Coincidentally, I just returned from a similar short trip to the Basque country to visit my aunt in Bakio, a little seashore town outside of Bilbao.  She spends half the year there and I’ve been going there, on and off, my whole life (so far, as they add in Maine.)

For me, it was a trip back in time to visit people I hadn’t seen in years and, of course, a chance to eat crazy great food.  That little corner of the world has always seemed to me to have the best food anywhere and growing up it was always confusing to me that my friends in Bakio seemed to eat, to live, so much better than the rest of us.

What’s really startling, though, about the article, to me, is that the bar I grew up visiting, Itxas-Ondo, is so prominently described in Wildman’s article.  This is a little neighborhood bar, one of dozens in the town of Bakio alone.  It’s in a garage in the basement of the building where my aunt has an apartment, and where my parents used to own an apartment.  It’s her local and she can reliably be found there with her friends every night, during the summer season, from eight to ten or later at night.

I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out in Ixtas-Ondo and we have lots of family stories set there.  It’s really jarring to see it in the New York Times, especially since I just happened to return from there after an absence of seven years.  But I can highly recommend the pintxos and txakoli, especially the salty fish and pepper sandwiches up there next to the napkin holder by the old lady.  Those are especially good.

More on this later.

(Actually, I sorted that for you by cost, from lowest to highest.)

Notice how there are three geographical bands evident:

• East Asia (Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and, anomalously, Vietnam) with the lowest fares, averaging $627 return from Los Angeles.
• Southeast Asia (Thailand, Phillipines, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia) average $781 from Los Angeles, with Phuket as an outlier.
• South Asia (India and Bangladesh) average $1035, plus Balikpapan in Indonesia which is new to me.

Within the bands, South Asia has the highest range from low to high; more than $300.  East and Southeast Asia are $100 and less.

But then I said to myself, “Self, what about the distance travelled to these places?”  So here’s a chart for you, based on Great Circle data, of the distance from LAX to each of those destinations, sorted from farthest to nearest:

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This isn’t exactly what I was expecting; the East Asian band is clear enough at the bottom, but somehow in terms of great circle distances, South and Southeast Asia aren’t so clearly distinguished.  Bombay and Bangkok are both farther from Los Angeles than Delhi, which is closer than Dhaka.  Now, you can argue that this is not exactly correct because there aren’t today flights from LAX that go beyond Hong Kong and Singapore; maybe Bangkok now?  So that to get to Delhi or elsewhere in South Asia you’re going to need to transfer (typically in Singapore or Tokyo if you’re going west; it’s about equidistant going in the other direction via Dubai or London) and that’s going to add to the duration.  And you, my pedantic reader, would be right.  Bless you.  Here’s a map of the routes, from The Great Circle Mapper:

Then — we’re in the home stretch, dear reader! — I put the two, price and distance, together to give us a cost per mile comparison which looks again very different:

These cost per mile bands reveal that although Narita is the cheapest in nominal terms from LAX, it’s actually only middling in cost per mile terms.  Ho Chi Minh City is hands-down the cheapest per mile and Dhaka is off the chart on the other end, almost double Saigon.  (Within the bands I’ve sorted by distance, longest to shortest.) India’s cost per mile varies widely, from ten to thirteen cents per mile.

Travel arbs, start your jet engines!

To me, the ideal travel duffel bag size is approximately 65 – 70 L.  My 100 L BD Huey is too large, verging on hockey bag big.  It’s useful to bring on car camping trips or for skiing equipment for the family but for international travel it’s just too big.  For comparison purposes, the latest version of my daily carry, the Patagonia MLC is 43 L or 2,610 cu. in., so my ideal duffel is about 1.5x MLC.

The MLC used to have a smaller version, the LBC, that was discontinued years ago but which I would buy in a flash if they re-introduced it.   Likewise with their travel beanie, a hat with an integrated sleep mask.  Genius!

The North Face has some good duffels, including the wheeled “Rolling Thunder” and their standard Base Camp expedition duffel.

The same is true with presentations.  It’s hard, I think, to give good presentation advice without precisely specifying the context of your advice.  So, for instance, Seth Godin has a new posting on “Nine steps to Powerpoint magic,”

The first of his steps (not rules) is to not use Powerpoint at all.  But if you have to use Powerpoint, don’t use bullets.  And if you have to use bullets, make them one or two word bullets, max.  After all, Godin says, “Powerpoint is for ideas.”  He recommends using a remote and a microphone, and keeping the overall presentation time down to ten minutes if possible.

