Snowy Roads & Superpowers & Why I Love Flying Overseas

I can handle my kids just fine when they’re not around. The feeling is mutual I’m sure since most of what I say is warm fatherly stuff like Turn that off and Clean this up and GARBAGE goes in the #$%* GARBAGE CAN!

What passes for dinner conversation in our house is mostly about past or future stuff. (It’s hard to polish the present with nostalgia or hope.) And a lot of that largely revolves around traveling, our only strong event in the never-ending Family Olympics.

In December 2019 our conversations were particularly lively; for the first time in three years we’d be flying to New Jersey for Christmas. My wife loves going to my mom’s house and ravaging her nuclear holocaust supply of canned soup. My kids love Grandma’s house for the cable TV, the pool table and the pinball machine.

Three kids with three diversions to share. They fight over all of it the entire time we’re there.

Life & Near-Death in Cambodia

Half my life ago, when I was twice the idiot I am now, I flew to Cambodia to meet up with two friends who were riding tandem bicycles around the world. This was my first trip to a country without a sanitation department so naturally I was pretty excited.

The plan was for me to ride on the back of one of their bikes as we pedaled from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap and out to the temples of Angkor. When I say the plan I really mean my plan. The plan, according to my friends, was not only to cycle across Cambodia and the rest of the world but to live to tell about it.

My plans tend to lack such detail.

Virtual Vacation - New Orleans, USA

New Orleans, I've always said, is the only place in the United States where you'll find culture of any substance. But of course this isn’t true. There are pockets of organic, uncontrived character in every corner and plain of the American west where Native American traditions still survive.

Culture goes back a long way in the New Orleans area, further even than the earliest gumbo recipe. Watson Brake, in northern Louisiana, is a burial mound complex thatwas constructed over centuries by a hunter-gatherer society. Dating from about 3500 BC, they are a thousand years older than the Pyramids of Giza.

Virtual Vacation - Chur, Switzerland

The town of Chur sits like a decorative knick-knack among the Alps of eastern Switzerland. The streets of the old neighborhood are a storybook come to life. The Plessur River flows down from the southeast, cutting a straight line through town, joining the fabled Rhine out on the northwest skirts. The verdant alpine slopes up above watch over Chur like loving grandparents. The surrounding countryside is replete with vineyards, keeping the town in good spirits.

If you aren’t checking flights by now I don’t know what else to tell you.

If you are checking flights, be prepared. Chur sits in the middle of a rough circle formed by Zurich, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Milan and Geneva. The intolerable wonders of Paris and Vienna are slightly further-flung but eminently accessible. What hell to have to choose which city to fly into! You’ll then have to tolerate being whisked headlong into the Swiss Alps via a train system that is the transportation equivalent of satin sheets.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Virtual Vacation - Yakushima Island, Japan

Yakushima is a circular island off the southwest tip of Japan. By boat or by plane, it takes a bit of time and a chunk of change to get there. Barely fifteen miles across, Yakushima is home to fewer than fifteen thousand people, inhabiting towns and villages strung around the island’s perimeter. There’s no traffic, no noise, and definitely no night life.

There is, however, a lot of rain. Yakushima’s mountains manage to suck in just about every cloud floating across the East China Sea, bringing several meters - meters! - of annual rainfall to the island. Bring a change of socks.

Virtual Vacation - Arequipa, Peru

 

The desert is like a campfire in its ability to empty your mind. Gazing out the windows of the bus, the view constantly changing as we leaned and lurched through curve after unforgiving curve, climbing up into the mountains of southern Peru, I had only two thoughts in my head. One, who on this bus was going to throw up first, and two, was that person sitting directly behind me?

As the land plateaued and the road straightened another question came to mind, one whose answer eluded me for years.

What made the town of Arequipa back there so cool?

Virtual Vacation - Cañón del Colca, Peru

Depending on who you talk to, the Cañón del Colca in southern Peru is the third or fourth, or maybe the fifth, deepest canyon in the world.

Some say Nepal’s Kali Gandaki Gorge holds the title. Where the river runs between the peaks of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri the elevation difference reaches 5,570 meters (18,275 feet). For others the Tsangpo Canyon in Tibet is the deepest; though listed at 5,500 meters (18,000 feet) deep, at one point the river flows 6,009 meters (19,714 feet) below the land above it.

Then there’s the DenmanGlacier, hidden under the snows of Antarctica. Reaching 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) below sea level doesn’t make it the deepest in relation to the land around it, but it does make this glacier-carved valley the lowest point of dry land on Earth.

Cañón del Colca, then, seems to sit at #3 on the list of World’s Deepest Canyons. With a maximum depth of 3,501 meters, this remarkable hole in the ground is fully twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA.

Which is nice. But that’s not why we’re here.