The Disappointed Tourist tries to create a level playing field in which personal losses and larger cultural losses can meet and be recognized and create a new conversation about our love for our physical environment, harnessing nostalgia to create empathy rather than division.
Pia De Girolamo shares a travelogue recounting observations and art from her trip to Vietnam.
“I sit on the wall and watch a fisherman wrangle his net; the sea is dark and a little choppy, and I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.”
I was in the partial state of not knowing if I was awake or still dreaming; it had been another fitful uncomfortable night, mostly involving a donkey braying and the snores and […]
“The wind that comes off the Sahara towards the Atlantic is called Harmattan. The breezes over Senegal and Mauritania mingle with the warm waters near Cape Verde and occasionally become one of those end-of-summer storms that plod their way up the Mid-Atlantic states, dropping enormous amounts of rain and causing damage.”
There is a second sort of bamboo growing here, with beautiful varied dark green stripes on a yellow background. My friend tells me that in Vietnam this is special and a spirit might live in such bamboo. There is a large stand of such striped bamboo nearby. I’ve seen no spirits but there are weaver birds occupying the grove, much activity from the birds building their nests. The ground around the stand is littered with failed nest attempts.
The idea, a loose brief, of following the Nile to Aswan, close to where the river enters Egypt from Sudan, I would talk to farmers and fishermen and those whose livelihood depends on the seemingly eternal flow of the longest river in Africa. I wanted to learn of the potential risks posed by climate change on rural Egypt. I also wanted a photo or two, and, an anecdote would be good.
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.'” – Douglas Adams
Everywhere the surface was changing, crumbling to dust, washing away … Gradients of color, broken edges quickly softened. Never straight lines, only gravity pulling water on paths of least resistance.
In the course of my travels I have had many unforgettable conversations, many from dusk to till dawn, entire train and plane rides, fascinating people with incredible stories or theories on the point of our existence, and yet, more often than not, it’s the conversations in silence I remember most fondly.
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