Travel

Cuban hip hop legend Telmary on her youth in Havana, making music from Cuba to Canada, and which region has the sweetest rum. Telmary Díaz is one of the most innovative Cuban artists of the last two decades, blending Afro-Cuban and Latin beats with spoken word, jazz, and hip hop, and drawing inspiration from her youth promoting gigs in Havana, Yoruba traditions, poetry, and an omnivorous taste in music. Her first solo album, A Diario, was released in 2007 and won the Cubadisco Award for Best Hip Hop Album—a category created especially for that project. She’s also a really good person to drink rum with in Havana to talk about music, migration, and more. This is an edited and condensed transcript from my conversation with Telmary. You can listen to the full episode, for free, on Stitcher,&nb...

Author, musician, and comedian Jennifer Neal on her journey from the US to Japan to Australia to Germany, her experiences as a Black woman abroad, and the perils of jaywalking in Germany. Chicago native Jennifer Neal, author of the forthcoming novel The Colour of Her Blood, has spent her adult life trying out life overseas—from teaching in Japan to seven years in Australia to stand-up comedy in the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany. Along the way, she volunteered for Obama’s campaign, wrote a column for The Root on Black peoples’ experiences traveling and living abroad, and served as a host for the video series The Perfect Dish with Anthony Bourdain, hunting down the best meals in Jakarta and Singapore. In Berlin, she has found a home. For now. Jennifer and host Nathan Thornburgh sit in her...

The founder of San Francisco’s notorious band The Brian Jonestown Massacre on sneaking into punk-rock clubs at age 11, finding a sound, and finding his way to Berlin. Ah, Berlin. One of the most visceral pleasures I’ve had over the years has been crawling every quadrant of this great, open city, with friends, boozed-up surveyors charting mental mischief maps. Berlin is a city which even now, three decades after the wall fell, seems to delight in its openness. And we have taken advantage of that over the years—on bike, on foot, taxi, kayak in the western lakes, S-Bahn to the northern forests, U-Bahn through the dark middle. The city that used to be trussed up like a turkey is unbound and beckoning for any number of deep drinking nights. And that’s what it was on my final evening in this cit...

This week on The Trip podcast: Writer Musa Okwonga on Berlin’s exquisite and heavy psychogeography Social media, for all its ills, can deliver unexpected gifts. For me, that was when I found writer Musa Okwonga’s self-published excerpt, on Instagram, from his upcoming novella called In The End, It Was All About Love (available for pre-order in November 2020 from Rough Trade Books).  I first lived in the former East Germany in the early 90’s, and spent decades since balancing a deep love for the place with my unease as an outsider—especially as a half-Jewish teenager living through the dawn of Germany’s neo-Nazi revival. Musa’s novella, in that way that good writing can do, seemed to speak directly to my experience, even though it was written by someone quite different from me: an Oxfo...

This week on The Trip podcast: Tijuana design legend Edoardo Chavarin on growing up with one foot on each side of the border wall, how to brand Mexico, and why Tijuana is having a creative revolution. It is deceptively simple. Exchange your dollars, walk a couple hundred yards, get your passport stamped, keep walking, wave off the taxistas and hustlers, sit on a plastic chair and order an al pastor torta, a sandwich so heavy with meat and mayonnaise and jalapeños that it can only mean one thing: you’re in Mexico, just past the San Ysidro Port of Entry, one of the busiest border crossings in the world. Easy. It’s also incredibly complicated. I happen to have been born in the land of the blue passport, not the green, and to have walked from north to south, not the other way around. So I cann...

This week on The Trip podcast: Journalist Jorge Nieto on covering Tijuana’s good and bad days, losing friends to violence, and what happens when you accidentally get the wrong beer for members of the Sinaloa cartel. Ah, the sound of a dozen hellhounds slavering for a taste of sweet gringo flesh. This is actually part of my perennial Mexico soundtrack, from the south or north, whenever the omnipresent guard dogs catch that scent of vanilla or sulphur or whatever the hell Caucasian men smell like when they’re wandering around looking for an address they cannot find. This particular bit of the Baskervilles was on the Otay Mesa, a plateau that spans the border from Tijuana to San Diego. There’s an absurdly wide view looking down across the sprawl of Tijuana from up here. And people like the ne...

This week on The Trip podcast, deportee Gera Gámez on surviving L.A. gangland violence, jail and deportation, and adjusting to his new reality in Tijuana. I got a WhatsApp voice message in Tijuana from a journalist named Jesús Aguilar. He’s one of a special breed of police-scanner-hawks, independent reporters of the people, who zoom from crime scene to crime scene, take pictures of the carnage, tell what they can about what happened, and post it on their social channels. Every Mexican city seems to have a handful of these—in Tijuana it’s people like Jesús and Margarito 4-4, and they can have huge followings, partly for the lurid fascination, partly for the sense that this is the most honest reporting people can get on dishonest system. In this message he left me, Jesús is telling me that h...