(a) lose two pounds in sweat

(b) learn unwanted personal details of the family in the row in front of me

(c) read three Economists

(d) all of the above

If you guessed (d), you would be correct!

A good unit of measure for me of air travel (a function of distance and time) is how many issues of The Economist I can get through.  It’s the perfect reading material for Airportlandia because of its density — many thin pages of text versus thick pages of photos — and because of a certain timelessness to the writing.  I don’t read it to find out what happened yesterday, I read it to find out why it happened.  So the timeliness of the issue is not critical; the date on the newspaper is usually its most important descriptor, but not for The Economist (which, oddly, claims to be a newspaper.  Whatever.)  Even though I’ve been a more-or-less diligent reader since college, for many years now I’ve had the habit of primarily reading it on airplanes; I think I would have to buckle my seatbelt at home to read it in my lounge chair.

An indication of the quality of the ‘newspaper’ is the way it deals with issues that I’m familiar with; I usually find that I agree with their analysis on things I know about, which increases my trust in their analysis of things I don’t know about.  (Unfortunately, the ratio keeps shifting as I realize I know less and less.  Separate problem.)

We just got back from a gloriously off-the-network vacation in West Cork, Ireland. We rented a house with friends and generally stayed off the beaten path. Which was great and everything, except that even the beaten path in Ireland is still a pretty narrow road according to my tastes; I think that the street in front of my house in California would qualify as pretty much the widest road we saw in Ireland.

So staying off the beaten path meant that the ‘roads’ we drove along were more like narrow driveways, optimistically two lanes. Which, again, is fine, except that Hertz, out of gratitude for my loyal patronage, upgraded me from the cheapskate sedan I rented to an absolutely gorgeous — and completely impractical — Alfa Romeo 159. After getting over the normal adjustment to driving on the other side of the road and remembering how to drive a stick, I was still left with a terrifyingly large shiny Italian car that I had to squeeze down the rural roads of West Cork. I have never in my life been so glad to return a car as I was with this one, and I’m happy to report that it was mostly undamaged, except for some crayon stains in the back.

But there were many compensations: I think it was the best car I have ever driven. The engine was powerful and responsive, the steering — balanced and sensitive — was a revelation, and the seating position and dials were just perfect. I have never felt so connected to a car, so completely in tune with it. I sort of suspect that the intensity of the driving experience (raining, no visibility, one tiny lane, left-hand driving, twisting and winding road, howling three year in back, etc.) only added to that feeling, since I was required to be attentive in a way that driving down the interstate in a Ford Taurus does not demand. My current rental, an otherwise serviceable Subaru Outback, pales considerably in comparison to the Alfa.

It wasn’t a perfect car; unlike Jeremy Clarkson I thought that the triple headlights were bizarre-looking and it felt heavy in a way that I didn’t expect from an Alfa Romeo. Plus, the rear visibility wasn’t great and the stereo was crummy. There were times, though, that the car just sang; I remember one rainy early morning drive into town once I had the road figured out and it really felt like the car was responding to me. Or the time when we finally got onto a divided highway and I dropped the hammer; I could just imagine the car saying, palms up: “finally!”

Yahoo is testing a new locative service, “Fire Eagle.” Yahoo describes it as a ‘location data broker,’ which is useful enough. Navizon, for example, is a service that uses wifi and cell phone tower locations to triangulate your location; I’m trying it out right now and it found me, on my laptop without GPS, down to the street block level. If I wanted to, I could link up Navizon to Fire Eagle and make my exact location available. This will be even more useful when there’s a Navizon client for my now-outdated first generation iPhone without GPS. Navizon, or the native GPS functionality of the next generation iPhone, can automatically and continuously update Fire Eagle with my location.

But why would I want it to?

