Posts from the “Travel” Category

Stuck

Posted on 23 December 2021

This is about where I didn’t go as much as where I did go. Landscapes shifted drastically over space but comprehension remained steady. I knew how to interact. I understood everything. I threw myself into a vast land, I hauled myself into higher altitudes, I walked between rocks that reached up to the sky and, still, there was always a sense of familiarity. A part of me reaches for the total unknown. I want to be submerged in that which I do not recognize or understand. I want to be overwhelmed, bombarded with novelty. I miss different languages, different cultures, different buildings streets rules stores food almost everything. As much as we, humans, fuck each other and much else over, I suppose sometimes I…

Intersections

Posted on 16 February 2020

Sometimes the world seems as if it is made up of different planes of being that may overlap, or crash into each other, or may simply stay parallel, not touching. It sometimes jars me to think that my life in Seattle exists in tandem on the same earth as that of a child growing up in the remote Andes or of a yacht-owner in Monaco. These planes of existence sometimes intersect, but geography mostly holds them apart. There are places, though, where the edges bleed and blend, and one of these places is Po Toi. Po Toi is the southernmost island in Hong Kong. And though the Hong Kong you’re likely thinking of is full of towering skyscrapers and crowded with people, this part…

Questions from Hong Kong

Posted on 10 January 2019

  How is the public transportation so good? How is it so cheap? So clean? Why do their buses have seatbelts and ours don’t? Why do I see so many bike share brands and so few shared bikes being ridden? Why do I feel so safe? How is it that I haven’t been sexually harassed? How do they build so high on such steep slopes? Is the slope maintenance environmentally friendly? Why do the street crossings take so long to change for pedestrians? Who are the people behind the dueling Falun Gong/Dafa protest displays? Who would pay over $1,000 USD for a pet fish? Are the caged birds in the market alright? How is the coffee so good here? When did they start serving…

The Enchantments in a Day

Posted on 26 November 2018

The Enchantments. The name holds an aura of glittering mystery and the hurdles to access them add to the impression. I’d heard whispers of them, always conflating their beauty and the luck of the permit draw. But on Labor Day weekend, my friend and I smashed away the perception of unattainability. To camp in the Enchantments you need a permit, and to get a permit, you either have to get lucky in the permit lottery or try your hand very early morning at the ranger station. The Enchantments, a series of lakes in the Central Cascades, are a fragile alpine wilderness and it’s quite fair to limit the number of people pitching tents up there. This also meant that I didn’t think I could…

Across Hemispheres

Posted on 12 November 2018

I walked into the hostel’s lobby, agitated after the most harrowing taxi ride of my life, during which the driver threatened to veer off the mountain road at each bend and then tried to raise the price when we arrived, spurring a Spanish language argument with me. Thus shaken, it took me and my traveling buddies a bit to correctly navigate through the streets of Potosí to the hostel we’d booked. After all of this, I just wanted a bit of security and dinner for the evening. I remember plopping into a chair in the lobby, plugging my phone in to charge, and conversing with a French woman who was traveling through South America solo. We realized we’d met the same fellow traveler at…