarding process.

We knew then that our vacation would be disrupted; that we would lose time together in Puerto Rico; that we would lose money — our hotel reservation at this point was non-refundable — all due to airline incompetence.

Things started getting hostile in the baggage claim area. One guy accidentally backed into another guy and they nearly came to blows over it. People were pushing through each other trying to get up to the front, yelling questions out to the gate agent who was in the middle of the mob. The gate agent got on the PA and calmed everyone’s nerves:

“Everyone will be refunded, everyone will be given hotels, everyone will be given food vouchers.”

While this didn’t necessarily appease anyone, it did at least extend the fuse on the powder keg.

“You will receive two emails,” the gate agent continued. “One will have your options for another flight. The other will have your compensation — your hotel and food voucher.”

So we all stood there waiting. Eventually gasps of exasperation and laughter began emitting from the crowd. We received the first email to be able to select new flight options … but the link didn’t work. It just sent us to a page that said, “Session has no active disrupted flights, expiring session.”

We discovered the reason for this an hour later — were not able to select another flight, as is customary in this situation, because our flight wasn’t cancelled, it was a delayed flight — a 20 or so hour delay until the following morning. We were expected to ether go home or sit around the airport until then.

While there are companies like AirHelp who assist passengers in getting adequate compensation, we were already promised hotels and food, so I figured I’d just wait for the second email that would include our vouchers.

That email never came.

There was around a hundred of us just standing together in the rebooking section of the arrivals hall just looking at our phones … for literally hours … for an email that was never sent.

By this point the crowd was getting unruly. We had just endured a delayed boarding, two hours of sitting on the plane, and then another three hours of standing around waiting for some fabled email … all the while the gate agents were promising us hotels and food and anything else they could think of.

Passengers organizing after being “Frontier-ed.”

A couple of female passengers then began organizing us — one got the number for the Department of Transportation, wrote it on a piece of paper, and began urging everyone to call to file a report. The other lady seemed like she wanted us to begin chanting … This was getting ugly, and the Frontier gate agents began looking like thieves caught by a lynch mob. They knew this was getting bad.

Passengers organizing after being “Frontier-ed.”

Another exasperated laugh soon rolled through the crowd. We got a second email from Frontier, yes, but it wasn’t our hotels and food — it was a $75 voucher for another Frontier flight. In other words, insult to injury.

Needless to say, that didn’t keep the mob at bay. Eventually, the gate agents had everyone who wanted a hotel to come up to their kiosks so they could write down our confirmation numbers on a piece of paper so they could manually enter them into their system and get us hotels.

Apparently, whatever they were doing to get us our hotels the first time — more than likely stalling so more people get tired of waiting and just get hotels on their own — wasn’t working. We now had to resort to a 1980s era protocol and have things done completely by hand …

As we were left waiting for an email… again.

And we waited …

And we waited …

Then an email arrived!

It was for a measly $10 food voucher.

And then we went back to waiting …

I eventually cornered a gate agent and asked her in her experience how long it takes to get hotel vouchers.

“I haven’t done this before,” she said. “This is my first day.”

She was lying to my face.

I know someone who flies for Frontier and I sent him a picture of the lady and he said he’s seen her working there before.

I then began explaining to her how when other airlines cancel flights they provide hotels and food almost instantaneously.

“I don’t work for the other airlines,” the gate agent snapped back, “I work for Frontier.”

Again, she was lying to my face.

Frontier hires a third party company to provide their gate agents and they are not actual Frontier employees.

Nothing says customer service like ear buds.

This is a major part of why Frontier is America’s worst airline. It’s not just all of the delayed and canceled flights, it’s not just that they used to financially incentivize gate agents to nail people for not abiding by carryon baggage restrictions (they were sued for this), it’s not just that their Go Wild passes are literally impossible to use (they should be sued for this), it’s also not that they now charge a $120 fee if you need personal assistance at check-in … It’s that their gate agents tend to be under-vetted, under-trained, and are downright rude to passengers. They have no stake in the company — and why would they? They’re not even actual Frontier employees.

After waiting a total of four hours after we were forced off the plane that didn’t go anywhere the hotel voucher emails begin arriving. But, as is customary of Frontier, there was a catch:

Only half the people who spent all this time waiting — who were promised hotels — actually received vouchers. Apparently, one of the reasons why we were waiting for so long for the vouchers was because some jobsworth at some tech center at Frontier was going through the manifest of passengers requesting hotels to deem whether or not they lived far enough away from NYC to warrant one. So some passengers were compensated and others were not.

Some passengers who were not compensated lived over two hours away … Some lived in CT, some in NJ, and some, like us, had some reason why they couldn’t return to their homes.

(In our case, we had to get out because our landlord wanted to repair some damage to our walls.)

At this time we thought this was going to be the lowest blow of all. But we were wrong. Frontier had another surprise for us:

Those passengers who did receive a hotel voucher quickly discovered that their hotels were over an hour away and Frontier refused to pay for transportation. Seriously, on a flight that was supposed to depart from JFK, Frontier was giving passengers rooms way out on Long Island or in New Jersey — a different state.

The voucher recipients were now comparing the Uber rates to get to their hotels, and they were all invariably over $100. So that would be at minimum a $200 round trip to access their “free” hotel.

More than likely this was by design. Frontier probably did the math and realized that if they provided passengers with hotels that were far enough and expensive enough away that few people would actually take them … and Frontier would subsequently get out of paying for them.

People are now freaking out.

“But I need transportation. I can’t afford $200 for this …”

“Frontier will not provide transport.”

I imagine some Frontier executive sitting in an office somewhere laughing his ass off: “Yup, we got them a hotel … but let’s see how many actually take it!”

The mother with the two kids from the beginning of this story now couldn’t check back the tears. She was not given a hotel due to the fact that she had a NY address. Not only was their vacation disrupted but she’d now have to pay $300 in unexpected transportation fees to get home and back for the flight the following morning. She kept asking the gate agents what she was supposed to do as tears streamed down her cheeks.

“What am I supposed to do?” she kept asking.

A male gate agent just looked at her and in all seriousness told her to sleep on the floor.

“A lot of people do it,” he said.

Mother of two in tears after being told by Frontier gate agents to sleep on the floor after their airline’s incompetence disrupted her family vacation.

Share your Frontier horror stories below!

MIAMI DADE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, Miami, USA- Airports are now the place where you can best watch the collapse of civilization happening in real time.

“Why do everyone in airports in the US look like kids watching Saturday morning cartoons until noon in their pajamas?” I asked a pilot friend while I stood in line to go through security at the Miami airport.

While he is a bonafide aviator, not even he had any idea — “It’s really bad, man” — but he does often find himself grateful that he gets to shut himself in behind a steel reinforced door from the rabble on the other side.

I walked through the terminal in Miami, just watching the show. Full-grown adults were literally wearing their pajamas, a thirty-something-year-old woman had a pair of giant animal slippers on her feet, examples of combed hair and washed faces were far and few between, and one hefty woman in a gown with two suction drains half full of blood dangling off of her was hastily making her way to the gate looking as though she had just escaped from the ER. Then at my gate, sprawled out on the floor, was a bum. A real one.

It was the bum that I found to be the least offensive. At least he was just doing his bum thing — going north for the summer, and a flight on a budget airline is vastly cheaper than a day and a half slog on the Greyhound. But you probably wouldn’t have seen a bum on an airplane twenty years ago.

Flying was just different then. I came into traveling in 1999, well after the end of what’s called the golden era of aviation but before the start of the race to the bottom that we’re seeing now. This was a time when flying could still be seen as a luxury experience, where people wouldn’t necessarily dress their best but would still maintain some semblance of public presentability.

Looking back with the power of hindsight, the airlines coddled us then with respect, hospitality, and amenities — no baggage fees, free meals, and open bars. To fly then was to feel a sense of convenience and locomotive superiority over those on trains, busses, or slogging in out in cars. You’d say that you were flying somewhere and people would go “ouuu.” Being a frequent flier was a badge of honor — it was a demarcator of class, a statement of who you were and where you fit in the matrix of broader society.

I would like to say that the cultural bottom has fallen out of air travel because it’s now cheaper to fly and it’s more accessible to a wider swath of society — apparently, even bums. But I’m not sure if this is the case. While the airfares themselves are much cheaper, once you add baggage, seat selection, meals, and everything else that was once free into the mix — along with all kinds of novel taxes and fees — it is my impression that it averages out to being very much the same as it’s always been since I first began traveling:

The adoption of ancillary service-based fares has also added a different edge to operations. While you may be able to scoop up an affordable ticket at base fare, tacking on seat bookings, suitcases, carry-on luggage, and other services once offered as part of a standard ticket can quickly cause your cheap flight to double or even triple in price. Once exclusive to low-cost carriers, the model has slowly evolved to be included in ticket prices for major airlines and flag carriers, to mixed public reception.

Something else is at play here.

Woman in airport with bags of blood hanging from her.

Now flying is very much a similar experience as taking the bus. Many airports in the United States have effectively become over-glorified loading docks. They are grody, outdated, and crammed; essentials, such as drinking fountains, often don’t work, there aren’t enough places to sit down, everything is exorbitantly priced, and airline’s seem to pluck their gate agents from the same employment pool as McDonald’s … and then train them to merely say one term: “There’s nothing I can do, contact us on the app.”

This is a public sphere where everyone looks like shit, doesn’t give a shit, and treats others / expects to be treated like shit …

And why shouldn’t they?

In this venerable zoo of humanity what’s the point of putting in the effort? Why wouldn’t passengers be on edge when they know that there is a good chance they’re going to be nailed for an outrageous fee for having a checked bag over the weight limit, yelled at by the person checking boarding passes at the entrance to security, stripped of dignity by TSA, have their gate changed at the last minute, have to pay $5 for a bottle of water, be sniped for having a carryon bag that doesn’t fit in the box, endure extended delays, and then, after all that, go and sit in a crammed little seat for hours next to some guy wearing pajamas and slippers — if they’re lucky enough to be on a flight that’s not cancelled outright.

Flying is now a gruesome experience.

Definitely not something to get dressed up for.

Grotty bottle refill station in Miami airport.

I believe this change happened in the aftermath of 9/11. This was when flying became an exercise in security theater, when ridiculous taxes and fees began being added to ticket prices, and the rise in operational costs and the ease of finding the lowest airfares on booking aggregator sites and apps began putting enormous financial pressure on the airlines … a margin that they began making up by cutting amenities, charging for everything, stuffing as many seats as possible on aircraft, overbooking flights, automating / outsourcing / eliminating customer service, tricking passengers with misc fees and penalties, and basically making the flying experience as uncomfortable and undignified as they can without being regulated by the government.

If you treat us like cattle we will act like cattle.

This is a race to the bottom.

PANAMA CITY, Panama- I laughed in the poor girl’s face when she told me the price. To get a day pass to Power Club gym in the Cangrejo district of Panama City would cost $17. Some gyms in the USA hardly even charge $17 a month … While I know that being a tourist in Panama is expensive, I did not think the high income, low density model would extend to gyms.

But Power Club was a bougie kind of gym — a particular type of gym whose high price lends to the feeling of exclusivity that is ultimately one the perks of membership … and the steady stream of monied-looking foreigners parading in and out of it was testament that what they were doing worked for them.

It may sound odd, but in the urban spheres of the world the gym that you go to is now part of how you define yourself. Kind of like if you decide to have a dog rather than a kid, think masks inhibit the flow of respiratory viruses, or vote for one particular brand of war monger over another.

But I simply did not budget an extra $100 to work out in Panama. I was doing this research trip dirt cheap — I didn’t even bring any luggage beyond a personal item because I didn’t want to pay for it. So I asked the receptionist if there was a cheaper gym nearby and she said yes (with a smirk) and sent me to Robert’s Gym around the corner.

It took me a moment to find Robert’s Gym. While I clearly saw where it was positioned on my map app, I just didn’t think that it would be located behind a parking garage beneath a shopping mall. But I followed the little blue dot through a dark melee of parked cars and just when I began thinking that there was no way that a gym could be down there, I saw some flashing lights coming from the far back of the cavern. When I got closer I was able to make out that the lights spelled out a word: G – Y – M.

Walking into Robert’s Gym is like time traveling to another era of bodybuilding and fitness. It costs $3 to work out for a day and you pass through a turnstile like in an amusement park. Robert himself — a shorter, ultra fit guy probably around 50 — will invariably be behind the counter with a big smile on his face welcoming you in.

Then you are tossed into the inferno. While Power Club was a bougie gym, Robert’s Gym was definitely a bro gym. Giant men with bulging delts, biceps, and quads grunt, strain, and yell on the concentric phases of lifts, slamming weights to the floor and growling when finishing a set, fit women with gargantuan glutes push weighted sleds down the aisles in sheer disregard for anyone in front of them. People can be heard calling out to each other, laughing, high fiving, and talking shit. The music is blasting. The place smells of sweat, machismo, and tren …

Some weenie guy totally ate it on bench press, spewing iron plates all over the floor and nobody seemed to notice or care. That’s just the kind of place this is, and I liked it.

The machines are well-worn and heavily used here. Some of them appear to be held together with wing nuts and duct tape. The stacks of plates lost their numeric markers long ago and the amount of weight that you’re lifting isn’t much more than an estimate. Things are bent, things are rigged together, but somehow it all does the job. There is a pile of broken iron weights in the center of the room stacked up like a cairn that seems to be a shine to the deity of the meathead.

The place was a mix between Westside Barbell, Dorian Yate’s grotty old gym down an alley in Birmingham, and the workout room in a prison movie. It was my kind of place.

My workouts on the road

My workout varies depending on my circumstance. In NYC, where I’m based for much of the time, I’m currently doing five days a week in the gym — three days of chest / back / shoulders and two days of arms / legs. This is an atypical split but I do it for a reason that I may get into at some other point.

When on the road, I adapt. Some gyms aren’t as equipped as others and when traveling I’m often not able to workout everyday. If I only have one day in the gym here and there I will generally do a full body workout. If I have two+ days in a row I will do my usual split. If the gym isn’t particularly well stocked I will just do whatever I can.

I’m not a pro bodybuilder, so there is no need to stick to any kind of strict regimine … so, ultimately, I basically just do whatever I feel like.

In Robert’s Gym, the plates were in high demand and I would have felt like a dick occupying the ten to twelve of them to do leg presses, so I just did a few days of upper body splits.

Working out as part of the travel experience

My father was a bodybuilder and my mother was extremely fit. My memories growing up are full of my parents in the basement, dad slamming weights and grunting and my mom bouncing around on this wooden platform doing weighted aerobics. When together, they would always have a John Mellencamp tape playing … when my mom wasn’t around my dad would pop in AC/DC.

So lifting weights was just something that I’ve always been into. Over the years I’d concoct all sorts of different training regimens that I could do while traveling — from lifting a weighted backpack to using exercise bands. But I’ve always thought that going to the gym while traveling was somehow out of reach. For whatever reason it just didn’t occur to me until a couple of years ago that this was something that I could do …

Now, going to the gym has become a regular part of my MO when traveling. It’s familiar terrain upon which to engage with people from other countries, something to connect over, something to talk about that we have in common. Things are more or less the same in gyms everywhere — working out has become a global universal — but there are just these little tints of cultural difference that make them interesting … and sometimes you find these machines that are just absolutely unique and fascinating.

It’s important to have things that you can build on in life — things that you can work towards achieving each day, things that you can develop expertise in, things that you can add onto that pile of things that’s called “your life.”

This has always been my biggest problem with travel — that you work hard towards obtaining knowledge and skills in a particular thing in one place and then you have to start over again when going somewhere else. There’s so many things that I’ve attained a reasonable level of proficiency at — languages, sports, martial arts — only to abandon them when I move on. The paradox of travel is that it gives you unparalleled access to cultivate skills, knowledge, and expertise but not the duration of exposure to develop advanced proficiency in any of them.

At 43 years old I’ve almost become obsessed with cultivating and maintaining a particular collection of skills that I’ve developed over my travels, regardless of where in the world I am. I have a few languages that I study daily, I write, I shoot video. I guess I also have to add going to the gym to this list.

ASTORIA, NYC- When the people of Panama voted in the henchman of a former president and convicted felon it probably should have sent a message to the people of the United States loud and clear, as what happened there may portend what is to come for us in November.

Last month, the people of Panama would have voted Ricardo Martinelli back into power … if they were permitted to by the courts. In July of last year, the supermarket magnate was convicted of embezzling and laundering $43 million of public funds … and there’s a laundry list of other alleged crimes that he could potentially be charged with in the future.

This move broke with Panama’s long-standing precedent of not prosecuting presidents for their less than scrupulous acts while in power — effectively, the gloves came off between the country’s various political parties and a former president was sentenced to ten years in prison.

But this mattered little to the voters of Panama. On election night, as Martinelli was hiding out in the Nicaraguan Embassy to avoid serving his sentence, the country voted for his hand-picked choice in a decisive victory — the thinking, obviously, was that the former president would be running things behind the scenes.

Ricardo Martinelli first gained prominence as a businessman and created several successful companies before jumping into politics. However, he was always seen as a political outsider who had a penchant for doing things his own way.

Something about this sounds very familiar…

But how could this happen? Why would a democratic society want to choose a convicted criminal to lead their country from the shadows?

From what I could tell, some people felt that, though corrupt, Martinelli at least did some positive things for the country when he was in president. Others felt that all of their politicians are corrupt so what difference did it make that he happened to have been convicted? While a sizable amount of others were legitimate supporters and felt that he was persecuted by the system and that his conviction was politically motivated … something that Martinelli himself played into:

“I feel concerned about justice in Panama. When I was president I made many mistakes thinking that prosecutors and judges responded by law … There is no justice, justice is useless. They receive orders from the Executive and other people …”

It was a lesson in human psychology, group think, and the sheer political power of victimization.

On May 30th, Donald Trump walked out of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse wearing a shiny blue tie and a vengeful smirk assured that he will become the next president of the United States of America. Those 12 jurors ostensibly served as delegates casting their constituents’ vote for president, and they unanimously chose “four more years.”

After all the nonsense — the fast tracking of the snake oil, not disposing of the mass-murdering Fauci, the approval of moronic lockdowns, “Stop the Steal,” J6 … it is my impression that most of America was ready to let that guy stroll off into the sunset. It was ride — a sometimes funny, sometimes ugly kind of ride — but like all rides there comes a time when you want to get off.

But they kept making the blowhard front page news. It was clear that they wanted revenge and legitimization for the years that they spent going after the guy on false pretenses, and they got it in a way that involved a contrived admixture of obscure, twisted, and overtly novel legal theories … that most lawyers and lay folk alike would probably describe best with the word “bullshit.”

From Taibbi:

Maureen Dowd in the New York Times in this morning’s op-ed about Donald Trump’s trial:

Even though the case was a stretch and not the strongest one against Trump, there was something refreshing about the jury doing what no one else around Trump has been able to do — not the inexplicably sycophantish Republican lawmakers, not the corrupt Supreme Court, not the slowpoke Merrick Garland.

…

New York’s Jonathan Chait, who lives on the outer edge of the spectrum of Trump-detesting pundits but has expressed unease with some recent moves to unseat him, wrote “the case was always marginal” and “the sort of charge you’d concoct if the target is a bad guy and you want to nail him for something.”

While Martinelli was prosecuted for a major crime and severe abuses of power, Trump was prosecuted for mis-categorizing an otherwise completely legal payment to a lawyer to buy off a prostitute. He was found guilty, so we’ll go with that — there’s no need to go into the credibility of a primary witness who previously committed perjury. He’s guilty. He’s a felon.

They got him.

Yes, they did.

And in the process he became more popular than ever.

I’m the production manager of a national cable talk show that films in Midtown Manhattan that has on a wide range of guests from across the political and social spectrums — from Joe Lieberman to Rudy Giuliani, rock stars to movie stars — and a few weeks ago we had on a guest who’s working on the Trump campaign.

“This trial is the best thing for him,” she said in the green room before the show began. “He’s just letting this trial do his campaigning for him. You have no idea how much money this is saving him. And if he loses it will be even better for him.”

She appears to have been correct.

In just seven hours after the conviction, the Trump campaign raised $34 million dollars in donations — a record. Over the next 17 hours this total would jump to $53 million.

From the Free Press:

Meanwhile, as media analysts were busy celebrating the verdict, with ABC’s chief White House correspondent calling it a “political gift to Democrats,” searches for “donate to Trump” spiked on Google. So many people were rushing to Trump’s fundraising page that the site temporarily crashed. By the next morning, his campaign announced that nearly $35 million had poured in overnight—almost 30 percent of which appeared to come from first-time Trump donors. By late Friday, the campaign stated that the total had climbed to nearly $53 million.

You can now see MAGA hats around NYC. They are mostly being worn by young black and Latino males. In a strange way, the criminal justice system’s ravenous pursuit of Trump has given him a degree of street cred:

Trump’s repeated run-ins with the law, and what seems like an unfair obsession with catching him and punishing him disproportionately for his so-called “crimes,” reminds a lot of us of what was done to us.

From where I’m sitting, the events of this week will only increase Trump’s “street cred”—especially among formerly incarcerated voters…

Many critics of Trump interpret his arrests as proof that he is unsuitable to return to the White House. But to my eyes, as I still struggle to repair my life from the damage of serving an unjust sentence, this is evidence that he may be just the right person for the job.

He’s literally been in my shoes. No other president can brag on that. And believe me, he will brag about it. Such boasting will not fall on deaf ears…

Trump’s credibility doesn’t just improve among the formerly incarcerated. Let’s face it: Americans love an underdog. What better way to make a billionaire relatable and counted among the disenfranchised than to have him targeted for criminal and civil prosecution?

More:

People are also noticing the justice system’s seemingly unjust treatment of President Trump—a fate many black people have experienced.

“They’re saying to themselves: ‘Now wait a minute; this looks very familiar,’” Mr. Fisher said. “Subconsciously, that’s a powerful thing.”

Black people also lament that authorities are letting violent crime and illegal immigrants run amok, while they’re targeting President Trump and others for alleged nonviolent offenses.

Imagine that.

They made Trump look like a victim, they made him a martyr, and the fuck you vote is one of America’s fondest pastimes.

As it apparently is in Panama.

Postscript

Every time I publish a post like this my political views are called into question — perhaps with good reason. So I’ll put it like this: I vote for the candidate that’s least likely to go around the world bombing people and fanning the flames of war. It’s usually a draw, so I generally don’t waste my time voting. But this year things are a little different, as there is a candidate that I actually want to be president. It’s not Trump and it’s definitely not that desiccated, warmongering bag of dementia hobbling off to nowhere looking like he has no idea what planet he’s on …

I’ll leave it at that.

