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The Royal Mile

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The Busiest Mile in All of Tourism

If you want to see the most concentrated real estate in all of tourism, I recommend the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. At one end is Edinburgh Castle. One passes historic pubs and fascinating museums, the towering hulk of St. Giles Cathedral in the center, and ending at Holyroodhouse Palace, from where Mary Queen of Scots ruled.

In my visits to Britain, I have always preferred Scotland to England. The food is better, the history more poignant, and the people more friendly. And then there’s the whisky, which can be ethereal. (In one of my boxes of photos is an image of Martine hugging the distillery at Bowmore on Islay.)

I particularly love the Highlands and Islands. My travels north of Edinburgh have included Stirling, Perth, Oban, Loch Ness, Inverness, and the isles of Iona, Mull, Islay, and the Orkney Mainland.

One can’t walk up to Stonehenge and look at it up close, but one can walk up to the Standing Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar.

As I sit here in Los Angeles during yet another overlong heat wave, I dream of re-visiting some of the places in Scotland Martine and I have seen and having a good meal of haggis and neaps washed down with a wee drappit of Scotch.

Mexican Rules

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Benito Juarez Airport in Mexico City

I was reading Oliver Sacks’s Oaxaca Journal—a book I do not recommend you read unless you are a botanist—when I came across this passage which reminded me of past trips to Mexico:

“What gate do we go from?” everyone is asking. “It’s Gate 10,” someone says. “They told me it was Gate 10.”

“It’s Gate 3,” someone else says, “It’s up there on the board, Gate 3.” Yet another person has been told we are leaving from Gate 5. I have an odd feeling that the gate number is still, at this point, indeterminate. One thought is that there are only rumors of gate numbers until, at a critical point, one number wins. Or that the gate is indeterminable in a Heisenbergian sense, only becoming determinate at the final moment (which, if I have the right phrase, “collapses the wave function”). Or that the plane, or its probability, leaves from several gates simultaneously, pursuing all possible paths to Oaxaca..

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This reminds me of a trip my brother and I took to Mexico in 1979. We flew into Mexico’s Benito Juarez Airport and were to take a connecting flight to the misnamed city of Villahermosa. Not only was the gate uncertain, not only was the time uncertain, but whether the flight would take place at all was uncertain. (You can read more about it here.) This was a interesting lesson in traveling under Mexican rules.

This was no longer the precise Anglo-Saxon world we had just left behind. There was uncertainty everywhere. If you let it bother you, you will mot enjoy your vacation. If, on the other hand, you take it as a “Heisenbergian” event and hang in there to see how it all sorts out, you not only win but you learn an interesting lesson that, in the end, you can take back home with you.

Tojásleves

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The Plaza Mayor in Cuenca, Ecuador

My brother and I were in Cuenca, Ecuador. In a few days, he had to leave to honor a work commitment, while I was to stay behind for another week. On the Plaza Mayor in Cuenca, Dan and I made an interesting discovery. There was a café that served a perfectly authentic Hungarian tojásleves, or egg soup.

When we checked for any Magyar influence in the kitchen, we were met with looks of confusion and consternation. What reminded us so much of our mother’s beloved egg soup was actually a local dish.

Sometimes, one can travel halfway across the world only to find something that reminds one of home. Not always. More often than not, one makes strange new discoveries.

This time, after a couple weeks in Ecuador, Dan and I had a taste that sent us back to our childhood in Cleveland. Here is a copy of the original Hungarian recipe. Only, Mom would add some sour cream in ours.

Some Travelers in the Middle East

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Dromedary Camel

In the heat of summer, I tend to read books written by travelers in the deserts of this world. Here are just a few of my favorites, with an emphasis on older sources.

Charles M. Doughty: Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

This is the gold standard. Doughty, a poet and Anglican minister, spent months on the Arabian peninsula at some considerable danger to himself. Interestingly, his book inspired one T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, in his own travels during the First World War. In fact, Lawrence wrote the introduction to my Dover edition. By the way, this is not an easy read; but it is a rewarding one.

T. E. Lawrence: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

Read Lawrence’s own account of his attempt at mobilizing the Arabs against the German-allied Turkish sultanate. What are the seven pillars of wisdom? Well, actually, Lawrence never made that clear. He planned to write a more massive work but used the original title for the one he finally published.

