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Rastafarians, Scared of Snorkeling, and the Embodiment of Jerk Chicken: Jamaica, Where Things Went Wrong
I could do this. Easy. Laid Back. Island Time. Jamaica. After all, I’m the girl who will go almost anywhere, try almost anything, eat almost anything. But I’m still not fearless. Sitting at home at my kitchen table, I was the one who had decisively stated that I was going to Jamaica to face my fear of the water. Wind whipping through, what at the time felt to me like my effortless beach hair, but otherwise in pictures looking like my, my hair is stuck to the side of my face hair, I looked out into the infinite turquoise Caribbean. Chickens ran beneath my feet. A German Sheppard jumped into…
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Guatemala, Land of the Trees
As we rode into Guatemala on CA13 we were stuck behind a bicycle race. The slow pace forced us to carefully soak in all that the countryside had to offer: a van went by with a loudspeaker announcing available medicine for sale out of the back of it. Senoras nursed on the front porches of their ranches. \Stallions nipped each other in the scorching sun. Vaqueros sat in their large white cowboy hats. Everyone stopped to cheer for the bikes coming through but life lingered at a slow pace. Really we had luckily stumbled into finding the charming town of El Remate. Resident families…
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 3: A Flamingo, An Ice Wall, A Rock Pile, & An Estancia
Crossing between Chile and Argentina was little more than a blink of an administrative counter. We got out to lift up a chain and let ourselves over. We had been strategically planning our diesel stops on the map. All plans to purchase and keep a spare can had run dry. The scrub grass silence was broken when we took a 65 km shortcut down a cheese grater and laughed in disbelief that the lambs had long tails. They wagged like dogs. Then there was the lone flamingo. Lost far from it’s comrades in Northern Chile, the wind had grounded it. It was the only colorful thing for hundreds of miles,…
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Tierra Del Fuego, The End of the World: The Patagonia Chronicles Part 4
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 2: Is That Really Another Guanaco?
Puerto Natales is the closest hub of civilization and it’s 80 km to the national park. From our hostel we passed the town’s pride, a massive Milodon sculpture, and later on the cave of the Milodon. I wasn’t even really sure what a Milodon was, but knew it was big, kinda had the body of a bear and the face of a llama, and it was really old. Yeah, like 5,000 years old. But the landscape looked exactly like a place where dinosaurs, Milodons, and cave men probably ran around. There’s just something that doesn’t couple about sliding around in a ragged out truck rocking out to Nelly’s “Ride Wit…
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Wild Penguins: The Last Patagonia Chronicle, Part 5
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The Patagonia Chronicles Part 1: Backpacks, Bagualeros, and Torres
The dreaded blue box . . . A plane full of backpackers chatters as we barrel in our silver bullet from Santiago to Punta Arenas. Many were headed to Antarctica. My blood pressure begins to calm since the teenager in the airport aggressively demanded to assess the size of my (and everyone else’s) backpack at the plane door by trying to put a blue box over it. Shoutout to LATAM airlines, the biggest bunch of bag-Nazi-fun-police I’ve seen in 43 countries. You people need a physics lesson that a bag exactly the size of the allowed dimensions will not fit into a blue cardboard box the exact same size. “You’re…
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Romania, So Much More Than Vampires
Can we begin with a creepy, exaggerated laugh of a villain? I’ll be the first shmuck to admit that the reason that we visited Romania was to see Bran Castle– hit Bucharest, tackle some vampires, and get out. But Romania has a way of slapping around silly tourists with this inappropriate attitude. My favorite memories really had nothing to do with Vlad , castles, or blood sucking. Folklore developed around the region when tribes fought to keep out invaders. The ruthless Vladimir, rather infamously known as Vlad the Impaler, went around mounting entire armies on sticks when they threatened his people. He became the most wanted man in…
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An Entirely Maddening Time in Dubrovnik
Let me just preface this by saying that I loved the Dalmatian Coast. Visiting a new place is similar to dating. You’re both trying to figure out if you like each other, if you fit together. Dubrovnik was the equivalent of dating an international super model. Despite her beauty, I couldn’t get to know her. I couldn’t tell if she just had no personality or if she was fabulously & characteristically mysterious. She slipped out of my fingers before I had enough time to figure it out. The experience was entirely maddening. Old town Dubrovnik was one of the most beautiful places that I have ever seen . .…
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Funky in Seattle
Photos of the lovely Seattle
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14 Photos of Montenegro That Will Make You Want to Visit
A week before my Balkan road trip I sat in a meeting. I didn’t know the man sitting across from me. I didn’t know his name or his official job title, but I knew he outranked me because of the way he carried himself. We scoffed at the latest news about Trump shoving the prime minister of Montenegro back in May. We conducted our meeting business via phone with an associate in London. Instead of telling the associate goodbye, someone at the table nonchalantly said, “Be safe” and the phone clicked. We all looked around. “Be safe?” “Yeah, you know, because she’s abroad”. Then the conversation came full circle. “She’s in London!…
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Friends to Cuba- Actually, Friends to Cubans
If loving Cuba is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. What I especially loved about it were it’s normal, everyday, working class people and the families of the slums. I visited Cuba legally, and hesitated to publish what I learned because of the icy relations of the past that have yet again been drug up to the mat. But I’m publishing in the name of art, in the name of truth, in the name of education, free speech, and almost everything I believe in: loving others despite their ethnicity, nationality, race, political stance, or religion. The second story balcony of a colonial casa with iron railings and white…
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Vancouver Island & Telegraph Cove
∴Mountain Ranges & Sunshine∴ There’s something about the way the light shines on Vancouver Island. Even the weeds on the side of the road are beautiful. The green that hits you when you step off of the ferry is unreal. The island is roughly the size of Honshu, the main island of Japan—pretty big for a place that I had never really thought about before. It sits like a finger gently brushing the shoreline of Western Canada pointing north to Alaska. Driving through I realized just how sparsely populated and secluded the northern part really is. ∴Forests out of Imaginary Places∴ It’s quite remarkable how the bright moss carpets…
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My favorite Places Around Banff
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Authenticity in Costa Rica
This is where this story began; it was hard not to miss the burning forest outside of Liberia. When the Spanish claimed “Costa Rica” they named it after the RICH land they saw. Mixed research indicates that in the 1940’s 75% of Costa Rica was forested. Suprise As of today 20,000 acres of land is deforested annually. Now, while I can’t speak first hand about the authenticity of statistics, I can speak about what I saw while there. I had these HUGE expectations of Costa Rica . . . cue the dreams of . . . forging a river crossing in a Land Rover, maybe getting stuck in the mud a time or two,…
