Travel

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Storm clouds bunched ahead like an unmade bed as our captain gunned his single outboard motor straight into the oncoming swells. Thwack! Every 10 seconds, we bounced high then slammed down hard, drenched in salt spray, on the wooden bench. Even more thrilling -- or maybe terrifying -- we could see no life jackets aboard. It was just another island crossing in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

To see more than one or two of this Caribbean nation's 32 mostly uninhabited islands, which stretch in a roughly 56-mile-long crescent closer to Venezuela than to North America, you'll need a boat. Flights between islands are hard to come by, and if you do find one, takeoffs are unpredictable.

Read rhe rest here

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They say the sun rose twice over a corner of southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The first sunrise was produced by the detonation of a new weapon its makers had nicknamed "the gadget." The actual sun rose 10 minutes later, dawning on a new era in human history.

The world's first atomic bomb exploded that morning, launching the nuclear age, and foreshadowing the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the month.

Though the creation of the bomb was dubbed the Manhattan Project, much of its development took place in New Mexico, making it the nation's premier nuclear state, with, today, weapons labs, a cache of nuclear weapons, a nuclear command center and atomic history around every butte. Some of the sites are off limits to the public, but it is possible to tour atomic New Mexico without getting irradiated or arrested.

Read the rest here

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There is a way through Spain that is all horseshoe arches, keyhole windows and bronze doors carved in Arabic script. It meanders into crenelated forts, Moorish castles overlooking the Mediterranean and grand mosques reconfigured by Christians into cathedrals.

As the child of an Iraqi woman and a Swedish-American man, I have always been drawn to places where West and East converge and dissolve into each other. The southern edge of Spain, where North Africa is just an hour away by water, is one of these places.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

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May 10, 2022

The New York Times

Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers/ That grow so incredibly high.

-- "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" The Beatles

Picture yourself in a room by an ocean with pink-petaled trees and sapphire skies. Then imagine being surrounded by guides feeding you a powerful hallucinogen every 72 hours or so, to expand your consciousness and strip you of your ego "game."

For two summers in 1962 and 1963, at least 50 day-trippers retreated to the Hotel Catalina Beach Resort on the Pacific Coast in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, to do exactly that. The first known Western psychedelic retreat was organized by the soon-to-be-fired Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary and his partner in mind-expansion studies, Richard Alpert (renamed Ram Dass after a visit to the Himalayas). They called themselves the International Federation for Internal Freedom -- IFIF.

Read the rest here.

For the New York Times

Dog-sledding across the snowy white canvas of Lake Umbagog in Southern Maine.
Credit...Erik Freeland for The New York Times

Our dog-sledding guide -- the guy with the icicle'd beard -- had already released three sets of dog teams hauling gear and inexperienced tourists into the Maine winter wonderland. It was my turn. I felt clumsy in my multiple Teletubbies layers and a bit worried that I wouldn't remember the recently shared instructions about how to handle my team of dogs.

As the guide unhitched my sled, he issued a final warning: Remember the brake!

And then we were off. A sudden jerk, a crunch as I released the brake. Except for the faint hiss of sled runners on snow, the whole world went silent. Twelve paws padded soundlessly on the snow ahead. There was the white-and-black leader, Olga, surprisingly small for her big job, followed by Teslin and Layla, both bigger and brown and black.

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02/25/22

Aegean Shores

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I first heard of the Metochi study center on a dark, wet November afternoon in the cafeteria at the University of Agder. Sleet smeared the great windows, afternoon was already indistinguishable from midnight.

To get to Metochi one must travel an "unnamed road" according to the Google map on my i-phone. The dirt road winds for kilometers through stands of tall grasses, cucumber and tomato and pepper fields, and pear and pomegranate orchards, on a flat plane. Monks have walked this path for 500 years. Generations of olive-tending peasants in need of medicine, and pilgrims seeking spiritual succor also added their centuries of footsteps to the grooves in the rocky dry soil.

The van dumped me off at the end of the unnamed road. Up a steep little hill, and through a stone archway, I passed under a second, living arch, a giant fig tree, its trunk planted in the ground, apparently rooted there for a very long time, rising and then bending a great bough of leaves and green fruit over the entrance. Cats lolled here and there, eying me, tails switching. At the far end of the courtyard, I spied the tables and benches where we would eat al fresco, arranged under a gazebo laced with thick old grapevines heavy with bunches of green grapes. Just over a stone wall and down below the tables was an orchard of pomegranates and pears. Small and large stone urns nurtured bushes of rosemary and basil, their scent filled the night air.

