Any post on this blog that starts with a closeup of a glass of beer has to be a good post. This is certainly not the first and likely won't be the last post that's started that way. Shocker, I know! This delicious pint of Fuller's Black Cab Stout in the matching glass (the way it's supposed to come) was captured on film (or maybe not film, exactly) and then downed lovingly at The Hydrant pub in London right near The Monument in 2016. Yummy! Give me English beer over any other nation's beer any day!
It's now been more than nine weeks since my cancelled trip to Costa Rica was due to depart but didn't, a casualty of the global pandemic we now still find ourselves in more than two months after I was supposed to board a southbound flight at Dulles Airport. Last week, I cancelled my second trip of 2020, a long weekend in New Mexico visiting a site that I should have visited 19 years ago but which I missed because I just didn't get how big the Land of Enchantment is. Go figure! I guess now it's going to be 20 years at least.
Since I've been grounded, I've been combing through my picture archives from the last almost seven years that I've been traveling in a deliberate way and writing about it in this blog. I thought it might give me some hope for the day I can go somewhere new on this rock of ours if I posted some pictures of a great past memory. I've been doing that on Twitter every day since March 26, the day I was supposed to go to Costa Rica. As of today, I'm up to day 65. I'm going to keep going until I take my next trip, whenever and wherever that might be.
Some of the pictures I've posted over the last couple of months have appeared on this blog. Others have not. For whatever reason, they ended up on the cutting room floor, likely because I either elected not to write about that day or moment in time that I took the picture or just couldn't find a way to work them into a post. I miss writing about traveling, so for this post (and since I'm not going anywhere right now), I thought I'd write a few words about some of the photographs I've unearthed this spring. They are presented in the order I tweeted them. And, no, I'm not covering all 65 days.
Hawaii (2016)
One of the most disappointing experiences we've had over the last seven years was in Hawaii. I know, right? Who'd have thought? I sound completely spoiled. But it's true.
We decided to spend the better part of one of our days on the island of Maui in February of 2016 by driving from Kahului to Hana on a road appropriately named the Road to Hana. It's a twisty, turny highway right along the ocean front with tons of pullouts and scenic views and secluded hikes to waterfalls along the way. It sounded cool as hell, especially when we had rented a Jeep Wrangler to get there.
It sucked. Honestly for us it was almost a complete waste of time. Sure we enjoyed a hike into the woods but other than that it was literally just a drive to a hardware store. A long, long drive to a hardware store. And I really do mean a hardware store. That's what's at the end of the road. Seriously. And nothing else. We got there, were supremely disappointed and headed back, without stops on the return journey.
So why am I reminiscing about a day that was almost a complete waste of time? Because "almost" is the key word. Along the way we stopped at Aunty Sandy's, a roadside stand selling hot, fresh banana bread, for breakfast. We walked down to the ocean and sat while we ate our loaf of banana bread and looked out at the view above. If there's ever been a breakfast I've eaten with a better view, I can't remember it. We were literally in paradise. We got nothing out of that drive except that view. And ultimately, that was enough because I'm remembering it four years later.
Venice (2015)
If there's something every first time tourist has to do in Venice, it's take a gondola ride along the Grand Canal. Sure it's overpriced, too short and a little cheesy. A complete tourist trap in other words. We did it anyway. How could we not? The Grand Canal is one of the great boulevards in Europe, albeit the only one made out of water. We have a picture in our house of us in the gondola with our gondolier smiling giving us two thumbs up after our ride. It was completely awesome, despite the fact that it's a total tourist trap.
When I was paging through my old directories of past trips, I found the picture above, which shows a series of gondolas in the foreground and Andrea Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore church in the background across the water. For me, that church and those boats bring me back to Venice instantly. They are enduring symbols of that city. To find a picture with both in them at once brought back the three days we spent there in vivid detail. This photograph must have been taken late in the day because the gondolas are closed up for the day and the sun is hitting the west side of the church as it is setting.
I loved Venice. I thought it would be flooded and overcrowded with both tourists and pigeons. It was none of those things. I could have spent a week or more just wandering around the canals and streets of this place. It's definitely on the would love to go back list. But then again, so are a lot of places.
