I had a new article in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Entitled “A Desert By Any Other Name“, it explores a single mystery: Why has Peru’s vast and beautiful coastal desert remained nameless and virutally unknown — not only to South America travelers, but to the very people who live there?

For those who don’t get the Sunday Chronicle magazine, an online version of the article is here.

[Above: Alpacas hanging out on the Bolivian-Chilean border.]

One of the best things about traveling by Land Rover through Patagonia (and surrounding regions) last month was the opportunity it allowed us to see wildlife. Unlike on a bus journey, we were able to stop and linger when we saw penguins swimming or guanacos running. In an effort to share what I saw (and especially for my nephew Cedar, who is crazy about “aminals”), here’s a collection of pictures we were able to snap of animals along the way. Each text link below clicks into its own picture box.

It’s been nearly two months since I’ve posted any writings by my four year-old nephew Cedar, and it would appear that his fans are getting restless. In a recent comment to Cedar’s last article, a reader declares:

“You are being far too skimpy with the wisdom from this wise sage… when is the next installment? Impatiently waiting… Tell The Great Cedar that we, his followers, await futher teachings. All hail Cedar!”

That said, I humbly share a new poem from the man himself:

My favorite indie travel book publisher, Travelers’ Tales, is celebrating ten years in the publishing industry by putting out a “year’s best” anthology, entitled The Best Travelers’ Tales 2004. Simon Winchester wrote the introduction, and contributors include Brad Newsham, Jeff Greenwald, Richard Sterling, Larry Habegger and Stephanie Elizondo Griest. My story “Anthem Soul” (which originally appeared in World Hum, and later on public radio) is also included.

Since I

“As tourists, we have reason to hope that the quaint anachronism we have discovered will always remain ‘unspoiled,’ as fixed as a museum piece for inspection. It is perilous, however, to assume that its inhabitants will long for the same. Indeed, a kind of imperial arrogance underlies the very assumption that the people of the developing world should be happier without the TVs and motorbikes that we find so indispensable ourselves. If money does not buy happiness, neither does poverty.

“In other ways, too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the place we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out the rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is called a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.”
–Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu (1988)

After having lived almost exclusively overseas since 1996, I’ve returned to the United States this month with the intention of sticking around for a few months while I work on my next book. Since my life is still quite portable, I am in a position where I could choose to live almost anywhere. American cities high on my list include New York, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), and the San Francisco Bay Area — though I’m open to living just about anywhere.

As I begin my research process in coming weeks (right now I’m taking a pit-stop with my family in Kansas), I’d love to have some help from you folks out there in the blogosphere. Does anyone have leads on affordable (and temporary — 6-9 months) housing someplace stateside? I don’t require much — just a private space to sleep and work and spread out a bit. College-town studios and over-the-garage apartments are perfectly acceptable, as well as (given a longer-than-normal-term gig) house-sitting arrangements. In short, I’m just looking for ideas and options, and I figure it can’t hurt to ask around.

So. Any ideas? No need to post here if you have a housing lead for me — just send me an email.

Though I am now back in the United States, I do want to share some leftover photos and observations from my recent Land Rover expedition from San Francisco to the southern tip of Argentina. Today I’ll share some photos from Patagonia.

I feel like I’m cheating when I say that the Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina was my favorite area along our South American route. I use the word “cheating” because the region — while beautiful — didn’t feel quite as exotic as the other places we visited, as it bore so much resemblance to the American West (but with fewer people). Chile’s Carretera Austral felt like Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Argentine Patagonia felt like parts of Montana, and Torres del Paine National Park felt a lot like Wyoming’s Grand Tetons. As a result, we spent a lot of time camping and exploring as we drove our way south across these sprawling wildernesses. Here are a few glimpses of the action (each text link clicks into its own picture box):

I randomly managed to catch the travel blog roundup in this weekend’s USA Today, but what I failed to notice until the middle of this week is that I also had a travel column in last weekend’s San Francisco Chronicle. Entiitled “Native eye for the tourist guy“, my essay is a humorous look at the art of wearing native clothing in foriegn lands. “It’s often difficult to determine where the propriety of ‘going native’ begins and ends,” I state at one point in the essay. “Travel is not the same as emigration, after all, and no combination of culinary and fashion savvy can truly make you a part of your host culture. At some point, then, many attempts to “go native” cease to be an inquiry into other cultures and begin to be a token of status within travel culture itself.

“In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin observes that nomadic animal species tend to be less dependent upon hierarchies and shows of dominance, since the hardships of the journey naturally weed out the weak. However, now that humans’ nomadic life rarely involves natural selection, travel culture seems to have utilized fashion as one subtle kind of litmus test. Ostensibly, a Shan jacket worn with a Mao hat and cotton pajama bottoms implies that you had the Darwinian oomph to survive northern Burma, communist China and the Punjab. As with all fashions, however, the accepted vogue for going native tends to be fickle. In Jordan, for example, scores of Westerners trade ball caps for Arab khaffiyeh scarves to better keep the sun off — but few of those same travelers would don conical peasant hats for the same purpose in Vietnam.

“In the end, then, ‘going native’ is a mixed endeavor — part attempt to understand your host culture, and part extension of how you want to selectively showcase your travels to others. Properly balancing these urges is part of the challenge and fun of travel.”

Full essay online here.

“When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”
–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)