Read the rest here

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BLOOMBERG

It's a well-known fact among traveled women that the best-looking men on the planet can be observed at the Oslo Airport. Broad of shoulder, lean of shank, with the wellspring of Viking DNA still flowing in Norway. Less widely noted is that Norwegian women run the country.

Last summer, I left New York for a semester as a lecturer at university in a medium-size fjord town four hours south of Oslo. I'd lived in Manhattan off and mostly on for 20  years, but the thrill had begun to wear thin. The thing that had made New York worth living in was its enticing array of amusements. But invitations to gallery openings and soirees with swells had lately failed to compensate for the city's darker side, starting with the cost of living, health care, and education for our teens. Some kind of free fall was evident everywhere. Even friends with jobs and money were twitching with anxiety. Subways rang with the World War III-style warning sound of iPhone bad weather alerts.
Read the rest Here

For years, whenever I found myself in Miami with an afternoon to spare, I sneaked off west to where a road abruptly separates the urban grid from the Everglades. Depending on time, I drove as deep into the saw grass void as I could, parked, got out and gazed up at tropical clouds racing unimpeded by tree or building.

Then, usually, I burst into tears.

Sky and grass. Nothing else. It's a bit embarrassing to admit that anything in Florida -- with its postcard palms plastered against postcard sunsets, its coconut tanning oil and Lily Pulitzer pinks and greens, its schmaltz and buffoonery and hanging chads and "Florida Man," with his love of Styrofoam, weapons and monster trucks -- affects me this way. But it does.

Read the rest here

05/05/19

In Italia 2019

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CILENTO, ITALY -- By the time my husband and I set off on our hike in the Cilento, an Edenic mountainous region of Italy where some of the longest-lived people on Earth dwell, we'd been in Italy gorging on antipasti, primi, secondi, dolci, and vino twice daily for almost a week. To say we staggered to the edge of paradise would be only a slight exaggeration. Read the rest here

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Photo Credit: Erik Freeland

New York Times, Feb. 18, 2019 -- As the polar vortex bore down on the United States a couple of weeks ago, we left our home in New York via an ice-encrusted front door. We were lucky enough to have tickets to Bonaire, a little island in the Caribbean Sea. Seven hours later, including a layover at Miami International Airport, the plane landed on a sunny, flat field rimmed with pipe organ cactuses and scraggly shrubs. Bonaire looks like Arizona, except for the azure waters in the distance. It also happens to be showing the rest of the world just how to save coral.

Read the rest here.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Most Americans come from somewhere else. That is as true of presidents as it is of newcomers reciting naturalization oaths across the United States today. Donald Trump, the 45th president, is a second generation German-Scot -- two nationalities that happen to be the first and tenth most common in the United States. Trump's mother and grandparents arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th century from Scotland and Germany. Two of his three wives are relatively recent arrivals from Eastern Europe and four of his children are half Slavic.

Last fall, researching a book on the women of the Trump clan, I set off on a three-week dash to the remote corners of Europe from where the Trump family hails. Besides interviewing people who knew them, I wanted to capture the history and rhythm of life in areas where the Trumps have roots, and so I wandered, sampling food, culture and ambience.

Read the rest here:

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Norwegian flies direct from JFK, there's no reason not to go to this little French bomb in the Caribbean.

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Last fall, Nina Burleigh visited her cousins in Baghdad in hopes of better understanding Iraqis' love-hate relationship with America. Weeks later, as the bombs began to drop, her own loyalties went to war -- Mirabella, March 1999.
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My first night in the Middle East, I feel as if I'm falling asleep on the dark side of the moon. There is a smoky kerosene smell and a mullah calling "Allah akbar" (God is great) from the neon green rim of a minaret. My flesh will take days to arrive in this time zone.

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IN NEWSWEEK: The billboards start appearing miles from Kruger park: "Poachers will be poached." For illiterate poachers, another sign announces, "Dehorned zone," with a picture of a living rhino without its horn. (Some private game owners remove rhino horns to deter poaching.)

The iconic Big Five animals trophy hunters covet are lion, rhino, elephant, Cape buffalo and leopard, but it is the endangered rhino that has become a potent symbol for the ugly inequality between whites and blacks in post-apartheid South Africa.

