There are secret languages in the streets of the cities we live in. Signs and notes meant to be read by folks who know the neighbourhood, ways of doing things, a whole subtext of unwritten laws to live by and understand. When the trash is taken out, whom to avoid, which shops sell quality and […]
Here for your travel listening pleasure, in the latest edition of WPIG the Pig is Thai Funk – a radio hour of dive-bar bands in Thailand playing rock, funk, and soul. Tyler Dillon and Anthony Weersing join forces in this episode to drop the nasty. Pour yourself a tropical cocktail and soak up the tunes. […]
August 24th 2008, the day after my 29th birthday, my mind was tattooed with an image. It was the closing ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing and I had spent the past 30 days guiding a family all over China, intermixed with gold medal event tickets for the two weeks of the games. It […]
I spent a lot of time in China in the early 2000’s, trying to make up for an overly euro-centric upbringing. I knew there was a world I’d overlooked, and hadn’t been taught about in school, a missing hemisphere. I’d read books like Ernst Gombrich’s History of Art which ignored the “East” side of the […]
Last week Conde Nast Traveler released its annual Travel Specialists list, kind of like the Oscars of the travel world. And with another record-breaking 7 Trufflepig planners with their names in lights (again), we feel more than usually justified in describing ourselves as the Tiny Company with the Great Big Nose. We are of course […]
Over the past few years a symbol has made the leap from movie into life. It is a salute with three fingers held high: pointer-middle-ring. It came from The Hunger Games, the series written by Suzanne Collins. Both a book and movie franchise, it is a tale following the life of Katniss Everdeen. Her name […]
Last November between lockdowns, I made it down to Turkey for a glorious trip accentuated by a moment of pure serendipity. Making my way down the Aegean coast, I was in touch with a friend back home, and let him know I was headed to the Troy/Gallipoli area, known as Çanakkale – a place I’d […]
There is a noise I associate with heat and fever, and I am not sure if it’s real or from distortions of memory. It could be from something as simple as the cicada, that strange beast that emerges from the ground, periodically, in the hot humid months, and rages against the known world with its […]
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 […]
There is much discussion in the shell-shocked world of the travel ‘industry’. What’s lost, what’s coming back, what’s never to return. Goodbye to the city break? Good riddance mass tourism! Farewell fly-and-flop. Well, I don’t know the answer to all that, but I do know that there is one journey I currently cannot get out […]
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 […]
Turkey spans continents, it defies expectations (mostly by surpassing them), its cuisine is constantly impressive, and then the separate regions within this vast varied country are themselves myriad, from the thriving cultural hub of Istanbul to the Azure Coast, from the interior splendours of cave-like Cappadocia to the historical highlights of Ephesus. You can now add another to […]
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, […]
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 […]
We’ve been out on the road this year…. a lot. At half-time on 2019, our trotters are worn smooth, and it’s time to take stock. The pictures above flooded my inbox when I naively wrote to our planning team to ask for a few shots from recent research trips. I was struck by the awesome […]