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Gros Morne, whose name means "Great Somber," is a harrowingly beautiful stretch of wilderness on the western end of Newfoundland, Canada. It's one of those rare places that teaches you the meaning of the word "grandeur" while at the same time beckoning you to rest in its landscape.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at all skeptical of finding the actual building in which my father was born. He was born a Baby Boomer in St. John's, Newfoundland, outside the nation that raised him, to an Air Force officer during the nascent years of the Cold War.
Kandinsky's abstract forms burst into concrete shapes for the briefest of moments, flickering in reality like fireworks before disappearing, lost again in the unconscious, like a dream forgotten upon waking.
Read MoreDespite my main camera getting nabbed in Liberia, I still managed to get some great shots of the trip using my GoPro HD Hero2, which I've compiled in this little roundup. One of them was even featured on GoPro's Facebook page and garnered over 7,000 likes and several hundred shares!
Read MoreDo you ever get lonely?
All too often.
Read More“It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!”
—Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
It might seem out-of-place to feature this video on a "travel blog," but before any conclusions are drawn, hear Amanda out at the 9:30 mark:
Through the very act of asking people, I connect with them. When you connect with them, [they] want to help you…it's not easy to ask. Asking makes people vulnerable…"celebrity" is about a lot of people loving you from a distance…but this is about a few people loving you up close, and about those people being enough.
I've found the art of travel in the state of being vulnerable, and by being willing to ask a stranger for something. For an overwhelming majority of the time, people have been good, kind, and hospitable to me. The best journeys are the ones when I let others be responsible for my voyage, delivery, and activity. Wherever I go, I go as a disciple of that place and the people I find there.
And disciples tend to ask for a lot of help along the way.
The first time I went looking for it, I overshot the turn-off for Punta Jesús Maria by about 15 kilometers, which is a lot of distance to overshoot something on an cantankerous two-speed bicycle with knobby tires. Especially when the island being pedaled across is only 30 kilometers to begin with.
Photo credit: Scott Sporleder, MatadorU faculty
I've been a little quiet on Sparkpunk for the last few weeks—not because I've lost interest in the website, but as I approached my one-year anniversary on Tuesday, I thought a lot about the energy and emphasis of each piece, and I'd decided to pare it down to one of two things: either an aesthetic feat (like Travel Candy), or a more longwinded piece that explores the raw, beautiful heart of travel.
This piece from Candice Walsh popped up on my RSS feed during a time I was contemplating this re-focus most, and as I read her quiet narrative I could sense the fire within: the struggle with ambiguity, with not-knowing, seems to be a default setting for real travelers. But the way she expresses hope amidst this—even at her worst—is a story for all of us.
I remember as a kid thinking that underwater cameras were awesome. I'm glad that hasn't changed.
I returned to Florence in the summer of 2008, a year and a half after my first extended stay abroad there. The city was exactly as I'd remembered it—maybe less scaffolding this time around—but I couldn't shake the feeling that it had progressed beyond that which I'd known. I'd spend the summer reacquainting myself with its roads, museums, and people, only to uproot once again in August, to return home to my job after my grant research had completed.
In 2011, again I noticed this weird undercurrent of an ancient city in flux—but the buildings hadn't shifted, and the streets still led to where I wanted to go. Franco the waiter was showing his age, but the tables at his restaurant hadn't budged an inch. Nothing looked different, but nothing felt the same.
But it wasn't in the city I'd noticed the change: it was in the man I'd become during those years. The act of journeying morphed into the art of pilgrimage, and in the quest to find an answer, there I was: already a part of it.
Traversing the Gates of Hell (Azacuelpa, Honduras)
According to lore, the chasm that created El Portal del Infierno in rural Honduras opened up at once—seemingly in an act of defiance of the nearby priest, who was in the act of blessing the ground for a good harvest. Geothermal vents boil the adjacent river, and steam constantly pours out from both sides of the cave. To the superstitious, the landscape is terrifying, a harbinger of doom brought about by the dark forces obscured by the vapor.
