Devils in the Land of Diemen’s
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter HOBART – All Vivi knew of Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state, was what most people knew – the cartoon character, The Tasmanian Devil. But there is a lot more to it than the fictionalized version of a mammal endemic to this island state. Although Tasmania is closer to the Equator than [...]
Chasing Dragons in Vietnam
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter VIETNAM – An old fable tells that Halong Bay was formed when a giant dragon came down from the mountains and dove into the South China Sea, the flick of its tail forming the more than 3,000 islands. A Unesco World Heritage Site, this natural wonder is unarguably the jewel [...]
A Fistful of Dong
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter VIETNAM – “Good morning Vietnam!” I called out from the balcony of our five-dollar room in Chau Doc, as the tropical sun rose out of the rice paddies. We had floated down the Mekong River by boat from Cambodia into the Mekong Delta, the food bowl of the region. At [...]
Holiday in Cambodia
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter CAMBODIA – The lyrics of 80s’ punk band The Dead Kennedys, “a holiday in Cambodia, where everyone’s wearing black”, rattled around my brain as we bumped along back roads on a minibus across the Thai border to the Cambodian town of Sien Reap. Only a few months earlier this frontier [...]
A Thousand Smiles Away
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter THAILAND – Even though it is known as ‘the land of a thousand smiles’, this offered Vivi little solace as we arrived in Bangkok after a grueling 24-hour flight from New York. Her throbbing toothache set us off in search of a dentist and not on the usual routes for newly-arrived [...]
Biting into the Big Apple
By Contributing Reporter, Aaron Smith USA: New York, New York; a name so good they say it twice. NYC has had several different names over the years; in the beginning it was known as New Amsterdam when the Dutch controlled the area. First as slaves and later as refugees, Brazilians made up some of the [...]
The Art of Living in Mexico
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter MEXICO – One of Oscar Wilde’s oft-quoted lines, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,” makes me wonder if he’d ever been to a Mexican wrestling match. With names like ‘Ultimo’, ‘The Blue Panther’ and ‘Heavy Metal’, the wrestlers somersaulted off the sides of the ring, grabbing, slapping [...]
Chicken Buses and Saints
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter USA – The expression, “The journey is more important than the destination”, rang true for us as we exited Latin America, eventually disembarking in Houston, Texas. Compared to some of our stops along the way and even despite its mirrored-glass columned skyscrapers, Houston lacked luster. Over 110 days, we had [...]
Cuba Caught in a Time Warp
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter CUBA – “My mojito in La Bodeguita, my daiquiri in El Floridita,” was Hemingway’s famous quote about his two favorite watering holes during the twenty years he lived in Havana. La Bodeguita is reputed to make the world’s best mojito and El Floridita was the cradle of the world’s first [...]
Honduras’s Trouble in Paradise
By Aaron Smith, Contributing Reporter HONDURAS – Marooned on a Caribbean island, once the hideaway of pirate Henry Morgan, may seem implausible in this day and age. Yet that’s essentially our current situation on Utila, one of three of Honduras’s Bay Islands. A world famous diving Mecca, we came to explore Davies’s Locker and possibly [...]