PANAMA CITY, Panama- Every country has a relative pricing index. You can usually determine how much things should cost based upon what you pay for almost any other thing (exclusive of imported products). The price of hotels should give you an idea of the price of food, which should give you an idea of the price of transportation, which should give you an idea of the price of entertainment.

While I’m well past the point of writing about travel budgets and how to get between A and B and reviewing hostels, there was just something about the extreme disparity in the relative pricing index in Panama that I found interesting.

In Panama, judging from the price of hotels, food, and transportation you’d consider it to a low-medium cost country. You can get a hotel in the capital city for $15 to $20 a night, a meal costs $5 to $10, an Uber across a city for $3, and public transportation ranges from so cheap that it’s not worth mentioning to a $3-$4 an hour on a nice bus. You can get a beer for a buck or two; you can get a small cup of ceviche for $1.50; a beef empañada for $2.50.

But where Panama violates the relative pricing index is in the realm of tourist attractions. Be a tourist here and get wrung dry. To watch some boats go through the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal costs $17, to go to the Panama Canal Museum is $15, to walk along a trail through Soberaniá National Park costs $30, to get a meal in Casco Viejo you’re looking at $25 to $50+, to take a tour to the top of Volcan Baru is $120. And this is all in a country without a single big ticket tourist attraction.

Little of this really concerns me much, but I just found it a little surprising — a walk down a trail in the woods probably shouldn’t cost 1.5X the price of your hotel room. While I don’t have anything against tourist attractions, they’re just not really how I wish to utilize my time in a place. I mean, really, what can you write about visiting a tourist attraction?

“I followed man to this. Man told me to look at that. Man taught me things I could have read on Wikipedia. I gave man tip.”

Not my thing. But it doesn’t have to be.

Low density, high income tourism has always been the rallying cry of Panama. The country seems bent on not becoming another Costa Rica. They want tourists, yes, but only those with an inclination to spend.

And the country is incredibly successful at applying this model.

I don’t think I saw a single backpacker in Panama. What I did see was a bunch of pensioners getting their pre-croak travel fix, young professional digital nomad types, and the standard lot of tourists with wide brim khaki hats, cargo shorts, and the works.

Tourism in Panama isn’t bad; it’s just different than the rest of Central America.

Or — important correction here — how I remember Central America to be.

PANAMA CITY, Panama- Travel provides nothing if not a lens through which to view the passing of time. Places change constantly, with one landscape becoming another just to become another … ages pile on top of ages, ever churning in the celestial soup of ungraspable time.

You change constantly, with each experience, relationship, and obsession leading you on to other experiences, relationships, obsessions … Your lifestyle changes, your outlooks change, your values change as you metamorph from one person into another into another.

The paradox of change is that, while we all know it’s happening, we simply can’t observe it.

Until we return.

An entire era of change has passed over Panama City since I was last here a little over 16 years ago. Thickets of skyscrapers sprung up from barren lots, slums became new trendy districts, boulevards were etched onto land reclaimed from the sea, casinos popped up everywhere, an unchecked scourge of TGI Friday’s covered the land, and the old city was transformed from a defunct, falling apart pit of poverty to an extremely posh and prohibitively expensive tourist zone with cuisine from everywhere in the world except the country it’s in (the true sign of class and status anywhere). And those painted old busses that I once enjoyed riding on through the city are now on the verge of going extinct — they’ve become a preemptive relic whose pieces are now displayed in tourist restaurants.

Ave Espana in Panama City in December, 2007

The same shot in 2024.

I walked through the streets of Panama City and simply marveled at the changes. But I’m not sure why I was so surprised … I was based in China for years, I literally watched as ancient villages were wiped off the map and new cities were created in their place from scratch. I know how time does its thing on places. But something about the change here caught me a little differently.

I soon recognized that it wasn’t the place whose change I was marveling at, but my own.

There was some reason why I was drawn to that broken down, abandoned hotel. I walked by it and it instantly caught my attention. I stopped and just looked at it for a moment. Was it the unusual towers at its corners? Was it the odd storybook-esque paint job and decor? Was it something about the name, Pension Las Torres?

Pension Los Torres in 2024

There were for sale signs on its exterior and electric fencing was put up to keep out the trespassers and squatters. It appeared to have been years since this hotel last housed any travelers …

And the area around the hotel was equally barren. There weren’t really any restaurants, few open shops, hardly anyone was walking in the streets; there was nowhere to go and nothing to really do. To the south was a busy, fully of life, working class / poor area. To the north was the booming financial district. Calidonia was as dead as the Pension Las Torres.

“It didn’t use to be like that,” a friend recollected as he was giving me a lift back to my hotel. “This used to be the center of the city, but then it moved farther up the coast. Over time, the center of the city kept moving north.”

Later on, an Uber driver told me that when the Americans invaded in 1989 the soldiers brought the city to a stand still by walking through the streets here. If they tried to pull that today I’m not sure how many people would even notice … the place isn’t an urban dead zone but it’s getting there.

My hotel was just down the street from the now defunct Pension Las Torres, and there was just something about this area that felt like the vertigo that you get when waking up from one of those visceral dreams where you can’t figure out if it was based on actual memory or not.

I just felt like I’d been here before. And as I browsed through some of photos from my travels in Panama at the end of 2007 I realized why: it’s because I was.

I had taken an entire collection of photographs of the Pension Las Torres, as this was where I stayed. I remember the place being full of travelers — backpackers from all over the world, cash-strapped Central Americans on business trips, and that sketchy assortment of locals who for some reason are holed up in a cheap hotel. I could remember the stairwell leading to the top floor, the creaky wooden floors, the bathroom at the end of the hallway. I could remember trying to figure out how to get into the towers and the tickets that they would give us at reception to get breakfast at the conjoined restaurant. I can remember that the breakfast itself was served from a stainless steel bar — probably the same one that I could still see in there today through a fence that had been painted bright orange — and I would get a hard boiled egg and some fried dough and plantains.

Pension Las Torres in December, 2007

Pension Las Torres in December, 2007.

Pension Las Torres in 2024.

I could also remember how kinetic this area once was. The streets were full of people, there were fruit and vegetable hawkers on the sidewalks, the traffic was amps to 11. There was an energy to the place …

The memories that those photos brought back were remarkably uninteresting — their only relevance is that they serve as temporal waypoints between then and now.

The last time I was in Panama I was 26 years old. I was on my second fiancé. And from looking at photos of myself I’m not quite sure if I knew I was bald yet. Life was romantically pointless then. I had no real responsibilities, I was living off of scholarships and student financial aid mixed with earnings from the three months of archaeology fieldwork that I would do each summer. I had no real goals or plans … other than devising ways that I could keep doing what I was doing in perpetuity.

I had nothing then and was proud of it. I was a backpacker. I was free to be poor anywhere. I went back and read those posts from Panama that I published in early 2008. I wrote sheepishly then, apologetically — it was as though I was embarrassed to be doing what I was doing; that I was almost ashamed to be a blogger. I was clearly violating the Law of the Three Nothings: to have nothing, to be nothing, and to do nothing.

While it was unknown to me then, I was on the brink of sabotaging everything. I had no idea what was going to come next. I had no idea that these were the last moments of an era. I had no idea that I was about to board the something train to somewhere. I would soon leave Central America and attempt to ride a bicycle from Olomouc in the Czech Republic to Istanbul. Somewhere along the way I figured things out.

I ditched the bike in Budapest, went to Brooklyn …

And left that guy drinking out of a coconut in the ruins of Old Panama behind.

GAMBOA, Panama- Gamboa is located at the end of the road, right on the continental divide, along the banks of the Chagres River near the point where it feeds into the man-made Gatun Lake, which is the primary water source and thoroughfare of the Panama Canal. In other words, it is at the crossroads of continents, waterways, and development — a place where species from north and south converge in the middle and bespectacled dorks with binoculars and ultra-long telephoto lenses come to gawk at birds, monkeys, and anything else that flies, creeps, or slithers.

In other words, if you want to look at some wildlife in Panama, come here.

I was originally in Gamboa to get a taste of Canal Zone history. The town was once the site of a booming transplanted American community who brought all aspects of small town Americana with them. For 57 years there were American schools and American churches and American little league … and then one day it was gone.

Gamboa probably would have went the way of many other Canal Zone towns and gotten eaten up by the surrounding forest if it wasn’t for the canal’s dredging division remaining there.

As it’s located at the end of the road, Gamboa is literally the place where development ends and the forest begins. It is also where the ecosystems of North and South America converge and is considered a vital biological corridor where crocodiles and iguanas, monkeys and hundreds of species of birds gather and do their respective things.

For this reason, the 20,000 hectare Soberania National Park was created here in 1980 and later on the Smithsonian established a tropical research institute … and now troops of college kids with big rubber boots are tramping through the forest taking samples of microbes and bugs and rescuing amphibians.

I walked through the town of Gamboa along a narrow paved road that petered out into a gravel path and then turned onto an old access corridor called Pipeline Road. It’s basically a hiking trail today, and is widely considered to be one of the best birding trails in all of Central America — and is therefore intermittently speckled with khaki clad birdwatchers checking boxes off their lists.

While I wasn’t really equipped or inclined to do any birdwatching, I did enjoy the walk. Howler monkeys bounded between crackling limbs hooting at me and birds squawked from the canopy above. The hot sun shone down through the leaves in speckles … creating a nice shady walk of the kind that would have been literally impossible to report any hardships about. I leisurely made my way up a slightly inclined hill and simply dug how ideal everything was …

I then came to a fork in the road with a visitors center in the middle and figured I’d take a break, eat some Greek yogurt and fruit that I had packed in, and figure out where to go next.

As I walked by the front of the visitor’s center, which was actually kind of like a hot dog vendor stand made of plank board, I was welcomed by a young dude chilling behind some stacks of maps and brochures.

“Would you like me to tell you about the park?”

“Sure.”

He then broke out a map and showed me this loop trail that went into the forest, stopped at a lookout tower, and then swung by the banks of Gatun Lake. It seemed cool and I said that I was interested.

“Ok, for foreigners it costs $30 to enter.”

I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “So, what you’re telling me is that it costs $30 per person to walk down a trail and climb up a ladder?”

Traveling in Panama is relatively affordable, but tourism is incredibly — no, ridiculously — expensive. It’s almost as if the prices for tourist activities here are determined by a group of cronies sitting around the national tourism office chugging beers and one-upping each other as to how much the stupid foreigners would be willing to pay …

$15 to go to the Panama Canal museum, $17 to go look at the canal, and, apparently, $30 to stroll through the woods.

I decided to stick to the free Pipeline Road.

I really couldn’t imagine things looking much different on the paid trail a few hundred meters away.

The nice thing about a good hike is that there’s often very little to write about. There’s nobody to talk to, nothing to negotiate the price of; you’re just walking and thinking easy thoughts. Every once in a while your meditations are broken by a jumping monkey or a screeching bird.

The birders on this section of the trail were out in force. I know from experience that these are serious folk.

I traveled with a birder for a while in the Peruvian Amazon over 20 years ago. The guy traveled with nothing but a change of clothes, a wide brim adventurer hat, and a pair of binoculars. He had a long white beard and only wore Indian hippy garb. His mission was birds — not capturing them, not eating them, not even studying them … just looking at them. Our guides got it about as much as I did.

How long can you just stand there looking at the same bird? Will it change a different color or something if you wait long enough? I don’t get it. But I don’t have to …

“What’s the point of it?” I asked him one day, wondering why he was so adamant about looking at something for no other reason than being able to say that he looked at it.

“It’s good to know the things that you see in life,” he replied.

This guy was in his 50s and had been traveling for decades. He didn’t carry a camera. He didn’t keep a diary. He didn’t have a wife. He didn’t have kids. He didn’t have a home. He never even had a career — he just picked apples or something for a few months a year in France. All he had was a little notebook full of lists of all the birds around the world that he looked at.

I was young and just starting my traveled then and this guy has a major influence on me. He had nothing — truly nothing. I wanted to have nothing too.

But there was something about that notebook that seemed to manifest the time of his life — a measurement of accomplishment, a collection which made what he did with his days, weeks, and years seem worthwhile.

He’s probably dead now. I wonder what he thought on his death bed when he realized that the only thing he had in life was a list of bird names.

GAMBOA, Panama-  The end of the road isn’t on the path to anywhere … it’s the last stop on the way to here. In a way, it’s the antithesis of travel. And what is especially appealing for me is that the end of the road is more often than not an anti-climatic experience. Few make the journey to the end of the road. The action, the people, and all the stuff tends to peter out along the way, leaving no more firecrackers left for the grand finale. The end of the road is the refuge of those who have nowhere else to be.

I have an attraction to the end of the road. There is just a tinge of romance found in getting to a place from which there is nowhere else to go. For a moment, at least, you have arrived.

Gamboa is at the end of the road.

I have to admit that I’ve allowed my imagination to wander about the old days of the Canal Zone a time or two since I’ve landed in Panama. That period of time was such a historic anomaly and the stories that came out of it were truly unlike anything else.

For nearly the entirety of the 20th century the corridor of the Panama Canal was administered by the United States and was ostensibly treated as US foreign territory. They did, after all, secure (i.e. pay for) Panama’s independence from Colombia …

What was created in the Canal Zone was essentially a facsimile of life in small town America. Everyone spoke English, the kids played little league, they raced canoes on the canal, had American cops and American jails and American churches. They had cinemas that played American movies and shops that sold American cereal and canned beans. The families who worked there were given decent pay, nice benefits, and subsidized housing. From the people I’ve talked to who grew up there, the place seemed like Leave it to fucking Beaver played on repeat for a century.

And then one day it was gone:

“I went from having a normal childhood with neighbourhood friends in a nice suburban neighbourhood with mowed lawns, and all of the sudden everyone is gone,” says Zach Kunkel, who was born in 1976. “From one day to the next, it was clear that everything had changed and there was no going back.”

When the US fully handed the canal over to Panama in 1999 most of the Americans split, leaving behind the towns that they built and officially ending the culture of Panamanian Americana.

Some of the old canal towns are now underwater, some of them have been reclaimed by the jungle, while others are still there in some form or other.

Gamboa is located on the other side of a silver painted iron bridge, right at the point where the Chagres River, Gatun Lake, and the Panama Canal all blend together. The town was etched out of the jungle in 1911, seven years after the construction of the canal began. It originally wasn’t an American town but was populated by Afro-Caribbean workers who were brought in to dig the ditch that would change the world.

The place wasn’t really much of anything then — being little more than a police station, a single four-family house, and a strip of box cars that served as dormitories for the workers and a commissary. When the canal was finished, most of the laborers split, and Gamboa nearly became a ghost town, with its population dropping from north of 700 to just 173.

Then in 1936 the canal’s dredging division moved in, and that’s when Gamboa became an actually place on the map. With a year, the population rose to 1,419, and by 1942 there were 3,853 people living there, and many of them were American transplants who brought all the vestiges of American life with them.

These early settlers of Gamboa literally built their town up from scratch on their own. They constructed their houses with timber from Californian sequoia trees, built a USO entertainment center, a rail station, a school, athletic fields, a movie theater, a commissary, a country club, a golf course, and multiple churches. It was a community effort — when the men weren’t working on the canal they were swinging hammers and sawing their way to actual township.

For the next 57 years they remained here …

I ventured out to Gamboa on one sunny morning. I wanted to see what was left of the place as well as to get a feel for the small chapter of history that played out here.

I believe it’s normal for Americans to feel a sense of longing for what we imagine life was like in the 1950s. While I don’t share that particular longing myself I do appreciate it. It’s ultimately a longing for community, for knowing your neighbors, for not being worried about your kids as they run around in the streets with packs of their peers. It’s a longing for a way of life that we don’t really have anymore, and in an odd way I feel as if these old Canal Zone towns manifested that sentiment perhaps better than those in the actual US — because at least these Panamanian communities had the decency to disappear overnight rather than slowly descending into isolation and stranger danger and smartphones.

I took an Uber out to Gamboa. While it was a short 30 minute ride from Panama City, it was as if we’d fallen off a cliff and landed on the other side of the country. Dense city immediately turned into dense forest. The expressway turned into a highway which then turned into a narrow road before petering out as an unpaved gravel path. I had no idea where I was going and the Uber driver wasn’t much help.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“How about here?”

I looked around. There wasn’t really much, but I guess that’s what I was looking for. I stepped out of the car and the driver sped away back to the city.

The first thing that struck me about Gamboa was how quiet it was. I just stood there for a moment in front of the church at the entrance to the town and just listened. There wasn’t a sound until I heard the wheels of a skateboard hit the pavement behind me and I turned around to find some white dude in a button up plaid shirt skating by. I figured he worked at the Smithsonian Tropic Research Institute that’s based here. And if I’d know that he’d basically be the only local resident that would come within earshot of me the entire time I was there I probably would have flagged him down to ask some questions …

I walked over to the Chagres River and watched a massive freighter float by. I looked up a the cranes of the dredging division. I watched a train roll past on the Panama Railway which cuts through the town.

I then began walking into the heart of the settlement. The Gamboa Union Church at the entrance to the town stood out to me. As it had a fresh paint job and the sign in front of it read “God loves tourists,” it was a safe bet that it was still functioning. But beyond that it was a little difficult to believe that people still lived here. There was an array of big wooden houses that appeared to be in various stages of abandonment and empty lots where other houses once stood. I walked out onto the athletic field that’s in the center of town and looked up at the small grandstand and imagined it full of square jawed men in straw hats and women in poofy white dresses clapping and cheering as their kids played baseball.

Gamboa isn’t a ghost town but it has a similar feel. There’s more space than people to fill it. It’s teetering on the edge of relevance. It’s eerily quiet.

Gamboa was the quintessential boomtown. An economic switch was flipped, a bunch of people moved in, stayed while the staying was good, and then quickly left when it was time to go, leaving the place behind to descend into history.

I crossed the athletic field and looked at an abandoned church before cutting back to the main street and walking by the police station, the administrative building for the dredging division, a convenience store, and a small post office.

At the edge of town I watched as some college students in green knee-high wellies jumped into the back of a pickup truck and sped off into the forest. They seemed to be on some kind of study abroad eco trip. They looked like little kids on a Panamanian adventure — but then I laughed because that’s probably how I looked when I was a student at an archaeology field school in Ecuador at the age of 19.

I followed them into the jungle and began hiking up a trail …

When leaving Gamboa I tried to hitchhike out. Nobody picked me up. What was I thinking? I’m at the end of the road. Nobody is going anywhere here.

MIRAFLORES, Panama- Visiting the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal is kind of like going to the zoo and looking in the lion enclosure. There will inevitably be that one big lion in there with the massive mane and the bulging delts and whip-like tail … You know, the one that’s just laying there in the sun … just laying there and laying there … and laying there. Sometimes it flicks a tail at a fly. Sometimes it twitches an ear. You wait and you wait and you wait just in case it gets up and roars or eats something. You know it’s going to do something eventually — it can’t just lay there forever, right?

Right now, there’s a bunch of people sitting around looking at a Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal. The sun is glistening off the shimmering little waves in the channel below. The fields and hills in the distance are radiating with a full spectrum of green. It’s pretty and all, but, you know, when is it going to do something?

Then, just like when that lion in the zoo jumps to attention when he hears the lock on his enclosure rattle and knows it’s feeding time, the PA crackles with an announcement that a ship is about to arrive. We all scurry to the corner of the observation deck and look out to the north.

There, we found a massive freighter slowly being led into the almost impossibly narrow breadth of the locks. It looked far too big for where it was going to go, but I watched as the ship was slowly guided to the mouth of the tight little channel by tug boats, and once there it was attached to a pair of locomotives on both sides of the lock which starting pulling it through with mere feet to spare on either side.

Timelapse of the ship going through the locks:

The ship was called the Morning Linda and was hauling a load of German cars to Ecuador. It was a 68,000 ton vehicle carrier and it stood way up out of the water, towering over the locks below. The crew of the ship all spilled out to its observation decks to watch its passage through one of the most iconic thoroughfares of the maritime world. One particularly friendly crewman was on the upper deck waving vigorously to us onlookers, filming us as we filmed him. The more hardened workers looked out with arms akimbo as they chatted as their ship slowly inched forward. The Panama Canal is a spectacle for everyone.

But the Panama Canal is actually only a canal for segments of the way across the 82-kilometer isthmus from Panama City to Colon. It is more like a relay system with canals ingeniously connecting various rivers and lakes — some man-made, some not — rather than something like the Erie Canal, which is a full-on canal for 565 kilometers.

The original idea to construct a canal across Panama became an obsession almost immediately upon Europeans showing up in the Western Hemisphere and discovering the fact that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were separated by a very, very thin strip of land. In 1534, Charles V, the King of Spain, ordered a survey to figure out if a canal could be made. In 1698, Scotland had their Darien Scheme. A hundred years later Spain was back at it with a plan to build a canal. 150 years after that the British said they were going to actually do it … but quit before they even got started.

An overland route was cut across Panama in the mid 19th century, allowing ships to relatively quickly relay cargo from one side to the other, and the US would open the Panama Railroad in 1855 (which is still in use today for multimodal shipments).

But this simply wasn’t the canal that was really desired.

So in 1881 the French began digging.

But they couldn’t cut it.

Then in 1904 the US took over what the French began … and 10 years later — after 380 years of planning, obsessing, trying — there was finally a canal across Panama.

In just 11 hours a ship could cross from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and vice versa.

The opening of the Panama Canal immediately disrupted trade patterns, put legions of Patagonian sheep farmers out of business, and made Panama an instant global player. The canal was also a key driver of Panamanian independence, with the US paying off Colombia $25 million to relinquish its claim.

The locks of the Panama Canal are really the big show here. They are located on both sides of Gatun Lake, which was created by the damming of the Chagres River and Lake Alajuela. Ships are lifted 26 meters up to the height of the lake on one side and then lowered back down to sea level on the other. They are arranged as a series of three steps on each side. The ship pulls in, the doors are closed behind it, water is poured in raising it up to the level of the step, and then it moves on to the next one … and the inverse on the way back down.

Timelapse of the Miraflores locks in action:

The canal loses 52 million gallons of fresh water to the sea with each ship that passes, which has left Panama with a fresh water problem that has been exacerbated in recent years by rampant urbanization, more sophisticated farming methods, mining, and, many say, climate change.

These locks were one of the most impressive feats of engineering to ever be accomplished when they were first opened in 1914, but today they appear archaic, almost anachronistic — the ships are still pulled through the channel by ropes attached to silver locomotives, the locks are still just concrete doorways that open and close as they’ve always had. While the width of the locks have been widened and another lane was added, they are basically putting on the same show that they were over a century ago. The technology seems to have changed very little, and this is what really impressed me as I watched ships passing through the Miraflores locks. There was just no reason to upgrade any of it. There was something about this that I liked.