It might be useful have my general location available, for example published here on this blog, so that my friends and family could look and see where I am, but I don’t want the world to know that I’m on Old Country Road in Westbury, NY. Instead, something like “Long Island, USA” would be adequate. And that’s what Dopplr does; it takes location information from Fire Eagle and applies a set of filters to it and then makes the filtered information available. (Dopplr supposedly also identifies friends travelling to the same city as me, a problem I don’t need solved. Who needs that problem solved?) I use Dopplr now, published via RSS on the righthand side of this blog, to update my location via Tripit, yet another service that consumes and standardizes travel itineraries. I adore Tripit.

Fire Eagle’s position as a broker is smart, I think; there are all kinds of location-information providers (Navizon, car GPS systems) and lots of services that can consume that information (mapping services, geo-tagged photos), but too often there’s no way to go from one to the other. Plus, crucially, there is a tremendous privacy component to location; I like having the insulation of a broker like Fire Eagle between the raw data of place and that which is publicly available.

For me, as an end user, the developer release of Fire Eagle is still of limited value. I see where it’s going and how I could use it but the range of supported applications (Dopplr and Moveable Type but not Tripit or Wordpress, and certainly not my camera or my car or my kid’s embedded beacon. I joke.)

All of these bits, of course, are just small specific pieces of functionality; the beauty lies in the elegant composition of them, a process that is only just beginning. A more fundamental question might be the business model for this brokerage service and, given Yahoo’s recent travails, the viability of the company itself.

From Abbey Strand, where the boat docks, walk a mile to the crossroads. You will pass the store/post office on your left, Kinish Harbor on your right, and the Island House (on your right). At the crossroads, bear left up a small hill, with the church on your right.

After 3/4 of a mile you will be opposite Trabawn, a sandy beach. Slievemore is ahead on your left. Leave the road at a gate, where a rough track passes between two houses. This track disappears into a pasture — continue straight and up through bracken. Stay close to the stone wall (on your right) running straight up the hill. You should be going up the righthand side of a saddle. At the top, pause in a small clearing. Set in line with the stone wall is a Bronze Age solstice stone, a large flat rock with a round hole bored in it. It is exactly aligned N-S, so the hole catches sunrise on the longest day of the year.

The view here is excellent. The pond below, Lough Ordree, is used by gulls to preen their feathers. The Baltimore Beacon is also visible. On the ridge, the wind picks up considerably. The cove below is called Fourdree.

Maybe someone else pointed it out to me, or maybe I found it based on some written reference; I don’t now remember. They’re fairly common in that part of the world. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a map for this entry, but I’m hoping I can find it again, especially since we’re going to be there around the summer solstice.

Have I made Burmese life sound like one grand joyous song? Let me assure you that I have not really exaggerated its good will and fraternity; its spirit of helpfulness, its generosity, warmth, and contentment. Fortunately—or unfortunately—it is all too true.

Oh bitter poignancy!

I studied Tibetan history with Aung San Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, at Harvard; his Tibetan studies seminar in Sever Hall was where I met my wife, and his suffering at their separation was evident.  Years later, living in Bangkok, we made a deeply memorable trip to Burma.   The truth of the quote above does not conflict with the horrors of everyday life in Burma today, even without the natural disaster of Typhoon Nargis.

The old Thai capital of Ayutthaya was a fantastically cosmopolitan place in the seventeenth century. Among others, there were French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, and Persian colonies living around the city. The Japanese residents alone included ronin, traders, and Japanese Christian refugees. (The photo above is of Japanese mercenaries in the service of the Thai king — note the elephants and the rising sun flag.)

As you might imagine, the characters that wound up in seventeenth-century Ayutthaya were not exactly run of the mill personalities. There was then apparently a job title of “adventurer,” along the lines of the Man Who Would be King: see, for example, Filipe de Brito de Nicote, the Portuguese adventurer in the nearby Arakan coast of Burma, or the unappealing Bastian Gonsalves, aka Sebastian Gonzales Tibao or Sebastian Gonslaves Tibeau. The chaotic history of the failed Portuguese colonization of Chittagong and Sandwip Island (modern Bangladesh) and Arakan is still waiting for a movie.

One of these adventurers was the Greek Constantine Phaulkon who became, briefly, an important character in late 17th century Ayutthaya and married Maria Pina de Guimar, a Luso-Japanese (presumably Catholic) mestizo.

Could you get a more obscure ethnic designation than “Luso-Japanese mestizo”? Only in Ayutthaya.

Or Macao; but that’s another story.