The rhinoceros's bloodlines stretch back to a giant relative that roamed lush grasslands 30 million years ago. "It is a miracle that this prehistoric idiot still exists," wrote T. Murray Smith, former president of the East Africa Professional Hunters Association. For thousands of years, the primeval beast's descendants roamed the grasslands of Asia and Africa by the millions, but now fewer than 20,000 of them roam free. South Africa is home to 79 percent of the world's rhinos, and half of them live in Kruger park. Rhino numbers there and worldwide have been plummeting since Asian demand for their horns exploded about 10 years ago, after a Vietnamese general declared that powdered rhino horn had cured his cancer. Rhino horn sells for $3,000 a pound, which can turn poachers into kings in villages without running water or electricity.

Read the rest here.

05/05/17

Home Sweet Home

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After four countries in four months, there's no place like home.

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05/05/17

Delhi, Feb. 2017

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Newsweek

In the early 20th Century, Virginia Woolf pointed out that one of the greatest differences between male and female life was the ability of young men to travel and experience the world, while women feared for their safety on the streets even at home. More than a hundred years later, women in Western countries like Woolf's England have advanced considerably in terms of access to adventure and experience.

But in most parts of the developing world, women remain severely restricted by open or implicit gender violence. Few nations are as saturated by rape culture as India, where one woman is estimated to be raped every 15 minutes. The notorious 2012 gang rape and murder of a Delhi woman on a bus led to mass street protects, prompting the Indian government to increase jail terms for rapists. But those changes have not altered India's ingrained rape culture. Amnesty International reports Indian authorities have still not effectively implemented their new laws on crimes against women. The numbers of reported rapes increased by more than 10,000 since 2012. There were 34,651 cases of rape reported in 2015. Many more incidents are believed to go unreported.

That constant physical threat makes independent travel difficult for most Indian women. For that reason, and because of traditional cultural pressure on young women to marry young and stay home, most families forbid their daughters from traveling very far, whether alone or with friends.

Now, a small but growing group of young women is leading foreigners around the teeming streets of Delhi, in and out of hotels, through grimy roadside rest stops, ordering for them at restaurants, or accompanying them to remote mountains or nature reserves, in addition to the Taj Mahal and the great Moghul mosques. In these roles, they are challenging old customs about women's place in public spaces.

Read the rest here

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No story here, we were just goofing off. Missed the Oscars, and the Trump SOU while offline for a week. I might write about it someday, it's a magical place.

01/15/17

Nica!

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Newsweek, Dec. 2017:

After covering the too long, too mean presidential campaign, I fled New York City for Nicaragua.

Witnessing the collapse of the American system has an edgy vibe I've always found compelling and even sexy, but I now realize it's much more fun observing institutional mayhem in places where (a) it's hot outside and (b) you can check out early and hop a C134 back to high ground.

But "Nica," as the natives call it, is now postrevolutionary. During the decades of the left's bloody effort to throw off a succession of dictators and their American-backed death squads, the literacy rate nearly doubled. Agrarian reform temporarily gave peasants a couple of acres and a rifle each. That experiment ended in national bankruptcy, and the oligarchs were invited back in. Nicaragua now has some peace, and a little prosperity. It also boasts thrilling apolitical diversions, like world-class surfing, "ash-boarding" down one of 17 volcanoes, zip-lining over jungles and sipping tropical cocktails made with the national rum at infinity pools overlooking crashing surf in the sunset.

Read the rest here.

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New York Times Sept. 6, 2016:

A few days after first grade ended, in June 1967, I boarded a train pulling out of Union Station in Chicago with my parents, younger brother and baby sister. My father, a University of Chicago Ph.D. candidate, had decided to bail out of academia and move to San Francisco, where he planned to devote himself to writing poetry and where, coincidentally, the Summer of Love was about to commence.

The counterculture meant nothing to me then, but that summer in San Francisco was to be historic. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of young people across America left their own cities, parents and schools and hitchhiked to the area around the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets to tune into drugs and music, and tune out of "square" society. They converged there, having heard about free food and free love. In that summer of 1967, Haight-Ashbury transformed into the epicenter of the counterculture movement.

Read the rest of the journey here.