VERACRUZ, Panama- If you want to know what a culture is made of all you have to do is go out to a popular beach near its largest city on the weekend and look around.

You know the type of beach I’m talking about here — the type where all the locals pour in on Saturday blasting their music, grilling their food, setting their kids loose on aquatic rampages, kicking around soccer balls, and drinking their beer. These beaches are usually loud, crowded, hectic … Which is to say, not really the type of beach that tourists dare venture — the antithesis of what we think of when we say the word “paradise.”

Go out to one of these beaches and look around. Is it full of garbage — food wrappers, broken sandals, discarded plastic forks and plastic pop bottles? Are kids fortifying sand castles with empty beer cans? Are used maxi pads coming to get you in the surf? Or is it just sand, waves, and people having a good time?

This will tell you about everything you need to know about a culture.

Some urban beaches are essentially recreational landfills. Some are beautiful places full of life, laughing, and fun.

I was expecting the former type when I rode out to Veracruz …

… but I got the latter.

This place is nice, real nice. It’s little more than a stretch of sand at the mouth of the Panama Canal and a long strip of wooden beach bars. There are some trees, some big rocks that people sit on, some small islands in the near distance, and that’s about it.

Peace.

Beaches don’t need much … but they need to be clean. And this is all about the culture that uses them — do they throw their stuff away or do they just toss it on the beach? Cultures that care enough to throw their garbage away tend to care about other things … such as caring about making their country a good place to live and travel in.

San Juan has some of the best urban beaches in the world.

Havana has some of the worst.

Panama City is right up there at the top.

But it wasn’t always like this.

“It was very different when I first moved here five years ago,” a friend who is originally from Venezuela laughed when I told about my impression of the beach at Veracruz. “It used to be full of garbage like the other beaches you talked about. It was only a recent thing that they cleaned it.”

This is where the empty beer cans go.

It has been a recent worldwide phenomenon where the younger generation has had the importance of caring for the environment and the value of cleaning up after themselves drilled into them by schools and, I strongly believe, social media — nobody wants to take Instagram photos on beaches that second as trash heaps.

But there is something else at work here too. I suppose you could call it the new global ethics. When cultures collide value systems change, and the world’s cultures are currently being sloshed together and shot through the same funnel.

Cultures change. It’s not a bad thing.

Especially when they start cleaning the beach.

PANAMÁ CITY, Panama- I had to go back and look at my photos of Casco Viejo from 2008 because I was having difficulty trusting my memory.

16 years ago I remember Casco Viejo as a glorious expanse of falling apart 17th-century buildings. Many were abandoned, some had families in them making the most of living quarters that could better be described as ruins. The facades were often mere skeletons, the insides having crumbled long ago. This was a poor area, a place of rival street gangs — the kind of place that you’d be warned to take precautions before going. While there were a few buildings around the Plaza Herrera that had fresh paint jobs and restorated exteriors, there was very little in the way of tourism. I remember the for sale signs that were posted all over just about everything.

In those days Cosco Viejo was real, it was raw, and I couldn’t believe that it was being left the way that it was. It was a full-on colonial district that wasn’t yet Disney-fied into a tourist epicenter … like everything else was becoming at that point in the early 2000s. In an odd way, the place seemed like a gift — one of those little unexpected surprises that come to the traveler ever so often on long journeys.

But didn’t they know they could be banking off this?

Apparently, they did.

UNESCO claimed the place in 1997 …

… and would soon starting doing their UNESCO thing.

(Their UNESCO thing = kick out the local people, fix the buildings, bring in restaurants, bars, and hotels owned by rich people, sell overpriced goods and services to foreign tourists.)

Casco Viejo is now posh, polished, absolutely gorgeous … and way too expensive for most Panamanians — let alone backpackers — to go to. The place is now ground zero for tourists in Panama. If you don’t count the people working there, there’s not a local to be found anywhere — literally, the place is 100% foreign tourists. While the academics try to say that the gentrification here was “inclusive,” the view on the ground tells a very different story.

Cosco Viejo in 2008.

The same buildings today.

I went over to Cosco Viejo one evening and made the critical error of being hungry in a tourist zone. What started as an attempt to land a meal turned into an investigation into the ebbs and flows of gentrification. I went from restaurant to restaurant and oogled over the numbers on the menus: $35, $52, $48. There was no shame here, no shame at all — they seemed to just be charging whatever they wanted because they knew their clientele wouldn’t dare jump ship and head into the real city for a normal priced meal. It was a tourist trap of the finest sort …

I eventually called a truce and paid $15 for a hamburger … a legitimately good hamburger.

And that’s the thing here, when I wrote the “finest sort” descriptor above I didn’t choose my words carelessly — you seem to get something for what you pay for in Cosco Viejo … unlike in a tourist trap such as Tulum. I peaked through windows into truly well designed and ambiance-spewing restaurants and watched wealthy foreign people eating gorgeous looking steaks, artfully arranged platters of seafood, and Asian fusion that could hold its own in Manhattan.

Cosco Viejo in 2008.

The same building today.

While Cosco Viejo really isn’t the place for me, this doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate it. Sure, they had to give a bunch of people the boot to recreate it … but the only real alternative was probably to let the place fall to ruins …

The cashing in on Cosco Viejo probably saved it. Maybe in 100 years from now it will again be full of local families squatting the ruins of both the the 17th century and the globalized empire of the 21st … but the place will probably still be there …

I don’t know why this is important. There’s really no reason why old buildings should be preserved … other than the fact that we just like them.

There was something else about Casco Viejo that wasn’t there during my first visit. It was something rather askance that shook me with a jolt of surprise when I first saw it as I walked down one of the old colonial streets to the edge of the sea. It was a highway. A major highway that completely encircles the old town.

You see, Casco Viejo is built on a little nipple shaped peninsula that shoots out into the Pacific, which seemed to have presented a bit of an engineering problem for Martinelli’s Cinta Costera project, which saw the coastline of Panama City from Paitilla to El Chorrillo extended out into the sea via land reclamation and new highway built to relieve congestion, along with parks, etc … but then it hit the old town.

The Cinta Costera 3 viaduct encircling Casco Viejo.

What do you do when you’re building a highway and you come to a UNESCO-protected site? Do you cut to the west through a densely populated working class / poor area? Do you plow right through the colonial district? Or do you take a detour and construct a massive viaduct out into the sea which awkwardly flanks the contour of the old town? They chose the third option.

The effect was almost surreal. One minute you’re walking along narrow streets with elevated sidewalks beneath beautiful colonial buildings lost in thoughts of times long gone, gawking at Panama hats and expensive Greek restaurants, and then you make a turn, walk down an alley to the sea … and you’re suddenly assaulted by a super highway.

Cinta Costera 3 from Casco Viejo.

I can remember this place and its unimpeded views of the ocean. Casco Viejo seemed like a real port city then — one of the earliest places where ships would come in to the Americas. Now it’s cut off from the sea … and the world beyond, and the result is that this redeveloped old town conspicuously looks inward. There’s a little walk out by France Square and the Panama Canal monument that goes along the coastline, but other than that there’s very few hotels, restaurants, or bars that face out to the sea. Nearly the entire — potentially developable — waterfront area is now just ignored. Who wants to be sipping their wine and nibbling their cheese while watching cars roaring by in the distance?

While the Cinta Costera 3 project received international acclaim and engineering awards, the local supporters of Casco Viejo apparently weren’t too pleased about it — and the district’s UNESCO status was actually reviewed for potential revocation. But there was another side to the story. From a contributor to Rolf’s Vagablogging site:

To the locals, the Cinta Costera III had ‘ruined’ the historical heritage of Panama City’s most popular and important sites. To me, a visitor, Casco Antigua’s streets had become more inviting to the pedestrian. I enjoyed a safe passage, a vibrant connection to the public, the views, and a lovely evening stroll along the boulevard.

This is true. The traffic in Cosco Viejo is manageable and the walk through it’s streets is pleasant, but …

If you walk east from Plaza Herrera on Avenue A for a couple of blocks you will come to the boundary between the gentrified Casco Viejo and the old Casco Viejo. The dividing line is stark, as if it was drawn out via a truce between waring armies. On one side are luxurious amenities for rich foreigners, on the other side is the way things used to be here.

Walking into this area is like going back to a time pre-UNESCO, and it looked exactly the same as the entire district did during my visit 16 years ago. There were young, shirtless dudes drinking in the streets, old women hanging out on balconies, and kids running around everywhere. The buildings were in the active process of falling apart and many were literally being squatted. When you walk around here the locals look at you like who the fuck is this guy? and probably figure you just got lost on your way to drop a Benjamin on a meal from some restaurant that’s themed from somewhere on the other side of the world.

It was raw, it was real, it was what I remembered … it was the last stand of a people and community. UNESCO’s gonna get them too. Someday … probably soon.

I imagine the next time I return to Panama City I will be writing this same post for a second time.

What Casco Viejo looked like in 2008

Casco Viejo outside of the tourist area.

Chinese gate of Casco Viejo in 2008.

PANAMA CITY, Panama- As the results from the presidential election were being announced I was standing outside of a modest looking, single family house along a middle class track that weaves up the side of a hill in Panama City. It was the location of the Nicaraguan embassy, the hidehout of the most famous / most wanted man in the country: Ricardo Martinelli.

Previously sentenced to 10 years in prison for money laundering during the time that he was president (2009-2014), the supermarket magnate took refuge in the Nicaraguan embassy to avoid having to serve his sentence. From there, he began mounting a new presidential campaign to again take the reins of the country and, presumably, pardon himself.

However, the Supreme Court in Panama didn’t like the sounds of a convicted money launderer becoming president and earlier this year nullified his candidicy. At that time he was the leading candidate in the country by a significant margin, and this fact added to an extreme amount of social tension surrounding this election.

In February, it was announced that Jose Raul Mulino would take his place, and Martinelli’s popularity seamlessly transferred over. Mulino, who was Martinelli’s chief of security during his presidency, came out of nowhere and entered the race late — Panama’s courts actually didn’t even decide if he was a valid candidate until two days before the election. But all that didn’t matter. Last night, the people from Panama voted him into power in a landslide victory.

It’s my impression that it’s widely thought that a vote for Mulino would essentially be a vote for Martinelli, and a large portion of the people here believe all of their politicans are corrupt and just want the economy to go back to the way it was when he was in office …

There was a strange vibe in the streets of Panama City all day yesterday. Most of the bars and many other businesses were closed, there was very little traffic, even less people in the streets, as the city was rendered a very lonely place.

It didn’t seem like an election day. While there was an uptick in people showing support for their candidate of choice by flying flags on their cars or wearing t-shirts or hats, they were still far and few between. This election seemed to be less of a competition between ideas and cultures and more of a selection of the candidate they disliked the least … I walked all through the city and couldn’t detect much excitement or banter over it … and even though many restaurants had coverage of it on their televisions nobody seemed to be watching.

When the results were announced I thought there would be cars honking in the streets, people banging on pots and pans, cheers and jeers and celebrations. Instead, there was almost nothing. I asked some Uber drivers and other random people if they knew where crowds were gathering and they didn’t seem to know … or care enough to tell me.

It was around 9PM and Mulino had already given his victory speech. I figured I would go out to the Nicaraguan Embassy — which had kind of become an impromptu unofficial headquarters of Martinelli’s RM party — to see if anything was going on there. I imagined that supporters would be going out there to celebrate in proximity to the embattled former president that they ostensibly voted for. And when I got to the first police checkpoint this seemed to be the case — a couple of women decked out in RM gear and holding signs where walking up the sidewalk.

When we got to Martinelli’s hideout a small group of reporters and photographers were there hanging out, waiting for something to happen. They perked up when they saw the women and began firing shots. Every camera — including my own — was rolling as one of the women stepped up to the front of the embassy and began belting out thank yous to her politician of choice.

The assembled press stood ready to catch a glimpse of Martinelli if he was to look out and acknowledge his very vocal supporter. The media here has been camped out in front of the embassy for weeks just waiting for any sign of the former president. Sometimes they get a peak:

After yelling out every form of thank you that they could, the women soon left and another small group of supporters arrived. It was a big, bellowing guy who was fully decked out in RM gear with his two similarly dressed daughters. He performed for the media … and then noticed that I was a foreigner, announced that the international press was here, and walked over to me and continued the show …

Supporters continued trickling in … as well as those looking to get Instagram photos in front of the embassy. But at no point was there a crowd. There were no chants, no celebrations, not much of anything besides members of the political party and people that I assume Martinelli knew personally going in and out of the house for celebratory visits.

I stood there and watched. Some members of the press split. It was getting late … I walked up to the edge of the front yard, leaned over a fence, looked at the house, and just appreciated the absurdity of everything. A man who was the king of his world fell from grace and took refuge in another country’s embassy but was again propelled to prominence on a wave of distain that the people of Panama have for their previous two presidents.

Mulino won the election decisively. The other candidates conceded gracefully with the incumbent making a congratulatory call and saying that he would assist in a peaceful transition of power.

It was a rather anti-climatic way to end one of the most tumultuous elections in Panama’s history … no bullets, no civil war. Just a country that would rather be led by a convicted money launderer than by any of the other options. In other words, the new normal of global politics.

PANAMÁ CITY, Panama- You never know how lonely a city can be until they shut down the bars.

From noon on Saturday to noon on Monday, — the day before to the day after the presidential election — Panama is in the throes of prohibition. Stores can’t sell alcohol, bars can’t serve it, and people can’t drink in the street.

“If they catch you drinking it’s a $100 fine,” I was told.

Of course, there are ways around these restrictions. Bars outside the central areas of cities or in higher class establishments will just serve booze in disposable cups and either write it down on the bill as juice or require payment in cash. In one beach town near Panama City I was served an ice cold Corona in a styrofoam coffee cup. In a higher end restaurant where I was hanging with some local friends they wrote strawberry juice on the bill.

But, even still, for all intents and purposes the entire drinking apparatus here has basically been shut down — most bars didn’t even bother opening.

And Panama City is a very lonely place because of it.

https://x.com/vagabondjourney/status/1787121717149675958?s=46&t=Wyyu38DaUWUZyTBkIszlMw

I’m hanging out on Argentina Ave in the El Cangrejo district and there’s hardly anyone out on the streets, there’s hardly any traffic, and this entire area that’s usually one of the biggest party zones of the city is completely dead.

I spent a couple of hours walking up and down the strip, just looking for a crowd . The lack of people made me feel social — I wanted to find out what people were thinking about the election, the prohibition, and everything else … but without bars most people just stayed home.

I found a group of dudes drinking pop at a table in front of a bar that was running a $3 burger and fries promotion … I guess you have go to such measures to attract customers to a boozeless bar.

I sat down and ordered a nonalcoholic craft seltzer and a promo burger and listened to their conversation about the election as I typed out a blog post on my phone.

Besides us, there’s nobody around in the streets anywhere. Sometimes a group of skateboarding kids will roll by, taking advantage of the lack of cars. Once in a while the bored server would walk outside to check on me.

I’d like to order something more but how many nonalcoholic craft seltzers can you drink?

The bar serves a vital social function in this world …

… and for the traveler they are often imperative for diving deeper into a culture and making friends.

When I’m in a new place where I don’t know anyone I head for the most local looking, old man bar I can find, walk in, order something, and strike up a conversation with the bartender. When other people see you connecting with someone they know it removes your outsider spines a little … and often other people will start jumping into the conversation … and, before long, you’ve found what you’re looking for.

Without the bar there just isn’t that social space for strangers to interact with other strangers.

Molino won the election, as expected. There will be no riots. The bars will be back tomorrow at noon and life will go back to normal … for another five years.

PANAMA CITY, Panama- “What do you think will be the result of the election?” I asked a friend who works in economic development as we rode through the financial district of Panama City.

“Bullets,” he replied without hesitation.

I looked at him funny and he took the prompt and continued:

“Civil war. This will only end in civil war.”

Tomorrow the people of Panama will be going to the polls to vote for their president. There is a tense feeling that emits from people here when you ask them about it. Everyone has a reaction, but most say something to the effect of: I don’t like any of them but will vote for who I think is the least bad — in other words, the most popular take on politics in the world today.

The background

This is not a normal election in Panamá. This isn’t the usual three or four parties going against each other to see who can net the most support. While the election procedures are the same, the potential consequences are very different this time around.

“The political parties canceled an agreement to not prosecute each other for what they do while in office,” I was told by someone who is in the fray. “So the current government is doing everything they can to win again because they are afraid if they don’t they will be prosecuted.”

The gloves came off and coalitions fell apart in the battle between political parties here when supermarket magnate and former president Ricardo Martinelli was sentenced to ten years in prison for using public funds to buy a media company that he was given a majority stake in last year. Since then, he has been hiding out in the Nicaraguan embassy.

Two of his sons also spent time in prison in Guatemala and the US on money laundering charges and he was banned from entering the US on allegations that he accepted bribes while awarding government contracts.

However, this doesn’t seem to have impacted Martinelli’s popularity in Panamá, and he was the front-runner in this year’s election prior to the country’s Supreme Court nullifying his candidacy.

The candidate to take his place, entering the race hardly three months ago, was Jose Raul Mulino, Martinelli’s former chief of security. However, his candidacy was also challenged by the courts on the grounds that he didn’t go through the requisite primaries.

This was a hot issue because the polls indicated that Mulino had a 20 point lead. If the court was to annul his candidacy it would have been the second time in one election cycle that they kicked out the leading candidate. This may have been too much for the country to bear, and yesterday — literally two days before the election — it was decided that he could run, thus avoiding the lighting of the powder keg … for another day, at least.

The word is that the incumbent political party is scrambling to do whatever they can to win this election out of fear that they will be prosecuted — either legitimately or out of retaliation — for what they did during their time in office. Some have suggested that they may go as far as cheat or contest the results to achieve this goal.

“If Mulino doesn’t win there will be riots,” I was told.

The social divide

How could the political party of a convicted money launderer be the most popular in the country?

“It’s because when Martinelli was president he did things for the country,” my friend continued as we sped along a beautiful highway that flanks the coastline. “He made this land and those parks and built this road, he gave people better transportation, he standardized the taxis. He did things for the poor people.

“The poor don’t care about corruption, they only care about what the president can do for them.”

The word on the streets is that many people here seem to think that all of the candidates are corrupt, and Martinelli, while corrupt, at least did things for the people too.

“The last two presidents, they didn’t do anything and the economy is much worse now than during the time of Martinelli.”

The IMF is expecting Panamá’s economy to drop a full five percentage points year-on-year.

It’s only when people have more than what they need do they start voting for ideas — and caring about things like the Panamá papers. Until then, it’s all bread and circuses.

This is reflected in Panamá right now, as the poor and working classes seem to either be going for the incumbent PRD, a center-left party that was founded by General Omar Torrijos in 1979 or the center-right Realizing Goals (RM) party that was founded by Martinelli after splitting from the Democratic Change party (which he also founded) in 2021, while the educated middle classes tend to be going for Ricardo Lombana, who is running on an anti-corruption platform.

“The corruption is very bad here,” a bar owner on Argentina Ave. passionately declared. “They all just steal money.” She was educated, wealthier, and cared about ideas. She continued complaining about corruption for the next twenty minutes. She said she was voting independent.

The view from the streets

Honestly, I didn’t even know that there was going to be a presidential election on Sunday until an Uber driver mention it to me as I was riding around on Monday night. For a country embattled in what could become a very bitter election there is very little outward indication of it on the streets.

There are very few election signs, very few t-shirts with political slogans, very few people soapboxing. Before walking through San Miguel — a poorer area inland from Cosco Viejo — the day before yesterday I only saw one truck that had a politician’s decal on it, two trucks flying political party flags, one banner hanging in front of a shop, one guy walking through the street holding a candidate’s t-shirt out in front of him, and the work of an enterprising individual who had placed fliers under the wipers of parked cars on a street that I walked down.

But when I talk with most people, they seem to be mostly interested in just getting the election done and over with. They give warnings about the potential for protests or worse, and that seems to be a bigger concern for them than who actually wins.

This is something that has more or less become a standard in politics around the world. Every once in a while you will get an Obama or a Trump who actually has a passionate support base, but mostly people just vote for the candidate they don’t like the least.

The view from the camp

While making contacts and doing research for a completely unrelated — and rather benign — story for big media, I found myself hanging out recreationally with some members of ______’s camp. One guy was set to become a minister, a lady was set to become an ambassador, and another guy was on track to become the behind the scenes third in command.

What struck me as surreal — other than the fact that we were hanging out in TGI Fridays — was how absolutely, completely chill and unassuming they all were. They didn’t seem like the usual politicos — literally, they weren’t: Two of them were farmers, the other was a former girlfriend of __________. We talked about farming and one of the guys showed me a picture on his phone of the biggest pig I’ve ever scene and an unassuming shack on his farm that he was planning on turning into a place for tourists to visit.

Throughout my work at Forbes I’ve met many people high up in various governments around the world. They tend to be covered in this polished veneer that almost squeaks when they walk. That was not these people. But on Sunday they will more than likely become the masters of their own universe.

If that powder keg doesn’t explode first.

TERMINAL 4, JFK, NYC- They were sprawled out upon the cold, hard white tiled floor, awkwardly perched up against rectangular columns as they crouched over phones, they were curled up in the fetal position while trying to balance on a little embankment that stuck out from beneath the windows at the front of the hall. Some were twitching to get into a better position, others just gave up, allowed their heads to drop upon the stone cold floor … and endured. They all were miserable.

Why do airports need to look like refugee camps?

While airports sometimes house actually refugees — such as my Syrian friend Hasan was in Moscow — it was not this type that was splayed out all around as I walked through the arrivals hall of JFK Terminal 4 in search of an ATM. They were just normal travelers unfortunate enough to get delayed in such a dire place.

It’s always shocking to me how purposefully uncomfortable many airports are. Their interior designs often border on the sadistic — they’re as cold, hard, and jagged as they can be, preferring to have wide open halls full of nothing than to set up some benches and chairs so people could rest or maybe even sleep a little before their next flight. The design is the antithesis of character — it’s a transit zone alone, an over glorified hallway between here and there. Nothing to see here, nothing to dawdle over, nothing to experience … unless, that is, you get stuck here.

And this is a simple fact of travel: many people are going to get stuck — they are going to opt to just hang out and wait for their connecting / delayed / rebooked flight for 5 – 10 hours rather than get a hotel room. I’m among them, as I’m sure most of you are as well. So we splay our bodies out all over the floor, pile up our bags into impromptu beds, and hide in corners with our heads in our arms.

… the airport is probably the only place where it is socially acceptable to do this, and I’m not sure why.

