Travel | Frank Bures

Archive for the Travel Category

On the Power of Money

Posted in Africa, Clips, Travel on April 12, 2013 by frankbures

“America,” said the exercise in our grammar book, “is the (rich) country in the world.” It was a lesson about the superlative, and the answer was, of course, “richest.” I was teaching English in Tanzania, and it was strange to read such things about my home.

“You are a rich man,” one of my students was fond of telling me, exasperated because I wouldn’t give him the books, pens, pencils, and notebooks he asked for. “But you are a rich man. America is a rich country.” He seemed to take a certain relish in using the word as he rolled the r, drew out the i, and let the ch trail off. “Reech …”

This bothered me. It felt like an accusation. It made me resent something that was larger than myself, something that I had nothing to do with – something that wasn’t my fault.

Why did I get so angry? I spent a lot of time agonizing over that question. It seemed to come from the guilt that many of us feel when we cross a border into a poorer country. After a lifetime of being average, we find ourselves bizarrely privileged. Suddenly we become one of the global elite.

This affects our relationships with the people we meet…

Read the rest here.

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The Fallout: Weapons of Mass Attraction

Posted in America, Clips, Travel on March 21, 2013 by frankbures

From The Washington Post Magazine:

In the early 1980s, when I was a fifth-grader at Jefferson Elementary School, in a small town in Minnesota, our teacher, Mr. Odegaard, asked us if we wanted to see something. We did. So he took us down a little-used stairway, through a door and into a tunnel beneath our school. He flicked on the lights. The sound of our shuffling feet echoed down a long, dark corridor.

“The walls down here are solid concrete,” I remember him telling us, “and you need three feet to stop gamma rays. When the Russians launch their missiles, this is where I’m coming!”

Mr. Odegaard was an unusual teacher and one of my favorites. He felt that we should know about the real world, in addition to multiplication and division, geography and grammar. He also explained — in great detail — the finer points of the nuclear winter.

“Beta rays,” he told us, “those are dangerous, but they can’t go very far. Gamma rays. Those are the ones you have to worry about. Gamma rays can go right through anything.”

I don’t remember how far he said gamma rays could go, but I do remember that it seemed impossibly far. There was no escape. Gamma rays would go everywhere and pollute everything until the end of time. I also remember how it all felt so close at hand, how it only would take a few foolish minutes for the last war to begin.

Another day around that same time, I was sitting outside with my best friend Jon discussing this when he told me that after the missiles were launched, his dad was going to drive them to ground zero, because he didn’t want them to die slow, painful deaths. I had no idea what my family’s plans were.

Such were the dilemmas of the Cold War, which seems so strange and distant now…

Read the rest here.

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The Sky Is Burning: Caught in the Pagami Creek Fire

Posted in America, Clips, Travel on March 7, 2013 by frankbures

From Outside:

The wind started to pick up, gusting. There seemed to be more smoke lingering around them. Far off, there was a strange cracking noise that sounded like branches breaking. Greg took a photo of the clouds to the west, and when he took a look on the camera, there were streaks of orange shot through.

Julie started getting uneasy, so Greg agreed to paddle out and have a look to west to see if he could see if the smoke from the Pagami Creek Fire looked any closer. He walked down to his kayak and paddled out into a little river just to the north of the lake. As soon as he rounded a bend, he saw it: The entire horizon, all the way across, was on fire. The flames were horizontal, blowing straight at them.

Read the rest here.

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The Bridge of the Horns

Posted in Africa, Clips, Travel, Video on January 10, 2013 by frankbures

Here’s a slick, bizarre, unintentionally hilarious video promoting the Bridge of The Horns that I wrote about in Nowhere Magazine last year. Is the distance between rhetoric and reality greater than the distance between Djibouti and Yemen? Who knows? Maybe someday “the dream of seeing the future of mankind bathed in light,” will come true after all.

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The Year in Words (or 2012 Recap)

Posted in Africa, America, Art, Arts in Africa, Books, Clips, Culture, Science, Travel on January 9, 2013 by frankbures

It can be hard, as a writer, to watch your stories slip into the past, particularly the ones you love because there is a piece of you in them. So if I can steal a page from Teju Cole, in a vain attempt to rescue a few from the flow, here are the ones with the most sweat and blood on them, the ones I will miss most from last year:

1) The Crossing (Nowhere Magazine, Djibouti, 5,494 words)
This story is about a tiny, desolate county where humanity took its first steps out into the world, about my traveling to that place, about Bruce Chatwin, about restless genes and ultimately about what pushes us beyond the horizon.

2) The Reunion: After teaching there nearly 15 years ago, a man learns new lessons about change. (Washington Post Magazine, Tanzania, 2,954 words)
A sort of bookend to a piece I did years ago called Test Day, about teaching English in Tanzania. For this story, I went back to Tanzania and caught up with my students to see where life had taken them. I was as surprised as anyone to find out.

3) Inner Space: Clearing Some Room for Inspiration (Poets & Writers Magazine, Portland/Cyberspace, 3,167 words)
This was a story about my own struggle to find a quiet place to let new thoughts be born, and about the nature of creativity.

4) Fall of the Creative Class (Thirty Two Magazine, Madison/Minneapolis, 3,743 Words)
This story caused the biggest waves of any story I’ve ever done, taking aim as it did at Richard Florida’s so-called Creative Class Theory. It even evoked a defensive response from Florida, which I addressed here and here.

