In Patagonia

The plane flew parallel to the distant spine of the Andes, whose sharp peaks rose up out of the vast, brown, mildy rolling landscape. We landed in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, Chile just 30 miles away over that spine of peaks. I was in Patagonia.

Sometimes when you travel, your experience is deepened by coming to a place that’s long tugged at you. A place that’s called you to come through messages that have stuck for years to your bones and heart and soul. Your personal places of a lifetime. For me, these places include Petra, Tibet, Istanbul, the Cinque Terre, Kathmandu, Machu Picchu, Tikal, Lake Titicaca, all now visited, savored and some little part of who I am. And others I still hope to see: Burma, Bhutan, Carcassonne, Ethiopia’s rock churches at Lalibela, Mali’s mud cathedral at Djenne, the Pyramids and Abu Simbel, Angkor, Uhuru, Milford Sound.

Patagonia is one of those places that had tugged at me and, as I stood in it for the first time, on the sidewalk outside the Bariloche air terminal, I said, to no one in particular, “We’re in Patagonia! How cool is that?!” A Finnish woman who’d been on our flight heard me and said in a serious voice, “It is about 37 degrees.”

Before we’d exited the terminal, beautiful, black-haired girls manning the doors had handed us cards warning against our trying to bring any foreign fruits, vegetables or plants into Patagonia. After they handed us the fruit-warning card, they reached into their baskets and handed each traveler a gargantuan, shiny, red apple. “Look at these apples!” I cried, fully engulfed by excitement at experiencing things Patagonian.

“The best apples in the world,” affirmed an Argentine businessman as he took his fruit card and his apple. Dana, Mike and Adam, all hungry from the flight from Buenos Aires, ate theirs on the spot and agreed. The best apples in the world.

We met our guide, Roberto, and driver, Fabio. Bariloche, which sits in the midst of Nahuel Huapi National Park, the world’s third oldest national park after Yellowstone and Banff, has about 100,000 year-round residents, but in a good year hosts one million visitors. This was a good year, and it was July, height of ski season. Besides Argentine and Chilean visitors, Brazilians en masse were in Bariloche to ski, see, and be seen. They’d schuss around Cerro Catedral ski area during the day and fill Bariloche’s quaint streets, restaurants and chocolate shops in the evening. Said Roberto, “If any of you know some Spanish, you walk down the street and you won’t understand a word. Everybody’s speaking Portuguese.”

On the way to town, we passed through the police checkpoint that monitors comings and goings in Rio Negro, the province Bariloche sits in. Roberto held his breath, then released it as we were waved through. “Sometimes they stop the bus and check everyone and give out fines. When the police need money.” He told us about obscure, outdated motoring laws kept on the books specifically to provide as-needed revenue: “They can always put you some fines if they need money,” said Roberto. “There’s an old law requiring motorists to carry a kerosene lamp, wax, and wooden matches. Chances are you’ll be missing one, two or three of these, so you can get a fine put to you.”

In two days, we’d be embarking on one of the planet’s great border crossings, the Cruce de Lagos, which brings travelers by boat and bus across Argentina’s Patagonian lakes and forests and into Chile’s. (I’ll share the wonder of that day in a separate post.)

So, we had two days to explore Bariloche, which sits on mountain-ringed Lake Nuahel Haupi ( above). We ate cheap, bountiful food, including exquisite fresh-caught lake trout, at La Esquina Restaurant. We walked the streets lined with brightly painted, Swiss-style wooden buildings. Bariloche’s residents are mainly of Swiss descent, with some German and Italian tossed in. In the late 1800s, the government offered free land to European settlers. Bloody battles with the indigenous indians ensued and, as in most places, the native people were eventually wiped out or moved, and Bariloche and its Patagonian environs were turned over to sheep ranching and the wool industry. All that vast, uninhabited, brown land I’d seen from the plane, in the shadow of the Andes? Unimaginably massive sheep ranches. It takes a lot of land to feed one sheep. If your herd is huge, you need a fair chunk of Patagonia.

On Bariloche’s lakefront sits the town’s main square, anchored by brown-timbered stone buildings in alpine motif. The word “Justicia” was spraypainted on the cobbles, as were scores of white kerchiefs. Each kerchief represents a mother or grandmother, an abuela, searching for information about Argentina’s “disappeareds,” mostly young people imprisoned or killed in the late 70s and early 80s by the generals of Argentina’s then ruling military junta. The square was a smaller and in some ways more poignant version of Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, also a locus of quiet protests honoring the memory of the desaparacidos. Many of Argentina’s white-kerchief abuelas are the mothers of women imprisoned during the country’s “dirty war,” women who gave birth in prison and whose babies were taken away and not seen again by their families. The abuelas may, by now, know their children’s fates, but they want to know what happened to their grandchildren.

Travel, like life, is often a series of contrasts and juxtapositions. After we prayed in our way on the kerchief-covered cobbles, we went back to our lakeview hotel, and Adam and Dana played a game of two-on-two pool basketball, shooting into a floating, jury-rigged laundry basket, with a brother and sister from Minas Gerais in Brazil. They laughed and whooped and splashed, communicating in the language of sport and fun. Just four kids on vacation.

www.LoriHein.com

Bob Jordan takes on Ironman Canada (again)

This post is for Bob Jordan, the husband of one of my best friends, Terry. In two days, Bob will race 140.6 miles in Ironman Canada, held in Penticton, British Columbia. If you read this on or before August 28, send good vibes and well wishes to Bob, who’ll be wearing bib number 1608.

Bob, who heads the FBI in Oregon, is no stranger to ironman-distance triathlon. He’s done about a dozen, give or take. An ironman triathlon starts with a 2.4-mile swim. The best athletes knock that off in well under an hour. Then, out of the wet suit and into the bike shorts for a 112-mile ride. The best will sit some five hours in the saddle. The day’s work ends with a marathon, the whole 26.2-mile banana. The youngest pros and elite triathletes will complete the full ironman in eight hours or so, but most times are double digits, with finishes between 10 and 17 hours, the maximum time allowed.

(Anything over that cutoff is a “DNF” – “Did Not Finish.” Man, they have to change that. A person trains for six months to a year, completes the grueling course in 17.5 hours, and he or she did not finish? Brutal! How about changing that to “FOOT” – “Finished Outside the Official Time.” I’ve run marathons where the sponsors roll up the finish line and the clock at six hours. But don’t tell me that the person who fights her way to that line in seven hours didn’t finish. Of course she did! I have a problem with DNF. Did Not Finish should be used only when a person did not finish – not when he finished, albeit slowly. A finish is a finish.)

Penticton doesn’t have the altitude or peaks of the Coastal Range just north of Vancouver (above, a glacier near Whistler Blackcomb, which you’ll reach after a stunning ride out of Vancouver on Highway 99, the Sea to Sky Highway), but the Ironman Canada bike course does serve up two peaks at Richter Pass and Yellow Lake that exceed 2,500 feet. The assault on Richter requires seven miles of climbing. You’d better have done your hill work. (And you’d better save something in your legs. You’ve still got a marathon to run before midnight.)

I’m proud of Bob Jordan. Inspired and awed by him. Terry awes and inspires me, too. Let me share a little bit of why. It’s an incomplete view, bullet points only. To tell you everything about Terry and Bob and their extraordinariness would require a book.

In 1997, Bob and Terry’s five-year-old daughter, Emily, wrote a letter to the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC), asking the WTC to grant her dad a coveted slot in the Hawaii Ironman, granddaddy of ironman races and holy grail of iron-distance triathletes. Five days after he received his slot, Emily died of leukemia.

Two years later, Terry became an ironman, completing Ironman USA in Lake Placid, New York. (She has a moving chapter in Kara Douglass Thom’s Becoming An Ironman: First Encounters with the Ultimate Endurance Event.) She did it for and because of Emily and with the love and support of Bob, her ironman, and she’s been channeling her energy ever since into raising funds and awareness for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS). Between them, Bob and Terry have raised tens of thousands of dollars for LLS, and Terry sits on the board of directors of its Oregon chapter. And, at last count, she’s a four-time ironman, having recently completed the Ironman Coeur d’Alene in Idaho.

(If you pay the least attention to grammar, I know you’re wondering about the lower and upper case “I” in ironman: The word is capitalized only when it refers to a product or 140.6-mile race sponsored by the WTC. Lower case “ironman” refers to the 140.6-mile ironman distance or a person who completes that distance. There are ironman-distance triathlons sponsored by organizations other than the WTC. These are not capitalized, but the people who complete them are still ironmans. [My Spellcheck is going bonkers on that one, but I’ve yet to see the word “ironmen” relating to triathlon in print anywhere.])

