FAQ

Here are some answers to questions that I’ve had from several folks over the last year:

1.     Which place has been your favorite?

I've loved most of the places I stayed in.  But within that general sense of delight, there’s a short list of places where I could happily live out the rest of my days: 

 Karakol, Kyrgyzstan

 Ushuaia, Argentina

 Wanaka, New Zealand

 Christchurch, New Zealand

There are also a couple of places I really love and would happily stay for a good long while but couldn’t live permanently, for one reason or another:  North Clare/Galway, Ireland (no mountains). Almaty, Kazakhstan (air quality issues). Tyengboche, Nepal (pretty inaccessible). Bergen, Norway (OMG SO EXPENSIVE--or should I say, unaffjordable).

2.     Which place has been your least favorite?

I don’t regret going to any of the places I went.  I found every single place fascinating, and I enjoyed my time in each location.  Having said that, I don’t need to while away too many more hours of my life in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, or Dushanbe, Tajikistan—though when I someday get back to that Pamir Highway hiking trip (the one my illness prevented my doing back in September) I will certainly go back to both of those places.   

3.     Best hike?

In no particular order:  Ala-Kul (Kyrgyzstan), Fitz Roy (Argentina), Buarbreen Glacier (Norway) 

3.     Did you write anything?

Well, I finished a book of poems.  I wrote a lecture and a conference paper.  I edited an enormous essay collection. 

4.     Are you going to write a travel book?

Sounds like a lot of work.  Or more precisely, sounds like the perfect way to transform this adventurous life into a deliverable.

5.     Have you counted your steps?/ Have you used a pedometer?/ How many miles have you hiked?

I didn’t track my steps because I didn’t want to gamify my efforts to just be present in these places.  I do know that I put in about 2000 miles between Turkey and Nepal because I calculated after the fact, but I haven't kept track after leaving Nepal.

6.     Hardest place to be a vegetarian?

Tajikistan, because of the uncooked vegetables.

7. Best food?

  I had outstanding food pretty much everywhere. 

8.  Worst food? 

Burritos in New Zealand. Ketchup is not salsa, amigos.    

      9. Best travel tip?

      When you know that you will arrive at a foreign airport, jetlagged and in a place where maybe you don’t speak the language or even read the alphabet, splurge on a prebooked hired car to get you from the airport. (I usually use Booking.com for this.) In most places it’s not that much of a splurge—in nearly all of my destinations, the cost was between $5 and $15; only Istanbul came in high, at $37, and having a driver standing there with a sign with my name on it is totally worth it in that madhouse of an arrivals lounge.  By the time you're ready to go back to the airport, you know the city well enough to figure out the best way back to the airport, but on arrival?  I'll take the bougie driver option, thanks. 

     10.  Have you been lonely?

I don’t know how people managed this fellowship before the smartphone. I've kept in pretty constant, even daily, contact with my family--mostly by video.  I've had wifi in most of my lodging (excluding time on treks), and T-Mobile’s mobile/data coverage is worldwide (it’s not necessarily lightning fast but I did have free data in every single country I went to).

11. Have you ever felt unsafe?

No.  Most places, I felt warmly welcomed, and people were kind.  The one place I felt less than easy was Tajikistan.  The people there were not unkind, but neither were they welcoming.  They regarded me with a mixture of bald curiosity and suspicion, and I was conspicuous everywhere because of my tall fair aspect and my nontraditional clothes.  No one spoke English.  But I wouldn't say that I felt unsafe there--went on a run every evening as usual, explored the mountains on my own.  Just really, really felt like an obvious outsider, like the country wasn't especially happy I was there.

12. What did you pack?

3 pairs of pants (climbing tech pants, water resistant/weather pants, zip-off hiking pants); 7 T-shirts; UV-blocking shirt; baselayer; fleece jacket; running shorts; wind-resistant shell; anorak; heavy gloves; light gloves; turtle fur; 3 buffs; sun hat; swimsuit; bandana; 4 pairs of shoes (hiking, running, daily sneakers, flipflops); crampons; hiking poles; drybag; toiletries; first aid kit; pharmacy kit; sewing kit; multitool; mylar blanket; Steripen; Lifestraw; headlamp; computer; spare phone; power converters; 3 nalgene 1L bottles (and a small bottle of baking soda to keep them clean).

12. Most essential gear?

Aside from sun-protective clothes (that ubiquitous bucket hat and plaid shirt!), I'd say it was my Steripen, which kept the water drinkable worldwide. 

Also, these poles, which are lightweight and tough and also fold down to fit in a backpack.  

13.  How does it feel to be ending this year of travel?

There are photos of Utah landscapes and samples of Utah rocks in museums from London to Kazakhstan to Singapore.  Utah is so crazy beautiful, so varied in its terrain, so sublime in mountains and deserts, that people come from everywhere to hang out in my backyard!  I'm thrilled to get back into my own, intimately known, spaces again.