The sweet spot of travel

I’m now sitting at my gate. The hyperactive thought patterns of preparing for travel, getting to the airport on time, and going through the security are starting to dissipate … and that inexplicable full body calm of starting a new journey is starting to overtake me. I can almost feel it radiate out from my solar plexus through my legs and arms and up through my head. I take a deep breath, exhale … and get ready to step into the great theater of “things around me.”

There is really nothing more stimulating than travel. Even the simplest things create oscillating waves of thought — the kid with cornrows astutely dribbling a basketball between his legs while he sits waiting for his flight, the old people in wheelchairs lined up in a row looking worried that the airline attendant forgot about them, the lady who can’t seem to decide what self-help book she needs the most … The narratives of those around you start spinning and you know that you get absorbed into that sweet spot of travel.

I smile. I really have nothing to do but walk around, look around, and talk with people. There’s really nothing I’d rather be doing.

Avianca Airlines

I can’t complain.

This is the new era of travel: you don’t have to talk to anyone anymore. If it wasn’t for the gate agent asking me when I was planning to return after my boarding pass triggered an alarm, I wouldn’t have talked with anyone from the airline at all.

There’s now self check-in AirBnBs, hotels, and hostel, and airlines are increasing following suite by streamlining everything to make check in clerks and gate agents redundant.

Everything in life will soon be the social equivalent of a vending machine.

The TSA agents that check your ID and boarding pass as you enter security, they will probably be gone soon — terminal 4 of JFK already has these new (albeit unused) facial recognition screens that I imagine will one day match you to your ID and boarding pass, adequately doing the job of the person sitting behind them.

I’ve already seen pilots of high-tech turnstiles at airline gates which allow you to board without a human checking your boarding pass … and some airports have already completely transitioned to these.

It’s not like the airlines provide much customer service these days anyway, serving the primary function of saying “tough shit” when something doesn’t go your way.

But those bastards screaming at you to take your iPad out of your bag and to take your shoes off, they’re probably there to stay. It just wouldn’t be flying if your privacy wasn’t violated and your dignity knocked down a peg or two.

The paradox of the tropics

There is only one word to describe my two hour layover in San Salvador: cold.

The paradox of hot climates is that the air conditioning is blasted everywhere, making them surprisingly cold places to travel. Airplanes, airports, shopping malls, cafes, restaurants are often freezing, making it a prudent practice to carry around a sweatshirt in otherwise 90-100 degree heat.

I was cold on the flight to San Salvador. I was cold in the airport. I was cold on the flight to Panama. And as I was standing before the agent at immigration I was cold to the verge of shivering.

But the guy kept asking me questions.

The agent was a little old and moved slow. After each response he’d move sloth-like over to the computer and enter in my responses. He’d then slowly rotate back towards me, ask another question, and would repeat the process. He was just doing his job but as he did this over and over again all I could think about was stepping outside of the airport and into that hot tropical sun …

Into the sun

Once stepping outside I held out my arms and basked for a second in the hot sun, feeling my body become supple and warm again. There is nothing like stepping outside of the airport after traveling from a temperate climate to the tropics. The instant rush, the energy from the heat, is the surest indication — for people from the north, at least — that you have arrived … that you’re somewhere very different than where you’re from.

Is there any better feeling than that?

ASTORIA, NYC- As a kid, I’ve always had a fascination with Panama. I would spend countless hours gazing at the National Geographic maps that I had stapled all over my walls and almost invariably that squiggly little country linking North and South America would grab my attention.

The place looked like a bridge to me — a meandering, noodley sort of land bridge connecting continents while dividing oceans. I thought about the peoples who would traverse this corridor as well as something that I would later find out was called the Great American Biotic Interchange, where masses of wildlife from the north and south would join together on their respective evolutionary journeys.

When I began going to the places that I would gaze at on those maps in 1999, high on my list was Panama. However, it wasn’t until 2008 — when I was nine years into my travels — that I’d finally go there. And it would be another 16 years before I would return.

I just read through some of my blog posts from Panama in 2008 and laughed — I had no idea then that hardly eight months later I would have gotten together with the woman who would become my wife and be expecting our first child.

There was nothing on my path indicating that I would go in this direction, and those weeks that I was in Panama could be called some of the last days of my youth. I would soon leave Central America and go to Eastern Europe, where I would attempt to ride a bicycle from Prague to Istanbul before getting an email from Hannah inviting me to join her in Brooklyn, where we would actually complete our bachelor degrees.

I just read through some of my blog posts from Panama in 2008 and laughed — I was so young then, so clueless; and my life was so gloriously pointless. Nobody relied on me and I didn’t rely on anyone else. I was wonderfully irrelevant. I was 27 years old — not quite an adolescent, not quite a man — and my only care in the world was working as little as possible and clenching every penny so that I could travel for just more day … just one more day ...

I hope that someday I come back and read these posts that I’m writing today and again find myself clueless and naive. That’s probably the best indicator that you’re learning, progressing, and building something in life. The worst thing in the world would probably be to look back on who you were 16 years ago and think you were pretty cool.

The plan for Panama

What initially caught my attention about Panama was a collection of articles that came out over the past couple of years about how the Panama Canal is facing operational challenges due to an unusual lack of rainwater. Almost universally, the reporters and the researchers they interviewed attributed this to human created climate change. The Panama Canal is an iconic thoroughfare of commerce and travel, and I figure it would be a good place to begin my new project. Plus, as I mentioned above, I’ve always had a thing for the country … and this gives me an excuse to go there.

But I will probably also have some time to hang out a little, travel around, and partake in that particular brand of do-nothing that you can only do when strolling around a new place all by yourself without any semblance of plan or agenda.

I would kind of like to climb up one of those mountains where I can look out at both oceans at the same time.

I may go to Boquete.

Or I may just string together a few random little dots on the map that nobody ever goes to.

I’ll probably end up just wandering around Panama a little. It’s not like I will have any luggage weighing me down.

ASTORIA, NYC- I’m attracted to clusterfucks. Or at least that’s my takeaway from reviewing the types of projects that I’ve been drawn to over the years.

And there is perhaps no bigger clusterfuck in the world right now than the debate over climate change.

(Well, maybe Israel / Palestine, but you have to be a madman to touch that one…)

On the one hand there’s a massive contingent that says humans are responsible for the weather and that we’re rapidly accelerating on the path of boiling ourselves in our own tank. They put up giant clocks counting down the time to doomsday, glue themselves to highways, and fling soup onto priceless paintings. The tides of academia, government, and creepy post-corporate entities like the WEF are now flowing in their direction, as cities are restricting movement between their own districts, countries are banning domestic flights, farms are being shut down, cows are being engineered to fart less, and bugs are what’s for dinner.

On the other hand, there’s a much smaller, much less connected movement that says this is all bullshit, that the data is being rigged, and that the earth naturally has periods of accelerated climatic fluctuations that we don’t fully understand.

As for me, I have no idea (yet) … but I imagine the truth — as usual — is somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn’t think that we could go through a century of mass global industrialization, where we threw up cascading seas of smokestacks and built massive highways chock full of exhaust spewing cars all over the world, and have it not have any impact.

But, at the same time, the story of the earth is the story of a changing climate. Even within the insanely short time that anatomically modern humans have been around, lush rainforests have dried up and became desert, glaciers melted away to nothing, and sea levels drastically rose to swallow up wide swaths of land — and this was all while we were playing grab ass in caves and chasing around herds of caribou.

From New York Nature:

Global warming accelerated 10,000 years ago, triggering rapid changes in plant and animal life. It’s possible Paleoindians witnessed the changeover from spruce to pine forest in a single lifetime. As pines quickly colonized the region, tundra retreated northward, and with it, the animals that grazed on it. Some of the mammals that thrived at the edge of the ice, caribou and elk among them, shifted northward with their habitats, but many others died out in what is termed as the “Great Wave of Extinctions.”

If we don’t blame the native Americans for climate change ten thousand years ago then why do we blame us now?

However, I know it’s more nuanced than this … and many will go out of their way to claim that it is different this time.

Iactually began this project around six months ago when I started shooting a documentary feature that looked into the various initiatives to turn coastal ecosystem all the way down the east coast of the US into colossal industrial power plants. I traveled from Maine to Delaware, and what I found didn’t make much sense: massive government subsidies being paid to oil and gas companies to build expensive “green” energy sources that don’t last very long, don’t work very well, and need to be backed up by brand new gas-fired power plants.

So much about this doesn’t make any sense … and this is my primary interest here — climate change is really just a segue. Globalization is entering into its third phase, and our cultures, economic systems, and governments seem to be on the brink of being transformed into something very different than they were in the previous century.

My interest is in such big global changes. (That’s my elevator pitch anyway.)

At root, you travel the world to find out what’s going on — to find out what way the winds are blowing by sticking out a hand and feeling them. You travel to observe the small movements of thought and politics that may eventually gain traction and challenge our existing paradigms. You go out there, ask some questions, and try to figure out what’s going on for yourself. It’s clear that our conventional media, government, and educational institutions aren’t going to do it for you.

I’m simply curious about what’s going on … and a reason to travel, check out some interesting things, and talk to some fascinating people is always welcomed.

Sometimes the project is just an excuse to move.

ASTORIA, NYC- When I saw my car being towed away I knew it was over. But I wasn’t yet ready to admit it.

For two weeks I searched manically for a new car (knowing full well that I didn’t have enough money to buy one). While I feel that the insurance company gave us fair compensation — $10,000 for a car we spent $12,000 on nine years ago — it simply wasn’t enough in a market whose prices have been enormously elevated since the pandemic. We went around to a few car dealerships but the writing was on the wall: it’s over.

My film company, that is.

To make films you need to be able to haul around a lot of gear. Shoots done with just one camera or a phone look like shoots that were done with just one camera or a phone. If you want it to look good, you have to be able to control and shape the light … you’re going to want a couple nice cinema cams … the list goes on until you have an entire vehicle stuffed with gear.

Before my car was totaled I was at a crossroads with Real Life Cinema anyway. I had some good clients, I had some good projects, I got paid well for what I did … but the expenses needed to run a company like this kept me lingering in a perpetual state of hardly breaking even. I knew that I was going to have to either double down or shut it down.

I could again move into a studio, start some new shows, get some new clients, and blast out the content. I could hire an editor or two and free myself to just run the business and manage the shoots. I could …

Doubling down would have cost low five figures.

And I knew down deep that I couldn’t pull this off.

The fact that I would also need a new car was just the proverbial straw …

The nail in the coffin of my film company endeavor was finally pounded in a couple of weeks ago at a party that was thrown by a film director in the city that I work for sometimes. The relevant part of our conversation went as follows:

Me: “How are those new films coming?”

Him: “I can’t find anyone to buy shit.”

This guy is at the top of his profession. His documentaries have won Emmys and have been short-listed for Oscars. He owns a giant building in a trendy area of Manhattan that’s six floors of film production. If you watch a Hollywood movie this weekend there’s a good chance that his company did the post-production for it. While I suspect that he makes documentaries just for fun he still wants to get paid.

And nobody is buying.

I went into a quiet corner of the room as the party raged on, sipped my drink, and harbored that particular sinking feeling when you know it’s time to move on.

“Man, if this guy can’t sell his films then what do I think I’m doing?”

So I began the process of deescalation — selling off some gear, renting out cameras that I don’t need everyday, canceling various film-related subscription services, and basically trying to get whatever I can for whatever I can part with.

One of the main reasons why we came to New York City was so that I could try my hand at running a small film company. Like my ambitions, my collection of film gear had grown out of a backpack and I was having difficulty transporting all of it from place to place around the world. The regular moves between continents was also making it difficult to concentrate my efforts and do more involved projects that require being in a place for an extended period of time. I was also curious what would happen if I settled down in a place for a while and gave filmmaking a real go.

Five years later my report card reads somewhere between a B- and a C.

I did do it. I’ve worked on some big films, helped start and continue to do a national weekly cable talk show that’s nearing its 150th episode, did a bunch of smaller jobs for various media outlets and businesses, shot some of the best footage of a historic event, and finished a couple of my own passion projects.

But I didn’t hit it out of the park.

And I’m still left with a few lingering ‘what ifs.’

Sometimes I look out of my window at the street below at all the cars parked and double parked and honking, and I smile …

Because I don’t have to do that shit anymore.

Likewise, with each piece of gear that I sell I feel a sense of relief.

Because I’m getting closer to the point where I can shut down NYC.

Real Life Cinema is really the only thing holding us here.

ASTORIA, NYC- Searching for flights has never been a very sexy affair. But today it’s kind of like trying to make a genuine friend in a Fez bazaar. In other words, a mine field of confidence tricks, scams, and entities who will try just about anything to separate you from your money.

It’s always a fun game to look at flight prices as they are listed on flight aggregator sites like Skyscanner and then look at what you actually end up paying. By fun, I mean effing sucks.

All too often, the flight prices that you’re shown are little more than feeder rates. The airline doesn’t actually expect you to buy these tickets for the price shown, the low rates merely serve the function of getting you in through the door and onto the booking page …

… where the actual price of the flight begins to reveal itself.

Once there, you will almost inevitably find multiple higher priced booking tiers for you to choose from with threats that if you actually purchase the cheap ticket that you came to buy you will suffer the consequences:

Not being able to travel with any luggage.

Not being able to select your seat.

Having to board the flight last.

Potentially losing the money you spent on the ticket if you don’t buy insurance.

And sometimes not even being permitted to check in at the airport in person.

If you actually want to be treated like anything more than a hunk of biological freight, you have to either upgrade to a more costly pricing tier or add on another $35-$65 per leg fee for a carry on bag, a $60-$80 per leg fee for checked bags, a fee to choose your seat, a fee for travel insurance, another fee for cancelation insurance, and sometimes even a $30 or so dollar customer service fee in case something goes wrong and you need to call the booking agent.

In point, no airline expects anyone to be so brash as to buy a ticket for the price they advertise on aggregator sites. And if anyone does, the airline has gate agents who will try to snipe them as they board and slap on a massive gate check fee if any part of their personal bag peaks outside of the metal rack.

The takeaway here is that airlines no longer make money from selling flights. They make money from selling credit cards, insurance, baggage, seat selections, and customer service. The next time you buy a flight, look at the receipt as to how the expenses break down: the actual ticket fare probably won’t even come close to half of the total price.

When I first began traveling the peak of backpacker cool was to travel long-term with just a carry-on.

Today, the biggest travel hack is to be able to travel with nothing.

And that’s basically what I’m doing on my trip to Panama in a week.

I’m calling the airlines on their bluff and showing up with just a small sling bag.

I’m not sure if this is going to work out. The bag fully complies with the airline’s regulations, so I’m not concerned about that, but I am wondering if I’m going to be able to carry all the stuff that I need. But I did a dry run:

iPad, iPhone, a pair of shorts, three t-shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, a toothbrush, toothpaste, charger cables … and it all fit, so I said fuck it and bought just a flight with nothing extra added.

If this works out then I know I can travel all around for relatively cheap. I’m saving $150 on just this trip alone. Added up over a course of a year, that’s a savings that could be measured in four figures.

But this really makes me think of the old days of air travel … where the price that you were shown was the price that you paid … where you could travel comfortably with a personal item, a carry on, and a checked bag all for free… where …

The thing about the good ol’ days is that you can never recognize them while they’re happening.

ASTORIA, NYC- I’m going to stretch my legs a little at the end of this month. The film about the old explorers crossing the Atlantic in a hydrogen balloon got axed and I’m questioning whether I want will be able to continue my off-shore wind film …

… My car was totaled at the end of last year and I decided not to get another one. It’s not really feasible to do film projects in the US without a car.

But as every traveler knows, each dead end just leads to new roads.

When I watched my smashed up car getting towed away I knew my projects in the US were DOA — and more than likely my days here were numbered.

And I didn’t feel too sad about it.

Not. At. All.

I’m in the mood for something a little lighter, a little faster — a little closer to my established wheelhouse. While I’m ready to leave NYC and move on to somewhere else, the time for that isn’t right now — my wife and kid want to finish out the school year.

But my wife is in the same place as me, and Rivka has a taste for adventure. In other words, we’re (almost) ready to go.

To Mexico, perhaps.

Or maybe Argentina.

I’m touting for Paraguay.

Whatever the case, we very well may be looking at our last summer in NYC.

In the meantime, I’m back to doing what I originally intended to do while here: use the city as a base of operations to travel through the Western Hemisphere.

So here are the options:

Guyana- Because I’ve ever been there before and it’s currently dirt cheap to fly there from NYC on American — $350 RT, direct both ways. I came close to just clicking the buy button on this but then thought about it for a moment … and then I discovered that the cheapest, shithole of a hotel room in Georgetown appears to be going for $70 a night, that you have to fly everywhere in little prop planes which cost $200+ a pop, and then when you land you probably have to pay good $$$ for people to take you around, house you, feed you … While I’d like to go there, it would probably be a better option to wait until I had a reason for it — a project, assignment, etc.

Medellin- Why? Because I could get there for $300 RT and I’ve heard it’s a cool place to pass some days. While I’ve traveled around Colombia before I’ve never been to Medellin. Plus Andy is around Colombia somewhere.

Puerto Rico- Because I like it there and if you search at the right time you can get an RT from NYC for $150.

Guatemala- Because it used to be one of my old stomping grounds and I haven’t been there for over a decade. I’d also like another go at the country when I’m not ass-clenching every penny.

Panama- Just say fuck it and start the next big project.

I really had two options in front of me: to travel for no reason or to travel for a reason. These are probably the two main modes of travel. Either you’re going out to frolic with serendipity and moving with the winds or you’re going out with a specific objective that you aim to accomplish. While I do enjoy both forms of travel and understand the value of do-nothing, I’m usually going to choose do-something if it’s a viable option.

I figure I may as well just get started with it. As with most big projects, in the beginning you’re just tossing out some lines to see what bites. I’m not sure where this is going to go, but if it hits things are going to get a little fun around here.

ASTORIA, NYC- I know of few things more exhilarating than starting a new project. The feeling is a mix of excitement — you think of all the places that you will go, the people that you will meet, and things that you will do …
And the fear.

You have fear not because you’re scared of something happening to you — any traveler knows that can happen anywhere at anytime — but because you know the investment of life that each project requires.

The lifeline of each project isn’t something that’s measured in days or months, but years. Each project represents a relatively large chunk of your existence, and you only get to do a finite number in any one lifetime.

To date, I’ve only ever done two big projects: ghost cities and New Silk Road. Each required years of travel, writing, editing, promoting, presenting … Years and years of life that are manifested in books, articles, blog posts, films, and lectures.

Your life is what you put your time into.

So wisely selecting your projects is paramount in this profession. If you choose well you get book deals and film funding, invitations to write for big media and speaking engagements. If you choose poorly you end up with nothing …

… but a series of blog posts.

But this is actually a decision that I often don’t put much thought into. I let the projects come to me.

Ghost cities happened when I saw a really poorly researched Al Jazeera report about Ordos Kangbashi. I knew of China’s ghost cities first hand when I accidentally ended up in them on two occasions while traveling as a university student years before. I knew there was more to the story, and when I read that article I was consumed by that nagging little impulse that said go.

The New Silk Road project began when I was at a trade fair in Xiamen in 2012. I saw an exhibit from the province of Jiangsu about a proposed new rail corridor that would stretch from Lianyungang to Rotterdam called the Second Eurasian Land Bridge. This was before Xi announced the Belt and Road and nobody was talking about New Silk Roads or anything like that, but somehow I just knew that I was going to follow it.

If you get too analytical about selecting a project you will be prone to select them for their success or profit potential rather than if you have the required amount of passion to actually carry it out … which inevitably ends in a quick burn out.

I know this because I’ve done it. The “Books” folder on my laptop is chock full of the ruins of DOA book projects — books that I thought would be good ideas that just didn’t have the intrigue needed to see through to the end.

A project is a masochistic proposition. You have to love the one holding the whip.

And you just have to wait for the projects to call to you. It could be a news report or a video or a conversation and I will just be like, “Oh yeah. That’s it.”

You just know it when you know it.

For the past five years I’ve been around NYC, Mexico, the Caribbean … just waiting for it … just waiting for the next big project to come to me.

For a moment I thought it was going to be the Covid nonsense, but that just made me want to vomit. You can’t spend years on a topic that makes you sick [figuratively]…

You also can’t spend years on a project just because you think it’s important …

It has to be something fascinating, something that’s relevant, something that grabs you by the cojones and doesn’t let go. It has to be all consuming.

Otherwise the Project will destroy you.

It will leave you ragged by the roadside begging for mercy as life passes you by.

But it happened the other day. I randomly had an article about something related to the Panama Canal pop up in front of me …

… and I got that feeling.

And I knew what it was.

ROCHESTER, New York- If you didn’t know where the sun was, you wouldn’t have known where the sun was.

This basically sums up what Solar Eclipse 2024 was like for people in Western New York.

The elusiveness of our nearest star wasn’t because it was covered up by the moon crossing in front of it as perfectly as a quarter landing inside of the red dot in that old carnival game but because of the dense cloud cover that was built up in front of it.

My father actually had to work out where the sun was as we stood out in his yard looking up at the sky. He pointed to the east and proclaimed that the sun rose over there. Then he pointed to the west and proclaimed that that was where it set. Then he aimed his finger somewhere in the middle and said, “That is where it should be about now.”

I would like to say that there was a slight illumination behind that thick wall of aerial diffusion but I could have just been kidding myself.

It was all clouds everywhere, and these were not the friendly type of fluffy clouds that politely move aside and give way to the sun every once in a while. No, these were those big thick muthas that cover the entire sky like a fat bouncer blocking the door of an exclusive club.

As I morbidly predicted earlier, going to Western New York to observe this natural phenomenon that only happens every five to ten generations would be a bust:

But as I thought about all the people going there, kind of marveling in the temporary relevance of the region that I grew up in, I suddenly burst out laughing. All of these motherfuckers are going to go all the way to Western New York to watch a once in a generation event and there’s a really good chance it’s going to be cloudy. I do not have any advanced knowledge of meteorology or have even checked a weather report but I grew up in this region and I know that it’s cloudy just about every day this time of year.

For weeks, the local media in Western New York was abuzz about the hundreds of thousands of people who were expected to travel there for the solar eclipse — invading hoards who would gobble up all the hotel rooms, pack the restaurants, and clog the highways. A special task force of 15 state agencies had been planning for this event for a year and a half. Day after day, the public was ceaselessly warned, riled up, and put on notice about anything and everything related to solar eclipses.

And then …

Nothing.

Nobody showed up.

I first got the impression that maybe things weren’t really going to be the way they said they would be when I drove from NYC to northeastern Ohio the day before completely unimpeded by traffic. This part of Ohio was also in the path of totality and was slated to receive an influx of visitors. Then I drove from Ohio to Rochester — right through the heart of what was supposed to have been packed highways — and there was hardly anyone else on the road.