Brú na Bóinne, Ireland (2019)
Every so often I write almost an entire blog post about a place and then discard it. My post about Brú na Bóinne from the end of last year is the latest one of these posts to be started and never see the light of day. Sometimes I lose inspiration about a post or can't find enough to say or am just forcing things and decide to give up rather than completing something that's not worth the time and effort. With Brú na Bóinne, it just came down to not many interesting photographs.
I've been to some pretty ancient places over the last seven years or so. Prehistoric petroglyphs in the American southwest. All sorts of Roman ruins. Stonehenge. Machu Picchu. I never would have thought the most ancient site with construction at the hand of man would be in Ireland but Brú na Bóinne beats all those other places handily in the age department.
What we saw that day in the Irish countryside was a passage tomb, a stone structure beneath a mound of earth that's stood in place for 3,200 years. Stepping inside this place and hearing our guide talk about the history of the place and its relationship to the solstices was just amazing. The amount of labor that must have gone into putting this place together so precisely must have been staggering.
I love this picture as a reminder of what we experienced that day but I also love it because it's about the most green photograph I've ever taken in my life. It's perfect as a memento of Ireland which shone so brightly on some days and disappointed us so badly on others. A day at Brú na Bóinne was not one of the disappointing days.
Mount Fuji, Japan (2017)
When I first made my list of must sees for my one and only (so far) trip to Japan, it needed some serious editing. There's often a dilemma with me between getting into one spot in a country super deep vs. moving around and seeing a lot at the risk of spreading myself too thin. In the end, I think I sort of split the baby on Japan. Mount Fuji made the initial list and survived the cut down.
There's not much to a visit to Mount Fuji unless you are intending to take a hike right to the summit, which in mid-May we weren't planning doing. We hopped on a bus for an hour or two and got dropped off about halfway up the slope on the north side. There's a store and some food vendors and (of course) a Shinto shrine but not much else. You just sort of do what you can until the next bus shows up to take you home or wherever the next stop is that you have a ticket for.
But there's something about Fuji. It's a picture perfect single volcanic peak and its shape couldn't be a more idealized cone shape. It's like a cartoon image but its presence and meaning in the lives of the Japanese is huge. It was important to me to stand on the mountain on my first visit to Japan. So we did.
The day we were there it was about impossible to photograph the mountain either because of the cloud cover or we weren't standing in the right spot or there was some object or human in the way. This picture is my favorite of the day, taken from the front steps of the Komitake Shrine where I purchased what is now my niece's goshuin-cho and then half filled it with goshuin, the calligraphy and temple seal artworks that you can collect from each temple or shrine you visit in the country. To me, this picture reminds me of how cold and isolated and spiritual it was on Fuji and it also shows off the peak of the mountain which I love.
I can almost guarantee the reason why this picture hasn't appeared on this blog before this post is that it has a portrait orientation and plain and simple I usually use landscape orientation or square photographs in this blog. Today, that doesn't matter.
Roosevelt Island, New York City (2019)
I am pretty sure without really checking too closely that I've visited New York City more than any other destination in the past seven years. I don't think there's really any need to check. I just know it's true. Despite all the time I've spent in the Big Apple, I've only written one post about my experiences there, a 2015 visit to the Statue of Liberty's crown.
The reason for this is simple: we are usually in New York to do the same things we love doing over and over again and by that I mean Broadway shows, trips to Kalustyan's to stock up on spices and chutney and our new tradition of dinners of chicken skewers at the excellent, excellent Tori Shin restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. Simply put...New York is where we would live if we could afford to live in the manner we want to live there. We can't. So we don't.
Every so often I do something in New York that approaches post-worthy status. My trip to Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River last year almost made it. As many times as I've been to New York, I'd never been there before last summer to see the ruins of the old smallpox hospital and Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms State Park, which was executed posthumously (and therefore in my opinion not the way Kahn would have done it; the great architects always tweak during construction). It's totally worth a trip.
One of the best parts of this day was getting to the island, which can be visited by bus, Subway or ferry. Or you can take the tram, which takes you above the city from 2nd Avenue to the middle of the East River. You'll get some killer views of the City as you ride alongside the Queensboro Bridge for the low, low price of a Subway ride. The picture above shows the tram approaching the Roosevelt Island terminal. Do this if you are in New York, even if you turn right back around and go back to Manhattan.
