Jul 26, 2023
Papua New Guinea
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Paradise hustle, pt. 2

 Boluminsky Highway, Papua New Guinea

“Ni hao! Oh, you’re waiting for the PMV? Please sit. Leave your bags here. Have a drink.”

The Konos supermarket is full of customers, and I awkwardly sit between cashiers. Like in some other developing countries, Chinese people own all the supermarkets in New Ireland, maybe the entire country. Every time I walk into one, there’s that wordless glance that says it all: “wait, I know every Chinese person here, you’re new, what’s your story?” Straight to Mandarin.
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Jul 23, 2023
Papua New Guinea
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Paradise hustle, pt. 1

 Dalom, Papua New Guinea

I’m 200km down New Ireland’s Boluminsky “Highway,” the only paved road down this narrow island/province. It’s been a weird route to get here, having lost three days stranded in East New Britain province attempting to take a boat from Kokopo to Namatanai, the nearest town to ENB on New Ireland, only slightly further down the road. Two boats of passengers were lost in the last week of bad weather. I’m a bit relieved that our boat never left, our driver refusing to depart after lackadaisically wasting away the sole brief window of good conditions — but the cost was great, as I missed the Shark Calling Festival.

After an extraordinarily expensive 30-minute flight to Kavieng just to take a PMV truck almost but not quite all the way down to Namatanai, at last: Dalom, this tiny village of a few dozen people. Immediately upon arrival, seeing the extraordinarily idyllic emerald river running through it, I decide to stay for three days — doing what with so few people, limited electricity by generator, no cell reception, and little activity, I don’t know. But on this one weekend, it’s swelled by maybe a hundred – there’s a Seventh Day Adventist church camp comprising of kids and adults from surrounding villages literally camping out in the open between the few houses in this village.

It’s given an energy I wasn’t expecting in this place – the river teeming with children jumping in off the bridge and swimming against its current, its confluence with the ocean full of others playing ball in low tide. There’s a lot more people bathing and washing clothes in the river than usual too, that’s for sure. And then there’s me, since that very refreshing river is the only option for a so-called shower.
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Jul 17, 2023
Papua New Guinea
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Tradition

National Mask & Warwagira Festival
 Kokopo, Papua New Guinea

When people think of Papua New Guinea, they think of traditional cultures. On my first true impression of the country, well outside of the messy capital, Port Moresby, I had the chance to see that in full concentration at the National Mask & Warwagira Festival held in Kokopo, the first in three years.

East New Britain province (ENB) is home to four main cultures: Tolai, Baining, Pomio, and Sulka. That’s but four language groups of PNG’s over 800. Yet even within these four, there’s vast diversity of kastoms (customs) — rites, ceremonies, singsings (songs and/or dances), and whatnot performed for initiations, funerals, bride prices, and so on.

Yet all of this coexists with what appears to be a very Christian country. And in this day and age, how often do we see traditional cultures in the world practiced as more than a costume we put on once in awhile? Is anything still considered sacred? For PNG, we know that answer already — a big yes to both — but I’m here to learn what exactly that looks like and means.
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Jul 10, 2023
Australia
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Mirror

 Brisbane, Australia

Bleary-eyed after a 13-hour flight, I go for a walk in West End and end up on Granville St, eventually turning onto Boundary. After braving the brunch lineup at a hip café for a delicious meal and coffee, I top up my TransLink card at a train station, before opting to walk some more to the nearby waterfront for a ferry ride instead. The weather’s spectacular as I watch the glistening glass towers of downtown disappear in the distance. I disembark by a park, and walk along a pedestrian path bisected by a bike lane, surrounded by picnickers on this lovely Sunday afternoon. After some more aimless wandering, the sun’s going down and I’m hungry. I head to the night market — packed as usual, full of people speaking everything including Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, French, and the like.

If it weren’t for the cars running down the wrong side of the road, if it weren’t for the accent… I may as well have been describing a lovely summer weekend at home. Oh yeah, it’s winter here.

Brisbane may be on the other side of the world, but the similarities to Vancouver don’t end there. Both are the third-largest cities of their respective countries. Both have a metro population of roughly 2.5 million. Both have a vacation-friendly Sunshine Coast about an hour away. And for whatever reason, both cities like to thank their bus drivers when disembarking. I think that’s great.
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Oct 21, 2022
Portugal
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Subsume

 Porto to Lisbon, Portugal

10 years ago, despite spending five weeks in Spain, I had so much going on with all of Silvia and Óscar’s recommendations, and so many friends to visit elsewhere, that I never had a chance to get to Portugal. Six years ago, the original idea of my Silk Road trip was to go from one ocean to the other, from Hong Kong’s Pacific to Portugal’s Atlantic, by land. I had so much fun in the middle that I ran out of time by Austria. So there’s some motivation to address some unfinished business!