So much for 71 sold out football games getting out at once.

It turns out that the modern solar eclipse traveler is wiser than local media wanted to let on, and most of them were competent enough to read a weather report and realize that if they continued on their course to Rochester they wouldn’t be able to see shit. Or perhaps they just came to their senses and were like, “Are we really traveling to a place that has 200 cloudy days a year to watch a cosmic event that requires clear skies?”

The weather reports also said other locations along the path of totality would have clear viewing, such as Vermont and northern Maine, so that’s where the crowds went instead, unceremoniously ditching Western New York.

The one event that put Buffalo and Rochester on everyone’s map for the first time in generations was usurped by the region’s infamously horrible weather.

Imagine that.

But the local media didn’t give up the ruse, and local restaurants ending up stocked with extra food and had all hands on deck to serve the un-materialized masses.

It was disappointing.

But it was the kind of disappointing that Western New Yorkers are well used to.

I really appreciate that people still care about solar eclipses. I was actually surprised when I found out that traveling to see them was a thing. While we could all have just stayed at home and watched the absolute best shots of the eclipse in real time being beamed to our various screens, for some reason we still feel the need to be there, to feel there, to experience there.

There is something ancient about our fixation with solar eclipses. They’re just something that humans have always gotten excited / amazed / freaked out about.

5,000 years ago some human etched a rendering of a solar eclipse on a stone in what is today Ireland.

In 1302 BC, an eclipse over China cause the emperor to eat vegetarian food and do rituals to bring back the sun.

On May 28, 585 BC, a solar eclipse ended a war between Lydia and Media in Greece because it equally freaked out both armies. In ancient Greece, solar eclipses were interpreted to be communications from the gods, and apparently they felt the gods wanted them to stop killing each other.

It is said that a solar eclipse appeared during the crucification of Jesus.

It is also said that a solar eclipse happened just before the birth of Mohammed. However, according to the Hadiths, Mohammed didn’t think too much of this, stating that “the sun and the moon do not suffer eclipse for any one’s death or life.”

On August 2, 1133, a solar eclipse in England led many to believe that it portended that the France-bound military campaign by King Henry I would fail. The king died and England descended into civil war.

While it was cloudy and visibility was just about 0% we did not pack in our eclipse party. My Chinese sister brought over her boyfriend for the first time to meet my family and my wife and younger daughter were there. We gathered around a picnic table that was set up in the middle of the yard, ate chicken wings and hot dogs, and threw around a football.

We put on our solar eclipse viewing glasses for no real reason and laughed about how we couldn’t see anything out of them. We joked about the media hype and the government warnings and anyone foolish enough to travel there for this (i.e. me). We took bets on where the sun was in the sky. We jested about how if we had stayed in NYC we could have viewed 100% of a 90% eclipse rather than 0% of a 100% one.

And then it got dark. Fast. The birds stopped chirping. We got quiet. The joking and the mocking ceased. There was this tingly, eerie feeling that permeated everything as we realized that we were experiencing something … something celestial … something raw and real that had gave no qualms about our lives and deaths … something that would only happen here once in our lifetime …

The next total eclipse that will happen in Rochester, New York won’t be until 2,144. We will all be dead by then.

What’s the chances of a total solar eclipse happening in the place where you grew up during your lifetime? It’s slim. So slim that it was worth the trip back, to check in with my family, to experience something that’s ultimately meaningless beyond its rarity. Although we couldn’t view anything of the eclipse, we were there for it, altogether. And that’s what really matters.

For three minutes and 38 seconds the moon was completely in front of the sun and we stood there motionless, silent in the dark. Then it quickly got light again, the birds came back, and we returned to our football, our chicken wings, and our self-disparaging jokes — life, as usual.

Everyone in Rochester NY trying to see the eclipse through a wall of clouds pic.twitter.com/dblnredYRQ

— Patrick Cicchetti (@PatInvesting) April 8, 2024

ASTORIA, NYC- “You’re from Buffalo?” some guy in the gym asked with excitement one day a few months ago. I’m not sure if it was my Bills hat or my Bills shirt that gave me away.

“Yes, why? Are you from there too?”

“No,” he replied, “but I’m going there soon.”

“For what?” I asked with a laugh. “Do you go to school there?”

That was the only reason why I could imagine someone who wasn’t from Western New York going there.

He just shook his head as his eyes opened wide and began sparkling. “Don’t you know? There’s going to be a solar eclipse!”

“Oh,” I responded, clearly not understanding the significance.

He then told me that he travels all over the world to watch them.

“Really? Why?”

“Because they are really beautiful.”

Cool, I thought to myself. At that time I thought this dude was some kind of an oddball eclipse tourist.

It didn’t really sink in as to how big this would be until multiple people from my acquaintance tree declared that they were also going. Apparently, this is a thing.

Hundreds of thousands of people will be descending upon the place where I’m from to observe the first total solar eclipse to happen there in 400 or so years. The media is calling for traffic jams on the scale of “20 or 30 Super Bowls.” Or 71 sold out football games ending at once.

During the last total eclipse to hit the US in 2017, over five million people traveled to see it, and this year there’s expected to be even more.

This is the first total solar eclipse to cross New York in 99 years and for the past year and a half the state has been planning for the influx of visitors traveling there to watch it. The hotels are packed, the cheapest room you can get in Rochester is currently $573. Local colleges are charging people $80 a car just to park there to watch the eclipse.

I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about traveling for the eclipse when I first heard about it but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to be there. Places only get a total eclipse once very four centuries. I suppose I should appreciate that one is happening where I come from within my lifetime … and I should probably be there, at the very least, on principle.

So we will be joining this hoard. It works out that Petra needs to go back to her boarding school in Ohio this weekend, so we figured that we’d also stop by my parent’s house in Rochester on the way back. Our entire route of travel both to Ohio and then to Rochester is going to be within the span of traffic heading to places to watch the eclipse on the day that it’s going to be the most heavy.

This could perhaps be the dumbest travel plan ever.

But as I thought about all the people going there, kind of marveling in the temporary relevance of the region that I grew up in, I suddenly burst out laughing. All of these motherfuckers are going to go all the way to Western New York to watch a once in a generation event and there’s a really good chance it’s going to be cloudy. I do not have any advanced knowledge of meteorology or have even checked a weather report but I grew up in this region and I know that it’s cloudy just about every day this time of year.

For the first time in 400 years my hometown is going to be important enough to travel to and there’s a good chance it’s going to be a total bust.

The humor in this is perhaps something that only people from Western New York can appreciate.

ASTORIA, NYC- Today is April Fool’s Day, 2024 — my blogging birthday. It is also the 20^th anniversary of when I first began this blog.

For 20 years I’ve had this blog as a place where I could record my observations, experiences, and thoughts; a place where I could effectively chronicled my travels, career, and life; a place where I could document the world as it changed around me. This blog was a constant travel companion that I could hang with during long layovers in airports, lonely nights in remote hotels, and when sitting back in a riverside cafe with a cold beer on a sunny day. 

I’ve been writing this blog for nearly half the time that I’ve been alive. 

I’m going to sit here and ruminate on that for a moment …

…

I can still remember my first blog post. It was probably the most unremarkable start to any venture that has lasted for two decades ever. I was drunk in Kyoto and just wrote some nonsensical sentence. But the endorphin rush that I received from pushing that publish button was something I will never forget. 

It was the same little rush that I still feel to this day every time I push publish, 3,700 times later. 

20 years.

3,700 posts.

About 145 countries. 

I don’t know what I was thinking when I first started a blog. Although I do remember being embarrassed about it. Back then, blogging was akin to an online diary — nobody was doing it to make money, there were no pro bloggers, and it definitely was not a respectable form of writing. It was something for teenage dorks, old people, and soccer moms. 

But I secretly enjoyed it.

I loved the thought that I could sit down, write something, and the push a button that would send it out in to the world for other people to read, share, and discuss. 

I immediately sensed the power of the medium but I wasn’t yet in a position to know how to harness it … and the world wasn’t in a position to accept it even if I was. 

My initial justification for blogging — the story that I told myself — was that it was something that I was doing to let my parents know what I was doing while traveling.

For the five years that I had been traveling before blogging my parents were kind of confused about how I was spending my young adulthood. They thought that I was just some dude going on a lot of vacations, Peter-Panning my life away.

So I would blog so they would understand that I was traveling to understand culture, gain experience, and build knowledge that could someday bolster my prospects and maybe even lead to a career. 

I don’t believe I ever really believed that line of bull … but somehow that’s exactly what happened. 

With Andy Graham in Prague

It wasn’t until I found the blog of Andy Graham that I fully realized the potential that blogging could have. This guy was traveling perpetually around the world living off of a blog. I was like, “So I can travel, write for myself, and make money too?” It sounded too good, and I stoped viewing blogging as a bridge to something else and more as a medium to invest my time into in and of itself. (Which oddly turned it into a bridge to something else). 

I dove in deep. Real deep. 

For the next nine years I blogged obsessively, I lived cheap, I barely made enough money to get by, but somehow I was able to keep going. I treated blogging like a real job and poured 60 hours a week into it. 

Then one day in the autumn of 2014 it all paid off. Out of nowhere I received an invitation to write a book. In the process of doing that I was offered a freelance position at the South China Morning Post which segued into a series at Reuters. After the book was published, Forbes asked me to do an unpaid webinar for them. For some reason I agreed. Soon after that webinar the person who arranged it received a promotion to editor and invited me to come write for her.

And that began three years of the best job in journalism that I could imagine: I traveled all around Asia and wrote original features about topics that I found interesting which, more often than not, were published on the homepage of a major publication. 

I would eventually go on to write for other big or respectable publications: The Guardian, The Diplomat, Bloomberg … 

I guess something really came of blogging. 

Imagine that. 

At this point, VagabondJourney.com may be the longest running travel blog on the planet. It’s not common for someone to do something for 20 years, especially not blogging. 

The highlights

Hitchhiking the 88 temple pilgrimage on Shikoku Island of Japan. I started out walking like a pilgrim but then decided to up the pace by sticking out my thumb. 

I went to the Bylakuppe Tibetan refugee camp in India and did a story called Seekers Of Refuge In A Land Of No Return.

I rode a bicycle through Eastern Europe.

I traveled out to the east of Turkey and did one of the first stories on Gobekli Tepe. This place was one of the first, if not the first, location where humans began experimenting with the sedentary lifestyle and agriculture — the beginning of the end for the nomad. Read more of a narrative blog post about it here.

I got married.

I had a kid.

I went on an ill-fated bicycle journey in Iceland. (On a pink mountain bike called the Ice Fox no less).

I went on a couple of fishing trips for tarpon in the jungle of Guatemala with local fishermen who used traditional gear and methods (I.e. dugout canoes and plastic pop bottles). 

I spent a couple of years traveling around China documenting the ghost cities and the destruction of historic communities.

I documented a 2.5 million person forced relocation in Guizhou province.

I went out to Gansu province and discovered how they were moving hundreds of mountains to build a new city.

I feel in love with Kazakhstan. 

I covered the story of a guy who got stuck in Moscow Sheremetyevo airport for eight months. 

I spent years traveling up and down the New Silk Road.

I went out to a new city that was being built in the desert of Oman.

I returned to New York City and started a film company. 

When I think about my life work I always thought it would be manifested by a stack of books and maybe some films, but now I’m starting to understand that it very well may be this blog. 

Not sure how I feel about that. 

But what I do know is that blogging has made me a lot of friends along the way. There’s a core of readers here who have been around for the long haul — for 10, 15, some for almost the full 20 years. Some I’ve met, most I haven’t, but they all have watched me grow up. These friends have read my autobiographical musings for years and probably know me better than people that I see regularly IRL.

How many writers can say that?

And I thank you for it.

And this is really what is unique about blogging. There has never been a medium which allows people to follow a story to the same degree that blogging does. It’s something that big media has never touched and the newsletters, zines, and small publications of the past could never really hit. It’s something that even social media fails at. The inside look, the daily experience, the behind the scenes story is what a certain segment of people find interesting, appalling, captivating — at least I do — and I’ve engaged in a two-decade-long love affair with the ideal medium for sharing this type of story. 

That was the power that I felt when I first pushed that publish button long ago in 2004.

ASTORIA, NYC- I never imagined a time when my biggest problem would be the result of a very good decision. No, life just doesn’t usually work this way. Or does it?

At the age of 16 when I came to the realization that what I wanted to do with my life was to travel the world, I would occasionally feel a significant amount of apprehension about the prospect of getting stuck somewhere. If looking at where I came from — a small village full of adults that seemed stuck and miserable — I suppose my apprehension was warranted. I would sometimes just lay in bed looking at the National Geographic maps that I had stapled all over my walls asking myself the following questions:

What if I find myself in a place that I can’t leave?

What if I get wrapped up in obligations — family, work — and can’t just go wherever I want?

What if I don’t have the resources to move on?

I ran these questions over and over in my head for years and devised well-developed strategies for each of them.

My entire life plan was predicated upon not getting stuck.

I even left my family when my first daughter was two weeks old for an archaeology job in Arizona to send the message that there was no way that I was getting stuck in Maine (and also to make the money to travel internationally). When my daughter was six weeks old my wife flew out with her to join me because it was clear that I wasn’t going back. Then a month or so later we were in the Dominican Republic, having officially started our international family travels.

Some time later during a visit to Maine that was going on for too long, I split to go ride a bicycle around Iceland. A month or so later we were in Mexico.

When my wife was pregnant with our second daughter we decided to leave China after being based there for a few years. We went back to Maine and it was looking like it could have been the end of the road for me. So I did what I’ve always done: I signed on to a new book project and traveled the expanse of Eurasia for the next three years.

This is all to say that I got good at not getting stuck.

But what I never asked was this:

What if I find myself in a place that is so good that I don’t want to leave?

This question would have been preposterous to me, as I simply never fathomed that such a place could exist. But this is the situation that I now find myself in. In an odd way, Astoria has become my Beach — a place where travelers turn in their club cards because it’s too good to leave.

I first came to Astoria in the summer of 2019 with the intention of staying for one year. My wife had just earned her AMI Montessori certification in Prague and wanted to get some work experience in at a respectable school in the US as kind of a springboard for future opportunities in Asia or wherever else we wanted to go.

At the time, a year in New York City sounded good to me and it didn’t seem to deviate much from how I was living before that. From 1999 to 2019 I basically lived on the road, but also regularly engaged in the spokes of the wheel travel method where you have a hub in a region that you use to travel out of. This allowed me to have a life and travel too — a combination that’s rather elusive if you solely travel linearly.

My street in Astoria.

I figured I would use NYC as a jumping off point to explore the Caribbean, various parts of Mexico, Western Europe — basically anywhere there were cheap flights to. I was doing a lot of public speaking then and also thought it would be a good business move to be more geographically available.

I also really enjoyed doing my final semester of university in NYC in 2008 and always wanted to come back to dive into the place a little deeper.

So we went for it and it worked out.

At first.

Then 2020 happened and, well … we don’t need to go here yet again as that shit sucked for everybody — even those who believed in it.

Basically, I found myself stuck in NYC for the next three years. It wasn’t in my DNA to jump through the Covid hoops to travel. I had an irrational fear of being Trevor’d — i.e. administratively detained / locked down in a place — and with all the nonsensical social distancing and masking and snake oil restrictions I wouldn’t have been able to carry out my work very effectively anyway. So I decided to hunker down and bide my time. I made eight trips to Mexico, enjoyed hanging out with my family, and basically just waited around for the world to open back up again.

And by the time that happened I had grown use to my life in NYC — so much so that I didn’t want to leave.

!!!

My neighborhood in Astoria is probably the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the world. Seriously. This isn’t hyperbole.

It started out as a Greek neighborhood.

Then the Italians moved in.

Then people from the former Yugoslav states arrived.

Then came Latinos from Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico.

There’s an entire Middle Eastern district called Little Egypt that runs to the north up Steinway.

There’s another Middle Eastern area to the south of Broadway around 31st Street.

The Chinese are here (of course).

There’s a sizable Tibetan contingent.

The Japanese have a community here too, and have their own convenience stores to prove it.

Then there’s the Indian zone.

There’s a big Brazilian population.

There’s even relatively large and visible contingents from Africa.

And everyone is all mashed in together — getting along because everyone is different.

According to census data, people from over 100 countries live in Astoria. But what’s most significant is that no one group dominates.

But people usually just come here to stuff their faces with food that is made by people who are actually from the country the cuisine is labeled as.

Walking down the streets of Astoria is like being sucked through a portal into a living Rosetta Stone. Everyday you hear languages from everywhere. You can walk from group to group and listen in to what they’re saying — chances are, they’re not speaking English.

In 2019, Time Out named Astoria the 8th coolest neighborhood in the world.

We did not know that Astoria was a thing until after we moved here. Honestly, we had never heard of the place before. We selected it based on its proximity to major transit corridors. It is right next to LGA, only a short ride from JFK, my apartment is a few blocks from Interstate 278, and the N, W, F, R, and sometimes E trains stop nearby. It’s just over the river from the Upper East Side and it’s easy to get anywhere in Manhattan.

I also applied what I learned about urban design from doing projects about new cities in Asia to the decision. All over the world, countries are striving to develop eco-friendly cites where you can get everything you need within a fifteen minute walk. These new cities have a population density that’s enough to support a vibrant ecosystem of local businesses but not too high where it’s crowded.

What this often translates to is a recreation of the cities of old. Basically, urban areas like Astoria.

In many ways, this neighborhood is like a flashback to another time … where there’s shopkeepers and butchers and tailors and barbers and bakers and beekeepers and fabric sellers and kitchenware venders … and in nearly all instances the people working in the shops also own them.

Community

Each lifestyle is at the expense of every other lifestyle. If you live one way then you can’t live another way. There are just these mutually exclusive elements inherent to each way of life. In other words, you can’t have it all.

If you want to live in a hut in the mountains then you’re going to miss the excitement of the city.

If you want to travel the world then you’re going to sacrifice being part of a community and miss out on time with family and having friends.

Having a community was something that I was starting to miss as my Silk Road travels wore on. I remember spending multiple days sitting in an American style restaurant in Athens listening to Bills podcasts and thinking of the place where I grew up. I was becoming aware that I was missing out on something vital in life by traveling all the time. While I didn’t necessarily plan to waver from my course, I was becoming aware of its deficiencies.

So when I found myself stuck in NYC, somewhere deep down I knew there was a bright side: I would get to experience an integral aspect of life that I never could while traveling.

I know my neighbors here in Astoria. When we see each other we do a stop and chat and give updates on our lives.

I know the names of the people who own the shops near me.

I’m a half day’s drive away from my parents and those of my wife.

I get to hang out with old friends at Bills games.

I get to go to Bills bars and there’s even an Astoria Bills Backers club.

My wife and I are able to dive deep into the lifestyle communities that we enjoy.

Big cities are like onions. They are made up of layers. When you’re just traveling through a big city you’re only seeing the outer peel. Maybe if you stay for a little while and really dig in you can get down to the start of the pearly white pulp, but you really don’t get any deeper.

I’ve stayed in NYC long enough that I’ve been able to peel off those outer layers and get into the meat of the onion. The places where we hang out don’t have signs on the door. We’re members of social clubs that don’t advertise their existence. The communities that were a part of were cultivated slowly over time.

My experience in NYC has transformed the way that I view traveling in urban areas. I now think of all those cities that I’ve traveled through that I thought I was seeing for what the were … No, I really didn’t understand or experience anything.

There is a fundamental need to want to be a part of a community, to have friends, to share common interests. Having a role within a tribe is what humans were built for. I didn’t have this for the twenty years that I was traveling perpetually — for the entirety of my adult life prior to NYC. It was the one thing that was missing in my life, it was something that I wanted to experience …

But it’s also a vacancy that I’m starting to realize that I’ve filled.

I’ve done that. I’ve had that experience. Do I need to keep having it?

“I want to be nothing and do everything.”

This is how I described by future ambitions in my late teens and, honestly, it’s how I still feel today.

So much of life is about checking boxes — about living different ways and experiencing different universes so that one day you can ultimately declare, “I’ve done that.”

ASTORIA, NYC- March 25, 2015 was the date that Ghost Cities of China came out. Nine years ago, Monday.

Part of the story of this blog is the behind the scenes of my projects. Bascially, the story of traveling the world and creating stuff.

While I don’t intend to bore anyone with posts like these, this is actually the kind of writing that I find myself most drawn to. Unfortunately, it’s a kind of writing that few writers are bold / dumb enough to partake in.

Honestly, I don’t really recreationally read well manicured, objectively written articles covering all the bases of X topic in Y location. That’s work for me. While I really respect the process of fiction writing, I have no interest in reading it. What I want is the story behind the story. I read the autobiographies / biographies of writers, often not any of the works they’re known for.

That’s just my preference.

Because people learn from other people.

Each March 25th hits like a brick to the head. It is my “what have you done lately?” day. A day for evaluating whether I’m still on the path … how far I’ve strayed from it … or if I’ve fallen off the horse completely.

My first book deal really came out of nowhere. I received a random email from a NY Times bestselling author and one of the most popular writers in China asking if I’d like to do a book for series that he edited.

I still remember where I was when I opened that email. It was one of those things that you spend years manifesting but somehow don’t believe could ever really happen. Well, it can happen. Because it did.

I didn’t feel much pressure when writing that first book because I didn’t really believe they were going to publish it. I took a few final trips for that project, did some more formal interviews, and then just wrote it.

I don’t remember the writing of that book ever being a struggle. I would just hang out in KFCs and McDonald’s in the middle of the night all around China pounding coffees and it all just kind of fell together.

The Silk Road book was different. It was an extremely difficult project to undertake — which I knew from the beginning. The geographical range — China to Europe and everywhere in between; the challenge of getting access — I had to visit places that you couldn’t just walk into; as well as the sheer number of different cultures, historic contexts, and languages amounted to some pretty unparalleled challenges.

But that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was that I went into it not with the goal of writing a book but with the goal of writing a good book.

I wanted it to be a classic of narrative non-fiction, as ridiculous as that sounds.

I put too much on my plate and, ultimately, I couldn’t finish chewing it.

I set myself up for failure. What I thought would be the difficult parts of the project I nailed: I went out and got what I needed. But because I set the bar too high. I’d read those pages over and over again and declare them not good enough. So I would rewrite it and rewrite it.

And get frustrated and take long breaks.

Eventually years passed by.

Throughout that time I would escape into film projects. It sort of worked out … I did some big projects with some big filmmakers, but not completely.

For the past five years I’ve had one foot in the writing world and the other in film, never doing one or the other fully.