Ollantaytambo, Peru (2019)
Last year we spent about a week deep in the heart of the Andes exploring the cities and towns and citadels of the Incan Empire. Our trip took us from Lima on the coast of Peru up to the Incan capital of Cusco and then over to a spot where we hiked for a day to the royal retreat called Machu Picchu.
When the Spanish conquistadors "discovered" the Incan Empire in 1526, they took what they wanted almost from day one. The Incas proved no match for the Spanish from the very first engagement although it was really the horses that they couldn't compete with. A man who has never seen a horse before in his life is no match for a trained and heavily armed soldier on the back of a 2,000 pound animal. Almost every engagement the Spanish had with the native Peruvians resulted in a victory for the Europeans except one: Manco Inca's stand at Ollantaytambo, a fortified hilltop between Cusco and Machu Picchu.
Today Ollantaytambo is one of many sites with ruined but mostly intact Incan masonry structures, a testament to the timeless quality of Incan construction. And like some of those other sites, the remains of building at Ollantayambo are in what seem like the most remote and most inaccessible locations you can possibly imagine.
This photograph of some abandoned grain warehouses is my favorite of our partial day stop in town. I appreciate the way these old buildings are just clinging to the most precarious of slopes and blend in perfectly with the mountainside. We didn't have time that day to explore these ruins but I got as far as I reasonably thought I could from our tour group to get a picture I thought I'd be happy with. And I am.
Kyoto, Japan (2017)
I know, I know, I already put a picture of Japan on this post. What can I say? Japan was simply one of the most amazing places I've ever been. I can't wait to go back. And yes, it's ahead of Venice. Way ahead.
It's difficult to describe all the ways I love Japan from my week and a half or so there in 2017. It's a place with so many details. Tradition. Respect. Humility. Incredible food. Gorgeous nature. Spiritualism. Cutting edge modern anything. Boozy late nights of karaoke. The markets. The temples. The bars. Cleanliness. Order. Speed. Crowds. There are so many sights and smells and tastes and sounds to take in.
As we walked around Kyoto, which is the traditional capital of shogun-era Japan, I couldn't help but notice these red paper lanterns with birds on them. They seemed to be everywhere in that city as we roamed the streets and alleys in search of geishas or gyoza or street markets or temples. I took this picture because I wanted to find one of these lanterns in a store and bring it back and hang it in our home. We never found a paper lantern store. But this is still one of my favorite details of Kyoto.
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (2018)
We've been fortunate in the last five years to have taken two safari trips to sub-Saharan Africa. We spent less than a week in primarily Zimbabwe and Botswana in 2015 to get our feet wet and then really did it right a couple of years ago by spending a week each in Kenya and Tanzania. The diversity of wildlife and the almost completely untouched environment is like no other place on Earth I've been.
In 2015 we didn't know what to expect. We were happy to see anything that we'd only ever previously seen in a zoo somewhere. Fortunately, elephants, hippos and lions featured heavily. In 2018, I went with a top 10 list of species that we hadn't been able to find on our first trip. I think we got seven of the ten. Maybe eight.
Never in my wildest imaginings would I have expected to find the birds in Kenya and Tanzania to be one of the more fascinating aspects of that trip. I've never been much of a birds guy (ostriches and storks and things like that don't really count here) but those two weeks in eastern Africa, particularly at Lake Manyara and Serengeti National Park, really opened my eyes and I fell in love. Who knew lilac-breasted rollers and carmine bee-eaters could be so interesting? The picture above shows four superb starlings. I love how the colors pop against the thorny gray tree (always with the thorns in Africa...) they are roosting in and I love that I got a group of four all in one shot. I have no idea how this didn't make my Serengeti post. Too focused on the wildebeest and zebras in that location I guess.
One day soon, I'm hoping that I'll be writing again about some new places I've visited. I have to find a way to do some low risk traveling sometime in the next three months and hopefully I won't be cancelling any more flights or hotels. I'll leave this post with a black-backed jackal at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. Haven't posted this one to Twitter yet but I'm sure it's going to be there if this thing goes on long enough. Stay safe out there.
