Since moving to New Jersey from Tamil Nadu, India at age 10, my life has been a battle of two normals, of not knowing when to cry tiger and when to cry wolf. It is normal to set a watermelon on fire, for religious purposes. It is also normal to lie in a coffin-like box of ultraviolet light, or as Snooki would call it, “tanning tanning.
Susan Conley’s China travel memoir The Foremost Good Fortune reminded me of an emotion we as travelers often feel, though we as travel writers don’t often write about: anger.In Conley’s case, she has plenty to be angry about. While struggling to make sense of the complexities of her life as an expat mom of two rambunctious boys living in Beijing, where they’ve moved for her husband’s job, Conley is unexpectedly stricken with breast cancer.
In our continued discussion of travel writing, we look at pathos and different forms of narration. Join a growing community of thousands of travel journalists and develop your skills in travel writing, photography, and film with a course at MatadorU.LAST WEEK WE EXAMINED how failing to recognize rhetoric can undermine a writer’s intentions, often transforming writing into “plight writing” or travel “porn.
Singita: The best safari lodges in all of Africa - Our SiteIN THE FALL of 2013, Matador traveled to South Africa to learn more about one of the most successful safari brands on the continent: Singita.In addition to spearheading massive conservation projects across Sub-Saharan Africa, Singita now runs 12 super high-end safari lodges and mobile tented camps in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania, and is building three new projects in Mozambique and Rwanda.
MY OLD APARTMENT in the capital of Quito is a rather famous hub for travelers in Ecuador. My roommates and I were active Couchsurfing hosts, and incessant streams of surfers from all walks of life crashed on mattresses around the house.On a recent return visit to La Casa Equinoccio — named after the street we lived on, Equinox — a bunch of us decided to take my friend Omar up on his open invitation to visit Finca Argentina, his childhood home in the jungle.
When I moved to LA from Toronto in 1999, I looked forward to raucous parties, celebrity sightings, and 24/7 sun. I got all of these, plus the following added bonuses.1. Watching brain surgery on a nude car wreck victim from a viewing platform at LA County Hospital. My father had good intentions when he arranged this meeting between myself and a surgeon who’d gone to my high school, but I was eighteen, had no interest in medicine, and kind of wanted to cry.
When you think of a birder, you’re probably thinking about grandma looking out the back window at the blue jay coming to her birdfeeder, or perhaps a group of middle-aged men wandering through the local park in their vests.Think again — there are millions of birders from all walks of life, and they’re out there looking everywhere from the backyard to the ends of the earth.
