T H I S+W E E K

Mondo Weirdo:
The strangest food in the world
By Don George, Editor

Praise the Titanic!
By Doug Cruickshank
Eighty-five years later, they're still going down with the ship

Above the volcano
By Robert Riddell
Blowing off steam at Mexico's newest volcano
-Books on Mexico
-Getting there

D E P A R T M E N T S

The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
It's a cocktail! It's a fruit drink! It's -- Supermartini!

Postmark: Alvescot
By Amanda Castleman
Down and out at Watermill Cottage
-Getting there

Passages:
"Into Thin Air"
Inside the Everest disaster
By Jon Krakauer

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Drinking and travel

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LA S T+W E E K

Tuesday, May 20

If it's Tuesday,
I must be tipsy
By Jan Morris
Jan Morris drinks her way across Europe

A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

ian perlman | Drinking and travel
05:33pm May 20, 1997 PST (#4 of 5)

Deep dark night. Ponape, an island in the middle of the Pacific. A hamlet on an obscure point on the coast, so remote it has no name.

I am sitting in an outdoor space fenced off by a wall of stones and rubble, shin height. Me and six or seven drinkers, men and women. A woman in the 'kitchen' is preparing sakau, a liquor wrung from the roots of the pepper plant. A man serves the drinks in cups and coconut shells, shuffling back and forth between the woman at the 'bar' (a rude board covered in coconut slop) and we, the drinkers. Strung above our heads are a few lengths of flickering fairy lights, probably the leftover decorations from some long-forgotten Christmas tree. No one talks. Not a word. Many stars.

Someone has brought along a beaten up cassette player, and we are listening to the saddest songs on earth, the drinking songs of the islands. The power surges and fails, and the songs speed and stretch accordingly.

The drink is bitter, so rough that I have to spit out root fibres in between sips. But it's good. It is good to suffer.

I have come to this place to investigate if this is the lost source of Sake. Or even of Japanese drinking culture, which is formidable. (I have already convinced myself that I have found the echoes of other Japanese customs in these islands: language, roof thatching terms, sumo, emperor worship.)

Sakau may or may not have a metaphysical connection with sake, but tonight, in a peppery drunken haze, I have stumbled across the source of Enka, the achingly sad melodies that Japanese love to hear as they contemplate their own deaths in a drink.

deb fellner | A Place in the Sun
05:38pm May 21, 1997 PST (#2 of 2)

Never have I felt so close to beach bliss than at Sharm-al-Sheik in the Sinai Penninsula. I was staying at a youth hostel on the beach, I forget the name. Something like Happy Hostel. It was mid-May... a supremely swealtering month in the Sinai. Near sunset, the beach horizon was glowing with bright, warm, orange sunrays. I camped out on a beach chair and watched the sun set. The fading light crowned the desert mountains along the water's edge. Dry, hot and featureless. I was alone on the beach. I laughed to myself "I'm in BFE!" And it was true.

Barry G. Berkowitz | What is it about Paris?
12:53pm May 21, 1997 PST (#7 of 7)

What I loved most about Paris was its full frontal assault on my senses in the new light of its early mornings.

The crispness of the air. The bicycle cavalry with armloads of sunflowers, their missions successful, riding back home for breakfast.

Breezes so thick with the smell of coffee and croissant that lightning strikes of longing electrified my palate.

Beautiful, beautiful women. Their sweet, freshly perfumed invitations carried to me from empty doorways, fleetingly passed through.

The shimmeriness of the Seine before me with the sound of steel chairs behind, being mustered for their daily cafe duty.

God, I miss Paris.

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