But let’s just cut to the chase here: this portion of the trip was completely overshadowed by the Azores. I had a fine enough time in mainland Portugal, but having experienced so many emotional reunions and seen everything I already wanted to, my head was already elsewhere. Unseasonably frequent rain also didn’t help. But there had to have been something more to explain the general sense of disconnect I felt despite being in an objectively compelling place.
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Oct 12, 2022
Portugal
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Sidetracks

 São Miguel, Azores, Portugal

After all these years and after becoming conversational in Portuguese, somehow I’ve never been to Portugal, a pretty popular place in its own right. It’s right next to Spain, too. So… Let me just skip right over it (insert meme song here) and fly to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean instead. Sounds logical, right?

Well, the Azores are still Portugal. Maybe not the first thing that comes to mind though, since they’re an autonomous region. Even some of the mainland Portuguese visitors I encountered slipped up and called it “going abroad.”

I’ve been fascinated by these little dots on the map ever since I saw the largest city, Ponta Delgada, had relatively short direct flights from Boston, home to a large Azorean diaspora. Though I never took the opportunity to go while I lived in Boston, they’ve stuck in my mind ever since. Why are these little isolated islands so inhabited? How’d they become part of Portugal?
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Oct 4, 2022
Spain
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Abundance

 Empordà / Girona, Catalonia, Spain

It’s funny how fast and intense travel friendships can be. Usually it ends with people extending an open invitation to visit their homes: hey, I’ve been on both ends of that. As genuine as they are, more often than not, these invitations are aspirational, seldom followed up.

It’s thus all the more surprising which friendships endure. I spent barely a day and a half with Gemma and Ramon in Sri Lanka seven years ago! We pulled a memorably freezing all-nighter, hiking up those 5500 steps, before parting ways in opposite directions with each other’s recommendations. Occasional messages over the years gave way an increasingly serious desire on my part to act on their open invitation to visit. And so here I am!
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Sep 25, 2022
Spain
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Euphoria

Festes de la Mercè
 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

It’s rare for me to visit a place twice. Even when it comes to visiting friends, it takes me ages. Without friends though, it practically never happens. There’s one big thing different this time that brings me here.

En route to visit my friends Gemma and Ramon deeper in Catalonia, timing led me to make an impromptu weeklong stay in Barcelona, just in time for the biggest cultural festival of the year. (Shoutout to Rob for telling me about it, and sorry the timing didn’t work out for Valencia!) They set me up with their friends in Barcelona, Mar and Ignasi, who could not be more welcoming and hosted me despite a week where were all too busy to actually hang out beyond a dinner or two. It’s still enough to form another fast friendship, and I hope we find an opportunity to pick things up again just as I’ve been doing with others on this trip.

While waiting for the main attraction on the weekend, before and after my weekday remote work hours, I spent a whole lot of time aimlessly walking around Barcelona. It’s nice for once to not have any pressure to see the sights or do touristy things, to relax at home whenever I felt like without feeling a loss of time, and to have a mix of old and new.
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Sep 20, 2022
Spain, Switzerland
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Years and years

Where do I even begin? 10 years is a long time. How do I even start a conversation? “Hey! It’s nice to see you! Long time no see! How is everything?”

10 years is enough for the world to visibly change. From the last time I’ve been here, we’ve gone from paper maps, big cameras, and day-ahead bus ticket purchases at the booths to the ubiquitous, always-connected smartphone. From the last time I’ve really talked to these friends, we’ve gone from Facebook to Instagram to an opaque, increasingly toxic algorithm pushing away any sort of personal content and whittling away already-tenuous connections literally separated by oceans. It’s made keeping up even on a circumstantial level more difficult, and time has worn the initiative it takes to keep in touch.

From the last time I saw these friends, many now have children. I’ve only ever known them while travelling, and now our lives have taken very different directions. And for the most part, I admit I haven’t really been great at keeping in touch either. So it’s with a bit of trepidation that I proposed this trip — am I imposing on them, am I being a burden? Am I merely a reminder of a past life? Aside from the good times we’ve shared, what drew us to become friends in the first place, and do we continue to share anything in common 10 years later? It’s with immense gratitude and a little bit of surprise that I’ve been so welcomed with open arms.
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Mar 5, 2022
Ecuador
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Theory

Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

Immediately upon arrival in Puerto Ayora, the largest town in the Galápagos, I spent two hours inquiring at every single agency down the main thoroughfare. I beat my previous time, found a reasonable price and a desirable itinerary, played hardball and negotiated a better deal, and I did it all entirely in Spanish. Allow me to toot my own horn here, cause I’m a little proud of myself!

What previous time? Well, the three hours I spent in Ushuaia arranging a last-minute cruise to Antarctica 10 years ago. This time, it’s a last-minute cruise around the Galápagos, a place I would have loved to visit 10 years ago but didn’t have the budget for, naturally, after that rather large expenditure.

So. While I wait for departure, what now? After all, in the Galápagos, it’s all about seeing the animals here, and that can seem somewhat inaccessible.
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