The Trip Roads & Kingdoms

This episode, we’re not talking about how the gifted journalist and traveler Kim Wall died, we’re talking about how she lived. And we’re doing it by talking with journalists Caterina Clerici, Christina Ayele Djossa, and Ingrid Wall—who is also Kim’s mother and author of A Silenced Voice of a new book about her life and work.

Show notes:
A Silenced Voice: The Life of Journalist Kim Wall 
Christina Ayele Djossa on Twitter
Caterina Clerici homepage
Kim Wall and Caterina Clerici on Haitian Tourism for Roads & Kingdoms
Kim Wall Memorial Fund at IWMF 
Kim Wall Memorial Fund: Donate
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the pandemic grinds on, I find myself unseasonably emotional about newborns and weddings, like some kind of weepy grandpa. Any good thing to latch on to in these twilight year, I guess. I feel that way about my old friend’s new album. Como Vivir en el Campo is a Madrid-based rock trio, and their drummer is Carlos Barros, who has been both friend and family to me over the years. Carlos has introduced me to many things, not least the nearly inexhaustible pleasures of Julio Iglesias’ album Hey. He talked to me from a village in Aragón, Spain about the process of making the album, and about how they were aided by the great global collective subconscious. You’ll see. Also in this episode, a conversation with American artist Aaron Firestein in Bogotá about what the US can learn from Colombia. And I’ll have a bit of good news about The Trip podcast, this very podcast, at the end of the episode.

Show notes:
Como Vivir en el Campo Bandcamp
Aaron Firestein IG
Where to Invade Next by Michael Moore
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A bit of tape and a brief message on Bourdain Day 2020
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know I don’t often cop to it, but this is a travel podcast, and this week, we’re going to travel. Far, far away, to Bali, Indonesia. And we’ll do it through the perspectives of a traveler (Travis Levius), an eater (Duwi Satrio), and a legendary pastry chef (Will Goldfarb). Along the way, of course, we’ll talk a bit about race and migration and surviving cancer, because life isn’t all suckling pig and ginger flower daluman, even in Bali. Let’s start with Travis Levius, a luxury travel writer who has covered Bali for Conde Nast Traveler and other publications. 

Show notes:
Travis Levius homepage
Room 4 Dessert Bali
Duwi Satrio IG
Perfect Dish: Jakarta with Anthony Bourdain, Jennifer Neal and Duwi Satrio

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michelle Borok is one of something like 9 million Americans who live overseas—nobody’s quite sure how many there are, nobody cares much about counting them. But one thing is certain: they are a more diverse group than you might think. This week, I’m talking with three American women, writers all—Michelle Borok, Sarah Souli, and Ruth Terry—about what it’s like to be Korean-American in Mongolia, Arab-American in Athens, and Black American in Istanbul, watching all this nonsense from afar. I’ll start with Ruth Terry in Istanbul, who talks about anti-blackness among white Americans overseas and about her dreams for what travel writing could become in a post-lockdown world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The writer and comedian Jennifer Neal used to have a deeply smart travel column for The Root called Blaxit, with one very simple premise: things are just too twisted for Black Americans, so they might, like she had, be feeling the urge to go live in some other, freer country. But where? What is it like being black in different parts of Asia, Europe, elsewhere? Jennifer’s column was a way to find out. I recorded with Jennifer in Berlin for a pre-COVID episode of this show that I hope we can play soon enough, but this week she connected me with someone she had written about in her Blaxit column: Reggie Robinson, a African-American native of Dallas who is a middle-school history and English teacher and a longtime resident of Korea and now Taiwan. I had originally wanted to do an episode about Americans abroad generally, but that will wait. For now, as the police are rioting through my city and our nation, and as our miserable president says all the quiet, dirty parts of America’s social contract out loud, I’m glad to be able to spend the entirety of this episode with Reggie and his unusual vantage point from the other side of the world.

Show notes:
Blaxit: Seoul Edition by Jennifer Neal
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices