Stepping out of the tower next to the Colombian Stock Exchange in northern Bogota, I walked in search of a bank down a clean-swept sidewalk seamlessly covered in mid-morning shade by a few of the columns of earth-tone brick buildings that so define the city’s skyline. I had been increasingly in need of an ATM that …
Category: Off the Beaten Track
Looking to get ahead of the tourism boom? It’s all here
Myanmar (Burma): Muslims, Jews and Nazi “fashion”
Every once in a while I decide to expand on some of the more telling anecdotes born out of my travels. This happens to be one of those times. --- The Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue sits on a lively corner in downtown Yangon that opens up onto an alley where merchants tinker with a miscellany of metals …
Continue reading Myanmar (Burma): Muslims, Jews and Nazi “fashion”
Myanmar’s détente makes travel easier
Poorly pasted together and full of pixelated photographs, my Myanmar Lonely Planet has been following me forlornly ever since I picked it up some four years ago from a child book hawker in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Besides my China LP (covered in brown paper to hide its entry from Chinese customs), it stood alone on …
Who are the waitresses at Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai?
Recently I've been fixated with totalitarian regimes, and it's beginning to show in my work. Today I published a piece titled "The odd reality behind Shanghai's Pyongyang restaurants" for CNNGo in which I discovered that waitresses of the three North Korean-government run Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai have no clue of each others' existence. Like the …
Continue reading Who are the waitresses at Pyongyang restaurants in Shanghai?
Jakarta’s Eco-village, Pulau Macan
It's a balmy afternoon on a sun-drenched island in the world's largest archipelago, Indonesia. And as island life goes here, things are quiet. The only sounds that interrupt the peaceful swash of the turquoise tide are the crinkling of palm fronds in the wind and the occasional over-sized lizard tap dancing in the brush. At …
Justin Calderón 