5) Time Travel (The Rotarian, Kenya/Tanzania, 1,074 words)
An essay about something that has vexed me all my life: The feeling of time as it unfolds before us, and how the so-called “timescape” differs from place to place and affects us all.

6) A Very Particular Place: Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (The New Republic, Nigeria, 1,109 words)
A look at Noo Saro-Wiwa’s book about Nigeria, and about the aspirations of the diaspora.

7) Notes on the Affairs of Man (World Ark, Kenya, 1,282 words)
A short piece on my struggle to understand how to deal with the many things beyond our control.

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Why Being Bicultural is Better

Posted in Clips, Culture, Science, Travel on December 14, 2012 by frankbures

Years ago, I was eating at McDonald’s in the Florence, Italy train station when I spotted three tall men in American football jerseys. I was glad to see some compatriots, so I went over and struck up a conversation. It turned out that the Americans were playing for a league that was trying to spread the sport in Europe, apparently without much success. We chatted for a while, and one of them mentioned that his contract was almost up.

“Man, I can’t wait to get out of here,” he said, “and get back to the real world.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I’d also experienced the feeling that in this new country, nothing made sense, no rules were obeyed, and the basic logic of the universe didn’t apply. But then I’d started speaking the language, understanding the logic, and moving into a space where the Italian world felt more real to me than the American one I’d left behind.

I recalled the football player’s remark recently, when I heard about some new research. It seems that living abroad is not simply a matter of relocation. It’s a matter of mindset. And what you get out of it depends more on what goes on in your head than on your dates of arrival and departure.

Read the rest here.

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Dispatch from Djibouti

Posted in Africa, Clips, Science, Travel on December 11, 2012 by frankbures

From my story about Djibouti, a bridge, and why we wander in the new Nowhere Magazine:

Standing on the edge of the Red Sea 60,000 years ago, the first people looked across the water, saw mountains rising above the horizon, and decided to go there. No one knows how they crossed the water, but they did. Somehow, this small band of a few as 150 individuals made their way from Africa to Arabia—from what is now the tiny country of the Djibouti on one side, to the troubled nation of Yemen on the other. After that, they kept going. They followed the shorelines. They went inland. They scaled mountains and crossed plains. They spread out into the world until they filled every corner of it.

They, of course, were us.

Bab al Mandeb is thought to be the place they crossed. It is the “Gate of Tears,” where the Red Sea narrows and the powerful ocean currents have sunk countless ships over the ages. But back when those first people crossed the oceans would have been lower, so instead of seventeen miles of water there would have been just seven, with islands along the way. Today the islands are submerged and the ends of the straight reach out to each other like some continental version of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Man” on the Sistine Chapel.

When I first read about this, I looked up the place on a map. The language those people spoke, they clothes they wore, the thoughts they had—those are all gone forever. But the place is still there, and I knew I wanted to go there someday. I wanted to stand where it all began…

Read the rest here.

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Remembering Blue Marble

Posted in Clips, Science, Travel on December 7, 2012 by frankbures

Forty years ago today, on Dec. 7, 1972, three young men were on their way to the moon, racing away from the Earth at 25,000 miles per hour. Some ways out (about 28,000 miles), their ship passed a narrow tunnel of light, directly between the Earth and the sun. In that moment, they looked out the window and saw the Earth as almost no one had ever seen it: a giant, full, beautiful circle. The sands of the Sahara were in full sunlight. The snows of Antarctica shone bright white. The ocean resonated a deep blue hue.

At that point, one member of the Apollo 17 crew picked up a specially made Hasselblad camera and took several photos. No one knows who did this, because all three astronauts recalled taking the photo. Whomever did, it was a stunning, rare shot. You could see nearly all of Africa – the cradle of humanity – as well as the island of Madagascar, the Arabian peninsula and the clouds swirling over the ocean.

The photo would eventually become known as the “Blue Marble,” and it would become one of the most enduring pictures of all time. In fact, that photo probably changed the way we viewed our place in the cosmos more than any other.

Read the rest here.

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On Time Travel, Temporal Diversity and How the Timescape Changes Us

Posted in Africa, Clips, Science, Travel on September 10, 2012 by frankbures

One recent morning in Nairobi, Kenya, I was sitting in the ninth-floor lobby of a downtown office building, waiting for the Tanzanian High Commission to issue me a visa. Several Kenyans were also waiting. But the office was as empty as a ghost town.

One man, holding a handful of passports for his clients, chuckled. “They are just taking their tea,” he said. “Tanzanians love their tea!” Another man looked at his watch and shook his head in disgust. Finally, a woman sauntered down the hallway and sat at a desk. After a few minutes, she looked up, took our passports, and told us to come back at 3:30.

In the elevator on the way down, the Kenyans were fuming. “It’s unbelievable,” one of them said. “Those people are so lazy.”

It might have been unbelievable to them, but it wasn’t to me. I had once lived in Tanzania, and one of the most difficult and disorienting things about it was adjusting to Tanzanian notions of time. There, time seemed to expand around events rather than contract to constrain them. Transitions were gentler. The flow was more measured. Things happened in a way that suggested time was not finite, but something of which there was plenty, if you knew the proper way to wait.