We were ready to get the hell out of Siam Paragon, as usual.

The cramped ground floor food hall was heaving with tourists and locals and young students and office workers on break. The roar of Thai-language conversation, and children screaming, and tourists blathering, and lunch trays clinking was fast reaching a suffocating pitch. There was nowhere to sit in the sprawling dining area, and navigating through these cattle-like herds at anything more than a sluggish shuffle was like playing a game of Twister while walking.

Patiently dealing with crowds like the ones typically found at Bangkok’s busiest megamall, particularly on weekend afternoons, is a skill one naturally develops over time while living here, but everybody has their limits. Having sufficiently accomplished what we came to Paragon to achieve–buy a new book, look for cheese bread, eat lunch–it was time to escape the feverish madness indoors and plunge back into the buzzsaw of whistles, buses, motorbikes, and candy-colored taxis that pump up the volume of the city’s orchestra of traffic rumble. That’s just how it is in Bangkok’s central commercial districts of Siam Square and Pratunam; I wouldn’t have it any other way (most of the time).

Something in the lower level just outside the entrance of Siam Ocean World drew our attention, though, as we rode the escalator up from the first to second floor. Something… odd. Something… not quite right. Something… inappropriate. Something… hilarious. We got to the second floor and turned right around to go back downstairs and further investigate.

Oh my.

My wife and I snapped photos through incredulous tears of juvenile laughter. We took turns posing with the bear, and snickered to ourselves when others posed with the bear. It was so revolting and egregious and amazing and, in a certain way, so perfectly Bangkok.

That poor, poor bear. She must have been so embarassed with nobody there to cover her up. I mean, really: no respectable bear would be caught dead in public wearing a red hankerchief around its neck.

I am on a bridge, crossing a wide river. The bridge is very high above the water, which is deep and running strong.  I must walk across the bridge, and as I do it becomes clear to me that the bridge is swaying. There are wide gaps between the planks that make my crossing difficult. People are falling.

I’ve had some version of this dream all of my life, usually in times of anxiety. (Armchair psychologists,  fire away — a few dream interpretation websites I’ve consulted seem to suggest that the bridge in the dream symbolizes some sort of a transition, the water, emotions. And the fact that the bridge is collapsing? A clear symbol that I’m all sorts of  f*d up.)

Perhaps this dream started due to those diabolical jiggly bridges you see in playgrounds. (They’re called “buckle bridges”, by the way,  an accurate moniker and one totally in need of a happy euphemism.)  But the dreams have continued because I occasionally confront this type of bridges in my waking life travels.  They haven’t been collapsing, but they are ominously shaky in a way that makes me feel the same.

The first time I was on my nightmare dream bridge was in Honduras, near a hot springs in Copan. I hesitated a long moment before walking across; it held just fine.  I was a little more primed for danger that day — we were going to sit in agua caliente, after all — but the Arroyo Grande Swinging Bridge came at me out of nowhere during a perfectly fine visit to California that was primarily dedicated to tasting wine.

Okay, so the bridge has actually been there since 1875, so it didn’t really sneak up on anyone, least of all me.  It was built to connect two sides of certain family’s land that was divided by a creek just under 200 feet across. The family’s name? Short.

So, for some reason, these Short people decided not to build a nice normal solid bridge, but instead built it swinging.   In 1912, the city of Arroyo Grande declared in a nuisance. In 1933, a “cross at your own risk” sign was erected. Years passed.  The bridge was vandalized, then it was damaged by a tree. In 1995, it was removed and restored, where it swings to this day.

I traversed this perfectly safe bridge without incident, but not before I read a sign that still haunts my mind.  Apparently when this swaying bridge was first constructed, it did not have sides! No sides!  Nothing to hang on to, in other words. Am I making myself clear? Nothing to keep a person from plunging down 40 fatal feet into that creek past those pretty marigolds, which, I hardly need to tell you, are the traditional flower of the dead in Latin America.

Yes, the bridge has sides today. Probably the marigolds weren’t there when it didn’t. But my subconscious doesn’t care.  It’s been busily incorporating all of this into the plot of my next bridge collapse nightmare.

Sweet dreams to me.

Did you know that where you are from and where you have been can be traced through a single strand of your hair?

According to this study published in the Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry journal in 2009, a team of  Spanish and British scientists  have found a way to trace your travels by testing your hair by using a laser-ablation technique. This technique is able to detect variations in the sulphur isotopes of a single hair strand over time.

During the study, researchers collected hair samples from three volunteers, two of whom were permanent United Kingdom residents while the third had spent the previous 6 months travelling through Croatia, Austria, and Australia.