As they say, it’s better to whole-ass one thing than to half-ass two.

I learned that lesson the hard way.

While I can’t say that working in film was necessarily a bad choice — I know of no other way that I can make $850 from three hours of work — it did diverge me from my path.

What I should have done:

Focus on one thing. Double down on writing books. I saw how they could benefit me. I loved the attention that they would attract, I appreciated the jobs and other projects that would spin off from them. I should have strove to get better, worked on perfecting my technique, all while getting it done … over and over again.

Because done is better than better.

But I feel as if that’s close to being over now.

I opened up Silk Road last week after taking a year off and it all just came together. Maybe the year I spent editing documentaries reconfigured my mind or something? But for the first time I could see how it all came together. A structure emerged and the rest just fell into place.

The fact that film editing also taught me how to cut mercilessly probably helped too …

I’m about a week away from it being done.

For real this time.

I believe the Bloomsbury ship has probably already sailed but, oddly, the book isn’t really too outdated. A benefit from the pandemic is that it froze all of those Silk Road projects in their tracks for years. So, maybe?

Other than that, this year I realize that I need to crank up the pace a little.

I want to get two books out.

As for a topic for the other one, I have something waiting in the wings.

It’s big. Even bigger than Silk Road. And I think I could do it well.

When people ask me what I write or make films about, I often respond with, “Big global changes.” After I say this their face inevitably scrunches up like they have no clue what I mean and that usually ends the conversation.

But I know what I mean and, really, that’s all that matters.

ASTORIA, NYC- I went to Cuba with the plan of going back there again. I would fly in, look around a little, get the lay of the land, maybe even make some friends, find some stories, and then go back and pursue something a little more interesting.

This is all to say that I went in with no plan other than to just walk around and see what happens.

And that’s pretty much what I did.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been in a country that I’ve had so many reservations about — that I was so confused about. It was the polar extremes that got me: an extremely unique, one of a kind culture with a way of doing things that’s truly different (not many of these in the world) that is at the same time overtly underwhelming, heavily polluted, impoverished, desperate, stunted. They had a revolution but then what?

While the rest of Latin America is certainly interesting, I wouldn’t necessarily call it fascinating. You get a feel for the patterns of the culture and they are very similar from Mexico to Chile. The term fascinating only really comes into play in travel when you are unable to completely discern what is happening right in front of you. India is fascinating. Azerbaijan is fascinating. China is fascinating. Kazakhstan is fascinating. Cuba is fascinating.

For many years I traveled all through Latin America listening to leisure travelers raving about Cuba. I’m not sure if this was because they thought it made them look cool, if they were enamored with socialism, or if they just liked the cheap, attractive, and readily available women (probably). It definitely wasn’t because they found the place fascinating.

But this left the thought in the back of my mind that maybe I missed something.

However, this all goes without saying — of course I missed something. It was my first trip there and your first trip to a country is basically a preliminary jaunt to let you know everything that you don’t know.

I know that I need a more holistic view of Cuba. Maybe I need to go back and venture to the tourist beach areas that are supposed to be nice, randomly bounce from little town to little town, go into the hills, and dive deep and find out a little more of what this place is really about …

Before leaving Cuba I did make a local friend that I feel could help me dive a little deeper into the place. While this is helpful everywhere, it seems more or less needed in Cuba.

Some places you can just show up and get down to work — China is like that (if you have the language skills), as is Central Asia, the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Mexico, Malaysia, etc. Outside of isolated tourist sites, the confidence tricksters and scammers are few and nobody is coming up to you in the streets pretending to be your friend to get money out of you. And when someone invites you to come and visit their home and meet their family, you go. Even when mitigating for all the language, cultural, and administrative barriers, this makes it fairly easy to operate in these countries.

Operating in places like Cuba, Central America, India, etc is vastly more challenging because there is often an issue of trust — or lack thereof — when meeting people. And you only learn that the stove is hot by touching it. Over and over again.

This is all to say that I’m planning to return to Cuba soon. I’m just watching the flight prices, and once things hit down around $200 for a round trip ticket from NYC, I’m there.

ASTORIA, NYC- While I wasn’t particularly concerned about returning to the US after visiting Cuba — the days of the strict embargo on travelers are over — I did wonder if there would be any residual hiccups when going through immigration.

Spoiler: there were.

Technically, I believe I’m supposed to keep all of my receipts, only stay in local-run accommodation, only eat at local-owned restaurants — basically, not purchase anything from any entity owned by the Cuban government. There is even a prohibited accommodation list on the US Department of State website.

Did I follow these rules?

I have no idea — I’m not asking who owns what everywhere I go.

Did I keep the necessary documentation?

Of course … I … did.

I came into Miami on a flight from Havana and stood in line to be processed, as usual. I looked around and it seemed as if I was one of the only blatant tourist around — everyone else appeared to have had some deeper form of connection to the place (i.e. being / having family from there).

When it was my turn I approached the booth and a young, kind of tough looking Latino dude looked through my passport and began his interrogation.

Where did you go?

Havana.

What did you buy?

Nothing.

What do you do?

I’m a camera operator.

Where do you work?

Newsmax.

Are you freelance?

No.

What did you buy?

A magnet for my mother in law.

Fuck.

I fell for it.

There seems to be a common tactic among immigration officials to ask you the same questions twice to see if there is any discrepancies in how you respond. It’s kind of like how you need to type a new password in twice before changing it. Any difference and you get stopped in your tracks by that bright red X with a message that your responses don’t match.

That’s basically what I received when the guy printed out a little ticket, handed it over to me, and directed me to go to tier 2 customs.

Maybe he thought that by magnet I meant cigars and rum? Honestly, I don’t think he thought anything — I just tripped a wire in his standard operating procedure.

Or maybe it’s just customary to mess with American tourists coming back from what were obviously trips of leisure in Cuba on principle?

To be honest, I don’t really mind being sent to tier 2 customs in the US. Tier 2 immigration can be a pain in the ass. But customs, well, I may be naive but I don’t have any fear of the agents in this country trying to scam or extort me. In a weird way, going through situations like this almost makes me appreciate being from here. All over the world people live in fear of their governments and public servants. And while the US government isn’t necessarily something to not fear — like any other government they do whatever the fuck they want — it is not my impression that this sentiment should be directed towards those poor saps digging through people’s bags in customs.

When you go to tier 2 customs you also often get to see all the weird shit that other people are trying to bring into the country. I’ve seen entire suitcases full of of meat, a small stuffed deer, and all kinds of random shit that makes you truly wonder about the mental disposition of the people carrying it. The question often isn’t why did they think they could get that through customs but why would they even want to?

On this trip to tier 2 customs my intrigued was captured by a guy who was trying to bring in a full size flat screen television. He had it wrapped in black garbage bags that were cinched around it with duct tape. What? Did this guy think we don’t have TVs in the USA? Did he really just spend all day(s) carting something so big and heavy across the world — more than likely paying additional checked baggage fees — that is readily available and dirt cheap just about everywhere here?

But the immigration officials didn’t seem baffled. This was probably one of the more ordinary things they see on a daily basis.

I’d really love to interview one of these guys sometime about all the weird shit they confiscate.

The other people around me in the customs area were from other countries and had massive amounts of stuff. I seemed to be the only US citizen and I just had a small rucksack and a shoulder bag. I kind of stood out.

When it was my turn the guy took my ticket and sent me over to the inspection table, but another dude intervened and waved me over to the x-ray machine. I ran my bags through. On the other side I looked up at the dude for further direction. Did he want to inspect my bags further? He just kind of grunted and did a hand motion for me to take my stuff and get out.

“I have no idea why they sent you here,” he said.

GUANABO, Cuba- It was time to get out of Havana. The thick smoke belching from the rears of decades-old automobiles was becoming a little too much, and I felt as if I’d capped off much of what I wanted to experience there.

When in a country for the first time it is a mistake to just skip through the biggest city, but it is also folly to spend all of your time there. Like they say, cities are the brains of a place, but the countryside is the soul.

So I called a car with La Nave, Cuba’s version of Uber, and set out for Guanabo, a beach town just outside of Havana.

The driver arrived in a beat up black car of a type and era that I could not readily identify. If I had to guess, I would say it came from the early 1970s. The dashboard was cracked from the sun, the carpeted floor was all torn out, and the thing shook and rumbled down the highway more akin to a go-cart than anything that should have been approved for highway travel.

The car smelled like exhaust.

The highway smelled like exhaust.

I’m not sure if I’ve smelt anything else this past week in Cuba other than exhaust.

I had my camera out and was snapping pictures and shooting some video out of the window, but the driver was extremely concerned about me doing this anywhere near police watch towers or the checkpoints they’d set up along the road. Sometimes he’d hurriedly reach over in and push my camera down.

After we drove by a checkpoint where a few vehicles were pulled over, his apprehension became a little too obvious and I figured it would be best to just can the photography.

So I just sat back and looked out the window. There wasn’t much of anything out there. I thought the German was speaking in hyperbole when he commented about how they don’t grow anything here, but at least over the short span from Havana to Guanabo he was correct.

It was only like a 30 minute ride. Guanabo is one of the main beaches that people from Havana go to for day trips on the weekend, and I was riding out on Saturday morning. If I know anything about beaches that are in proximity to a major urban area, this will mean that it will be crowded, dirty, and loud. 

I knew what I was getting into and I can’t say I had very high expectations for Guanabo. It would be a local beach, not a tourist beach. There’s a big difference. Although Lonely Planet did rank it as one of Cuba’s best beaches— for whatever that’s worth.

I booked an Air BnB here. This has been my default accommodation strategy in Cuba — for convenience, privacy, price, and because there’s these vague rules about where Americans are and are not permitted to stay (which I highly doubt are ever enforced or even enforceable).

My driver couldn’t quite figure out how to get to where I was staying and I was a few hours early anyway, so I just had him drop me off on the main drag that runs through the town parallel to the beach.

I stepped out of the car onto a wide, dusty, more or less empty street. There were shops on both sides but few seemed to be open or actually in business. The noon-time sun was blistering hot; everyone seemed to be in hiding. I looked up and down the street and everything seemed to be in various stages of being sun faded.

A horse-drawn carriage rumbled by me. I watched it clomp, clomp down the street. Then another one passed by going the other way. The horses were big and black and the carriages were like those from the 19th century and were well-decorated with big spoked wheels. It became apparent that this was the dominant form of local transportation here, but what I couldn’t tell is if this was just how people get around here or if it was something for the tourists — kind of like in Central Park.

I had some time to kill before I could check-in, so I went looking for a restaurant to get some lunch, relax with a beer, and type some notes.

I found a little place that had a large palapa hut that extended out from a cinder block kitchen. I stepped inside and appreciated the shade. I was brought an old and greasy laminated menu. I ordered some grilled chicken and sat back and began taking some notes about the morning ride.

It took a really long time for the food to come, but I didn’t mind — I truly had nowhere else to be.

Eventually, a plate of rigor mortis-y chicken with some oily plantains and desiccated beans was delivered to my table. 

Then the flies declared war. As soon as I’d shoo one group of them away from my food another group would dive bomb it from the other side. These flies were either unusually bold or desperate. They wouldn’t relent and I eventually gave up — picking up my chicken up and pushing the rest of the food to the other side of the table. A diversion tactic, I suppose. I then took a couple bites of the chicken but found that its chewy, rubbery texture reminded me too much of what it would be like to sink my teeth into one of those frozen mummies who spent the past ten thousand years stuck in a glacier in the Alps, and I decided to just call it.

I admitted defeat, picked up my bag, and began walking back down the main drag to a little park area at the center of town. There were a couple vendor stalls selling some fast food and beer. I got a can of local beer and sat down on a bench in the shade and cracked it open. I took a big long drink. It hit that particular spot that only a cold beer can on a hot day in the tropics.

These empty pre-check-in hours are a part of travel that rarely gets talked about. As check-in times have gotten progressively later there’s become this entire blocs of travel that’s essentially wasted time:

The hours before check-in are one of the conundrums of modern travel. Check-out times used to be 11 am or noon, check-in times used to be noon or 1 pm. Now check-in times are 3 pm or even later. So what do you do if you change rooms or arrive early somewhere? Just walk around all day with your luggage like a dumbass? In the old days you used to just drop off your bags at your hotel or hostel and they would hold them for you until check-in time. But in this era of temporary apartment rentals and self-service hotels this really isn’t possible. I don’t have an answer here … and I spent my first six hours in San Juan trudging around with a Kelty 44 liter rucksack on my back and a shoulder bag with a Macbook in it on my front.

You just sit and wait and look around at what’s going on around you. I texted some pics of the old cars to my dad. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock — ok, it’s time to go and actually start doing something again.

I booked an Air BnB from a young guy who’s originally from Guanabo but now lives in Ottawa. He handles the bookings for his parents. When check-in time came around he gave me some directions to find the house. It was maybe three hundred meters away on the second row of houses in from the beach. I found it without trouble. The Canada paraphernalia that was stuck, hung, and draped over everything gave the place away. Apparently, they’re a little proud of their son here.

His parents appeared to be in their 50s and seemed to be the typical retired couple — heavy set with the dude walking around perennially shirtless. Kind of reminded me of my father’s stepdad in Florida. I never once saw that guy with a shirt on.

The retired couple built a two story extension onto the back of their house for Air BnB guests and what appeared to be young long-term boarders (students or something).

The room had a bed, a small desk, a small kitchen with a gas stove that didn’t have a tank attached (good!), and a bathroom. There was local beer and water from Costco (from Canada?) in the fridge. It was the very definition of perfect.

But I didn’t hang out there for very long. I came here to go to the beach. That’s about the only thing anyone comes to Guanabo for. So I threw on some shorts, slipped into my Buffalo Bills sandals, and walked the 50 meters to the sand.

At first, a smile crept across my face. I looked out at the waves, looked out across the tan sands, and saw some beach-front bars with their telltale bright red umbrellas in the near distance. Peace.

But the more I walked into the crowd the more I realized that the place was full of garbage. It was packed with locals from Havana, and they seemed to just be tossing their spent beer cans around wherever they stood.

It’s their country, I suppose they can treat it anyway they want to.

But this sentiment began to wan when I saw a group of five year olds fortifying their sand castle with a strategically stacked pile of beer cans and then I kept feeling them crushing under my feet as I walked out into the surf.

I floated in the waves for a while and looked into the sky, but just couldn’t shake the adverse reaction that I would have when I put my feet down felt the miscellaneous refuse of beachgoers past and present. It felt as though I was trying to stomp grapes in a recycling center.

It was time to get out of there. My exit was hastened by a floating maxi pad that was giving chase.

I did a little filming and one of my sandals broke. I picked it up and continued on with one sandal on and one sandal off. Some drunk dudes saw my plight and approached me. One of them offered to fix it for me. 

Cool. Go for it.

He pressed the severed pieces of rubber back together and seemed surprised when they wouldn’t stick back together. He said that I would need something to tie it with and then noticed my camera and began freaking out.

He tried to not giving me back my broken Bills sandal. For some reason that I don’t understand I swiped it from his hand. I didn’t really want it. I just didn’t want him to have it.

I finished filming what I wanted of the beach and then headed back to my room, showered, sat on the edge of the bed, and said what the fuck?

I guess I’m drinking.

I went back out and walked into town. There was a big seafood restaurant near the beach that was full of people and looked like a cool place to hang, but I kept going. A girl propositioned me. Then I walked by a gaggle of propositioners on the other side of the street. They were whistling and trying to wave me over. Apparently, they still had time for one more job before hopping on the bus and heading back to Havana. 

I kept walking. 

I found myself near a little circus and filmed some drunk cowboy guy who was dancing on the street in front of a restaurant. I’m not sure if he was doing this for tips or for fun. 

I turned around and walked back through town and towards a beach bar that I saw earlier in the day. It was early evening by this time and I figured that I would grab a beer and lounge back and watch the sun set.

I approached the tiki bar … which was called Tiki Bar … and did just that.

I sat in a lounge chair facing west, cracked open my beer, and took a good, long drink. I looked around at the groups who were around me — an extended family was sitting to my side and a couple of young dudes were sitting on an embankment dangling their feet over the edge. We were all just watching the people playing in the waves — splashing, kayaking, fishing — and enjoying the radiating orange glow of the sunset.

It somehow made the rest of the day seem not so bad and I began looking forward to the walk on the beach that I would take the following morning.

As I was paying my tab I noticed a sign on the front of the bar that said “What happens at Tiki Bar stays at Tiki Bar.”

What could possibly happen here that would need to stay here? I thought about sticking around to find out, but then realized that I probably already knew the answer to that question … which was more than likely a two word term that began with an N and ended with an H.

When I was walking back from the beach bar I had a nice conversation with a young mother who was carrying a baby. She invited me to come back to her house to meet her family. 99 percent of the time in 99 percent of the places I say yes. Here, I had reservations. I simply liked the thought of having a nice conversation with someone so much that I didn’t want to risk losing the memory to some bullshit request to buy a family member medicine or something.

I didn’t like that I thought like that.

I didn’t like that at all. 

If you think like this in a place you’re probably wasting your time being there.

HAVANA, Cuba- My first take on nightlife in Havana was a little grim. While I could see the infrastructure of a vibrant nightlife scene here, it came off like a Potemkin stage set.

“There’s nobody here,” the German said. “There are no tourists and the locals don’t have any money to go out drinking anymore.”

The Cuban economy relies on tourism, and three years with the sector virtually wiped out has had an impact which has resonated through the society.

Outside of the famous tourist bars of Old Havana, I would spend my nights sitting in these trendy, well-decored bars that were set up to receive crowds and be virtually the only person there. 

However, I understand that my experience of Cuba was not typical. I visited right in that empty expanse of time between the world opening back up after the Covid pandemic and people starting to travel to places like Cuba again. While I wouldn’t necessarily call the place dead, I would say that there was a cloak of inactivity that permeated the place. I imagine this won’t last for long. 

I met the German in a small, cheap, but kind of chic bodega that seemed popular with the young crowd in Vedado. It was basically in a narrow corridor between buildings and was little more than some refrigerators stocked with beer and premixed cocktails and wobbly plastic tables. In times like these it’s easy to find the budget places: they’re where the people are.

The German and I made that particular type of eye contact that seems to say “Hey, it’s a traveler” as I walked in. After I sat down with my drink he broke the ice, asking how long I’ve been here or something.

I pulled my chair over and joined him at his table. There’s this peculiar look that travelers get after they’ve been on the road for an extended amount of time. I’m not quite sure what it is — clothes that fit like a broken in catcher’s mit, unkept long flowing hair, the appearance of being a little too comfortable with being unwashed, or maybe it’s just the far off look in the eye … or perhaps it’s simple than that — maybe it’s just the outward show of interest in the people around them.

Short-term tourists don’t talk to anyone, they don’t look at anyone, they are absorbed in the itinerary of the day, building brinks around the fantasy that they’re bold explorers, and miss the real show that goes on all around them. 

This German was different. He didn’t even have a phone, having lost it a couple of days before and never bothering to replace it. The guy was just looking around, looking for someone to talk to, and it was clear that someone was me.

He was long and lean with wavy shoulder length blond hair that rolled in loose curls upon meeting his shoulders. He’d been on the road in some form for his entire life, bouncing from continent to continent for one reason or another. He came from a family of international intrigue, with his grandfather having moved to Tegucigalpa when he was a young man for an internship and staying for the rest of his life. He spoke of having previous success in the corporate world, but I suppose that rolls off the tongue a little easier than saying you were terminated and banished. These days, he’s just traveling, having crossed the five year point of perpetual travel. I believe he runs a life coaching business. 

But then he began talking about Tulum …

I told him that I thought Tulum was one of the worst places on the planet. He told me that Tulum was about flow. 

The only flow I experienced in Tulum was the flow of money leaving my pocket and going into the outstretched palms of people who were ripping me off.  

I figured it was time for us to move on to the next place.

He told me that he saw a flier for some electronic music concert on a telephone pole but couldn’t remember where it was supposed to be.

He couldn’t remember where the telephone pole was either.

But I had little else to do and it sounded random enough to be an appropriate mission for the night, so I proposed going to find it.

So we went in search of a telephone pole that would lead us to a concert.

I didn’t think it would be particularly challenging but then it became clear that this dude had no clue even what part of the city he was in when he saw the flier. We just walked from telephone pole to telephone pole inspecting anything that was taped or wheat pasted to them as he talked through his memory trying to remember where it was and what it said.

“I think it said the concert was in Miramar.”

“Cool, let’s start walking towards there and we’ll keep looking for fliers, ask people along the way, and stop for a drink whenever we find a cool spot.”

I didn’t think there was any chance that we’d find the concert and I was starting to doubt whether it really even existed but I appreciated the excuse to have … something to search for.

As we walked we checked the telephone poles. No sign of any flyers about any concerts.

“The government probably took them all down,” the German muttered.

Our first stop was at a roughshod bar that appeared to be set up in front of someone’s house. It was just a little mobile bar on wheels with some plastic tables arranged around it. But there were people there. They were a couple of groups who were already drunk and carrying on. We caught their attention and then began asking the usual questions. They seemed friendly, but they were at a different phase of their night. 

I hung out and half assed drinking my beer as the German continued ruminating on spotty memories of the flier.

“Electrica tk, tk, electric … noise … electric …” then his head shot up and his eyes got wide as he began shaking me by the arm:

“Tropical Noise Electronica!” He exclaimed. “That’s it! Tropical Noise Electronica! Let’s go!”

We then shot up from our seats and began walking towards Miramar with renewed purpose. We walked down a wide boulevard with nicely kept sidewalk. The sidewalks of Havana are really something to marvel over — you don’t notice them at first because you’re not tripping over the cracks in them or dodging sinkholes. Sidewalks are something that many countries have a really difficult time with.

We now knew the name of the event but still had no idea where it was, other than in a district called Miramar. But our strategy had changed. Rather than just checking telephone poles we were asking every hip looking person we saw if they knew where it was. If the hip looking person was also an attractive female the German was sure to try to leverage the interaction into a date.

Nobody knew what we were talking about, and we were getting to the point in our walk when we realized that we were getting a little far from home and began questioning whether we should keep going or just keep drinking.

The German said he knew of a bar that he’d been to before that was a little ways down the road, so we walked across the boulevard and headed there, sitting down at a table in their outdoor seating area. The bar was right next to one of Havana’s new virtual reality arcades.

“VR is the new thing here,” the German began. “The government started opening these VR places. It only costs like thirty cents but nobody goes.”

There’s semblances of Cuban making shows of advancing into the 21st century, but these shows often come off as a little askance and out of context — VR arcades and electronic information kiosks in parks — when the rest of the country could be considered bygone by global standards. 

