By Mary Patrice Erdmans Ulrich, a robust 52-year-old pilgrim dressed in a red flannel shirt, told me, “I want to walk through the world without leaving footprints. It’s hard work to be silent.” Sitting alone inside the walls of the convent of Santa Clara in Carrion de los Condes, Spain, I stretch out my legs […]
by Christopher Tharp It was a 100cc Chinese make – a glorified scooter, actually – the type of four speed bike that is ubiquitous throughout Southeast Asia. The horn was burned out, along with the electric starter and both turning signals. The tires were bald. Neither the speedometer nor the gas gauge functioned. The silver-dollar […]
by Adrian Cole I couldn’t really ever tell you why I left home. I’d come up with some superficial reasons, of course, but just so that we could avoid an awkward and unhelpful silence. The deeper truth probably lies somewhere in the inherited murkiness of the human psyche, a monkey’s inclination to wander, always, one […]
By Ayun Halliday Twenty years of global travel have made me pretty choosy about souvenirs, but Milo, at six, is too green to resist the siren song of the colorful wares festooning the tourist trails. Not that his acquisition lust is confined to the kitsch cranked out for foreign visitors. It started in a Budapest […]
by David Grant How do kids in a rural, West African Muslim village manage to “get krunk” with each other on a Friday night in a culture that doesn’t allow dating, or even holding hands?In mid-November, 2006, my cousin David Agbemabiese and I visited Ghana’s Mole National Park. My agenda for this first trip to […]
By Jennifer Wells N’anga – a traditional healer and herbalist who, as necessary, may practice witchcraft Muti – traditional herbal remedy, in some instances used to cast or reverse a spell We’ve been cursed. An owl flew into our house two nights ago. No other explanation is offered. As witches in disguise, owls are not […]
BY ERIK R. TRINIDAD “YOU ARE MY BROTHER!” exclaimed Tilak, my Nepali guide through the Himalayan countryside, on our trek along the trail to Mount Everest. His proclamation was a double entendre; for one, since I was a Filipino-American with brown skin and a vague ethnic look, I was able to blend in as a […]
by Kelley Calvert In a taxi speeding wildly into tar-black night, the car’s headlights met the blindness of dust stirred and scattered. The famous wind known as the Harmattan was blowing angrily over the Sahel of Niger, carrying its fury south and leaving a veil of dust over the desert’s ever-expanding domain. Earlier, as I […]
By Kristin Repsher All we wanted to do was to watch a good footy game. This seemed like a reasonable expectation, since we were sitting in the upper deck of Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium, waiting for players to line up against one another for the second half of the second of three State of Origin clashes. […]
By Jennifer Hare Uno, dos, tres – ¡ahora! Here I am on a dusty dirt road in God-Knows-Where, Mexico, about an hour in from the border, watching three men huddled around a Chevy Suburban with a flat tire. They’re trying (unsuccessfully) to loosen the lug nuts with a wrench provided by a local rancher in […]