And yet, I'm also sad to stop drifting.  I've had to keep reminding myself that although I'm headed home, it's not as if I'm no longer allowed to travel.  There is much world left to see, many mountains left to climb.  I've got a list.  Let me just get my laundry done and weed my yard and I'll be ready to go again.

[A little nap on my backpacks in transit from Argentina to Chile]

At home in the world

For decades I have referred to Ireland as my "spiritual home," and indeed I feel a level of natural familiarity and peace there, an immediate orientation that resembles what I feel in my actual Utah home.  Ireland has always seemed to me like a place that I just "get."  

But one of the pleasures of this last year has been the luxury of lingering in a wide variety of places, sinking into a new place until it becomes a familiar place, whose rhythms and values and quirks start to be a part of my own psychic day.  I've been able to realize that I feel a kind of kinship with a goodly number of places.  Or, to say it differently, I have happily vibed into alignment with many formerly unfamiliar places--which has made these places, too, start to feel more like home.

Is the widening catalogue of places I feel at home a function of my having been to more places than I had been when I first went to Ireland as a young person and found myself settling into the place?  That is, is my expanded sphere of spatial comfort a result of my world having expanded?  I might be tempted to think so, except that even before this year of wandering (and indeed, even before my time in Ireland in the 1990s) I'd done a fair bit of traveling, so the variety of the world's places wasn't exactly unknown to me.  

Perhaps it is rather, as I suspect, that I myself have expanded--not as a result having traveled across continents during this past year but as a result of having traveled through a lot of more life's terrain, the dislocations and disorientations of joy, grief, loss, gain, learning, forgetting.  I think that, as we move through years, we have more opportunities to learn to find a place in our displacement.  And so the familiarity of the external landscape matters less than the recognizable contours of the inner landscape.  

My pal John Milton knew something about this phenomenon, I think.  The guy certainly understood displacement, having lived through national and personal crises and changes, triumphs and catastrophes, that would have made anyone feel dislocated.  So at the end of Paradise Lost (SPOILERS!), the archangel Michael explains to Adam and Eve--just at the point that they must leave their domestic paradise of Eden--that there's another way to think about home:

                       ...though all the Starrs

Thou knewst by name, and all th' ethereal Powers,

All secrets of the deep, all Natures works,

Or works of God in Heav'n, Aire, Earth, or Sea,

And all the riches of this World enjoydst,

And all the rule, one Empire; onely add

Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,

Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,

By name to come call'd Charitie, the soul

Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath

To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess

A paradise within thee, happier farr.

Milton's point--echoed elsewhere in Paradise Lost, is that the place doesn't really matter.  You can't lose paradise (or Hell!--sorry, Satan!), because it's a state of mind rather than a location.  I wonder if my goal (unknown even to myself) over this last year has been to follow a life-season of dispossession with the kind of movement that would make dispossession the default setting, with the resulting understanding that I can feel grounded through any displacement, the loss of any paradise, because it's not about the external conditions at all.  I may not have planned it that way, but I think that's how it feels from this end-stage vantage point.  

(Mullaghmore, Ireland)

As Jay always used to say, quoting his yoga guru, when things got tough:  Why fearing?  Not a bad mantra for all the journeys, brief and long, that we all must take.

One -way or another

From Norway to Galway, and the chance to take up the Irish ways and winds for a happy second time this year.  The annual John Donne Society conference was fortuitously scheduled to coincide with my being in north/west Europe, so a short trip on a tiny plane brought me back once more to the country of my youth.  This time my pleasure in being in this beloved city is amplified by the fact of my being here with beloved friends.  

[The transept windows in the Galway Cathedral are in the shape of a gentiana verna, which grows in the Burren and which I have tattooed on my left wrist]

Conferencing for several days makes for a photo album that is a) pretty static (folks standing at podiums), and b) filled with people whose faces I'm not going to plaster online, so I don't have much to offer in the way of scenery.  

But I will take this opportunity to celebrate the nightly music sessions.  If it's after 9pm in Galway, you're going to find me in the pub.  Of the several options for trad music in Galway, I like the Crane and the Bierhaus, but the champion of them all is Tig Coili.  Longtime haunt of absolute legends, this pub offers at least two sessions per day.  When I'm here in the winter, it's cozy.  In summer?  Insanity.

Actually, I realize that I haven't been in Ireland *in the summer* for 31 years.  I am here to tell you that I do not prefer it.  

First of all: where the hell have all these people come from?  Why are these narrow lanes ringing with American accents?  Who are all these people and why are they all here?  Why are they drinking so much and yelling into the night?  Give me a quiet February evening with a piercing, wet wind and an early sundown; you'll find me holding down a stool in Tig Coili, nursing my club soda all night long.  In July, I just scowl my way through the downtown scrum and try to find room to breathe on the Salthill Prom.

[I've become obsessed with the uillean piper in this photo.  He's so freaking good, across multiple instruments.  It's like he levitates as he plays, and when he levitates, I start to levitate as well.  I've heard him 4 nights in a row, at different pubs.  I hope he doesn't file a restraining order against me.  I swear I'm not after the piper; I'm just after the whole-body response I have to his playing.]