Terry works with LLS’s Team in Training, which provides fundraising and training support for people wanting to take on an endurance event like a marathon and also do some good in the battle against cancer. Bob and Terry fly all over the country, running marathons, inspiring people, speaking to, motivating and supporting athletes, and keeping Emily’s beautiful, positive spirit alive, well and very much in the moment. They fit ironman races between their fundraising, challenging themselves to show what we humans are made of, how much we can endure, and how precious and amazing our lives are.

In December, Terry will run the Honolulu Marathon for Team in Training, and she hopes to raise another $5,500 for lymphoma and leukemia research. Click this link to find out more about her efforts.

Terry and Bob live outside Portland with their eight-year-old son, Timothy, who’s become quite a bike rider. In a recent email, Terry wrote, “Now I can run with ‘my boys’ and don’t have to get a sitter. Ozzie, our yellow lab, is up to 25 miles a week. He goes with Bob on weekends. Timothy is up to 10 miles at once with no problem. Life is good!”

Indeed it is. May we all, at enough points in our lives to sustain and fulfill us, feel wings on our feet.

And, on August 28, Godspeed to Bob Jordan.

www.lorihein.com

Calgary Stampede Chuckwagon groupies

Two Daltons, a Drake, a Travis, a Casey, a Wiley, and a Dustin or two. Names of the cowboys leading the point pack on the afternoon we settled into the grandstand to take in some rodeo at the Calgary Stampede.

“This ain’t no golf game, ladies and gentlemen,” purred the announcer with the deep, gorgeous Calgarian voice as the world’s best cowboys – Albertans, Manitobans, Minnesotans, lots of Texans, a West Virginian, a few Australians – roped cattle with lightning bolt speed and challenged brute force and gravity by staying upright on the thrashing bare backs of unbroken broncos. We thrilled to the action, the raw power of men and animals, the intense display of courage, bravado and physical stamina.

But my favorite part of The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, as the Stampede bills itself, was the Chuckwagon Races, “the chucks,” to devotees. Thirty-six men in nine four-crew heats race chuckwagons around the 5/8-mile dirt oval that rims the rodeo infield, enter the infield, navigate a figure-eight around barrels, hurl items representing camp stoves and cooking implements, then bolt back onto the track for the gonzo break to the finish line. Four horses haul each wagon, and each team has a chuck driver and outriders, men who start the race on foot, then mount their horses and try to catch their wagons. Teams lose points if the outriders finish greater than 150 feet behind their chucks.

We had the good fortune to sit next to Jennifer and Kathy, native Calgarians and Chuckwagon groupies. “Haven’t missed a Stampede since we were three years old,” said Jennifer. As the horses, chuck drivers and outriders roared around the golden oval, raked smooth after each heat by smiling, big-paunched guys on green John Deere tractors, Jennifer and Kathy explained every detail, tradition and nuance of this rolling, thundering, galloping spectacle.

They knew the names of every team and every rider and driver, and they pointed out the chucks raced by cowboy families, with fathers, brothers, cousins and uncles dedicated to hurtling a particular wagon through the course and to the finish. Jennifer said many of these men, horses and wagons would be hightailing it down to Cheyenne, Wyoming as soon as the race we were watching was over. These serious rodeo men follow the “chuck circuit” all over North America in pursuit of event purses as large as $50,000. That year, the Cheyenne chucks, a circuit biggie and until recently a major part of Cheyenne Frontier Days, coincided with the Calgary Stampede’s 10 days of eventing. Serious contenders hopped between the two. If a team made the Calgary finals, they’d compete in Wyoming, “then hop a plane in Cheyenne and fly back in time to compete on the last night of the Stampede,” said Jennifer.

Stampede is in Calgarians’ blood. They love it, savor it, are proud of it, set their calendars by it, and never miss it. Cowgirls in full regalia greet tourists at the airport not with, “Welcome to Calgary,” but “Welcome to Stampede.” Then they “brand” you, stick Stampede buttons on your kids’ shirts and whisk you into the main terminal, a space decorated with hay bales and stuffed cowboy figures wearing Levi’s, boots, Stetsons, red bandanas and pearl button shirts. During Stampede, folks gather in parking lots, plazas and in front of strip malls across the city and enjoy carbs and camaraderie at Stampede pancake breakfasts.

During Stampede, nobody says, “Have a nice day,” Have a good evening” or “Take care.” Everybody, Jennifer and Kathy included, wishes everybody else well with a warm, genuine Alberta grin and “Have a good Stampede.”

Has Charles Veley been to the State of Chuuk?