Sir Richard Francis Burton: Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madina and Meccah (1855-56)

This one’s a classic. Burton successfully posed as an Afghan doctor and visited the forbidden cities of Medina and Mecca during the Haj pilgrimage, which he describes in great detail. Burton was a linguist and polymath, so he was able to beard the Arabs in their own den.

Freya Stark: Multiple Works

How was a British woman able to travel by herself through the Middle East and still live over 100 years? She wrote over twenty extremely readable books, many of which are still in print today. Check out the list of her works in Wikipedia.

Gertrude Bell: Syria, the Desert& the Sown (1907)

Yes, another of those talented and indomitable British women. This one was well connected with the Foreign Office and had some say in the region’s sad history.

Forest Road 300

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The One Major Part of Arizona I Have Not Visited

I am fairly familiar with the desert portions of Arizona, with the sole exception of Phoenix, which I have little interest in visiting. One non-desert part of the state I would like to see is the Mogollon Rim, which runs for some two hundred miles (322 km) as a series of high cliffs in the east central part of the state.

Running along the rim is Forest Road 300.. According to an article in Arizona Highways:

Measured in thousands of feet and hundreds of miles, it’s [the Rim] a massive wall of rock that begins near Arizona’s border with New Mexico and stretches diagonally across most of the state. Through the lens of a camera, a set of binoculars or your own baby blues, the views from the top of the Rim are stunning, and on a clear day, you can see all the way to Mount Lemmon.

The vistas steal the show, but there’s a lot to see along Forest Road 300, which can be approached from the east, near Woods Canyon Lake, or from the west, just north of Strawberry. This listing is written from the west, and it begins with an uphill climb through a thick pine forest—the Mogollon Rim is home to the world’s largest stand of ponderosas. After 1.2 miles, FR 300 intersects what used to be the General Crook Trail, a historic wagon route that was used in the 1870s and 1880s to provide logistical support for General George Crook in the U.S. Army’s war against the Apaches.

From reports I have heard, the road is being paved, to the accompaniment of complaints from the 4×4 community. I don’t know if my Subaru is up to a long isolated ride on an unimproved dirt road, but I’m willing to give it a try.

I hope that Martine and I can pay a visit to the Rim and various other parts of the state early this autumn.

Orozco at Dartmouth

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Panel of Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization

One of the things I most loved about my years at Dartmouth College was studying in the Baker Library’s Reserve Room, as it was then called. The Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). Between 1932 and 1934, he painted a series of murals entitled “The Epic of American Civilization” in the college’s Baker Library.

There is a detailed discussion of Orozco’s mural put out by Dartmouth’s Hood Museum describing all the panels.

The Reserve Room

Sometimes I think it is those murals which first got me interested in going to Mexico. Nine years after I graduated, I finally made it to Yucatán and visited the ruins at Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Mayapan, and Kabah during a two-week trip in November 1975.

Until I saw Orozco’s work, Mexico and the Pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas just weren’t on my radar. Afterwards, they became a major preoccupation.

Quetzalcoatl in a Panel of the Orozco Murals

Little did I know in my college years that my interest in the murals would eventually lead me not only to Mexico, but also Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.

Incident at Retiro

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The Retiro Train Station in Buenos Aires

It was November 2015. I had just returned by train from Tigre where I had explored the delta of the Rio Paraná on a boat. That evening, I wanted to take a night bus to Puerto Iguazú to see the famous waterfalls. First I had to get a bus ticket, then take a cab back to my hotel in Recoleta and pick up my luggage, which was being held for me at the desk.

The main Buenos Aires bus station is a couple hundred yards’ walk to the north of the train station, just to the right (not shown) of the train station shown above.

As I walked along the crowded walkway to the bus station, I smelled an odorous mix of steak sauce and mustard that was squirted onto my back by a young couple that was following me. They were exceedingly polite as they applied paper towels to the mess and offered to accompany me to a location on the left where I would be cleaned up.

Cleaned out was more like it. I was familiar with this pickpocket trick. As I was carrying several thousand Argentinean pesos on my person, as well as several hundred dollars cash, I immediately went to my right and hailed one of the numerous cabs that had just dropped someone off at the bus and train stations. I jumped into the cab and asked them to drive me to my hotel in Recoleta.