Second of all:  climate crisis--> European heat waves becoming more and more common and kicking continental butt.  Traditionally, Ireland has been spared such outrages.  But increasingly, even here in the usually cool northern waters of the Atlantic, heat waves happen--though they are less extreme than in continental Europe.  Still, believe me when I say that 80 degrees in humid Galway is too freaking hot.  Besides, such hot weather here feels like a broken contract:  I was promised cold and rainy!  If this trend keeps up I'm going to have to fall back to Norway.

A quick note on Norwegian food

I did not eat the whale sausage, nor the moose filets, nor the reindeer stew.  I ate a lot of salad.  In fact:  pro tip for vegetarian travelers to Norway:  the Spar supermarkets have a very good salad bar, better and way less expensive than you'll find in most restaurants. 

I have to mention two standout treats from the land of the midnight sun:

1. Boller / buns - soft, pillowy, fluffy spirals or domes of enriched dough.  You can get them with cheese or raisins or cinnamon or custard--all kinds of ways.  But to my mind the king of buns is the cardamom boller.  Imagine the best cinnamon roll you've ever had but replace the cinnamon with cardamom, and replace the thick white icing with a layer of caramelized sugar.  

[Here are a lot of boller at a bakery in Bergen]

2. This crazy ice cream bar:

Forget what you think you know about crappy mass-produced frozen novelties, because this little slice of heaven-on-a-stick is no Good Humor disappointment.  The Creme Ekte Pistasj is a big oval of pistachio ice cream with a shell of nut-studded salted pistachio, and it has a tube of pistachio custard tunneled through the middle.  Probably for the best that I can't find them in my local supermarket.

Nor-WOW

Not really anything more to say, is there?

Except maybe this:

Bespoke hiking

After all this hiking all over the world, I did not expect that the home stretch would present me with a trail that seems to have been built just for me.  

Dig if you will the picture:  an obstacle course for grown-ups, and if you complete all the obstacles, your prize is: a glacier!  That's what the hike to Buarbreen Glacier, in Folgefanna National Park, felt like to me.

Let's survey our slate of challenges!

There's the part where the trail crosses a river:

And then a bigger river....:

And then the part where the trail just is the river:

There's the chained section:

And the ropes and ladders course:

And whatever this half-assed eagle scout project is: 

There's this bridge over raging water held together by a single thin, frayed rope: 

And some extended scrambling:

And also a couple of legit bouldering problems:

And then, at the top:  wowza!  Blue ice!  

I love this hike so much.  I was laughing pretty much the whole couple miles of ascent, and then the whole time back down again.  I have done many, many longer hikes and harder hikes and more dangerous hikes in my time, but I don't think I've ever had as much pure fun on a hike.  Thanks, Norway, for designing a trail with me in mind!

It's 1:00am and still light outside...

Hello, Norway! I see that you have worn your most impressive livery to greet me!  

Back on my own again for this last stretch of travel.  When the boys flew back to the US, I flew north and east to Norway.   

This landscape is a fabulous Tolkein elf-world.  All dramatic plunges from rocky heights into blue water, and everything covered by thick green forests.  From the city center in Bergen, it takes about 10 minutes to hike up into the canopy, and maybe 45 to get up to overlook level, whence to access hundreds of miles of hiking paths, which wander around small lakes and into mossy woods.  And have I mentioned the waterfalls?  Because they're everywhere.  Like, you can't go a mile without passing some torrent or another frothing down from the black ridges overhead.  

And I note immediately upon arrival that this is perhaps the one place along my travels where I do not stand out at all, for here all the lanky, pale folk are just striding around the steeps waiting for XC ski season (ahem: nordic ski season) to begin.  Everyone begins by addressing me in Norwegian, only switching to English when I return their familiar addresses with a blank stare.  That never happened in Uzbekistan.

Cool, cool summer weather with lots of clouds and rain.  Abundant fruit and a weirdly strong burrito culture, to my surprise.  And, of course, all the outdoors.  Norway, I think we've found ourselves a love connection!

Museum stamina

One of the things that I think is really cool about my kids is their capacity to close a museum.  Most of the time when we visit a museum, we arrive roughly at opening time and are the last ones to get kicked out at the end of the day.  These humans of mine love to read an informational plaque, love to discern the narrative of a room, and love to leave with a few favorite knowledge-parcels in their pockets.  

Here are some of the highlights from several days together in London museums:

 [A 45000-year-old woolly rhino, preserved so well in a natural oil seep that its skin and flesh are still present / Natural History Museum]

[First x-ray machine, made by Wilhelm Rontgen, 1896 / Science Museum]

[Canopic jars - organ storage to accompany Egyptian mummies in their tombs / British Museum]

[15-inch naval guns, with E for scale / Imperial War Museum]

[A Bristol Beaufort, WW2 bomber / RAF Museum Hendon]