Results of testing showed that the traveller’s hair strand had considerable variations in the sulfur isotopes while hair strands from the two home-bound U.K. residents had minimal to no changes.

These interesting results could have huge relevance for governmental agencies interested in tracing the lifestyles of international criminals and terror suspects.

I doubt it’s a test that would be applied to ordinary travelers, but if one day, you’re heading through customs and feel a slight tug on your head, it might just be that you’ve suddenly be tagged for a hair test…

(image credit)

Story and photos by Edward Readicker-Henderson

Exploring the northern finger of Alaska, where mammoths roamed when the continents were one. Now changes are coming again as the musk oxen move to higher ground.

The reindeer sound like sleigh bells.

Maybe fifty of them, trotting down the middle of the road, shoulder to shoulder yet somehow keeping their antlers from tangling.

The reindeer sound like sleigh bells. The heavy jog of their muscles, the click of the tendon in their ankle that would make them the most efficient walkers on the planet, if only they had any real interest in walking, if only they weren’t, biologically, just fat, lazy caribou. Give them a thumb and a TV remote, they’d be really happy.

Which does bring up the question of why they’re running down the road to begin with. Grizzly? Probably.

I’ll never see the bear, though. The barren-ground grizzlies around here get to about twelve hundred pounds, but can turn invisible in the willows, blend into the tundra, hide in the old dredges that once searched for gold by eating entire rivers, and are now hulks slowly disappearing themselves in time.

In fact, I will never see any of the things I came here to see. Which is okay, because I knew that would be the case before I got on the plane, because what I came here to see doesn’t exist anymore.

The unaccustomed features of the situation with which we are confronted … necessitate the greatest caution as regard all questions of terminology. Speaking, as it is often done of disturbing a phenomenon by observation, or even of creating physical attributes to objects by measuring processes is liable to be confusing, since all such sentences imply a departure from conventions of basic language which even though it can be practical for the sake of brevity, can never be unambiguous. (Niels Bohr)

Reindeer are not what I’ve come here to see at all, because I’ve seen them here before. Once, one night, I left the hotel here in the bright sunlight about eleven p.m. to go for a walk. Got out onto the street, turned around, went back into the hotel. “Um, is the reindeer in the back of the truck a normal thing?”

“That’s Velvet,” the clerk said.

I had already fallen in love with Nome, jutting out from the coast of Alaska like a finger pointing to the North Pole: the way the people talking about “ounces” in the restaurants meant gold, not drugs, the way the Bering Sea rolled against the seawall, slapping against shivering men still trying to turn the beach into riches, as if not a moment had passed since the 1901 gold rush. I loved the fact that the grocery store sold ATVs next to the meat counter, as if offering you a choice between a real world and a world wrapped in Styrofoam. I loved walking past the sign that said this is where the Iditarod ends every year: after mushers have taken teams of sled dogs over a thousand miles, they end up in a town where the most popular restaurant is simply called “Airport Pizza.”

And now this, a reindeer standing in the bed of a pickup truck, happily munching on a bale of hay.

“Velvet.”

“Velvet.”

“And will Velvet object if I take her picture?”

“Velvet will be fine with it, but don’t get near the dog in the front of the truck. He thinks it’s his job to protect her.”

Today, Stinger, the dog in our own un-reindeered truck, sleeps. He knows we’re not going to let him chase these sleigh bell impersonating reindeer. Nor are we going to let him protect the reindeer, should that thought cross his doggie mind. And it’s not like he hasn’t been having some fun. We’ve stopped a bunch of times to let him bark at the few salmon, still running through the pan-shallow streams, looking like props from a zombie movie. Plus, his tennis ball, stuffed into the glove compartment to keep him from obsessing, is stained and drenched with blueberry juice. A half hour or so outside Nome, we’d stopped, standing on blueberries, running on blueberries, pausing between throws to eat blueberries that grew on plants the size of origami prayers and that tasted like a sun that refuses to set.

The ball splashed blueberry when it struck the ground.

On an 1850s chart, the mapmaker, eyes weary from a shadeless midnight, labeled this blueberried finger of land “? Name,” as if language were not quite enough to contain this place.

But what all this area is, really, is a region of off-ramps for a lost world. The Teller off-ramp, where we’re headed, just south of the Arctic Circle. And the Nome—”? Name” turned into a typo confusion of map and territory—off-ramp, 72 miles south of Teller, and where, this time, I can find no trace of Velvet, and where, because there is a political freak show in town, I feel like I have to flip off every single door in the hotel, just to make sure I get her room covered.