But there was something a little strange at the bar. The servers didn’t really seem to want to serve us. They knew we were out there because we could see them looking at us, but nobody came over to our table. The German had to go in request service.

We ordered a couple of drinks and the German continued telling me about his escapades in Cuba. Most of his stories ended in one of two ways: with a girl blocking his phone number or being thrown out a bar.

It really made me think about what you’d have to do to become such a persona non grata in a country that was so desperate for tourist dollars ….

The German laughed as he finished telling another of these tales and segued into a reference to his family’s efforts to commit him in Germany.

“My sister would invite me out for drinks and then I’d look up as we were driving and realize that she was pulling into a psychiatric facility.”

He explained how it was similar to what his mother did to his father, who he described as a brilliant man who German society couldn’t understand.

“The Vatican did a sonar attack on me the last time I was in Berlin,” he continued. “I was on the floor of my room for a week.”

“Kind of like what the people in the US Embassy here claim was done to them?”

“Yes, but way worse.”

“Why do you think the Vatican would target you?”

“Because my energy was really big then.”

He then told me that I have a problem with my solar plexus or something. Then he started trying to convince me that I don’t really love my wife and, while I listen to my visitors, I was also starting to feel as if it was time to go.

He seemed to pick up on this and we left the little bar and started walking again. But he stopped short while eyeballing a parked taxi on the other side of the street.

“I have an idea,” he said as we began walking over to it.

He leaned over to the driver’s side window and asked the guy if he know where the Tropical Noise Electronica concert was.

The dude nodded his head yes and pointed down the street.

“He knows where it is,” the German said while turning to me as though he couldn’t believe it. I certainly couldn’t.

We got into his beat up little car from the 70s and began rumbling down the boulevard. It was obvious when we started getting close. What appeared to be a small stadium rose up from the shadows and both sides of the street were lined with cop cars with their lights flashing. The taxi driver slowed down but didn’t stop.

“This is it,” the German said, but the driver kept going. He was nervous about dropping us off anywhere near the police. We went a little ways down the road and then he quickly pulled off to the side and hurried us out of his car before peeling away.

We walked back to the entrance and found a police line blocking our way.

“Do you know what’s going on?” I asked the German. “Did someone get shot or something?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think they’re trying to shut it down.”

We tried to make our way past the police line and through the gate but were stopped by two cops converging on us from both sides.

They asked if we had tickets. We said no. They said they weren’t letting us through.

We then tried pulling the white dude thing where you follow in a group of locals and just try to plow your way through, but we were picked out of the group and refused entry again.

We then tried negotiating with a female cop. We’d come too far trying to find this mythical concert to not be allowed in. But a nearby male cop wasn’t having it and began pushing us away in a manner that let us know he wasn’t fucking around.

The situation got tense fast and I was ready to call it. But the German was resolute. We hung back for a moment scoping out the scene.

“Let’s try again,” he said, “only this time we will take a soft approach.”

A senior looking officer was there by that time and we walked up to him and asked him nicely if we could go in.

“Go ahead,” he respond, appearing surprised why we’d ask him that.

The cops that were trying to keep us out grudgingly opened the gate. We made it. 

It was a legit concert. There were probably a few thousand people in the theater there and they were all really into the band, singing along with the lyrics, dancing where there was space, and pounding beers. The theater itself was a basic bowl ringed by a balcony. Everything was concrete.

My German friend was on the prowl, chatting up every pretty girl he could isolate into conversation. Invariably, she’d ask him for a drink … and a drink for her friends … and a drink for her friend’s friends.

And invariably there would be a girl tugging at my arm asking me if I could buy her a drink … and a drink for her friends … and a drink for her friend’s friends.

He did it once and I did it once and then we looked at each other like what the fuck are we doing?

After taking stock of the place and jotting my mental notes, I was kind of done. I didn’t see anything good coming from the rest of the night. The cops were also making their way into the crowd, on alert and standing back to back as though they were in the middle of a potentially inflammatory political demonstration rather than a concert full of kids that were just having fun. The Cuban youth just kind of ignored them and continued dancing. 

I stood back and watched the German operate. He would start talking with a young woman, begin dancing with her real close, start making out a little, and then he would whisper something into her ear that would stop things in their tracks. She’d look at him with a twisted look on her face and then walk away. 

“She probably just wanted money anyway,” the German would turn to me and say before trying again with another girl.

It wasn’t that the German was unattractive. To the contrary, he was a rather good looking dude. But like many rather good looking dudes who are used to having their appearance get them where they want with women, he didn’t quite seem to get the message when he entered his 40s that those days are over. The thing about rather good looking dudes is that they generally keep going for the same women regardless of how old they become.

Eventually, the concert was over and we all streamed out into a big open air market area behind the theater. The German had a group of five girls in tow. He invited them to come back to Vedado for a little private party. They said they wanted $100 each.

I was already walking away.

The German caught up with me and asked if I wanted to go to another bar with him. I declined. “Come on,” he urged, “I know of one that will have some awake women there.” I declined again and said I was going to bed.

“Come on, just one more.”

“Sorry, man, I’m done.”

“But I don’t think they’ll let me in without you …”

HAVANA, Cuba- It was hot. Real hot. And I was thirsty. And there before me on Obispo Street near the Parque Central was El Floridita.

El Floridita is a bar that could probably be in the running for the biggest tourist attraction in all of Cuba. It’s a tourist attraction not really because of their daiquiris — which are globally recognized — but because Ernest Hemmingway was a regular there.

In fact, the headline of El Floridita’s homepage proudly states that it was “Hemingway’s favorite bar in Havana,” and judging from the amount of testimonials and photos of him being in there— unlike the nearby La Bodeguita, which he probably never actually went to — it may be correct.  

Yes, people from all over the world go there just because some other guy did. Which I suppose is actually the basis of most tourism … just following in footsteps, all over the world.

I can’t say I planned on visiting El Floridita. There are plenty of other bars in Old Havana that I imagined served the same drinks at a fraction of the cost. But there it was right before me. I had just walked halfway across the city from El Vedado and was sweating in the sweltering noon-time sun … and there’s just something about thinking about the relief from drinking an ice cold daiquiri that makes you feel even hotter.

It was right before they were about to open and there was only a short line of tourists standing outside. If I didn’t go there now I knew I never would.

So I took my place behind a group of older tourists from Spain and waited. Right at noon they flung open the corrugated steel gate which revealed a set of saloon-style doors and we all streamed in. I made a beeline for the magnificent mahogany bar and took a seat. As though on cue, a well dressed band concurrently manifested with a row of sharp dressed bartenders in bowties. The band took their places at the side of the room; the bartenders took their places behind the bar. And as soon as the first note struck the drinks began being poured.

A row of blenders began buzzing, as ice, grapefruit juice, maraschino liqueur, fresh limes, and rum were tossed in and swirled about. The entire operation had the look and feel of an assembly line, as each bartender and bar back had a defined role to fill, and they did it as fast and efficiently as a 1950s era Ford plant.

The dress of the bartenders, their hairdos, the music of the band, the interior decor — everything about place — seemed straight out of another era, which isn’t something that’s necessarily out of the ordinary in Havana. Cuba is the place to come to if escaping the present is your intrigue. 

But here’s the thing here: El Floridita is legitimately from another era … and is over 200 years old. It first opened as a bodega in 1817 under the name “La Piña de Plata.” The place was apparently popular with locals but would undergo a major change and rebranding soon after the turn of the century. 

This was a period of time right after the end of the Spanish-American war, Cuba had just become independent and was looking for inspiration. The people here looked north to the USA, and began trying to recreate the things that they saw or heard from there. 

In 1910 — nearly a hundreds years after it was first opened — the bar was purchased by two bothers from Catalonia who sought to make the place a sophisticated, modern joint as they redid the interior to match the bars of the time in America. At the bequest from patrons who may have actually been from Florida, they changed the name to La Florida, which eventually became “El Floridita.” They also had their bartenders were a uniform that consisted of sharp red jackets. Like many things in Cuba, this styles has stuck.

In 1918, one of their most enthusiastic bartenders bought the place. His name was Constantino Ribalaigua Vert, otherwise known as Constante, and he transformed El Floridita into the legend that it is today. 

Constante was prone to experimenting with drinks, having created over 200 different cocktails, but his most memorable concoction happened in 1931 when he introduced a twist on the daiquiri that made it a classic. Apparently, it took him twenty years to perfect the mix, and he didn’t consider it a masterpiece until he got his hands on a granita machine which could crush ice into the customary slush that we identify with daiquiris today. “La cuna del daiquiri” is written across the back of the bar for a reason. 

By the 1950s, El Floridita was already known around the world, with Esquire magazine ranking it as one of the seven most famous.  

Then in the early 1960s, the Cuban Revolution happened. The previous government was disposed and everything was nationalized. But the show went on at El Floridita. The bar simply transitioned from serving American tourists — who were now banned from visiting — to Europeans.

The bartender here didn’t really have to ask me what I wanted. Everyone here just orders the same thing: a Hemingway daiquiri, which is a normal daiquiri without the sugar. 

In a moment my drink was poured into a cocktail glass, a steel straw was dropped in, and it was slid over to me. I dropped some bills on a small saucer that was placed in front of me and took my first sip. 

The frozen, slushy-like substance hit my mouth and my eyes lit up. It was exactly what I was looking for. Honestly, given the circumstances it was probably one of the best drinks I’ve ever had. My body temperature dropped instantly, I leaned back, and I tipped my hat to the bronze Hemingway statue at the end of the bar. 

I’m a fan of Hemingway not because of his writing — I may not have even read any of his books — but because of his discipline. Dude lived a life of frolicking and adventure but every day he would get up at the crack of dawn and begin writing by six am and keep churning until noon. Only then would he spend the rest of the day getting into shit and drinking in bars:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write…

Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

If you don’t make writing a daily necessity that you have no other choice but to do, you will never write anything. The process of writing is just so unnatural that it takes an obsessive form of mania to do — you’re sitting still in a room all alone for hours talking to yourself and stenotyping it. If you do this long enough you cross the divide between real life and story, and that’s when things start getting interesting.

It’s one thing to write all day; it’s another to give yourself things to write about all day. 

I thought about all of this until my first daiquiri ended with a final gurgling rattle of the steel straw. I wanted a sequel to that experience so I ordered another. 

This time I turned my attention to the music. There were four musicians and a female singer. They were playing a Santana-esque mix of rock, jazz, and Cuban rhythms, and every once in a while they would even play a Santana song, whereupon everyone in the bar would begin singing along. 

The place was full at that point, and there was a line outside of people waiting to get in. My seat was a hot commodity that I wished to hold on to for at least a few minutes more. I ordered a third drink. 

In 1992, El Floridita won the Five Star Diamond award as the best bar in the world. I looked around thinking about this for a moment but couldn’t really argue against it. While it’s certainly not my favorite bar, I could not detract from its quality and from the show that they’ve been putting on here generation after generation. But there was something else about it that I liked:

Yes, El Floridita is a tourist bar … but it’s been a tourist bar since 1910. Tourist attractions generally don’t age well — there’s ruins from even relatively young tourist sites scattered all around the world. But this bar has hung in there, serving drinks to more or less the same clientele for the past 114 years. In a way, the place has become a pilgrimage site of sorts — everyone who has passed through Havana over the past century has passed through the saloon doors of El Floridita. 

HAVANA, Cuba- Cuba is a place that gives you mixed feelings as a traveler. It’s concurrently exactly what you’re looking for while also being exactly what you aim to avoid.

On the one hand, it’s a truly unique place with a different history, political and economic system, and culture than anywhere else in the world. It’s a place in a time capsule, with very little evidence of the progression of time beyond the 1990s.

It’s an anomaly — there’s nowhere else like it. The Post Soviet States in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus don’t even flinch at being adequate comparisons. Equally poor at being a parallel are the other Latin American states — especially neighboring Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

Cuba is it’s own universe, it’s one of the rare countries in the world that you can say are truly something different, ranking up there with Turkmenistan and Bhutan. It’s the kind of place that you want to experience, dive into, and start to understand — the reasons to go to Cuba and the reasons you travel. On the other hand, it’s an extremely impoverished, heavily polluted, authoritarian backwater that can’t get out of its own way.

I walked into Old Havana for the first time and it was like something out of another world. The streets were lined with these beautiful, ornate colonial buildings. Street after street was nothing short of magnificent. However, most of these impressive arrays of architecture were in the active process of falling down — they’re covered in soot from automobile exhaust with pieces of stucco flaking off and roofs collapsing in on themselves.

I couldn’t help but to have been reminded of the movie Idiocracy, where skyscrapers in the future are held up with rope because nobody knows how to build or fix them anymore. Havana is a place where you can’t help but to exclaim “What happened here?” And marvel about how beautiful it must have been. At one time.

You can almost see it everywhere. The vibrancy of a place that is booming, the men walking down the streets in their tweed sports coats and fedoras toking cigars, the women in their big ornate hats and white frilly dresses. You can imagine the bars (some of which still exist) being packed with expats and exiles.

It’s difficult to walk the streets of Old Havana and not feel nostalgia for a romanticized rendition of the Hemingway era. It’s easy to imagine how absolutely marvelous this city must have been.

Walking through Havana is like walking through the ruins of a once great city … only UNESCO is nowhere to be found and people are still living in the ruins. The things that still work seem to do so solely because they haven’t broke yet.

Cuba was once one of the wealthier places in Latin America. Prior to the 1959 revolution, the country was basically an economic lackey of the United States, with the neighbor to the north controlling 80% of the country’s trade over 60% of its food production. But this meant that Cuba was the fifth wealthiest nation in the western hemisphere, had the third highest life expectancy, and was actually number one in the per capita number of televisions — and indicator of wealth in those days.

However, this wealth severely unevenly distributed, with a quarter of the population being unemployed … There wasn’t a revolution for nothing.

This place was so much different than I thought it would be, so much different from what I’ve read from travelers (racking up cool points talking about how incredible it is there). But I have to admit that it’s difficult to marvel over a place when people are walking up to you asking for your table scraps as you sit eating at a sidewalk restaurant.

“We don’t make anything here,” a local on the Malecon said to me one evening. He was well groomed, wearing a button down shirt and had nicely cropped, short curly hair.

He spent his days walking up and down this seaside strip, apparently looking for foreigners to sell his services too. These days, there aren’t too many of us, and the fact that he didn’t want to stop following me attested to a touch of desperation. But he was ingenuitive, offering to take me to a poor area of the city so I could take pictures of street kids.

Apparently, he has met tourists before.

I questioned him about his statement that Cuba doesn’t make anything and and he gave me an example:

“Even your water isn’t from here,” he said while pointing to the plastic bottle that was sticking out of the pocket of my jean shorts.

“What? You import water?”

“Yes, everything is imported. Look at it. That water came from Colombia or somewhere.”

I pulled it out of my pocket. He was right.

This sentiment was magnified when I met a German traveler who was around my age at a bar later that night. 

“When you go out to the countryside you will see, it’s all empty. They don’t grow anything. They have fertile soil but they don’t grow anything.”

He was right. I did not see a single agricultural field or even a garden along the entire 20 kilometers to Guanabo.

“Covid destroyed this place,” he continued. “It’s still not back to what it was. Nobody is coming here anymore.”

This fact was obvious. I was spending my days walking around the prime tourist areas, going into tourist establishments, and hardly ever sharing space with my own ilk. It was to the point that when saw another traveler in a bar you’d check in with and share notes rather than pretend they didn’t exist.

Cuba relies on tourism. Without it, the country doesn’t have much of an economy. When the Covid pandemic hit the entire country lost its economic lifeline. Before the pandemic, Cuba received over 4.7 million tourists per year and tourism amounted to 15% of its GDP, along with employing half a million people officially — and much more than that unofficially (sex tourism is big there and the providers are generally independent operators). This sector was absolutely decimated by Covid travel restrictions and hysteria, plummeting 56% from 2019 to 2020.

I have to acknowledge here that my experience of Cuba was probably very different than that of someone who visited pre-Covid and, likewise, that of someone who visits in the near future, as I imagine things will eventually get back on the previous trajectory.

I also don’t want to make it seem as if the travel experience in Havana is by any means unfavorable. To the contrary, once you accept the place for what it is, this city is incredibly easy to enjoy. Delicious food is cheap. Cocktails are dirt cheap. You can get an AirBnb that’s comfortable and well located for $20 a night. You can live to excess here on $50 a day. And all around you are things to pique your interest, things to question, things to learn about … The cost-to-experience ratio is off the charts — you pay a little and get a lot to chew on.

The German guy was beginning to fascinate me. He was thin with blond hair that hung down over his ears and curled up upon his shoulders. He was wearing a white undershirt and shorts.

He had been traveling for five years straight but seemed to have spent his entire adolescence and adult life on the road in some capacity. He went to high school in Tegucigalpa. He went to college in Boston. He told me that at one time he held a top position in a finance firm but quit just before he made it big. “I always quit a little too soon,” he said with a laugh.

He asked me what I thought of Cuba.

“Some days I love it and some days I hate it.”

He knew what I meant. He had been here for five weeks and was done. He said he’s been spending his days sleeping a lot.

“It gets bad near the end of the month,” he said. “That’s when their rations run out and people are hungry. Their rations aren’t enough.”

He then told me about how at the end of the previous month he had to walk for two hours to find a bottle of water. This was a topic that was being hotly debated on travel networks, with some travelers claiming that Cuba was out of bottled water while others claiming that they were nuts and bottled water was readily available.

I suppose it’s all a matter of when you come here.

Sometimes there’s stuff; sometimes there isn’t.

I suppose that’s why we go there.

The ride into Havana from the airport pretty much said it all: a menagerie of things from all decades of the 20th century but hardly any sign of anything from the 21st.

I got a room in the Vedado district — a nice, relatively upscale, not too hectic part of the city that’s full of restaurants and bars — and set off on a little walk. The first walk in a new country is something that you always remember. It’s really a one-time thing, an awkward ice breaker, as you will never again be as alert, as excited, as absorbed in your surroundings than when you’re taking your first steps somewhere. You’re just walking saying “Fuck yeah, I’m here” to yourself over and over again.

I walked down La Rampa to the Malecón, which is this seaside promenade that flanks a highway and runs the length of the west part of Havana. There’s a seawall there that people hang out on in the evening and at night when the heat dies down and people venture out to socialize. It’s a place to meet people, to talk, to pass some time in a way that doesn’t cost anything.

I just wanted to check it out. However, the sun was high in the sky and only a moron would be caught walking around out there then. I puttered about for a few minutes alone taking some pics, sweating under the sweltering sun, and then took refuge in the shade on the other side of the street like everyone else.

I began walking back up La Rampa and soon found a black dude at my side. He sputtered a bit of English and told me that he worked as a security guard at the Hotel Nacional on the hill above us. He told me that he comes here to find foreigners to practice his English during his spare time, but I’ve traveled long enough to know what this actually means … and I didn’t give him the chance.

It was my first walk in this country and I wasn’t ready to spoil my first impression just yet.

That would come about one minute later when a couple who appeared to be in their late 50s latched on to me. They were friendly and their English was more than conversational — as if they may have lived in the US at one point. The dude had a big scar that ran vertically down the right side of his face. The lady was a touch pear shaped and had adorned her face as though it were a Christmas tree. I had a friendly chat with them as I continued walking but got the feeling that I should disengage.

It was an amicable break up but that lady would cross paths with me again a little farther down the street. A coincidence, I suppose.

It was clear that I wasn’t going to shake her so I figured I’d see where this was going. I told her I was going to eat. She asked if I was going to El Biky. I said yes. She said the place was owned by the government and charged a lot of money. She said she would like to show me a good local place that was cheap. I had no intention of eating where she would take me but I really had nothing better to do … it would also be a good idea to find out where not to eat.

But she took me to a ration station for some reason. Perhaps tourists like going to these or something?

She told me that this was where people get flour.

It was completely cleaned out. Maybe it was just my timing? Maybe, as I was told later on, it was the fact that rations have started running out near the end of the month.

The lady told the guy behind the counter show me the ration books. He produced a giant, old and worn ledger that contained hundreds of hand written names and how many sacks of flour they got and when.

I followed the lady to what I would suppose you’d call an art street. It was a narrow, winding back street that was akin to an alley that had some murals on the brick walls and some large colorful steel sculptures. She said she taught a salsa class to the children here on the weekend. I didn’t quite believe her.

She then took me to a restaurant she was talking about. It was a little cafe style restaurant with pictures of famous people all over the walls. It seemed set up for tourists. But it was empty. So empty in fact, that there wasn’t even anyone there working. I walked out. The lady tried to get me to buy her a drink at the booze stall on the other side of the alley. I said no. She asked me for ten dollars. I said no. As I walked away she swore at me.

Iwill spare you the repeated retelling of this story, as it more or less epitomizes much of my initial experience of Havana. I’ve rarely had more difficulty connecting with people in any country I’ve ever traveled in before.

In some places, they treat you like money on legs; here, that was taken to even the next level. This isn’t hyperbole: nearly everyone that I spoke with in the city either wanted money for nothing, were trying to sell me a girl, or was a girl trying to get me to buy her things or was overtly selling herself. It wasn’t just street urchins either — it was also well dressed people who were clearly educated who seemed to have other things going on. It seemed to be more or less a “why the fuck not?” kind of proposition when asking me for cash, and to a certain extent I can’t blame them — why the fuck not? It’s not like they’re ever going to see me again.

But herein lies the problem: I don’t really do the tourist thing. I don’t care about restaurants. I don’t care about going to famous bars. I don’t really find much interest in museums, or sites, or the places that are said to be the reasons to visit a particular country. I take the UNESCO label as a signpost of where not to go. And someone leading me around like a dog on a leash trying to make me look at things is about the last thing I ever want to do.

This isn’t a statement of travel purity or a show of status — to the contrary, the way I travel would probably bore most people. I just know what I’m into and what I’m not. I know that I ultimately travel for one reason: to talk with people. And getting a proverbial bill after each verbal exchange definitely puts a damper on the experience.

A new strategy would be needed.

New Years is a time for reflecting. It’s a time for giving yourself a self-graded report card to gauge how you’re doing in that art project that you call your life. So here goes:

Travels

This past year I traveled more than I have in some previous years but haven’t gotten back to the way things were before 2020. It was my plan to use NYC as a base of operations to get elsewhere, but I’ve gotten caught up in the place … and that’s not a bad thing. “Why would I travel elsewhere when here is where I want to be?” I’ve had to ask myself more than once this past year. There’s a limit to how much I can talk about what I’m doing in NYC on this blog, but my wife and I are enjoying our time here. I’ve been appreciating it even more so because there is a threat that could find us leaving relatively soon …

Hawaii

We took a big family trip to Hawaii this past year, going to the Big Island and Oahu. It made me nostalgic for the days when my family used to travel the world perpetually. It was a real vacation — we rented a truck, drove all around, hiked around some volcanos, hung out on black sand beaches, and snorkeled with manta rays. I shot video throughout but haven’t processed much of it for the blog … this was another trip that I basically dropped the blogging ball on.

