Author: jamesvachowski@gmail.com

It’s impossible to appreciate just how vast the Roman empire was— at least, not until you’ve traveled to its furthest reaches.  I’ve been to Rome a couple times, and it’s an absolutely amazing place.  The city is layered in history, with ancient ruins on literally every corner, and a person can’t help but be overwhelmed.  But then, it always sparked a completely different kind of wonder whenever I stumbled across ancient Roman ruins in some distant parts of England, Africa, or Asia. At the height of its power, the Roman Empire really did stretch this far, spanning the width and the breadth of the Mediterranean Sea, from Constantinople to Carthage.  But the thing is, it’s not as if the Romans just magically built all of their legendary cities from scratch. …

As countries go, New Zealand definitely punches above its weight class.  Like, no matter how often mapmakers might snub the place, treating a sovereign nation of more than five million inhabitants as if it was nothing more than a forgotten annex of Australia, the 'Land of the Long White Cloud' seems to be a perennial favorite on travelers’ bucket lists.   And why shouldn’t it be?  There’s literally tens of interesting places to visit throughout the country, from a defunct movie set to the corpse of a really, really big cephalopod. But for travelers of a certain age— specifically toddlers, kindergartners, and first grade students—  the absolute crown jewel among all these attractions seems to be a deer farm in the middle of nowhere. As with all of New Zealand’s…

And then this one time, the traveling circus that pays my bills had deposited me in Helsinki, Finland.  That trip was an odd one— from the very start, things just didn’t add up.  The itinerary called for a five-day stay, but for some reason there were only four days worth of work on the books.  With the math in my favor for once, I made a quick decision to exploit this rare and unexpected day off.  Without even taking time to unpack, I rose early on that first day, grabbed a quick breakfast of reindeer sausage, and ventured off to explore. We’d pitched our tents out in the boondoocks, alongside a massive and picturesque lake, so the only way to reach the central business district was by using these electric…

When it comes to non-fiction, I’m a sucker for travelogues.  There’s something oddly satisfying about sitting down in a comfortable chair and paging through an account about some poor sap struggling to ask directions in a foreign language, or even to check their luggage through airport security.  I particularly enjoy the suffering inherent in a good adventure story— the more perilous, the better— which is why I absolutely devoured “Into Thin Air”, John Krakauer’s memoir of an ill-fated Mount Everest expedition in 1996. In this classic tale of true adventure, Krakauer, a writer for Outside magazine, recounts his assignment to document the rapid growth of commercial guiding companies on Mount Everest’s dangerous slopes.  After a relatively smooth start, Krakauer’s team encountered a series of obstacles, including poor communication, equipment failures,…

There I was, stuck in Beijing during yet another wave of the COVID-19 Novel Coronavirus, when I felt an irresistible urge to break quarantine.  For some strange reason it seemed like most of the tourist sites had been kept open this time around, as opposed to just a few short months before when they’d been sealed off completely.  My mind made up, I turned off the Tiger King episodes I’d been binging and prepared to break free from the locked-down Traveling Circus.  One quick glance at my Middle Kingdom Bucket List showed there was still one more tourist attraction I had yet to explore, and this one was a doozy.   It was the Holy Grail of Communist Propaganda Museums. It was the White Whale of Revisionist Historical Sites. It was…