Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jog

I set out to find wild elephants. That was my big idea. I pitched the story that way. I left on the plane with only that in mind. I got much more. In a couple months, the article about my trip to the Yunnan Province in southern China will run in EnRoute Magazine. I don’t…

Read More

Pilgrimage Redux

Elephants

Gone for a few weeks to China on a gig for EnRoute Magazine. Spotty to nonexistent internet while I’m gone. Taking: 2 blank notebooks, 5 pens, a knapsack, and zero preparation. Returning with: 2 full notebooks, a crucially necessary new attitude, and photos of elephants. Enlightenment is an outside possibility.

Read More

The Accidental Local

Beach

First published EnRoute Magazine We’ve been motoring seaward for about an hour when Roberto finally cuts the diesel. Brazil is a bare pencil line on the horizon, Monte Pascoal a tiny bump, as it must have been when Portuguese explorers first came across these cobalt blue waters 500 years ago, and I’m feeling more here than I…

Read More

Igloolik Dubai

Igloolik

My third novel The Blue Light Project was published in March/April and book business, touring etc, consumed most of those two months. In May I had to get back to work. That means magazine work. And that means travel. I still very much enjoy this aspect of my freelance life. This time around in particular, I had…

Read More

Rabbit Receiving his own Information

Rabbit painting by Cody Bustamante hanging at Scott Paul Winery

On a gig for Western Living Magazine, I toured the Willamette Valley recently. Lots of gems to discover there, like Whole Hog Wednesdays at the Dundee Bistro. And of course several hundred small, high-craft wineries that produce the amazing fruity, farmy pinot noirs of the region. But I particularly enjoyed “meeting” the mascot of the Scott Paul Winery.…

Read More

The Original Tourist Destination

Santiago de Compostella

Would You Walk 500 Miles? This month in EnRoute Magazine.   The place has a gravitational pull all its own. Just passing Amenal, 10 kilometers east, walking through a light rain, before I even glimpse the tips of its famous cathedral spires, I feel Santiago de Compostella like a spinning vortex just over the green…

Read More

Going to Mecca, or its near equivalent

When I was writing my architecture novel, Story House, I had a small library of images that I used to shape my sense of Packer Gordon, the senior architect in the story. It’s no secret that Arthur Erikson was one inspiration, particularly his wooden houses. And especially the beautiful Filberg House. But Vladimir Ossipoff, the Hawaii based modernist, was another…

Read More

Tokyo – Part Three: Eastern Promises

Minimalists sculpture

In travel, while you don’t want to rush, moments of real speed can be exhilarating. I mean those times during a trip when you can feel the globe rotating under your feet, the landscape transforming before your eyes. Liftoff out of Vancouver, on a trans-Pacific flight, is particularly evocative of this sen­sation for me. The…

Read More

Walking the Way

For Walrus Magazine   1. I can’t explain the feeling I’m having here, standing on the beach in Comillas, a little seaside resort on the Cantabrian coast of Spain. I’m actually wading in the water, because my feet are aching, and as I stare out to sea, my mind drifting, it suddenly occurs to me—ten…

Read More

Tokyo – Part Two: Without a Plan

Minimalists sculpture

It seemed like a good idea when I woke up: a day spent hunting the perfect Tokyo cherry blossoms. Here was the plan, drawn up in the first seconds after waking, still in my bed at the Claska Hotel: I’d walk the Meguro-gawa upstream to its source, following the many kilometres of cherry trees that…

Read More