Common Sense and Whiskey

Book Interviews to Come

Big thanks to Michael Edward Miller at WUTC, the NPR affiliate in Chattanooga, and Steve Goss, morning host at the Atlanta NPR affiliate WABE, for recording recent interviews about Common Sense and Whiskey, the book.

They'll be airing shortly, and afterwards we'll post excerpts.

A Week at the Airport

Great, great, lyrical book for those of us who have a weak spot for getting from here to there. Fine, light summer reading.

Check it out.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Chapter Three

Here is Chapter Three of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the summer. You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. The accompanying photos, and additional commentary are available at The Common Sense and Whiskey Companion.

 

3 PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Thin clouds hung between the shore and mountains. A single tarmac road plodded east, and a smoky fire burned halfway up the hills.

Inland, it would rain.

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, must be the only capital city in the world not connected to anywhere else by road. Port Moresby swelters alone.

Metal roofs, no apparent center. The parliament building, built in haus tambarin, or spirit house, style, just beside the runway.

A fair gale blew off the sea. Palms rattled along the utterly uncommercial waterfront. Brown shore water settled into azure after fifty meters, and a wooded hillock rose from the harbor half a mile out.

To Cecil Rhodes, the secret of imperialism was to “Teach the natives to want.” The Aussies brought an auto dealership, Coke and Pepsi signs, paved roads, a modern diplomatic community, and modest high rises. Without them would there be teeming anarchy, or would there have been less reason for country people to come to the capital for work?

Germans, Dutch and Australians had colonized the coasts of PNG, but they all assumed there was negligible value inland, over the hills, until the 1930s, when a group of Aussies disappeared over the rim and emerged with eyes wide as saucers and incredible stories of cannibalism and fantastic wildlife.

We flew into the highlands to see about that for ourselves.

•••••

Mt. Hagen, the gateway to the highlands, will scare you. I mean, it was grim, hostile and tense. You held your things tighter. And malaria was rife. The CDC said not “present” but “prevalent.”

Your first impression of the highlands might be of Malaysia - banana trees, brooding nimbus over far hills – but look closer and you’d think more of Tanzania, with filth in the gutters, firewood walking down the road on top of kids’ heads, people squatting by piles of betel nuts. Dirt.

In this mountain town of 30,000, there was a single downtown street, a rugby field, an airstrip and a rabble of housing. Claimed to have the best vegetable market in all of PNG.

The police barracks was a few score of little boxes like half a single-wide with a veranda, populated by wives and children. I might rather live in thatch. There was absolutely no other non-resident here. None.

Except one man from Osaka. He rode with us to the hotel.

The Hotel Highlander hid behind a gray metal barricade. Men in yellow hard hats rolled back the high gate. A six foot fence surrounded the compound and more men in hard hats walked snarling black dogs around the inside perimeter.

Inside, the walls were parchment thin and measurable dust infested the floor, but they did a pretty good job of serving dinner and stubbies, which is Aussie for short beer bottles. Third world chicken is third world chicken. But they curled the tops of spring onions as garnish. A stab at flair.

•••••

In the morning invisible helicopters thwapped at the air above the fog, circling the airport, waiting to land.

Visit Greenland Next Week

•••••

"Now Willy stopped to drift as near to a berg as he dared, and went aft to dip a bucket into the water until he retrieved a bobbing basketball of ice that he picked into pieces.

We all shared martinis poured over glacial ice that popped and snapped as the relative heat of Willy’s boat freed oxygen as old as man.

“Zum Wohl!”

Three hundred thousand year old air popping in our glasses - it was the sound of Greenland."

•••••

Next Tuesday here on the blog, we'll publish chapter two of the book, Common Sense and Whiskey: Greenland. See photos in the Greenland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com and in the Common Sense and Whiskey Companion.

Excerpting the Book

We'll start excerpting Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, with chapter 1 here on the blog in a few days. Chapter one is a brief story about crossing Lake Baikal, Siberia. Watch for it this weekend.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book, is now available at Amazon

Buy it now! 

Common Sense and Whiskey Available Now from EarthPhotos Books

Buy Common Sense and Whiskey - the Book, now.  Available next week at Amazon.