The cab driver was not happy to be dealing with a rider who made his cab smell weird. Still, he drove me and I gave him a generous tip to clean the steak sauce/mustard smell from the back seat.

I picked up my bags and took another cab—this time directly to Retiro Bus Station, avoiding the walkway between it and the train station. I bought my ticket to Iguazú and got on the bus, still reeking. When, after a good night sleep, I got to my destination, I talked my hotel into laundering my still-smelly clothes.

It was an interesting experience.

The Alabama Hills

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Hundreds of Hollywood Films Were Shot in the Alabama Hills

If you take California 14 from Los Angeles through the Antelope Valley to the end, you will find yourself on U.S. 395 near China Lake and Ridgecrest. In another hour or so, you will pass the turn-off for Death Valley in Olancha and soon afterwards the little town of Lone Pine.

Just west of Lone Pine, along the road that takes you to the Whitney Portal, are the Alabama Hills, which if you have seen as many films as I have, may be surprisingly familiar to you. That is because literally hundreds of scenes in Hollywood films were shot there, Here is a short list:

  • Gladiator (2000)
  • Django Unchained (2012)
  • Tremors (1990)
  • The Great Race (1965)
  • Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
  • How the West Was Won (1962)
  • Gunga Din (1939)
  • Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
  • The Ox Bow Incident (1942)
  • High Sierra (1941)
  • Greed (1924)
  • Ride Lonesome (1959)
  • Three Godfathers (1948)
  • Samson and Delilah (1949)

If you should find yourself driving up that lonely Eastern Sierra highway, you might want to spend an hour or two taking the Alabama Hills loop road and seeing the sights. You can find out more if you should eat breakfast or lunch at the Alabama Hills Cafe in Lone Pine, probably the best eatery for a radius of a hundred miles.

Also highly recommended is the town’s Museum of Western Film History, which memorializes the Westerns shot in the Alabama Hills area.

Touring with Manuel

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The Main Square of Acanceh, Yucatán … With Pyramid

During my magical first trip to Yucatán in November 1975, I decided to hire a guide. I could have gone to a fancier tour office, but I settled on Turistica Yucateca on a Mérida side street. I wish I could remember the name of the owner who didn’t speak a word of English, just as I didn’t speak a word of Spanish. No matter, if you want to communicate, you will; and you will be understood, more or less.

The señora at Turistics Yucateca set me up with an English-speaking guide named Manuel Quiñones Moreno who had access to a car for two days of travel. Instead of going at first to the big Maya sites such as Uxmal or Chichén Itzá, I decided to “start small” by spending some time at Dzibilchaltún on the first day and then going to Mayapan the next day.

After touring Dzibilchaltún, Manuel and I sat down at the entrance to the ruins and played chess. I lost two games in quick succession to Manuel and decided he was several levels better than me.

The next day we drove to Acanceh, where we ate lunch on the zócalo in view of the pretty church and a Mayan pyramid. Then we drove to the late Maya ruins at Mayapan, when much of the peninsula was under the control of a militaristic government which was still in existence when the Spanish arrived.

When I was last in Mérida, I inquired if Manuel Quiñones Moreno was still around. Apparently, he was; and he was still a tour guide a quarter of a century later, though now based in Uxmal. I tried to contact him there, but he was not available when I called.

Los Arrayanes

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At Los Arrayanes National Park in Argentina’s Lake District

It’s one of the smallest national parks in Argentina, being wholly contained within 6.77 square miles (17.53 square kilometers). I rode out there on Lago Nahuel Huapi on a beautiful Glasgow-built steamship called the Modesta Victoria and wandered for a couple of hours among the beautiful Arrayán trees (Luma apiculata) with their cinnamon-colored bark.

The Modesta Victoria on Lago Nahuel Huapi

The little national park was one of the highlights of my 2015 visit to Argentina and Chile. There is a myth that the color of the trees inspired Walt Disney in designing the look of the forest for Bambi (1942). I don’t know whether Walt traveled to Argentina or saw some pictures—or indeed whether he or any of his animators were even aware of the place.

One thing for sure, there are no Arrayán trees (aka Chilean Myrtles) naturally growing in the United States.