Curiosity, Travel and Change
May and me, Day 1. I awoke this morning to a thick grey mist covering the abundantly green valley below me. A thunderstorm had roared through last night, leaving everything glistening in the muted sunshine. Morning view from the homestay after a heavy rain I was in the village of Tà Phin, about seven miles …
The Anti-Atlas mountains stretch across southern Morocco, the last mountain range before the Sahara Desert. It’s a stark landscape of imposing ochre granite mountains scoured by wind and sand, rocky soils scattered with argan trees and terraced slopes that once held fields of barley. It is the land of the Amazigh people, better known to …
On the only sunny day of my six days in Newfoundland, I drove down the Irish Loop from St. Johns to Ferryland, a town founded in 1621. Ferryland sits halfway down the east coast of the Avalon Peninsula, nestled, like so many Newfoundland towns, in a cove framed by rocky cliffs. In mid-October, I parked …
There is a Balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, There is a Balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul [African American spiritual] Once, when I was a child, I ran briefly away from home. I got no farther than the wooded ravine on the far side of Salisbury Road, two blocks from …
Me in the hot springs There is something disconcerting about that helplessness you feel when you learn you will spend the next two days without access to email or social media. You don’t want to believe you are one of those people so hopelessly addicted to your phone that its loss causes anxiety. But you …
We arrived at Caleta Tortel and parked at the edge of this tiny town near the end of the Carretera Austral, having driven another 12 miles on a dirt side road till we reached the porous coastline of Patagonia. We strapped on backpacks with our stuff for two days, and started walking. Walking to our …
Continue reading "Chile Part 2: Caleta Tortel, the end of the road."
Chile is almost as long as the US is wide, but it snakes along the Pacific Ocean for 2700 miles, hemmed in by its portion of the 5,500-mile Andes range. Most of its 17 million people live in the center, within a couple of hours of Santiago and at its extreme ends are sparsely populated …
Capulalpám de Mendez is a pueblo mágico perched high in the Sierra Norte, reached by a curving, ascending two-hour drive from Oaxaca City. In these mountains, live people whose original language is Zapotec, not Spanish, who fight to preserve their traditions, and who live with a profound understanding of nature. View toward the villages Capulalpám …
Continue reading "The Sierra Norte: Walking in the land of the Zapotec"
The view from my home Not long before the world went into lockdown, I traded the city for the country. For almost 40 years, I lived on busy Philadelphia streets, awakened at times by sirens and horns. For all those years, I reveled in the messiness and color of urban life and prowled many corners …
Old and On the Way 