Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to --- they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool ca...
These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them?
There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather, a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window and disappears and becomes part of the past.
There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice cubes.
The religious belief varies from village to village. Nearly all worship the cholera and smallpox deities, and there are traces of serpent worship.
The British were fatalistic; it was the origin of their cynicism, but it also made them good sharers of misfortune. ‘Oh, well, mustn’t grumble!
Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. That...
Suffering has no value, but you have to suffer in order to know that. I never found it easy to travel, yet the difficulty in it made it satisfying because it seemed in that way to resemble the act of...
Since I will never write the autobiography I once envisioned—volume one, Who I Was; volume two, I Told You So—writing about travel has become a way of making sense of my life,
Like most Hong Kongers I had met, they were complete provincials, with laughable pretensions. Was it the effect of colonialism? They were well fed and rather silly and politically naive. In some ways...
Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power...
If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to...
Eating together is an occasion that humans have made into a peacemaking ritual;
Yet because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures,...
Travel has always been my way of defeating this sinking feeling, partly because travel is a form of escape, and travel itself—the elemental farewell—becomes the fugitive fantasy of a new life, travel...
The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks Ind...
Reading about a far-off place can be a satisfaction in itself, and you might be thankful you’re reading about the bad trip without the dust in your nose and the sun burning your head, not having to en...
At a certain age you stop being a child and start raising your parents ...
And I began writing, to console myself in my solitude and to ease the passing of time.
Triphthong.