Continue to Page 2 of Nome, Alaska

By Tim Leffel

Exploring abandoned structures built by men with big dreams—and the money to fulfill them—is a common pursuit in Mexico. Some of those dreams, however, blur the line between the real and the surreal.

As soon as I step out of the car and look up, it’s as if I’ve gone through the rabbit hole and ended up in Wonderland, only this bizarre place was created not on paper, but for real in the jungle. By one man and 40 laborers, over the course of 25 years. Concrete structures rise several stories, circled by stairs that suddenly stop. Huge support columns rise from the ground and tower above the trees, but don’t support a roof above—and never have. Around every bend is another surprise that makes no sense, simply a man’s dream images brought to life.

It hasn’t happened often, but occasionally I’ll see photos of a place and think, “Holy crap, I’ve got to go there.” Once that switch is flipped, it’s just a matter of when. It’s usually the bizarre, off-kilter places that look like they’ve come from another planet, or another dimension: Cappadocia, Jaisalmer, Tikal, Kasha-Katuwe, Petra, Howard Finster’s house. When I first saw photos in a magazine spread of surreal Las Pozas, in a remote area of Mexico near a town called Xilitla, the vow was made. Then I read about the place in Tony Cohan’s book Mexican Days. After I moved to Guanajuato for a year, I attended a party where the host had framed photos of several Las Pozas structures in his library. If signs come in threes, my time had come.

From Mind’s Eye to Marvel

Before that grand journey though, there are other opportunities to ponder what happens when big dreams meet with ample funds. Mexico is full of fantastic structures that required an army of workers toiling for years, then were left abandoned. Some, like Teotihuacán and Chichen Iztá, are restored to part of their former glory and are big tourism draws. Others have become mere mounds of rock covered by centuries of dirt, still hidden away in the overgrowth. Man can build great things, but the plants often take it all back when we leave.

Just before I visit the coastal vacation town of Zihuatanejo, a brief mention in my guidebook catches my eye. Sitting on a hillside there is another brash structure built by someone with big dreams and nobody to strike them down. “The Parthenon” stands abandoned on a hillside, on a prime piece of real estate with a panoramic view of the bay. Nothing was done halfway in this nouveau-riche homage to ancient Greece. There is a grand swimming pool and an outdoor disco, both surrounded by replica statues. Inside are stately marble columns, marble floors, and custom murals. The grand entrance gate is a replica of the one at Chapultapec Castle in Mexico City.

Arturo Durazo Moreno, the dreamer behind The Parthenon in Zihuatanejo, got his wealth up in a hurry through a manner powerful people usually get it in a hurry: through corruption. Much of the wealth came from the pockets of his direct reports in the Mexico City Police Department when he was their police chief from 1976 to 1982. His men in turn got it from their direct reports, on down the line to the hapless souls paying bribes and on-the-spot traffic tickets. He also got kickbacks from the very drug traffickers and crime syndicates his department was supposed to be arresting.

He spent lavishly on his friends though, flying them here and to his other mansions in police helicopters and throwing parties for hundreds. When he was arrested in 1984, his wealth was conservatively estimated at $12.5 million, even though his official salary was around $1,000 a month.

The pleasure palace is now surrounded by weeds, empty of furniture and the former gold fixtures in the bathrooms. Although the paintings are faded and the gilded mirrors cracked, it’s still easy to picture the mansion as it was before the chief met his fate and went to jail. As I walk the grounds alone, lizards the only signs of life, I imagine a Mexicanized night of Grecian debauchery, the pool filled with bathing beauties, both champagne and tequila flowing, and the disco lighting up the hillside until dawn. Power brokers, all in on the game, enjoying the fruits of their corruption in a luxurious bedroom on the second floor.

Surreal Dreams, Manifested

Finally though, a few months later, I am zig-zagging my way through the Sierra Gorda mountains in the Queretaro state, skirting steep ravines with an uncomfortably high number of roadside graves for lost loved ones. My wife and daughter have come along for the adventure and the little one is not helping. “Daddy, if you make one mistake on this road, we’re all dead! Just look over there; you would go straight down!”

Besides the inconsistent appearance of guardrails, there’s the inherent problem that it’s hard to constantly keep your eyes on the road when there is such stunning scenery in every direction. For the most part this biosphere is amply protected, with few signs of deforestation. The climate changes dramatically along the way, starting out with an assortment of cacti on brown hills, then rocky cliffs and pine trees. By the time we reach Xilitla, after a reported 1,000+ curves, it’s a full-blown tropical jungle, the humidity hanging on our bodies like a warm wet blanket.

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