WARNING! UNLESS FOREIGN PLACE NAMES EXCITE YOU,THIS POST MAY CAUSE YOUR EYES TO GLAZE OVER AND YOUR BRAIN TO EXPLODE

My subscription to National Geographic Traveler flows less than smoothly. The magazine shows up in my mailbox only intermittently, perhaps because I’m on the C-list of subscribers – those who cashed in soon-to-expire frequent flier miles to get the mag. I guess they figure if I didn’t use my miles (and who can anymore?) then I don’t really travel, so why bother sending me every issue of the magazine? (Travel & Leisure, for which I coughed up some 800 miles, has never sent a single issue, which is frankly fine with me, because it saves me having to read about precious martini bars, spas and $400-a-night hotel rooms that are soooo worth it because the sheets have a high thread count.)

I read about Charles Veley in one of the few Traveler issues sent my way. (I feel betrayed. I’ve subscribed to the flagship National Geographic since 1981. Kept up my subscription through thick and thin, even in post-college days when I had to choose between rent and beer.)

Veley is the self-described “world’s most traveled human.” According to Veley’s master list, which you can view at his website, www.mosttraveledman.com, there are currently 572 “countries, territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, geographically separated island groups, and major states and provinces” in the world. (This is up from the 570 he listed at the time of the Traveler interview. I’m losing sleep wondering about the names, locations and circumstances of the two most newly minted autonomous hunks of geography.)

Of those 572 entities, Charles Veley has, at the time of my last visit to his website, visited 518. This in itself is astounding, but it’s made more so when you analyze the list of places. With some time to kill on a Cape Cod beach, I took Veley’s list and really looked at it, trying to conjure pictures of these places and of the man who’s set foot in 90% of them and whose life seems to revolve around treading earth, if even for an hour or two, on all of them. I found myself wondering what will happen when Veley succeeds in visiting all the places while he’s still a youngish, healthy, adventurous man. Perhaps someone will create a new autonomous region or two for Veley to add to his list, or maybe he’ll try to become the first person to revisit 572 places.

Some of the places are, to this traveler’s mind (I’ve visited 114 of the entities, but who’s counting?), strange conquests, and the list bothers me a bit.

You’ve got your US states and Canadian provinces, your big and little countries, your places, like Tibet, that ought not to be owned by someone else but sadly are, your popular islands. You’ve also got places that make me rethink my confidence about someday applying to be a Jeopardy! contestant based largely on my knowledge of geography. Places I’m sure I’ll never plan a trip around. Lonely outcroppings jutting from oceans. (Veley must haunt freighters, tankers, ice cutters and packet boats). Places I’ve never heard of.

To successfully tick off all 572 world entities on Charles Veley’s master list, he or anybody else on this world quest must spend time in Banaba, Mellish Reef and Market Reef, the states of Pohnpei, Chuuk and Yap, Navassa, Cabinda, St. Peter & St. Paul Rocks, Moheli, Anjouan, Tripura, Udmurtia, Abkhazia, Adygeya, Sark, Svalbard, Nakhicevan, Komi and Ogasawara. After I post this, I’m going to pull out my Merriam Webster’s Geographical Atlas of the World and find every one of these buggers.

Veley’s list seems to count some places more than once, in my opinion, and other places not at all, in my opinion. I know it’s a tangled geo-political web we weave, but some of the list’s hair-splitting leaves me in knots.

Been to Australia? I’d count it once. Veley’s list gives you a potential hit for every state and region in Australia. “Australian Capital Territory” (hmmm, to me that’s the city of Canberra) is a distinct entity from Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, and every other piece of Down Under you can carve up. As it does for Australia, the list grants entity status to every US state and Canadian Province, but other countries are treated inconsistently. There’s an entity called “Mexico (North/Central)” and one called “Yucatan Peninsula (Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco).” There’s a separate listing for the Mexican states of Chiapas and Baja California, but none for Oaxaca, Zacatecas, Jalisco, Chihuahua, Sonora and other states (ah, yes...lumped into “North/Central”).

India’s treated a bit like Mexico. India as a whole is an entity, but then we’ve got separate entries for only a handful of the 35 Indian states and territories. Goa’s there, as are Mizoram and Nagaland, but there’s no Kerala, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal... Likewise South Africa. The country itself isn’t on the list, but eight of its nine provinces are. (Northern, formerly Northern Transvaal, is missing.)