Canary Islands telescope

Way, way out in the Atlantic Ocean, at a point where one of Earth's four cold water currents meets the searing African desert winds, nights are dark as prehistory. Once the sun sets on the volcanic archipelago known as theCanary Islands, a misty net of extraterrestrial white light blankets the sky from horizon to horizon. Until dawn, every ray of visible starlight in the entire Northern Hemisphere and much of the Southern Hemisphere gathers overhead. That sprawl of sky over a small island speck on the black ocean suggests, like few other experiences, the nanosecond that is human life.

Such black nights and clear skies have beckoned astronomers to install some of the world's most powerful telescopes on volcanic peaks in this archipelago off the northwestern coast of Africa. As scientists use these state-of-the-art observatories to search out signs of the Big Bang, at sea level 8,000 feet below, tens of thousands of mostly British pensioners and brides-to-be on "hen parties" are getting drunk and sunburned.

Five million tourists annually visit this Spanish territory from colder climes to bask in Europe's only subtropical weather. The port at Tenerife, the largest island, is the third-most-visited cruise ship destination in Europe.

Read the rest here.

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As world leaders started heading to Paris to discuss climate change, I boarded a plane last night going in another direction: south to Antarctica. From 30,000 feet, on a clear, moonlit November night flying south from New York City, the density of the lights along the eastern seaboard form a stunning lace trim along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Each of the twinkly whorls and grids represents millions of Americans living along the sea, populating a megalopolis stretching from Boston down to Richmond, and points even further south.

The heartbreaking beauty of our great eastern cities from the sky at night sometimes brings tears to my eyes. It's moving to behold what we, the thinking animals, have built and placed against that great black void of cold water.

All that, and even the jet from which to view it, we have accomplished in little more than a century. But the pace of human progress brought its own fragility, in the form of climate change.

Gazing down on those lights from the porthole of a jet brings home just what catastrophic sea level rise means.

Scientists believe that as the frozen Poles melt, which they are doing at a phenomenal rate, the sea will, like a glass of water into which ice cubes are dropped, surge upward and overflow its edges, extinguishing the lights and the great cities.

Read the rest here.

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It is still Earth, but Antarctica is an alien land. In his book Future of Life, Nobel-winning American biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote of Antarctica, "On all of the Earth, the McMurdo Dry Valleys most resemble the rubbled plains of Mars."

Antarctica is not as uninhabitable as Mars, but almost. It's also a place that tricks the eye, it's a trompe l'oeil of nature. On land, the whites stretch on forever, and snow, peak and cloud mingle so voyagers lose track of the difference. At sea, icebergs loom out of the fog like Gothic castles or the Sphinx, or simply abstract art, open to interpretation. But if the icebergs are Picassos, their positioning with backdrops of Alpine peaks and melted marshmallow, meringue and dollops of cream are pure Dali.

Here while the mind and eye are tricked, the body suffers extreme discomfort, from seasickness to frozen hands to frostbite and death, which might explain -- logically -- why Antarctic exploration always includes some element of the uncanny.

Ernest Shackleton and his two partners managed a death-defying sail across 800 miles of rough sea in an ice-crusted lifeboat then trekked across an island mountain range for several days to finally reach help at a whaling station. After that insane feat, the men admitted to one another that they had all sensed the presence of a "fourth man" -- an unseen someone walking beside them the whole time.

T.S. Eliot was moved to mention the mystery man in his modernist classic, The Wasteland.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

-- But who is that on the other side of you?

More recently, in 2012, polar explorer Felicity Aston became the first woman to ski solo across the Antarctic Continent. In 63 days alone, she started talking to the sun -- and it talked back. Eventually, she had entire conversations with it.

While voyaging around the Antarctic Peninsula, I posted the above, and some other journal entries on the website Medium. Read them all here.

01/26/16

The Big Melt

Antarctica

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In all mythic, transformational trips--acid, ayahuasca, Mars or across the river Styx--the voyagers must, at some point, face down their deepest fears. For expeditions into Antarctica, the most deeply strange place on Earth, the Drake Passage is where that happens.

This tumultuous realm--where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans converge at a latitude where water unimpeded by land flows in a continuous circle around the globe--was first sailed by Sir Francis Drake, the storied 16th-century English naval explorer. Winds and swells in the passage are commonly "hurricane" on the Beaufort scale. Its harrowing reputation prompted a 19th-century theory that the Drake Passage was a planetary drain leading to the South Pole, a notion Edgar Allan Poe used to terrifying effect in his short story "MS. Found in a Bottle," in which a cargo ship passenger narrates the destruction of his vessel and the events before his death.