Puerto Rico

I’ve always loved Puerto Rico and I went there this year looking for inspiration and to find the answer to the question of if I wanted to keep traveling. I kept things simple — I only brought an iPhone to write, film, and take photos with … and while it was effective for blogging there was a few things that I would have shot if I had better equipment with me. It was fun to try but I probably won’t travel like that again.

This trip netted me exactly what I was after: space and time to think. I hung out in San Juan and then rented a jeep and drove to the upper west corner of the island. I spent almost every day at the beach and actually went looking for the best beach that I could find because why not? I decided that Jobos Beach was not only the best beach that I’ve been to in Puerto Rico but one of the best ones that I’ve been to in the world.

I legitimately blogged that trip — even writing about mundane things like ordering six eggs at Denny’s or my thoughts on pristine beaches. It was as though I jumped back ten years and returned to what I was doing in my early thirties — just traveling and blogging. In a way I feel nostalgic for those days. I had a clear mission and it was very simple: to make a living as a traveling writer. It’s not exactly the traveling writer part that I’m longing for but the clear mission.

Cuba

Cuba was a difficult country for me. This wasn’t because the travel was particularly difficult — travel is easy almost everywhere — but because I found the culture difficult to navigate. With the Covid pandemic knocking out their tourism cash cow the people of this country were clearly in need, and they viewed the scant number of visitors who were still coming as a source of sustenance. It got to the point where I almost had to stop talking to people because almost every conversation came with a price tag. While I did have some wild times there and met some genuine friends, even people who were clearly not street urchins or touts would try to get money out of you. You’d be talking to some random, normal person and all of a sudden they would ask you for ten bucks. Or an old guy would walk up to you and try to force to — on the verge of being physical — to go to a pharmacy to buy him some medication (a scam). If I can’t freely talk with people, make friends, and collect stories there is no reason for me to be somewhere. While I did eventually break through the veneer and make some real connections it took a lot of effort and left me feeling as though the biggest benefit I got from going there was the ability to say “now I know” … which I guess is the currency of the traveler.

I intended to blog regularly from Cuba and come out of it with a nice series, but I haven’t completed it yet. There was just too much to consider and more context that was needed. This takes time. The biggest drawback to blogging is that time is something that you’re rarely allotted. But the remaining posts will be coming soon.

Dominican Republic

I also returned to the Dominican Republic in 2023. This was the first time I’ve been back to this country since 2010, when my family was still young and my older daughter was just a few months old. The DR will always hold a special place in my memory, as this was our first international destination with a child. It was an interesting trip, and we spent most of it hanging with my friend Andy and playing on the beach. It was actually Petra’s first beach experience. She mistook sand for food — something that she would do for the next year or so as we bounced around the beach towns of Mexico and Central America.

I can’t tell you any details about our most recent trip to the DR because that would make my wife not very happy with me.

Northeast film travels

In addition to a few international trips, I’ve also spent a large swath of 2023 traveling around the Northeast USA on film projects. Maine, Rhode Island, DC … This was mostly for documentaries that are set to be released sometime this year.

Accomplishments

Finished The White Elephant

This was a feature documentary that I’d been working on for some years. As I’ve discussed previously on this blog and on Real Life Cinema, I initially planned to return to Melaka for another filming session … but the “pandemic” scuttled this and after that I eventually realized that I couldn’t budget the money or time to do it. So I altered the theme a little and completed it with what I had … and I think it came out alright.

The White Elephant from Real Life Cinema.

Finished Laughing Through Lockdown

I originally did an abbreviate version of this film for another platform, but I had more footage that I wanted to include in it, so I assembled my own version. There was really no relevance to releasing this film this year, but I just did it because I wanted to … also, while the pandemic is something we all want to forget we should probably force ourselves to remember what they did to us in the name of hysteria, control, and greed.

Wise Guys’ 100th episode

We also filmed the 100th episode of Wise Guys this past year. This is actually a significant accomplishment as very few weekly talk shows make it to 100 episodes. I haven’t mentioned this show much, only having blogged about it once, but this has been one of my most regular projects over my time in New York City. We just filmed episode 124 last week and the show is still going strong.

Hendrick’s book

I also helped edit a book called The Curious Cocktail Cabinet, which was published by Penguin and consists of 100 recipes for cocktails featuring Hendrick’s Gin. This book came out beautifully — it is truly a work of art and probably as much of a thing to behold as a book could be. If you’re into gin, have a home bar, or making your own cocktails, I highly recommend checking this book out. Buy the Hendrick’s book here.

Started Real Life Cinema for real

While I technically started Real Life Cinema in the summer of 2019, last year was probably the first year that I really starting to put forward the branding. I still have some work to do on the website, but it’s finally getting somewhere.

Started other websites

I have a bunch of other websites too. I don’t mention them here because it would piss my wife off if you knew about some of them.

What I want in this year

My goal this year is very simple: to work on projects with other people. This may sound strange, given that I’m very comfortable working alone, but it is through doing difficult / fun / wild projects with other people that mutual histories are made … and these pay compounding dividends farther down the road. Sharing life with other people is really what it’s really all about.

We were not in poor spirits though. As we sat on our couch, back at the place where we started, we knew we had to rally. This couldn’t be how this ended. It was the afternoon of the day before Christmas Eve and public transport and flights would be packed and expensive. Could any rental cars still be available (for a price we’d be willing to pay)?

We searched from LGA: $800. Nope.

But then we searched from JFK, and found a car for $350 for five days that I believe had a little red tagline beneath the price that said “Only one left.” We jumped on it.

The problem was that the provider was Ace / Drivo — a NY based rental car company that’s leading the race to the bottom. Their object is to shoot for the lowest prices and then make their customers pay for it later with poor service and weird miscellaneous fees. The last time I rented a car through them I stood in line for over an hour and a half and watched several customers break down in hissyfits … which I suppose provided some degree of entertainment. But we were not choosers here.

There are many things in life that are more important than money or quality service … or most anything else, really. We could have stayed in NYC and saved some cash. We tried to make it but oh well, maybe next year. But that just didn’t seem right. The only value that money really has is the experiences that it can net for you. Nobody is every going to ride to their grave being like, “Boy, I’m glad I saved all that money …”

When you’re a young traveler you attached supreme importance to saving money because you understand that each dollar is a measure of time that you can remain abroad. When you become a little older you become more aware that time is fleeting and that you do not have an infinite supply of it, so paying out to enjoy the moment is often a far better bargain.

I now ask myself only one question when faced with the prospect of spending money:

Will I remember it?

My wife’s parents are getting old and her dad isn’t doing so well. This week together will be something we all remember.

I wasn’t feeling good about the ride up to that point. I had a weird feeling. I just wasn’t comfortable. This was odd as I drive long distances often and it’s usually a way of travel that I enjoy — you kind of just ride and think, come up with new plans and reevaluate previous mistakes made, the hum of tires on pavement matching the rhythm of the hum of the mind.

Then, just inside of Connecticut on route 15 we went around a bend to find a line of cars in front of us completely stopped. We slowed down, came to a full stop. Took a breath. And boom.

The person behind us didn’t follow suit.

We had enough space that we didn’t crash into the car in front of us — unlike the crash in San Juan. So it was just us and the car behind us left all smashed up on the highway.

I went through my triage checklist. Is everyone ok? Yes. Am I in a safe place? No. Ok, how do I improve this? I will drive beyond the curve to that flat area off the road up ahead. Cool. Is my car functional? I don’t know. I will try to go forward a little. It still works. Cool. Now that I’m in a less compromised position how bad is the damage?

The bumper that we just had replaced in July after someone crashed into our car when it was parked was again destroyed and dangling off. I peered into the innards and found that the frame was bent bad. I figured that I could limp it back to NY but knew that there was a good chance that this would be our last ride in this car …

Ok, what about the other driver? I looked back on the road and a white sedan with a smashed up front end was on the other side peaking around the bend in a very precarious position. It hadn’t moved. Shit. Could the driver be injured? I went to find out.

I crossed the highway and found a buxom young girl in a knit poncho sitting in the driver’s seat looking shell shocked. Her car was packed full of stuff — like everyone else, she was returning home for the holidays. I walked up to her window and she rolled it down.

“Are you ok?”

She looked at me fearfully.

“I don’t know what to do,” she stammered.

“First, I think it would be a good idea to get your car out of the road.”

There wasn’t a shoulder on the left side and cars were swerving around her.

“Can you drive it still?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

Her airbag had gone off but her vehicle appeared operable.

“Alright, try to drive it over there by us and we can exchange information.”

She did that and then got out of the car.

“What do I do now?” she asked.

I asked her for her insurance card and she dug it out. I took photos of it and the damage on her car. It was my plan then to just snap the pics and split. I asked her if she would be alright and could drive to somewhere nearby. She said that she couldn’t take her key out of the ignition or something and didn’t think she could drive. So she called Triple A and ordered a tow truck. I told her that I could wait with her.

Apparently, Triple A wanted us to file a police report and, honestly, it was a better idea for insurance reasons … and because I really didn’t know the accident laws in Connecticut — in some states you have to file a police report for all accidents.

I called the police and a half hour later a trooper showed up and did his thing. He blocked off traffic so we could get back onto the highway and we limped back to NYC with a hanging bumper and parts falling off onto the highway.

“This is like in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” my wife joked. Our car was decimated. Our trip was decimated. But we were still telling jokes … not bad.

But the closer we got to home the more I became aware of what this really means. I had a full slate of filming to do for the off-shore windfarms project in January that I can’t push back. It’s all regional travel and I need a full rig of gear … that means a vehicle.

Things just got a little more challenging.

Something about this place and this setting is giving me the tingle of nostalgia.

It is making me think of when I was traveling through Asia and Eastern Europe writing for Forbes, doing book events, and giving talks about ghost cities and new silk roads …

I would often stay in hotels that outclassed my actual status. I would often be put up in them by employers or event organizers, or I would at least hang out and drink in them. I delighted in my forays into the strange universe of the rich and powerful. And, as always, I felt extremely comfortable in my outsider status. (It’s being an insider that’s awkward and challenging.)

There was just something quiet, solitudinous about that span of life.Even though things regularly went off the hook and some true adventures were had, I had this distance from everything that I truly enjoyed.

I was alone.

I had time.

I was alone and had time to sit and think and write.

That was my job. To travel, look at things, and talk with people. It’s sometimes difficult to believe that they paid me for it.

As I sit in the lobby of an upscale Marriott in DC calmly preparing to film a US congressman for a movie that I’m making, I’m feeling very much the same as I did then. I have my checkered pink blazer on, my Ranger boots are kicked up onto a foot rest, there are neatly dressed business people scurrying in front of me or sitting nearby held captive by their phones. I don’t belong here and I like it.

***
Some places in the world have character in their extreme lack of character. Excessive yang becomes yin. DC is a capital city that looks and feels like a capital city.

Like Astana, Putrajaya, Canberra, Brasilia, whatever the fuck China is building in Xiong’an, a good capital is an empty, cold, sterile landscape sharp right angles, ridiculously long blocks, broad streets, and an architectural style that can be summed up in one word: edifice. These capital cities are living monuments designed to exude power … and to make you feel small. And by this criteria DC is probably the best designed capital city in the world.

It is the big emptiness of central DC that has always intrigued me. Where NY is tightly crammed together with cultures melting on top of each other and streets full of life and dialogue and WTF?!?, DC is a lifeless 1:1 scale model of a city where humans are an invasive mold creeping over the broad stone facades. New York is built for humans; DC is built for pharaohs.

***
I did a series of trips to DC in the lead up to and aftermath of the 2020 election. I was filming for a documentary about the culture wars and things were going apeshit and I had to document it. This project culminated in being part of the only professional crew to film J6.

I glimpsed the ugly core of humanity and recoiled from it. But each time I come back to DC I’m reminded. I filmed someone getting stabbed here. I filmed someone being trampled to death there. I was bear sprayed on this corner. I filmed a guy get beat down for wearing the wrong political colors on that corner. I watched a group of elderly women waving Trump flags have a garbage can dumped on them by young men clad in black …

It’s almost like the vacuity of the place sparks a particular type of insanity. Or maybe that’s just politics …

I lost my faith in humanity somewhere along the line during that project. No, I will rephrase that: I saw what we really are and came to terms with it. Violence, tribalism, and a thirst for conflict aren’t glitches, they’re features, and are probably some of the reasons why we’re still here.

***
It’s always surprised me how accessible US government officials are to regular people. I found this out in 2008 when I unexpectedly joined a group of lobbyists who met with a congressman’s aide.  You can just go to the Rayburn building and walk right in. You go through a simple security screening which amounts to metal detector, nobody asks you any questions or if you have an appointment … While I can’t say for certain, I don’t think it’s like this anywhere else in the world.

My interview went well. I kept it simple and only built a two camera, one light set. When interviewing government officials I usually don’t expect to get much usable material. But in this case, the congressman was on-point, interesting, and sometimes even funny. At one point in the interview I remember thinking, “Wow, I can actually use this.”

Out of the RVs that I checked out, I feared that I would not be able to take them too far away from nicely paved roads — their itsy bitsy wheels, low ground clearance, and very heavy weight would not be good for back country travel. And if I could not get to where the free camping is, the RV would have little advantage when placed into my family’s travel strategy.

In Cottonwood, Arizona, I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, parked our little Subaru, and looked to my left.

“Hey, that RV looks homemade,” I pointed out to my wife.

Homemade RV in Arizona

She grunted. I can’t say she cared too much about the custom made mobile home, as she left me to my own devices and went into the grocery store. I walked over to a guy who was putting his groceries into the back of the RV, and, as I assumed that he was the man who custom built the souped up traveling machine that stood in front of me, I began asking him questions about it.

Luckily for me, he was more than willing to talk about his creation. “It use to be an old UHAUL,” he said. He purchased the moving truck for $2000 seven years ago with the intention of converting into an RV to travel in.

Ford Econoline moving truck converted to RV

“I use to travel in a van that I just lived in, but that got a little . . . well . . .”

I knew what he was talking about. It can be a little trying living inside of a van long term. They can very quickly get very messy and uncomfortable if you do not display the constant diligence necessary to keep the bed cleared off, to keep the garbage from building up, and to have the tolerance to not allow a low head clearance to bother you. To have a comfortable traveling/ sleeping combination vehicle it seems important to have the sleeping area separated from the living areas. RVs and pop up trailers do this well.

The converted moving truck was a Ford Econoline and had a queen sized bed in a loft over the top of the driver’s cabin. Above it was a hatchway that opened up to allow the sleeper to look upon the nighttime stars as he slumbers. This roof top hatch also made the roof of the vehicle into an additional living area.

Homemade RV interior

“Yeah, I sometimes put a lawn chair up on top and I sit up there with my legs kicked back on the air conditioner,” the creator of the RV continued with a laugh. He then told me that people often think it funny to see him relaxing on top of his vehicle. “Two times newspapers have taken my picture and put it in the paper.”

He then invited me inside of the vehicle to take a look. I climbed up into the converted moving truck and was surprised at how much room was in it. “I usually put my motorcycle right there,” he said as he indicated the tiled passage way that lead to the back door. It was the perfect size for a motorcycle. On either side of this walkway were handmade wooden storage bins and benches. There was a little home made table underneath of a 2 foot square window, a comfortable sized doorway was cut out between the driver’s cabin and the rest of the vehicle, and the entire interior of the RV seemed very livable.

Interior of RV converted from a moving truck

Where I have found standard RVs to be cluttered and cramped, this converted moving truck was spacious and comfortable. I could fully stand up inside of it and stretch out my arms without being squished, or having to contort myself in any way to move through it.

The best part about this homemade RV was that the conversion was completed for very little money. All of the fabrication was done in a warehouse at the creator’s place of work, the wood and insulation were all taken from garbage piles, two small windows in the upper rear of the vehicle were taken from an old Greyhound bus, and the only things that were paid for was the air conditioning unit — $600 — a side window — $70 — and a good set of all terrain tires. The only expensive things so far have been gas and insurance.

Raised tires on converted motor home

There was also a generator with an outside electrical plug hooked up to the RV, though I did not ask about its cost.

The insulation in the RV was one inch thick on the sides and three inches in the roof. “The insulation foam is probably the most expensive thing that you would need,” the handy man told me. But he was lucky, as he use to work at a military aircraft fabrication plant, and was able to extract the foam from shipping containers that once carried missiles.

Other adjustments that were made to the designs of the original moving truck was that the front wheels were raised up three inches and good all terrain tires replaced the former UHAUL street only tires.

The creator of the moving truck motor home

For seven years this homemade RV carted its creator around the American Southwest and Mexico. He told me how the truck handles well off road and he can get to areas that other RVers cannot access. He told me about how he can back right up to a beach, open the rear door, and have paradise at his doorstep — for free. It sounded pretty good to me.

The only problem was the truck’s low gas/ mileage capacities. From what I was told, it costs a good deal of money to move this truck.

“Yeah, well think of all the money you have saved by not having to pay for hotels,” I reminded the RVer, “The hotels that I have been staying in cost no less than $40 a night.” There is little chance that anyone traveling with an RV who takes time to stop and enjoy the scenry would average more than forty bucks a day in gas. If I had an RV, I could travel for a day, stop and made a good free camp for a week, drive another day, stay two weeks, drive for a couple of days, camp out for a month . . .

He agreed, and then said that he probably spent over 600 nights on the road sleeping in his converted RV for free. Nights that would otherwise have carried accommodation expenses.

This converted moving truck RV strategy seems like a good move — if this was going to be my move right now. These trucks can be had at bottom of the barrel prices, can be converted to RVs at low costs, and seem vastly more hardy than a factory made mobile home. Meeting up with the creator of the moving truck RV planted a little seed in my head that may grow to fruition in other circumstances, in another land.

For Chaya, Petra, and I, the work season is over, our sights are set abroad. We have a Subaru hatchback, friends in the West who have opened their doors to us, and no need now to drop a couple thousand dollars on a mobile home. We are ready to get out of the USA again. It is about time.

Perhaps on a dusty day in Australia in the not too distant future I will dig up this travelogue entry and look over the photos of this moving truck RV again, and perhaps I will then put them to better use.

Update – October 30, 2012 – Photos of moving truck to RV conversion from Terry E

Notes from Terry E about this conversion:
My Penske 2008 moving van has a 16 foot box with a GMC cutaway van and a 6.0 V8, this engine puts out 324 HP and has 118k miles, and it runs great and so far around town driving is 9.12 miles per gallon. I am hoping for at least 12 or more miles to the gallon on the open road, we shall see.

My design is to be as light as possible to get to the 12 plus miles per gallon, I will have a two seat table with fold down leafs; this can be used inside or outside. Just below the cabinets with the microwave will be a kitchen cabinet with sink with faucet and a 70″ long counter top for a work area and a place to set the Coleman EvenTemp InstaStart 3-Burner Stove – 5444 Series this stove can also be used outside.

I will build a bathroom beside the kitchen cabinet for a Thetford curve Porta Potti plus a med cabinet. On the outside of the bathroom wall facing the bed will be black carpeted with a wall mounted flat screen TV with a drop down carpeted door that will hold the blue ray player.

The bed will be a new full pillow top mattress setting on top of the bed box frame, which under it holds plastic tubes for clothing. The rollup door in back will have a Tailgate screen door, so when the rollup door is up you will have the big window view all of nature, but keeping bugs out.

I will be adding electric outlets and a 12 volt converter plus a 12 volt deep cycle battery, and a gray water tank for the sink. City water connection on the out side for the sink and there will be no hot water heater to deal with.

Showers are at camp grounds like KOA’s just a very simple way to travel around. More pictures to come, so I hope this helps others in their build.

This post was first published on November 29, 2009. 

I can remember being a little kid, eating my morning cereal as my dad burst in through the front door at 5am covered in snow after spending an hour scraping an inch of ice off of his windshield so he could drive an hour+ to work in a blizzard … where he would remain outside in the cold working his ass off. I was sitting in our nice warm home spooning Frosted Flakes into my mouth and I can remember how he looked at me — it was as though he pitied my future, where I would one day be his age doing something like he did. He just looked at me as a glob of wet snow plopped down from his head to the floor and muttered, “Get yourself an education so you don’t have to do this shit the rest of your life.”

His job sucked. My mom’s job sucked. And I grew up thinking that all jobs sucked. I legitimately feared growing up and having to get a job … that sucked. I spent an inordinate amount of time as a kid lying in bed looking at a map of the world that I had thumbtacked to my wall feeling anxiety about my future. My one goal in life was to not work jobs that sucked. That was it. That was all I wanted to do. So I spent hours and hours laying there concocting strategies of how I could subvert what seemed to be inevitable.

I eventually came up with something.

I postponed working for as long as I could, not getting my first job until I was at the tail end of being 18. Then, feeling absolutely defeated, I went in for my first — and to this point, only — shit job. It lasted about a month and a half. Then I went to Ecuador and learned how to do something.

The archaeology era.

I was trained well and when I came back I began working as an archeologist. It was traveling work, it didn’t suck, and it paid decently. I was able to travel around with various crews for three or so months per year and then spend the rest of my time just backpacking or going to school abroad. I would eventually get a degree in anthropology and journalism and, almost as soon as I did, doing archaeology just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I realized that I liked the traveling part more than I did the science part, and I endeavored to hang up my trowl and just travel.

I would write. I would blog. And I had a path that was blazed before me:

But the fear of doing a job that sucked was always there. It drove me to spend the long hours in the saddle, bashing out words on a laptop, putting myself into awkward situations to find stories or get information. I was always driven because I knew that I could make it if I only worked 10, 12, 15 hours a day … and if I didn’t I would have to do a job that sucked.

I have to admit that this fear still keeps me going today. Even though I am now 42 years old and have enjoyed a nice career as a blogger, a journalist, an author, an editor, and now a filmmaker I’m still scared everyday that if I don’t keep going I will fall off the mountain and will have to get a job that sucks. They say that fear is a bad thing … unless you use it as motivation.

That fear also allows me to accept the times in my work when things get tough. I can remember one particularly tk day on the set of a show that I film. People were yelling, they were arguing, I got sucked into it. My fellow crew member got taken outside for a talk with the director. It was all bullshit but I really couldn’t get too mad or emotionally invested because in that moment — right when things got their most heated — that image of my dad walking through the door when I was a little kid popped into my consciousness. And I laughed. I laughed because I know that my worse day at work is going to be vastly better than my dad’s best day. Work is supposed to suck.

Happy Thanksgiving.