March 31, 2004

A Desert By Any Other Name

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.

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Category: Rolf's News and Updates
Related Posts: My Patagonia story in the SF Chronicle Magazine, How to put the endless in your summer, Virgin Trail: My Slate series has started

March 30, 2004

The animals of southern South America

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[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.

Llama-like guanacos on the run in Patagonia.

An armadillo we saw along Ruta 40 in Argentine Patagonia.

Penguins swimming in the Gulf of Ancud, south of Puerto Montt, Chile (the shot isn’t the greatest, but it’s the best one we got).

A macro close-up shot of a beetle in Chile (that was actually dead at the time of the photo).

A fox near our campsite in Torres del Paine National Park in Chile.

An ostrich-like nandu along the Chilean-Argentine border.

A fat beaver lounging at a lake in Tierra del Fuego, not far from Ushuaia.

Horses grazing near the beach in Pichilemu, Chile.

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Category: "Drive Around the World" journal
Related Posts: Motherlode of South America info, Is it safe for women to travel overland in South America?, Some glimpses of Central America

March 29, 2004

A poem about bugs

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:

BUG POEM

by Cedar David Van Tassel

Buggy buggies
Come to me
For I’ll find a home for you.

It will not be cold
It will not be hot
It will be moist.

It will be not too hot
and not too cold.
For I will be nice to bugs.

We don’t mind bugs here.
There’s no vegetables we don’t grow.
We already have food to sell.

We cannot be angry for bugs.

Good bye bugs.
I’ll see you later.

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Category: Writings by my nephew Cedar, who is 4
Related Posts: A monster poem from my nephew Cedar, An interactive poem about mummies, The Last Antiwar Poem: My new essay in The Believer

March 26, 2004

The Best Travelers’ Tales 2004

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.

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Category: Readings from the book world
Related Posts: Call for Submissions: Travelers’ Tales Prague and the Czech Republic, Video: Travelers’ Tales Cool View with Tim Cahill, Travelers, and grassroots tsunami aid

March 24, 2004

Tom Bissell and Ayun Halliday at RolfPotts.com

Since I

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Category: Readings from Around the 'Net
Related Posts: Tom Bissell on the line between fact and fiction in travel writing, Ayun Halliday’s Dirty Sugar Cookies Virtual Book Tour, Jen Leo interview at RolfPotts.com

March 23, 2004

Pico Iyer on the fickleness of our travel desires

“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)

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Category: Travel Quote of the Day
Related Posts: Pico Iyer on travel goals, Pico Iyer on why travel is important, Pico Iyer on time travel

March 21, 2004

Wanted: A place to live and work

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.

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Category: Rolf's News and Updates
Related Posts: People I Wanted to Be, by Gina Ochsner, Finding TEFL work out of high school, Live from the Acropolis Steakhouse and Strip Club

March 19, 2004

A look at our adventures in Chile and Argentina

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[Above: Rolf struggles in the currents of the Maiten River, not far from the Argentina border in Chilean Patagonia. What you can't tell from this picture is that Rolf is riding on an empty fuel jerry can from his expedition Land Rover. This adventure happened on a lark, and we promise booze was not involved.]

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):

Surfing off the southern coast of Chile.

Rolf aboard the overnight ferry on the Gulf of Ancud.
[The most comfortable place to sleep on the boat turned out to be in our safari tents, which we set up atop our vehicles in the cargo hold.]

DATW Land Rovers offloading from a ferry across the Gulf of Ancud.
[This ferry took us to the beginning of the legendary Carretera Austral.]

A moonlight shot of our camp at Lake Elizado, along Chile’s Carretera Austral.

A Drive Around the World Rover stuck in the mud near Lake Elizado.

A suspension bridge across a cove of Lake General Carrera in Chilean Patagonia.

Lakeside flowers in Chile.

Rolf tightens the Land Rover roof racks while Todd Borgie checks out an exhaust manifold problem in Argentine Patagonia.

A lone tractor outside the tiny town of Tres Lagos, in Argentine Patagonia.

Enjoying the morning at our campsite in the shadow of the famous Torres del Paine, or the “Towers of Paine” in southern Chile.

Taking a break from driving in Torres del Paine National Park.

A great sunset along the Chilean-Argentina border in Tierra del Fuego.

“Route J” outside of Ushuaia in the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego.
[This road is as far south as you can drive in the Americas.].

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Category: "Drive Around the World" journal
Related Posts: In Argentina, beef is what’s for dinner — and lunch, Exploring Patagonia at Yahoo! News, The animals of southern South America

March 18, 2004

Native eye for the tourist guy

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.

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Category: Rolf's News and Updates
Related Posts: The perils of “going native,” at Yahoo! News, “Going Native in the Australian Outback” at Slate.com, T.E. Lawrence on the ambiguity of “going native”

March 17, 2004

Paulo Coelho on the possibilities that come when making a choice

“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)

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Category: Travel Quote of the Day
Related Posts: Paulo Coelho on the world as a threatening place, A testimonial on making the big move overseas, Making the world your gym
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