Read about Antarctica.

11/09/15

In Assisi

JP-ASSISI1-articleLarge.jpgASSISI, Italy -- For centuries, pilgrims have trekked to Assisi to walk the same steep and narrow lanes on which a rag-cloaked radical monk named Francis preached an antimaterialistic message 800 years ago, rocking the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

But lately, those visitors have included a new sort of pilgrim.

Read the full article here.

AntibesThere's a reason why the Dutch have a saying, "living like a god in France," and if you want to understand it fully, spend a few days in Antibes or Juan Les Pins, sipping a cocktail in the soft-pawed night. Here's my story in the Times on the glorious little Mediterranean peninsula that inspired and soothed, for a time, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

05/01/14

Out of Africa

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for nyt.jpegLagos.jpgAfter some delays, I got my visa and headed over to Lagos last month. In steaming equatorial heat, I met members of the petro-state's micro-elite. I'm afraid words can't do justice to the Chief's birthday party, but I tried. Here's the story for the New York Times.

04/09/14

Into The Jungle

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I wrote an essay about a trip up the Amazon in Peru, exploring my ambivalence about nature. Besides anaconda, spiders, giant ants and sloth, I encountered river people whose lifestyles are as close to organic as one can find in the modern world. Read the whole story here.

I went to the Amazon jungle, brought back jungle viagra, piranha teeth, caught and released a rainbow catfish, and snapped many sloth pictures. I almost slept in The Mick Jagger Room at Casa Fitzcarraldo.

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601_b2f627fff19fda463cb386442eac2b3d.jpgMy daughter and I took this amazing trip into the Arctic Ocean in June, getting up next to walrus and polar bear in bays and inlets only accessible thanks to the dreaded polar ice melt blamed on man-caused climate change. I hope these animals survive.
Here's the story in DuJour Magazine.

Winged Skull and Basin for Holy Water

Image by Curious Expeditions via Flickr

nyt.jpegVisitors to Italy tend to seek its sunny, Dionysian side -- vino, pasta, opera, Renaissance art, George Clooney on a Vespa. But, like a chilly draft on a hot day, Italy's gothic angle offers intimations of darkness that make a moment on the piazza even more delicious. Consciously or not, anyone sipping prosecco at sunset in Rome or Naples savors an extra spoon of dolce in their vita thanks to the contrast between the beauty of the present and the proximity of catacombs, ruins and sites of ancient suffering.
Read the rest of the article in the New York Times.

On a visit to their X-rated painted tombs, I learned that the Etruscan funerary orgies were so wild, even the Romans outlawed them. My travelogue in Time, here
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One thing I wish I could bring home from Italy but cannot: the gonging of church bells. Here in Perugia, they mark the quarter hour with a primeval sound intended long ago for people who couldn't read, people who had no access to clocks, serfs who needed to get up in the morning and pray. Now the bells serve a different purpose: I do need to get up and make breakfast for recalcitrant schoolchildren, go to work, return home, check e-mail, make dinner. I don't need these bells to tell me the hour--I have a BlackBerry, a cellphone, and watch--but they clang out a larger, deeper measure of time, the mortal one. Continue reading at Slate

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I envy my bilingual friends, but I must admit my ugly-American monolingualism never really hindered me. I've traveled all over the Middle East and what I couldn't understand there, translators could. We spent two years living in Paris, where I wrote a book about an Englishman. Nestled inside a bubble of expat Anglophones, I learned just enough French to amuse butchers and bartenders. Whatever else they say about Paris, most urban French know some English. Continue reading at Slate.
10/05/09

La Dolce Vita?

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Six months ago, I was living in New York City with my husband and two kids, toiling alongside my tribe of New York media working women. I had an amusing job that paid for various indulgences, and deflected the indignities of subway rides and wartime urban anxiety with regular acupuncture, pedicures, and moderately priced wine. Then I was offered a contract to write a book in Italy about the notorious trial of exchange student Amanda Knox, accused along with two young men of murdering her British roommate, in what Italian authorities have called a drug-fueled orgy. Continue reading at Slate.

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An American family heads to Mexico for a lazy getaway and winds up bringing home a four - legged souvenir.

