It Smells Like Bulls***, But The Taste …

There are perfect moments that occur when I travel. Moments in which the universe exhales, releases its anticipation, and I let go of everything, stop overthinking, and just let myself be in one time and place. My worries and concerns go away and I just exist. I have a little one of these moments every […]

In Which I Make It To Hanoi

The driver who picked me up at the airport spoke no English, so I rode in silence next to him, gazing out from the passenger seat, taking in the tropical urban landscape around me. Hanoi is a fascinating juxtaposition of developing-world decay and modern 21’s century architecture. Some of the buildings are old (but not […]

My Longest Flight Ever

I’m just going to go out on a limb and say this: 16 hour flights are terrible. At best I sleep fitfully on an airplane, waking up at odd intervals checking the clock. On a 16 hour flight, when you open your eyes and look at the clock for the 8th time and find that […]

Butterblogger Says the “C” Word (Not That One)

Greetings, my readers! Yes, I’m back! It’s been almost 5 months since my last post, but finally the time has come for another journey into the little-known (it’s not really unknown). Since I saw you last I successfully made it home from Machu Picchu. That trip ended up incredibly uneventfully. After returning to Cuzco from […]

One Last Climb, For Old Times’ Sake

The mountains rise up around Machu Picchu like colossal green pillars of a shrine, supporting the massive, ethereal, dome of the sky above. This is hallowed ground, which we enter solemnly, humbled by the spirits of the people that labored here. In simple human terms, Machu Picchu is less than 600 years in age, but […]

We Hike To Escape The Rain

Sometime in the night, the rains came and woke me. When they died down, the furious din of the frogs returned with renewed fervor and I slept some more. When morning came we found a world saturated with water, and the sunrise for which we had hoped didn’t come, replaced by a dense brume that […]