By: Amanda McKee on November 06, 2012
"Expect the unexpected in Bhutan," advised trip leader Tsewang upon picking up our Hiker's Paradise group at the Paro airport. Within 20 minutes, almost as if he'd arranged it especially to illustrate his point, we found ourselves amidst a spectacular, unusual, and hard-to-predict Buddhist ceremony. Tsewang had just caught wind of it before our arrival and whisked us straight from the airport.
Joining the crowds of locals, decked in their brightly colored traditional gho (for men) and kira (for women), we zigzaged our way up a prayer flag-lined path to the massive Paro Dzong and then across the hillside overlooking the Paro Valley to the center of activity. A five-story tall and equally wide thongdrel (a cloth-on-cloth appliqué work) was being unfurled and...
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By: Candace Rose Rardon on November 13, 2012
Candace Rose Rardon is an American writer, photographer and artist currently living in India. She sketches as she travels, and these sketches, combined with the stories behind them, charmingly capture those fleeting, layered moments that are the stepping stones of travel. Recce will be presenting her on-the-road sketches-and-stories -- her sketchbook of serendipities -- in the months to come.
There are a few things this sketch shows: the palace’s intricate cupolas and balustrades, nearly impossible to capture in full detail on paper; the pigeons perching like hideaways among the eaves; and the monochromatic shade of gold that cloaks all of Jaisalmer’s hilltop fort, positioned at the far western edge of India in the Thar Desert.
But what it doesn’t show is my own perch on the terrace of 8 July...
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By: Tim Cahill on November 20, 2012
Tim Cahill is one of America's most renowned adventurers and travel writers. He is the author of nine books, including such revered titles as "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh," "Pecked to Death by Ducks," "Road Fever," "A Wolverine is Eating My Leg," "Pass the Butterworms," and "Hold the Enlightenment." A founding editor of Outside magazine, he has written hundreds of articles for Outside, National Geographic Advenure, Esquire, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications, and has co-written three Imax screenplays, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards. He lives in Montana.
The single question a travel writer most often hears is: What is your favorite destination? I think most of us who deal with the question as a matter of course have formulated some easy answer. I generally say something like, ''Well, it's like...
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By: Don George on November 28, 2012
Last week, the travel website Gadling posted a Thanksgiving-themed essay by me about an unexpected sequence of revelations I experienced last month at the end of a one-week stay on the wonder-filled Indonesian island of Bali. Travel is full of gifts like these, serendipities that surprise us when we are open to them, and I am always grateful when the gods of the road bestow them. Here's how my account began:
Last month, I spent a week on the Indonesian island of Bali as a guest of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. This was my first visit to that blessed place since I'd fallen in love with it 34 years ago.
Like me, the island had lost some of its innocence in the intervening years. Unlike my earlier trip, when the Balinese I met had simply welcomed me with wide eyes and hearts, this time most immediately asked me if I'd been there before. When I answered, "Yes, 34 years ago," their eyes opened wide for a different reason and they smiled and...
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By: Don George with Ruth Reichl on November 01, 2012
How did you decide where to go on that trip? How did you plan your itinerary?
Well, I was very lucky. I had a Belgian friend who had been living in Bangkok for quite a while. So I wrote him and said, “Zack, I want to come to Thailand. What do I do?” And he said, “You should stay here. You need to go up to Chang Mai and to Phuket.” But also it was partly decided by going to every food magazine (Food and Wine, Cuisine, Bon Appetite) and saying, “Can I write articles?” A lot of it was for the articles that various magazines wanted.
The hardest article was from either Cuisine or Food and Wine: they wanted an article about eating in a Japanese home. Nobody in those days wanted an article on Thailand—it was very hard to sell—which is why I went to Japan. I financed that trip by selling all of these articles on Japan and then doing a bunch of articles on Thailand on spec, because no one was...
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