AS ORIGINALLY PLANNED, our midwinter Mexican vacation was supposed to be a sedate, even sophisticated affair: nesting in a sun-dappled house in historic San Miguel de Allende, strolling the cobbled lanes, sipping coffee on the square next to the apricot-colored 17th century Parroquia and snagging cool art treasures made of pressed tin. After a few days of colonial elegance, though, our kids were utterly bored, and even I was longing for a Pacific beach--seven hours away by car. So before sunrise on a morning halfway through our vacation, we piled ourselves into a rental car and drove off vaguely westward. The highway took us across the high, dry plateau 6,000 feet above sea level, and then slowly downward into the green fields of Michoacán, Mexico's breadbasket. By eight o' clock, we were in the midst of a giant marshland populated by hundreds of thousands of migratory birds wintering in the south. Through the car windows, we bore witness to a primordial scene out of the Garden of Eden, myriad bird species eating breakfast and a few fishing boats setting out for the day with the so-called butterfly nets that the Aztecs used.

This pastoral vision ended abruptly at a diesel-scented industrial wasteland, the exurbs of a city called Morelia. Our directions advised that this could be the last place to gas up the car before tackling the 200 miles or so to the beach.

Pulling into a Pemex station with a mini-mart attached, my eyes were drawn immediately to a critter curled up against the curb where we parked. At first glance, it looked like a dead rat. Rather than keep this observation to myself, I blurted out something to the effect of, "Oh no, what is that?" and before I could say "Heel!" our children were out the back door of the sedan and poking their toes at the poor creature--which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a puppy with dull, sleepy eyes and a coat of dingy fur so worn away by malnutrition and skin disease as to suggest, perhaps, some Mexican hairless in its bloodlines.

My five-year-old daughter, Lulu, an animal lover who has made pets of potato bugs and weevils, was already caressing the filthy creature, which was now up and bobbing about in a friendly, if dazed, manner. My instinct was to ignore it, and I quickly shooed the kids away. I have learned a few lessons about picking up strays, and I generally try to avoid it, but a few minutes later, as I noticed it ambling across the parking lot straight toward three lanes of morning rush hour beltway traffic, my canine-loving instincts took over. I knew if I let the animal walk out into traffic, its demise was going to haunt me for days. While my husband was inside the mini-mart, oblivious, choosing between the sugared donuts and the jalapeño chips, I grabbed our two-liter bottle of purified drinking water, a towel and a container of rosemary and thyme hotel shampoo. With the kids helping, we held the wriggling pup in place while rivulets of perfumed black water ran off its belly and onto the parking lot surface. A brief discussion with the gas station attendant, whose expression as we washed the dog indicated he considered us escapees from a lunatic asylum, confirmed the obvious: The puppy was an unwanted stray who wouldn't be missed.

By the time my husband stepped out of the store, the dog was wrapped in a towel, nestled on the backseat of the car between Felix, nine, and his sister, all three of them beaming. Instantly conceding defeat, he merely wondered: "What do we do with him now?" I assured him that one of the rich, dog-loving, expatriate Americans who populate San Miguel would welcome our little friend.

For the next few hours, we drove southwestward, passing into a scorched desert. When we opened the windows, the air that entered the car was like something from a blast furnace. Our stowaway barely moved. His eyes remained closed, and we began to wonder if he'd even survive the journey to the beach. To divert ourselves, we thought up names for him. "I want to call him Chili," Lulu announced. Felix agreed. And so, while his dry nose, scrofulous skin and dull little eyes didn't bode well for Chili's longevity, he now had a name.

We finally reached the Pacific coast, rumbling up a dirt road leading to a collection of hotels along the sand--the surf town of Troncones. The sight of the heaving waves and the sensation of the cool breeze was a relief after our drive through hell's basin, but now we had a fresh worry: Would Chili be welcome at the villa?

We tried to sneak him across the lawn, but the feel of the grass apparently was a new sensation for him, and he kept migrating back to the parking lot to nestle on the cement by the wheel of our car. It reminded me of a book I read to the kids when they were tiny, Are You My Mother?, about a lost baby bird who decides a steam shovel might be its mom. A bit of sausage was enough to coax Chili away from his asphalt bed and onto the porch, where the villa's proprietors only winked at him. Then, after scarfing down slabs of the food, our withered little canine became a frisky puppy before our eyes.

