This is a story about how when you hear penguins at 20,000 feet, there’s a good chance you’re in deep sh*t.
“Ladies and gentlemen…the weather situation in Srinagar is very bad…flights are being diverted to Delhi…four flights just before us…we will try and see.”
I'd absorbed only fragments of the pilot’s announcement as my head was buried in a book. We’d come from Mumbai and rivers of monsoon to escape to Kashmir in northern India, apparently only to find more storms.
Then we began our descent.
Slum. It’s a loaded word, one that conjures a raft of negative imagery. But there's one characteristic that's not likely to come to mind: industry.
That’s where Dharavi, Mumbai’s most populated slum, might surprise you.
This is a story about the mystery of mountains, a San Francisco swami, a stroke of good luck, a dabbawalla and the fine art of resourcefulness.
Long, long ago in the late 1990s, I lived in San Francisco. And next door to me lived a man who would one day become a swami. And he told me of a land called Ladakh.
This is a story about taking a township tour in Cape Town, South Africa by bicycle — where people and life and answers to questions are up close and personal.
As we rode to the end of our visit, a big white van, way too clean, rolled passed us in almost slow-motion like you might expect in a movie. From the side windows, faces peered out, their eyes snagging on us. Others pressed cameras. They were touring the township from above, behind closed doors. They looked at us on our rickety bicycles, a tad perplexed.
We looked at them much the same way.
They were missing out.
This is a slice of backstory regarding our current visit to South Africa. It’s about a man named Tutu, a book entitled Invictus and a musician called Rodriguez. It's about South Africa and about our relationship to places before we've ever visited them. Finally, it’s about our journey from Cape Town to South Africa’s Northern Cape.
This is about fear and awareness and how recognizing a distinction between the two can improve your travels…and your life.
At the extremes, we have two choices in life: a) sit back and be afraid of absolutely everything and never leave the couch, or b) proceed recklessly and lean blindly into situations that will likely harm us.
Or, there’s a third way.
This is a story about living in someone else's shadow. It's also the beginning of our answer to the question: New Zealand, North Island or South Island?
Imagine a geeky younger boy who grows up in the shadow of his brother, the all-star. The big brother gets all the attention, all the fame. But it's the younger brother with whom you develop a special relationship, who was allowed to surprise you because you spent some time with him.
This is our relationship with New Zealand's North Island. It lives in the travel shadow of its South Island brother. Sure, the South Island is spectacular (yes, we'll get to that), but it's on the North Island that our New Zealand love affair began.
While most may steer you directly to the South Island when asked about New Zealand travel, we take a different approach. Visit both. Really. You can thank us later.
One minute, you're in the center of the town of Franz Josef, a cafe on one side of you, a pizzeria on the other. Then, within minutes, you are transported to another world. Your helicopter pops up into the air, through jagged mountain crags, just before dropping you into the heart of a glacier, an otherworldly ice field of turquoise blues and glowing whites.
This was Franz Josef Glacier.
This is a story about losing our surfing virginity on the beaches of Raglan, a town on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island. It’s also about taking a step back to appreciate that learning to surf is a lot like learning to live life itself.
I am starting to wonder about you guys. every time you celebrate your ‘love' (V-day, anniversary) you jump off something very high. Please explain.
— A good friend responds to our Valentine’s Day bungy jump, capturing a little problem we seem to have.
So there we were in New Zealand, Valentine’s Day approaching. We find ourselves in Queenstown, the so-called adventure capital of the world where just about any adrenaline-pumping, blood-draining exercise can be found. So we think: What sort of shared experience, that we haven’t done before, can we do together to celebrate Valentine's Day?