It's been quiet here in Road Wisdom land, but it's the silence of distant places rather than the silence of inactivity that has fallen over my blog...

I've been on the road these past couple months. Exploring the rugged interior of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Navigating the hectic city streets of Tokyo, and the quieter corners of northern Honshu. And more recently in the US -- the farthest steamy south at Key West, and then across the continent to Seattle to see The Church and hang with Steve Kilbey.

I've got a lot of new material for you: new adventures, new book reviews, new music, and new deep philosophical thoughts. And we'll get to it all in good time. But we've gotta start somewhere. Why don't we go for a walk to set the mood?

Let's begin with Tokyo...

How'd you like to join me for the day? We'll check out a couple places I've never been before. We'll stroll through history in the centre of the city at Hama-rikyu gardens -- the Edo period Shogun Ienobu's private retreat. We'll window shop the glittering streets of Ginza, Tokyo's 5th Avenue. And we'll wind it all up in the pulsing neon 22nd Century Shibuya night.

I just picked up a new camera in Narita. The weather's rather warm for December. Grab a light jacket and let's go. It should be a fun time...

Ahh, Tokyo. It's one of my favourite world cities. There's always something new to discover, and a new adventure around every corner...

Happy Gnu Year!

It's been several weeks since I've had a chance to write. I've been offline in the South Pacific, and now in northern Japan celebrating the New Year Japanese-style. It's the big  family holiday here (rather than Christmas), with lots of amazing food and far too much to drink.

I'll write more about the foods and sites of Japan in the coming weeks, as well as the South Pacific territory of New Caledonia. I filmed a few videos for you too.

In the meantime, I want to share a short video I made for our fitness site about hangover remedies. I figured that, if you're anything like me, you might need such knowledge as the holidays draw to a close...

I hope you find it helpful. And remember, if you can't find fermented mare's milk, there's always ramen...

I wish you all the best in 2011. I hope you find happiness, prosperity, and maybe even a few adventures.

I'm still drifting through Central American memories, looking at my life 10 short years ago...

The present has rippled and the past intervened. It's leaking through the walls of this cold northern room, and all those feelings are coming back with it.

This is from Chapter 4 of Vagabond Dreams. It's about traveling alone, and that first time you set out on the road.

My recent visit to Panama City has left me drifting 10 years in the past...

I'd like to share with you a reading of something I wrote at that time.  It was my first real trip. I was alone and disoriented, in a place where I didn't speak the language. I didn't really know why I was there or what I should do. I only knew I had to go. 

Those of you who have followed such impulses know how deeply that first trip will change you. After traveling the length of Central America, nothing ever looked the same again. I could never go back to the life I'd left behind. 

I wrote this passage during lonely nights in a windowless room. It describes my first glimpse of the city, and of the disorientation I felt.

This is from Chapter 4 of Vagabond Dreams. It's the first time I've shared an actual passage from the book that isn't an "outtake" or a "deleted scene." I hope you enjoy it.

A bit of shameless self-promotion to share with you...

The Australian adventure lifestyle magazine Bare Essentials is running an 8-page interview with me in their November/December 2010 issue:

We talked about why landscapes spark inspiration, trip preparation, the spirit of place, and even which books I have on my bookshelf. Eight full pages of your favourite introspective traveling scribe. What more could you ask for? I mean, c'mon...

They did a really nice job with this. Their questions were fun and original, and they've even featured full photo layouts from my frequent expedition partner Jason George. The rest of the issue is pretty cool too. 94 full pages of content! Jeez, you can't go wrong.

Log on and grab your copy today!

On the flight back, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, the feeling changed. I crossed some sort of invisible divide where I re-entered the life of the States: the life of work, obligation, responsibility and long hours. I dropped back into that weight as though it had never been lifted. It almost felt natural. But it's not.

I realized at that moment that Central America is a separate dimension. An alternate reality that one steps into, just as one steps into Macondo.

Down there I felt carefree. Like nothing matters. Rules don't matter because everything is chaos. You can do what you want, but at the same time you're responsible for looking out for yourself. Life slows down and Time loses its hold.

Ten years ago, sitting in a hammock in a dusty back yard staring at the moon, the night before I was to fly back home, I wrote:

At the end of my road I discovered that I could feel at ease anywhere. Every place belonged to me, because I no longer belonged to any place. Central America had become a state of mind, a mental construct, a place of no fixed geographical borders. It was something I carried with me.

But the challenge doesn't end with the conclusion of the journey. In many ways the most difficult task is just beginning. A journey is a liminal place, existing somewhere between the normal and the completely otherworldly. And so at the end of my journey I had to return, to confront society and my past lives with the light I'd fought so hard to win.

I would be shaken by questions, resentment, and the incomprehension of good people who couldn't grasp my new insights through the filters of the world I'd left behind. I would struggle with a nagging inconsistency between the wisdom I brought forth from The Road and the way things functioned in the day-to-day. My challenge would be to reconcile that; to carve out a new path for myself; to remain true to my vision, and to not forget.