We took a walk on the beach, our frolicking pup tearing up the sand alongside with his white-tipped tail held high, all of us in a state of glee. Beachgoers approached wherever we went, cooing over Chili, "What a cute puppy!" As his gas station misery receded, we started to imagine the unthinkable: This mangy, wormy little mutt might actually have to come back to New York with us.

Through the beach grapevine, we heard that an American hotelier nearby sported an ASPCA sign on the wall of her establishment and probably could direct us to a local vet--which seemed like an urgent need, given that the children were by now handling the sickly critter nonstop. In short order, we were at the office of a friendly vet in the beach town of Ixtapa, who hoisted our Chili onto the metal table to take some skin scrapings. He found no evidence of contagious mange (a certain bar to north-of-the-border travel for Mexican canines, apparently), and after dosing him with worm medicine, administering his first puppy shot and loading us with antifungal and insecticide shampoos, he sent us on our way.

Back in San Miguel a few days later, we serendipitously walked into a dog festival in a city park. It was put on by an organization called "Save a Mexican Mutt." The group is run by dog-loving Americans who round up, vaccinate and find homes for some of the thousands of Mexican strays that prowl alleys and garbage heaps south of the border (driving them up into Texas and New Mexico by the dozen). Here we met our angel, a woman named Kelly Karger, who gave us a dog carrier and directed us to another vet, who provided us with more papers that would ensure--we were promised-- Chili's entry into the United States.

A week after we found him in the Pemex gutter, Chili arrived at security at the Mexico City airport, accompanied by an airline representative and a $125 ticket. We had been warned that if the Mexican authorities didn't like the look of our dog or his papers, they might throw him into an airport kennel, the dreaded zoologico sanctuario, a prospect that-- imagining the children's likely reactions in an airport with a plane to catch--made my blood run cold. But the Mexican security forces waved him through, albeit after lengthy, inscrutable, nerve-wracking walkie-talkie consultations in Spanish with an absent superior.

Before takeoff, the children had already pulled Chili out of his carrier and onto their laps. A flight attendant approached, and for a moment I thought we were doomed again. But rather than admonish us to lock him up, she fell to her knees in the aisle and showered our little stray with caresses. "Who is this little baby?" she repeated. "I have one like you at home!"

The final hurdle awaited at Newark airport. Approaching the special aisle for travelers with "live animals or plant products," my heart raced like a drug smuggler's. A uniformed USDA inspector checked Chili's papers and waved us through without so much as a glance inside the doggie bag. As we passed, one of the inspectors called out, "What kind of dog is it, anyway?" Ahh, just a Mexican mutt, we mumbled.

And so, our Chili became a naturalized American citizen. When I told this saga to a Dutch friend who travels between Amsterdam and New York four or five times a year, she was outraged at how much easier it was for a dog to get past U.S. Customs than it is for a bona fide member of the European Union.

A month into his unlikely American citizenship, Señor Pancho Chili de Pemex has taken to the New York lifestyle with panache. The elevator, the dog run, the leash, the crowded sidewalks, even the subway--nothing seems to befuddle him for long. Crucially, he apprehended house-training within days, although if the temperature is below 60 degrees, he prefers to do his business as close to the building as possible.

When our Spanish-speaking friends greet him with a hearty "¡Como Estas, Chili!" we think we see a glint of recognition in his bright little eyes. We hope to keep him bilingual.

The author of Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land, NINA BURLEIGH wholeheartedly agrees with that great American philosopher, Snoopy, that "Happiness is a warm puppy."

Continue reading here.
03/01/03

Exit to Eden

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Shadows of man-size leaves dapple the stones as my husband and I tread up a jungle path to our "Rejuvenation" treatment at the Banyan Tree on Mah`e island in the Seychelles.  We arrive at a tropical aerie overlooking the Indian Ocean, where our feet are bathed in mint water and we sip bowls of ginger tea.  After being scrubbed with crushed rice, apples, and honey, we bow our heads under outdoor showers while turmeric soap is poured down our backs.  The massage lasts an hour.  Outside, the surf is distant thunder.
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After a long winter with a new baby, my husband Erik and I needed to get away, preferably to another dimension. So we were relieved and grateful to get The Call. On ADVENTURE's $1,500 we could go someplace warm and do something athletic - preferably mountain biking, an activity that had been curtailed by the arrival of baby Felix. And nine months of being chained to feedings and changings made us eager to travel with the barest outline of a plan. We opened the atlas and zeroed in on Turkey.