When your brain dreams for the body, it desires bowl after bowl of fresh fruit—pineapple, durian, mangos, watermelon, papaya, melon, grapes, oh grapes!, strawberries, and a dozen fruits only Google knows. When your stomach is honest with itself, it wants you to fill it with pastries made from fresh fruit, coconut fried dough balls, pies,…
At 3 AM, a gong reverberates us awake — time for morning chanting and meditation. I place my cushion behind everyone else’s so that they will not notice my frequent fidgeting. In the morning, I do better than in the evening, but seriously, the lotus position is painful. I hope that with time my limbs…
My Stomach Tells Me to Run Away from Bear Paw Mountain The Abbot of Bear Paw Mountain is an older man, maybe 70, with black peppered gray hair stubble on his head. He’s laughing and exchanging small talk with four workers excavating a plot of land near the main temple when we approach. He seems…
I leave Bangkok with nothing more than the name of a town and the hope that I will get there to the mountain where a temple and monastery sit uniquely in Thailand’s interior. I only know about the monastery in the mountains because a shifty British expat using a fake name, sitting outside a 7…
On my second night in Thailand, second night of Songkran, I meet up with legendary travel writer Joe Cummings. He’s the original author of Lonely Planet Thailand, and one of the most notable living nomads breathing today. Having left my ATM card and running low on cash at the bar, I follow advice Bruce Northam…
There is nothing easy about the plane from New York to my connection in Oslo. I don’t mind long plane rides, actually find the limbo of transportation liberating. When else can you read a novel cover-to-cover or spend five uninterrupted hours learning phrases in the language of your destination? But this time, I feel the…
At the start of this year I felt good about everything. I felt like I was not only sucking the marrow from life, but crunching on its bones. I was struggling less to support myself as a writer, I’d begun corresponding with editors of majors magazine who seemed interested in my work, had that new…
This is painful to write. Both figuratively and physically. According to my itinerary, I fly to Asia in a week. This untrodden part of the world has been a dream of mine for–well, like forever., and this year was the year I planned to fulfil it. But some recent health problems have thrown a wrench…
It used to be possible only in the realm of science fiction and Hollywood, but beginning today, Intrepy Tours, a Montreal-based tour company is offering travelers the opportunity to travel to the center of the earth in a specially made vehicle capable of entering a volcano, traveling through the crust, past the mantle, through the…
I believe that every guy needs a female friend in his life who says yes to statements like, “Do you want to go out on the town tonight wearing Gorilla masks?” Conventional wisdom said it was impossible. I simply wasn’t attractive enough. Common sense said it would never be. These types of things simply didn’t…
