The toucan lifts its lobster-claw bill into the sky over and over, releasing its whooping, loonish phrase like a persistent question. It wears a penguin’s tuxedo plumage, yet with flair—a yellow band at the base of the bill, bright blue just around the eye, a flash of red beneath the black tail feathers. It sits alone and throws its two-note song into the sky. For over ... [Continue Reading]
Backpackers in Paradise
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Our minibus is whisking us around flash cards of local color. The Waterfall. The Woman Walking on the Dusty Roadside. The Sulking Men on Motorbikes. The Village Store called “Christo!” The Kids Climbing a Lime Tree. The Fishermen At Ocean’s Edge. The Naked Toddler Jumping Into a Rock Pool. Then, when a massive metal seahorse rears up on the side of the road, the ... [Continue Reading]
A Road Runs Through It
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I strain to see stars through the tropical haze and the pollution of the city. Moto taxis rattle over the nearby road, and Latin pop music laced with Incan pan pipes plays tinnily from a nearby stereo—at least whenever the welding noises in the garage behind me cease. I’m lying in the back of a dump-truck sized truck, on top of a stack of thick lumber. Simon has gone ... [Continue Reading]
Who Made this Grave
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One day, in late October, my son and I left his Mexican preschool and wandered up the Calzada toward Morelia’s pink stone aqueduct. He was collecting sticks snarled with epiphytes and I was walking backwards so I could watch him—his red plaid uniform, his white-blonde hair—and yet lure him homeward. Behind him, I could see, through the ficus that lined the old ... [Continue Reading]
Touring the Revolution
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The green hills from which the Zapatistas descended to take San Cristóbal nearly twenty years earlier looked wet and blurred outside the windows in the rain. After the parched Oaxacan isthmus and clammy, tropical Tuxtla Guitierrez, San Cristóbal’s mountain air felt liberating, like emerging from a fever into quiet clarity. We rolled down the windows and watched the ... [Continue Reading]