Excerpting Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book

Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, will be available in the next several days direct from EarthPhotos Books or on Amazon.com (link soon). It's a series of fifteen adventure travel stories from forgotten corners of the planet. It's all here: Africa, the Arctic, atrocious food. Headhunters and evil spirits, liars and thieves. From Tbilisi to Tibet to the Trans-Siberian, it's a crisp survey of what it's like in the real world.

The photos in the book are in black and white, but we've posted them online in color, along with others from all the places in the book, at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. Follow along at the Companion as you read the book for additional photos and commentary.

And we'll be excerpting the entire book here on the blog, a chapter every week or two, all summer. Chapter one, a very brief visit to Lake Baikal, Siberia, will coincide with the book's publication, in the next couple of weeks. Watch this space!

Coming Soon

We're excited to say that Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, was sent to the publisher today. Ought to be available very soon. It's been a labor of a lot of love for some years now, and we hope everybody will enjoy it. Thanks in advance if you choose to read it.

The book contains fifteen stories about our adventures in some of the world's least visited places. There are stories from Bhutan, Borneo, Burma, Greenland, Guangxi, Lake Baikal, Madagascar, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Patagonia, The Southern Caucasus, The Trans-Siberian Railway, Sri Lanka and Tibet.

We'll be setting up companion pages on our photo site, EarthPhotos.com, featuring additional commentary and the opportunity for us all to engage in conversation.

We'll let you know when it's available for purchase.

Where to Go, Why, and What to Read.

Travel ferociously. Get out there. Engage people. Witness events. Explore the world. Bust a move. See all you can see. But when you’re at home and calm, sanguine and reflective, back in the part of the house where people don’t come unless you invite them, in that one little spot where only you rule, that’s where you can see most clearly.

Back there in that room, I saw our trip to Sarajevo as a conceit. We decided we’d go and see the aftermath of war and then we would think about it. And we saw the burned out houses on the airport road. We saw children at play beneath a hand-painted sign warning of “snijper” fire over there, in that direction.

We stood on a hill above town with an old woman and her little granddaughter and a vast field of Muslim graves behind them. We took pictures of SFOR soldiers (NATO’s ‘Stabilization Force’) taking pictures. And in the end, we didn’t really understand it any better. Or at least, we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

I read and read, before and after Sarajevo, and we went to see it, and we had a view of the bombed out parliament building from the Holiday Inn hotel, where we paid in advance, in cash, in Deutschmarks, right up front, for our entire stay.

The parliament building from the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

The elevator opened to carpet ripped by gunfire.

The main reconstruction work in Sarajevo was in busting down curbs and rebuilding them with wheelchair ramps.

We walked up and down the open air Markale market where a random, direct shelling killed 68, wounded two hundred on a rainy Saturday in February, 1994 – the bloodiest attack in the then twenty-two month long conflict. We saw bricks and mortar blasted from the side of the hotel next door. People bustled about the market that day, selling flowers, buying fruit, and we took it all in, but still we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

Plus Ça Change: Tibet

March is the most angst ridden month for Chinese fonctionnaires in Tibet. Elections for a new prime minister-in-exile are scheduled for tomorrow, and travel agencies "say they have been ordered not to allow foreign tourists into Tibet in March."

Spend a few worthwhile minutes with the New York Review of Books blog, where Pico Iyer takes stock of the state of Tibetan politics and the 75 year old Dalai Lama. Nine days ago the Dalai Lama announced his "retirement" from politics, which Iyer says "was one way of underlining to Beijing that the Tibetan problem will not go away when he dies...."

Stephan Tanty has written an entertaining new book, Escape from the Land of the Snows. It's a quick read; You can do it in a weekend. It's written in a dramatized, you were there style, purporting to know the thoughts of the players, but it paints a vivid, immediate portrait of Lhasa, 1959, as the young Dalai Lama prepared for and then carried out his escape.

Escape from the Land of the Snows describes a positively medieval world that just simply doesn't exist today. It's hard to grasp the depth of change Tibet and its leader have seen across a single lifetime.

The Tashilunpo Monastery in Xigatse, Tibet from the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Friday Photo Quiz #106

Here's a photo from one of the stories in the soon-to-be-published book Common Sense and Whiskey. This photo is from the capital of one of the former Soviet republics. Unlike most of the 'stans, this country has a long waterfront. Can you name the city? The country?

The answer is after the jump. A good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey & EarthPhotos.com.

(Photo from EarthPhotos.com.)

(Common Sense and Whiskey - the book - is coming soon.)

Books: How to Lose $279.00

"Written by an old captain who was tired of running over fools in their pleasure boats, and wanted to educate those same fools in a futile effort to save their lives."

Get How to Avoid Huge Ships.

Tibet As It Was

A couple of new accounts add richness to the story of Tibet. Tibetans have tried their best to draw the attention of the world to their circumstance. Now, Mark O'Neill reviews 1959 Lhasa in the Asia Sentinel, about the young Dalai Lama's flight to India. And Stephan Talty's new book Escape from the Land of the Snows provides an engaging you-were-there narrative. 

See also Parag Khanna's 3000 mile journey through Tibet and Xinjiang.

And in the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, see photos from Tibet, like the photo of the Potala, above.

Common Sense and Whiskey: The Book

Common Sense and Whiskey, the blog, was born less than two years ago to compliment the photo site EarthPhotos.com. From time to time since, we've published stories from the eventual book, also to be titled Common Sense and Whiskey. It's a compilation of short stories about the photos that found their way to EarthPhotos.com.

We're happy to say that finally, we think, Common Sense and Whiskey is only a couple of months away. Here's a mock-up of the cover, which will immortalize a gaucho and his sheep on the very desolate road to the Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia. Below is a short bit of the Patagonia story from the book. Watch this blog for the publication date.

 

 

The Alps are massive and majestic. The Torres del Paine only reach three thousand something meters versus Mont Blanc’s 4260. But the Alps have been domesticated, everywhere you go, all the way up onto the slopes. Cowbells tinkle so farmers can keep track of their livestock in every prim village.

It’s the vastness around the Torres, the silence. There are no houses, no farms. Land isn’t delineated by perpendiculars. No fences to keep anything in or out. Nothing, except for the snow and the big rocks, and the water and the animals and the silence.  That’s just what you’re after when you come to a place like this, but too often you find yourself in the common room with strangers, hearing about Kurt’s blister.

“It’s out to here,” Kurt said several times, showing a distance between his finger and thumb. Each time the wife of Kurt would chirp something like “He’s not very athletic,” the more galling because she clearly never auditioned for Buns of Steel.

There’s always people like that, though, and Kurt was a good enough old guy, running a party of five, some of them sullen kids.

Maps was what Kurt liked and he’d sink his head farther into his maps to ignore his wife. The wife of Kurt liked showing people things. She’d go back to the room (“Wait right here,” she’d command) to get some page that she’d printed off the internet. Or she’d inflict her sack of trail mix on a very dubious little boy.

Each time Kurt would move his face closer to his map and trace lines on it with his finger.

The wife of Kurt had a running disagreement with Kurt over the price of gas, or benzine as they called it here. Kurt had heard they were getting six dollars a litre out of jerrycans back at Posada Serrano and the wife of Kurt wouldn’t hear of it.

She worked herself up to high dudgeon (although high is pretty much the only way dudgeon comes) as she asked the dubious little boy’s father if he knew the price of benzine, and he allowed that he’d got some and it was close to the normal price.

“See Kurt! Six dollars a litre is impossible! I thought six dollars a litre was impossible. Did you hear that Kurt? I told you six dollars a litre was impossible. Kurt, this man says it’s not any six dollars a litre. Kurt thought gas cost six dollars a litre!”

And Kurt pulled the edge of the map nearest his wife nearly to his ear and the little boy’s father, who had a naturally puzzled, disheveled look, tried to find somebody else to talk to.

•••••

From Common Sense and Whiskey: Modest Adventures Far from Home, available soon.

Siberian Travelogue

The notion of "service" isn't quite the same in Russia as it is in other parts of the world. And beyond that, things in general just don't always work all that well. When a group of us visited Moscow in 1986, which was early-Gorbachev, we came home thinking, "THIS is the country we spend billions defending ourselves against!?"