Fully 192 of Veley’s places are islands. There are lots of far-flung, sparingly visited tufts of land, but some well-known spots seem to get shortchanged. Niue and Pukapuka may be individual entities, but then give me St. John and St. Thomas as two, not one. Veley’s list lumps “Virgin Islands, U.S.” into one entity. No one could mistake St. John for St. Thomas. Lumping them may make sense politically, but not geographically. And the British Virgins are lumped into “Tortola, etc.” What would Virgin Gorda have to say about that? On the other side of the pond, however, each of the Channel Islands, Herm included, gets separate billing.

While the islands of both the USVI and BVI are lumped together, the Grenadines are pulled apart. The Bahamas are a single entity, despite the fact that there are 13 major islands and additional minor ones flung over nearly 5,400 square miles. St. Maarten and St. Martin are two entities. Fly to the island, sun yourself on the Dutch side, have lunch on the French side, and check two entities off your list. (Again, that works for me politically, but not geographically. St. Martin isn’t Hispaniola. I wouldn’t come home from a St. Martin vacation and tell people I’d visited two countries.)

Gitmo is its own destination. Any soldier, or world civilian held without charges or representation for lo, these four years now, can tick off not only Cuba, but Guantanamo Bay as well. Spain is somewhat carved up, but France is not. Galicia, Catalonia and Euskaldunak (Basque Territory – my weekend jaunt from Paris to San Sebastian a few years back lets me chalk up Spain and Basque Territory as a two-for-one) are different entities, but France is France, and there are no distinctions between Bordeaux, Bretagne, Provence, Languedoc or Haute-Savoie.

To be fair, Veley, collector of countries, does acknowledge that devising a list of the world’s entities is subjective, and he invites comments and suggestions. (But you have to register and log in to mosttraveledman.com to share your thoughts, and I try to keep registering and logging in to a minimum.)

I understand most of the contemporary geopolitical considerations that guide the list, but I do wonder at some of the distinctions. Like why Cyprus, in addition to the separate Greek and Turkish parts, gives travelers a chit for visiting the “British Sovereign Base Areas”, why Greece’s Mount Athos, Dodecanese and Ionian Islands (but not the Cyclades or Sporades) count as separate from Greece, why Crete is not Greece (don’t shoot me), why Scotland’s Shetland Islands are counted as a world unto themselves, why Istanbul, which straddles Europe and Asia, counts as two places, why Panama’s San Blas Islands are a separately-rated goal from Panama itself, and why you get points for visiting the “Sovereign Military Order of Malta,” the Catholic order founded in Jerusalem about 1050, housed on Malta during the Crusades, but now headquartered in a palazzo in Rome. Is it the palazzo visit that counts, or can you just shake hands with one of the order’s 11,500 Dames and Knights, scattered in 54 countries around the world? And if you’re going to list European enclaves like Busingen, Llivia and Campione d’Italia, a piece of Italy sitting inside Switzerland on Lake Lugano, then why leave out the Netherlands’ Baarle-Hertog? And why is Germany listed twice, as Eastern and Western?

I have to stop now. I'm driving myself crazy. These questions will vex me for days. I wish I’d never found Veley’s list.

Now to my geographic encyclopedia to study up on Cocos Island, Jan Mayen, Ajaria, Rockall and the Srpska Republic.

(The picture above? Morocco. One of my 114/572. Easier to visit than many of Veley’s other list destinations. This is Ait Benhadou, in the Sahara desert near Ouarzazate. A place where stacks of twigs suddenly sprout sturdy legs, and the bush that blocked your path a moment before hoists its load up onto its back and clambers up toward the casbah. You follow.)

St. Basil's terrible beauty

Let's say you were an architect who’d just finished a major work for a very important patron – a guy with a reputation for being “terribly” picky. You’re happy with your work, it seems the guy who hired you is pleased, and this is the 16th-century, when lucrative building gigs are hard to come by because most people live in huts. So, when the big cheese walks over and says, “Hey, Postnik, think you could build something else this beautiful?” you’d probably get all puffed up and reply, “Sure, chief! What do you have in mind?”

Poor Postnik. He gave the wrong answer. When the work in question is St. Basil’s Cathedral and the boss is Ivan the Terrible, the right answer is “No, sir! There can never be anything as beautiful as this in the world.” For his hubris, self-confidence and mastery, Postnik Yakovlev (Yakoviev), was blinded, lest he ever create any structure to rival the soaring elegance of Ivan’s church just outside the Kremlin Walls in Moscow’s Red Square. (Some historians attribute St. Basil’s to two architects, Yakovlev and Barma, allegedly also blinded by Ivan the Terrible, but others believe Barma was simply one of Yakovlev’s noms de plume.)