I had to remember that the light is extinguishable, just because it is light. That it must be tended and cherished. And that it can only be lit from the source.

I'd forgotten that feeling ten years later. But I found it again once more.

As a writer and a constant reader of books, I've begun to feel increasingly disconnected from other people. I think it comes from spending too much time alone in a room. There's a glass barrier between myself and the rest of the world. I'm seeing it all at one remove, through the TV screen of my eyes, from several feet back in my head. Maybe it's a consequence of traveling alone, when the glances of strangers don't rest on you for very long.

I sit on the sea wall of Casco Viejo, up above the Plaza de Francia, and I have to keep reminding myself where I am: just above South America, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, lost ten years in my past.

I walk through the streets, revisiting places I'd been, trying to recapture how I felt then: alone, disoriented, unable to speak the language, lost and without purpose at the start of a journey that would change me in ways I had yet to comprehend. But it's no good. I can't connect.

I sit in a restaurant and eat alone, writing these words as dew drops run down the side of a beer bottle. I'm inside my head and it's like these other people aren't even here. They're just a few feet away, but they're behind that screen. They can't reach me and I can't touch them. And in an hour or two they won't even remember that our lives intersected.

But this doesn't bother me. I'm happy to sit here mute among strangers. Writing. thinking. Reflecting on the past.

I only regret that the city has changed so much, and I've changed along with it. It feels like I no longer belong in this world. I can't find that person I set free in Central America ten years before. The person I wrote about in Vagabond Dreams. Did I change so much when I crossed that gap to Punta Paitilla and the West? It was supposed to make everything easier.

I resigned myself to a different vision. And then, just as I'm about to leave this cantina, the 70's funk stops and a song by Maná comes on the stereo. It's a different Maná mix, but it's one of those songs I bought on a cheap dubbed tape in Bluefields, Nicaragua. I listened to it the rest of the way through Central America ten years ago, and it's plaintive, hopelessly romantic songs became wrapped up in the feeling of that journey.

I smiled because I knew The Road was sending me a reminder of what I used to be, and of what I still am. And it brought the past back to me again in these same streets.

Then....

...and now

Panama City, 10 years later. 

The plaza in the colonial district still looks the same. The tidal flats are still muddy, and they still smell of the sea. Punta Paitilla still juts out across the bay, a glimmering jewel of finance, luxury, and life lived on another plane. The big ships are still there, floating at random anchorages, waiting to transit the Canal. A couple of them even look familiar. But so much has changed.

New buildings have gone up in the banking district, and there's a condo boom down the shore at Punta del Este. The Hotel Central no longer squats in it's own filth. It's been completely gutted and work crews are busy turning it into a casino. A Brazilian company has built a causeway on land reclaimed from the sea, so you no longer have to drive down the Avenida Central to get to Casco Viejo -- through the "dangerous" area, the place where I stayed last time. The entire colonial district is under construction, and I see scaffolding on every street as centuries-old buildings get a facelift. I wonder if the poor have been pushed out, as I predicted ten years before?

I've changed too, ten years later. Last time I stayed in a hotel surrounded by prostitutes just off the Avenida Central. I paid fifteen dollars for a room, which was too much, but I was just getting started and I didn't know any better. I went everywhere on foot and by bus. It was my first real trip. That pivotal journey that changes your world so that nothing ever looks the same again. I wrote about it all in Vagabond Dreams.

Now I'm staying in a five star hotel in the banking district. A place where a butler comes to press my suit, and where my mini bar is restocked with ice each night. I'm here on business, and I no longer have endless time to wander these streets, or to sit and read on a bench by the sea. It feels like I've crossed that gulf I wrote about in this exact spot so many years before -- that gap to Paitilla and the west -- and I no longer belong here.

Was that the price I paid?

It's been a while since I reviewed a recent travel book. This one stood out among the books I read last month.

The Riverbones by Andrew Westoll

Andrew Westoll spent a year as a primatologist chasing monkeys through the jungles of the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. He returned five years later as a writer obsessed with finding the secret soul of this poorly understood country. 

Few outsiders have heard of Suriname, and even fewer can place it on a map. It's a surreal place -- a former Dutch colony, rich in resources but badly governed, home to indigenous peoples and Maroons (the descendants of escaped slaves brought from Africa), and quite possibly the world's last Eden. Ninety percent of it is covered in jungle, but the image that remains at the end of the book is that of the riverbones: a forest of lifeless trees poking skeletal fingers from the reservoir of the Afobaka Dam, and the 43 drowned villages at the bottom of all that murk, flooded to power an aluminum smelter that no longer exists. It's a moving example of how human rights and ecological preservation compete with the simple desire to build a better life.

This insightful book brims over with obscure bits of history, stories of shamans, Brazilian gold miners, political murders and shady characters of every tropical stripe. Westoll also paints a vivid picture of the disconnection endured by the traveler who truly drops off the map: that feeling of being trapped in a culture he can't understand, and simultaneously lost to the life he left behind to go there. To travel like this is to be alone among strangers.