Which is all part of the allure for Ian Frazier, whose book Travels in Siberia recounts a drive from St. Petersburg across the continent. Here's a paragraph that jumped off the page as summing up the whole "Russia" thing. People who have visited will nod knowingly:

"We joined the queue of waiting vehicles beside the train station about two in the afternoon. Asking around, Sergei learned that we would be able to get on a train leaving that night at nine thirty. If I thought I could pleasantly while away the afternoon reading, sketching and jotting in my notebook, I was mistaken. The misery bubbling up everywhere in Chernyshevsk blotted out any idea of calm. Sitting in the van was difficult because of the heat. The widely strewn trash and garbage guaranteed every person an individual corona of flies. Strange guys in warm-up suits loitered the premises at large and hit on any stranger they saw. Even Sergei and Volodya, when they strolled from the van, had to dodge them. The couple of times I ventured among them I was like a crouton in a goldfish pond. The public bathrooms had overflowed some time before, so most people who needed them employed instead whatever out of-the-way or not-so-out-of-the-way corner of Chernyshevsk they could find. The train station itself was devoid of services or information of any sort. Apparently all departure and arrival announcements were relayed solely by word of mouth."

Of course the train never came, and Ian, Sergei and Volodia were left to fend for themselves overnight.

(Photo from a 1990 trip to Leningrad, which reclaimed the name St. Petersburg in 1991. More photos in the Russia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)

 

The Ship-Busting Yards at Chittagong, Bangladesh

Deep in the process of vetting travel spots for two available weeks of Asian travel next summer, I know one place we won't go - the ship breaking yards at Chittagong. We've looked hard at Dhaka and Chittagong. The photos are compelling and I'd love to shoot my own. But with just two scant weeks available and a whole continent out there, maybe it's better not to try to force ourselves into one more place where we're not welcome.

On the other hand, some photographers have managed to take pictures there, and I'm glad they did. Michael Reichmann arranged a visit through a friend with an NGO in Dhaka. The resulting article is posted on Luminous Landscape. A blogger named Rich has posted bunches of photos on a blog called Adventure Travel. And 60 Minutes did a story a few years back.

There are dozens of photos from a fellow who calls himself Jimbojack at the bottom of this post on the Digital Grin photography forum. And there's a book, called Breaking Ships, by Roland Buerk.

 

Books: The Atlantic

The book to buy this week is Simon Winchester's Atlantic. It's another in a string of books by Winchester about One Big Thing. This review puts it like this:

"Veteran journalist Simon Winchester has, in recent years, taken to writing what might be called geological blockbusters. His method is to focus on a relatively contained event — the eruption of Krakatoa, say, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 — and envelop it in several layers of context, social, scientific, historical, political."

Winchester has done the Atlantic before. In the fun little book, The Sun Never Sets (reissued in 2004 as Outposts), he visited the odd remnants of the British Empire, including, in the Atlantic, islands like Tristan de Cuhna and St. Helena, the Falklands and Ascension and Bermuda. The new Atlantic is the story of the entire ocean writ large.

(Photo of a sunset somewhere south of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, en route between St. Helena and Ascension islands. Photos from these two islands in the St. Helena and Ascension galleries at EarthPhotos.com.)

Atlas of Remote Islands

Here's a pleasing little book for dreamers and inveterate travelers.

They say members of Washington's political class turn straight to the index of new bestsellers, to see if they're mentioned. The hard core traveler will turn to this atlas's contents straightaway, to see how many of the islands they've visited.

Atlas of Remote Islands is subtitled Fifty Islands I have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, suggesting its author is an armchair traveler. She gives each island a map and a little vignette.

Three samples:

- Howland Island: "She is tall and thin. Next to her, standing lke a shy, diligent girl, is her navigator, Fred Noonan."

- Napuka: "When they finally sight land after fifty days, they find nowhere to drop anchor, and the boats that they land on the island discover nothing to satisfy either hunger or thirst. They name the islands the Disappointment Islands...."

- Amsterdam Island: "No one is allowed to settle here, so the personnal at the research station changes constantly. Some of the men stay for only a few months, but most for a year and a half.... There is no boat. Where would they take it?"

Getting Along in Afghanistan

A couple of items to follow up on this column last week, which discussed travel to and in Afghanistan including, among other things, Advice for first-time embeds to Afghanistan:

- Here's the Survival Guide to Kabul

- Nicholas Kristof offers "advice on how to work in insecure or Taliban areas."

And to set the stage, read Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, about his crazy walk across Afghanistan back in 2002, just after the Taliban was deposed. It's a quick, two day read that leaves impressions you can sum up in three words: Mud, snow and fear.

Okay, maybe a few more: bluster, brinksmanship, bluntness, dirty, machismo, austerity, and ignorance come to mind.