Today, Postnik’s wild-hued towers and onion domes figure as backdrop in thousands of wedding day photos. Moscow newlyweds typically have some time between their civil ceremony at a wedding palace and their reception, so the wedding party enjoys a whirlwind city tour with stops at picturesque or historical locations for photos – and toasts. “They have a few hours to kill,” said my guide, Yelena, “and they drink champagne, break glasses. You can imagine the state they’re in when they arrive at the party.”

With St. Basil’s riotous, gleaming domes gracing the rare blue Moscow sky, Dana and I watched as pockets of wedding guests dressed to the nines turned toward their respective nuptial couples and demanded connubial kisses by shouting, “Gorka! Gorka!” meaning “bitter.” “Our vodka is bitter, and we need you to kiss to make it sweet again.”

www.LoriHein.com

Aveiro's salt mountains

We reached Aveiro on Portugal’s Silver Coast in a mild state of family disharmony. Mike, who has an obsession for clean (that he stays married to me and living in this house – there are too many things to do with life to spend it on housework – is a testament to him), had emptied the car of garbage at a rest area outside Aveiro and had pitched our autoroute toll ticket in the process. A lost ticket means you pay about $30 at the toll booth, and the collector cut us no slack. Nao, nao, nao. He seemed pleased to punish us.

The world was righted when a charming gentleman in a suit showed us to Room 205 in the Hotel Arcada, an old grande dame with comfortable, worn charm. That we’d scored a two-room suite with 12-foot ceilings and a view over Aveiro’s central canal for under a hundred bucks for four took the sting out of the $30 toll ticket blunder. We stood at our tall windows and looked across a courtyard into the second floor of the Clube Galito, the Club of the Little Rooster, where old men in gray t-shirts play cards. They played all day. And all night.

Our room also overlooked the little dock where, for about ten dollars, you can take a 2 ½-hour boat trip up the central canal, through the Aveiro locks and into Aveiro’s lagoon. There are two remarkable things about this trip: the boat and what you see when you enter the lagoon.

We rode in a traditional moliceiro, a long, narrow, brightly painted craft reminiscent of a Venetian gondola that was used by Aveiro’s fishermen to collect seaweed and eels. The skipper took a little break and invited Adam and Dana to steer the moliceiro past the huge, rusting hulks of ships at rest in the industrial docks near the village of Sao Jacinto.

In the lagoon, we looked on a rare sight. Small white mountains towered and glistened up out of the lagoon floor. They looked like snowcaps sitting on the sea. Huge, bright pyramidal cones popping from the water. These were Aveiro’s salt pans. Beds, or fields, are built in the lagoon and the sea water held within the fields is evaporated, leaving the precious white grains. Salt workers rake the granules into monumental piles that sit near rickety wooden lagoon-side docks. Salt boats come and haul the commodity away to market.

Back in Aveiro, a morning trip to the Mercado do Peixe, the fish auction where last night’s catch is quickly snapped up by city residents and restaurant owners, we examined some of the delicacies we’d try later that evening at dinner.

Fishwives stood behind marble slabs that hosted sparkling, eyeballs-still-popping seafood from the lagoon and sea around Aveiro. Inches-thick masses of live eels writhed in tubs, and occasionally one or two would slither up the tub’s side and try to escape. The marble slabs held octopus, squid, gleaming, flashing fish of all sizes and types. Red just-cut salmon steaks. Fishmongers wielding mallets and knives, pounding then slicing fresh fish flesh into various cuts, chunks and filets. The sound of pounding and slicing permeated the wrought iron structure that housed the market.

That night, we feasted on Aveiro fare at the Mercantel Restaurant, located on the second floor of an old building on one of the town’s most picturesque small canals. Locals packed the place, and we ate and ate, appreciating the magnificent freshness of our turbot and the special bite of the salt we sprinkled on our boiled potatoes. All around us, Portuguese families laughed and drank and dined, surrounded by beautiful blue tile scenes of Aveiro life – moliceiros bobbing at the dock, fishermen catching baskets of lamprey eels, and magical mountains of sea salt.

A little China, a little Russia...

Back from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thoroughly wonderful experience. I'll share more about the trip after I've developed my slides. I'll give you a hint, though: This ain't your mother's Russia! Babes, not babuschkas, and intense positive energy everywhere.

I have a million things to do before I take off for the New Hampshire woods for the weekend, so I thought I'd post a link to my story about a Beijing back alley that's running now in the July issue of Tom Schueneman's excellent online publication, The Traveler. Enjoy this walk down Wonder Alley.