That small chunk of rock in the North Atlantic…..no, not Iceland, the O.G. Iceland, home of a slew of folks who went out into the world to make a mark, and make it loud. Ireland. It is on all the lists, we all want to go there but we all tend to wait until we […]
Sidewalks and the paved parts of the urban landscape have a funny definition in some Asian cities. On the Silk Road after midnight, the roads and sidewalks become the communal domicile, as beds are dragged out into the streets to enjoy the cool breeze of the desert nights. Hanoi and Bangkok are two cities so […]
George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. grew up in Illinois, obsessed with the moon, its shape, its craters and scarred face. He drew pictures of the moon in grade school and studied it in high school, and when he graduated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a civil engineer, the lunar mark stuck and came back to […]
I have a list of three things which, perhaps due to a repressive part of my psyche or some masochistic Protestant lean, I have denied myself until I felt I could no longer continue without them; reading the entire Faulkner cannon, going on a surf/bike road trip through California, and learning how to make my […]
I love the cheese, I love pop… good pop music. There is a sea change happening right now. One of those high tide marks that we look back on decades from now to measure things from and it is disorientating. Emotions are magnified in both excess and ecstasy which is perhaps why pop music feels […]
The winds of Dabancheng can pick up an 18-wheeler and toss it like crumpled up newspaper. The winds are so strong that the landscape has no soil, no sand, no plant, no animal – just rock left over, boulders. And if the winds here can pick up a 40-tonne truck, then the rocks left over, you can imagine, […]
A dreamer for surf, I always imagined my life would follow the tides and know the nooks and crannies of some little seen coastline like the back of my hand, but I never lived on the salt water, at least not for long enough to get used to the patterns of the sea. All the pot-smoking […]
I think it was late spring, and school was going to let out a few weeks later, but things had been rough on the home front so it must have been decided that my brother and I were going to skip the end of the class year, and my 7th grade finals would be missed. […]
Eight years ago I got a call from friends who were thinking of moving back to Asia from the UK, with their family of 3 little ones in tow. The discussion was whether Bangkok or Hong Kong would be a better place to live. At the time Bangkok was under a protest and safety was […]
I was a shameless child with drag strip courage and an imagination that would often mistake clouds for mountains. I liked to move. My parents tell a story too often about them leaving me in the crib for a nap and when they came back to wake me up the crib was on the other […]
Tyler gives us the low-down on the remote plains of Mongolia and the surprises therein…: The same year that “Ice Ice Baby,” “U Can’t Touch This,” and the eternal Jon Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory” were all released, that same chunk of time gave birth to the modern state of Mongolia – with ‘modern’ being the […]
Here is a glimpse behind the curtain at the nuts and bolts of a Trufflepig research trips as Tyler heads out on the road to Bangkok…: From: tyler@trufflepig.com To: Greg and Jack August 2nd. Greg and Jack, So here is the story, Thai Tourism has put together a consultation trip for lux new properties in Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and […]
When I was eight I moved to Madison Georgia from the suburbs of New York City. It was a sea change of a move that opened up many doors of perception for me through the years since. We literally bought the farm and went from a house where I could reach out my bedroom window […]
You have your groove, you know your place in the world and jet lag is a memory, this is the midway of the trip, when all the faculties are lined up and in perfect running order. You aren’t fatigued or homesick, your eyes are wide open and life is good. This is our collection of […]
At the end of the Himalaya, where the booming roof of the world slows down and turns to hills, just past Kunming, merging with the tea fields and the mountain passes where the flying tigers once flew and the monkey man journeyed west to bring back buddhism, the Pearl River pebbles together its first few […]
My friend Tandin was talking to me of dragons, concubines, drunken Himalayan gods, and ritualistic funerals. I was in Bhutan, two weeks prior to the first national election proposed by the King, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, and therefore for final few weeks it could claim to be the last Buddhist kingdom (on paper at least) in the grand […]