10th September 2009
I'm often asked what it's like to work as a professional travel writer. Is "the world's best job" all it's cracked up to be? What's it really like on those assignments? What happens behind the scenes, when the "camera" is off?
I reply quite honestly th...
08th September 2009
Some people travel as a vacation: to decompress from life's stresses, to shut down and escape. Others view travel as a vocation in itself. I'm one of the latter. Every journey is like a life in microcosm. At the beginning we're energetic and naïve, fil...
30th August 2009
Enormous trees with wide buttressed roots propped up the canopy: giants draped with vines, mosses and epiphytes which hung in tangled green confusion. All the way down to the impenetrable jungle floor, life grew upon life in one symbiotic Gordian Knot.
...
30th August 2009
Bodyweight training is the exercise modality for our times.
We live in an age of Virtual Nomads, where the leaders of today are expected to be mobile, self-contained, self-reliant, totally portable, and absolutely efficient.
We demand this of our em...
18th August 2009
The Great Plaza is the picture postcard face of Tikal, cleared of jungle and rebuilt. Two enormous pyramids, monuments and tombs of dead kings, climb 44 meters to stretch their roof combs above the surrounding canopy. Smaller complexes that were once admi...
17th August 2009
While a six-pack stomach may be the most conventional benchmark of athletic beauty, functional abdominal strength goes deeper and is far more important than vanity. A strong core improves your posture and reduces the likelihood of lower back pain. It play...
03rd August 2009
When it comes to health, it truly feels like the deck is stacked against today's mobile executive. The typical business traveler is mildly to significantly overweight, bloated from an excess of restaurant food, puffy-eyed from jetlag and not enough sleep,...
02nd August 2009
Surrealism supplanted reality the moment I landed in Pyongyang, North Korea. In front of the airport terminal, beneath an enormous painting of Kim Il-Sung, a long line of women in traditional dress chanted "Welcome Pyongyang!" as they pumped their fists i...
11th July 2009
Movies shape how we see the world. Movies also shape the world we expect to see when we go out into it. Few things inspire us to travel like a well chosen backdrop. It paints romantic visions in our heads, visions that often linger for years.
Sometimes...
08th July 2009
Only those with little money and infinite patience would consider crossing the continent by bus, but it can be an unforgettable experience, one that's inaccessible to the short distance traveler. A barrier is breached when you go beyond that one-day trave...
05th July 2009
The endless steaming ribbon of road unrolls before you like a film. Heat haze shimmers and distorts the horizon, breaking the asphalt into tiny lakes which dissolve into nothingness as you rocket on through. A lanky saguaro cactus seems to nod at your pas...
22nd June 2009
I'm a firm believer that a nation's drink is shaped by its landscape and climate, and that its drink in turn shapes its culture.
According to my theory, the world can be neatly divided into several distinct zones of booze.
The UK and Ireland are hom...
18th June 2009
A motorcycle represents freedom: the freedom of the open road, the freedom of speed, the freedom to go. Bikers are cowboys reinvented. They aren't content to go the way of the package tourist. They see things for themselves and they form their own judgmen...
13th June 2009
The Landscape: Stony Adriatic islands scattered along the length of Croatia's coast. Coarse green shrubs and olive trees whose thin leaves flash silver undersides to the breeze. Translucent blue: a breath would cloud that water of glass.
Light has a cl...
