with Cara Lopez Lee, author of They Only Eat Their Husbands, a memoir of adventure in Alaska & around the world
I’m heading to Guangdong, China next week for book research. I’ll be spending a lot of time with a family in Taishan, learning their village customs. You can read the full story upon my return. In the meantime, here comes a 3-part story on my 3-day trek among rarely-visited hill tribes in northern Thailand…
“Take no liberties with game animals.” We giggle when we read the sign at the entrance to Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park.
On arrival at the tiny airport in Balice, Poland, I was greeted immediately by a pleasant but rather bold taxi driver who began carting off my luggage, smiling widely and muttering something about 25 zloty. My suitcases were locked in his trunk before I could protest, and his price sounded dirt cheap. So I hopped in, and he took off, riding the center white line through winding, dark, empty back streets, all the while talking in a rapid, hard-to-follow Polish/German/English clip. Every so often he’d turn around and gesture to emphasize a point, and I’d envision us running off the road into a ditch. But, fifteen minutes later, I was still in one piece when he parked the taxi in the middle of the street, about a block from the Hotel Saski.