The cave is too unreal to leave alone, though—places like this summon the splinters of intrepidness in all of us. We couldn't help but to explore a little, and wonder at all of it.
Just over one year ago, Ted Talks published this video featuring Kevin Allocca, the trends manager for Youtube—he's literally paid to watch Youtube videos, as he'll point out at the :20 mark. His job, essentially, is to monitor what happens when videos go viral, and to utilize that data into relevant cultural information about humor:
Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon…(speaking in reference to a number of viral videos) communities sprouted up that brought [these instances] from being a stupid joke to something that we could all be a part of, because we don't just enjoy now, we participate.
And participate I did: yesterday at D & D Brewery, the owner—a friend of mine—coordinated a massive Harlem Shake video (if you haven't seen one yet, this is as good an example as any), featuring a professional juggler, a horse, a tuk-tuk, a man in a tree, a smattering of beer kegs, and yours truly.
Can you spot me amidst the chaos?
The ancients created the first geometric forms as a means to understand the world around them
"Always leave a place better than you found it," whispered the wisdom of grade school. But in a place as perfect as Ometepe in southern Nicaragua, I was having a hard time finding a way to contribute. Punta Jesús María jutted out across the water, a narrow peninsula half-covered in waves. The sun would be down in 20 minutes, and I wasn't ready to leave. The maker in me stirred.
Sometimes, people travel to see something great. Sometimes, they travel to accomplish something magnificent, and others travel to relax and decompress.
When I travel, I like to make something new, and then leave it there for someone else to find.
If you're (a) near a waterfall, (b) doing a front flip, (c) screaming for your life, or (d) any combination of these things, it's highly probable your life is awesomely gnarly (photo furnished by Ryan Brown)
Ryan Brown has a lot of great qualities, but my favorite is his knack for taking the sparks of inspiration and pouring gasoline on them. He's one of the most compelling travel-dreamers writing on the web right now, and damned if I didn't read his story and not choke back a torrent of tears. His resilience, motivation, and action leave us little room to pardon the stagnancy in our own lives, and I think his motto bears repeating:
Good news for whoever bought in at Day 12, Morning: You win!
At least I still have the shirt on my back. And then some.
Read MoreI think it's hilarious that whenever archeologists unearth something really old, architects go watch Terminator 2 and then build something to house it
Scattered around San José—and the rest of Costa Rica, for that matter—are stone spheres of various sizes, dating back during the Pre-Columbian era. No one is absolutely certain what their purpose was for, but it is thought that a sphere's size indicated the social standing of its owner, and no doubt the carvers of these spheres were experts in stonecutting and hands-on geometry.
Housing a medium-sized sphere in front of the Museo Nacional is a more contemporary one that's no less enchanting than the stone one.
I'm glad to see we haven't lost our fascination with platonic solids…
There are tons of things I would do to save a dollar. Flying with Spirit Airlines isn't one of them.
Read MoreLeave it to the scientists to make awesome art ;)
At the entrance to the California Science Center is Aerial, a complex installation of over 300 gold- and palladium-coated spheres meant to help us ponder the concept of Origin, from the minute level of the chromosome to the grandiose scale of a galaxy. Underneath the display, it's impossible not to notice how the light catches each sphere beneath the pavilion, and it has the effect of making the viewer feel both small and large at the same time. The exhibit itself is an achievement, but what I like best about it is how it presents such a beautiful pointing finger to one of the largest questions of them all: How did we get here?
(beginning and end quotes from Albert Einstein)
If it wasn't readily apparent, the theme of this week in travel is outer space, and I've been wanting to share this video for a long time. My ultimate travel goal is to see a sunrise from orbit, and with the way things are going (and still going), I don't think it's unreasonable to anticipate this happening at some point in my lifetime.
Knate Myers has done a splendid job splicing together images taken from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory at NASA, and damned if I couldn't find any better eye candy to whet my appetite for shooting myself into the sky.
One day…one day…
